And We Can't Build Our Dreams...

Hey, suspicious minds! Ain't that what we're all about?
Just read a news article about "lucky charms" in the Obama campaign. Masters of the Universe and their lucky shirts. One campaign manager is afraid to shave, another carries a lucky stone given him by a woman who "seemed to have an aura about her". Whether to change your cowboy boots or your underwear- whether to shoot some hoops? The Man himself carries a pocketful of charms- a medicine bag of trinkets and totems to ward-off the Evil Eye.

This is the "secular humanist" party? The Rational Thought party? The same camp honest enough to characterise much of the heartland as "clinging bitterly to...religion"? And to think that Barry's mom was an atheist. I had such high hopes.

I should quit my bitchin'. On the "other side" is that divisive character Sarah Palin. Divisive in many respects, but the wedge she is driving within her own "party" intrigues me most. It seems that the saner elements within the Party of Lincoln tend to see her for what she truly is; she is
a "God-fearing Christian", a charismatic power-seeker, a beauty pageant runner-up, a Walmart-shopping intellectual lightweight who compensates with the viscious, viscous venom and vitriol in the petroleum jelly the make-up people have smeared on her perfect orthodontics.* That's all well and good. There is a recognition in the ranks that there is a loose canon on deck.

The trouble, as I see it, doesn't lie with that segment of the GOP. These folks may have hyper-active greed glands and atrophied empathy genes, but they could be called "intellectually honest" in the same breath. The Trouble on the horizon is like the drum-beat of a Viking ship just BVR. You know it's out there...you just hope it beaches on another shore. Sarah is pulling on her oar, has taken-up the rhythmic chant. (Go ahead- get a visual on this- horned helm, rough animal skins, pitbull with lipstick...)

This could be our ship of state. This could be our state of affairs. This could be an affair of superstition and hatred and fear and loathing. The ship of fools? Only a fool would dismiss it as such. A vessel of vassels of the Lord? Maybe. The Lord envisaged as the correct amalgamation of Old Testament anger and retribution and New-er "thief in the night" and "I come not to bring peace but a sword" temperment viewed through a Penatcostal-apocalyptic lens. What a Revelation.

She's got a full crew amongst that other segment of the Grand Old Party, but they want a full boat before making landfall. The Horse Latitudes have seen them already jettison reason and compromise- critical thinking and scientific discovery will gladly go overboard to make room.
The desperate wall-eyed Believers are swimming out...


*Hey! She's "one of us"! Whatever happened to aspiring to "the better angels of our nature"?
Is his name Barack?