The original is at: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
George W. Bush Means Nothing
Note to self: The demons of sour conservatism cannot touch anything that
truly matters. Just FYI
By Mark Morford San Francisco Gate Columnist
You cannot reach me, Dubya. Go ahead, ya smirkin' Texas lug, stumble around
all scrunched and blank eyed and pseudo-manly, shove this country into a
bloody unwinnable war and lie about all the reasons why, gouge the economy
and ruin the schools and embarrass the nation every single day as you mangle
grammar and meaning and truth. It doesn't really matter.
Go ahead, toss those useless $400 rebate checks to the depressed and jobless
populace as some sort of bogus humanitarian gesture as you quietly force an
increase in their property taxes to pay for your record-breaking deficit
brought on by the tax cut no one wants. Ha. You are so cute.
There is so much more going on than you know. There is so much deeper
understanding and wider knowledge and higher winking and you can't touch any
of it. Do you know this? You need to know this.
You and your brethren are like this sticky toxic mist. You will burn off in
the sun of awareness and orgasm and breath. This is what makes it so fun to
watch, so magical and visceral, such a divine circus, a rich tragicomic
pageant. Do you sense it?
By all means, hack away at the Clean Air Act so it allows millions more
pounds of pollutants into the air every year. Slam gays and women's rights
and call everyone in the country a "sinner," cut funding for AmeriCorps and
the arts and the poor and nature conservation. Wow. The universe is so very
proud. Do you hear it laughing? You're not even making a dent.
See, you cannot touch us. We are inured. You are merely hollow and sad and
quickly, effortlessly forgettable the minute we step outside or get into bed
with our lovers or laugh with friends or scream to the sky the lyrics to
"Ballroom Blitz", always, always striving to taste the intense flavors of
the collective dream state.
What, too vague? Too namby-pamby new-age tofu-licking pro-sex liberal? Too
bad. Because there is more meaning and content and depth and significance in
a lover's moan and in a drop of wine and in a dog's wag than in anything you
can conjure in your homophobic faux-cowboy Lynne Cheney-thick dream, honey.
Get over yourself. We are on to you. We know you are made of nothing but
spin and frantic gesticulations and scowls. Poke a finger into you and out
pours only sawdust and sighs.
Hello, Senator Lott. You want to stick it to the environment, do you? Lick
the tailbones of your corporate cronies in the auto industry and kill that
recent bill that would've mandated a reasonable increase in fuel efficiency
for thuggish belching SUVs in about 12 years?
You wish, instead, to snicker and sneer and give not one crap for the planet
or our nation's terrorism-inducing dependency on petrochemicals? Kill that
bill, senator. You go. Toss a bone to your Detroit pals. That is so sweet.
Here's a karmic Post-It note: The gods would like you to right now realize,
you have zero true effect. Barely a footnote. A blip. A flicker of quick
pain and then poof, gone. Very sorry.
How about you, RIAA? You want a piece? You want to bitch and moan and attack
individual music fans with your snide lawsuits and desperate paranoia and
come scour my iTunes library and find out how I got my hands on free MP3s of
the new Metallica and AFI and burned all that glorious chill electronica
from Net-radio broadcasts using my glorious copy of RadioLover? Here is my
phone number: 555-LICK. Bring it.
Here is my porn collection. Here are my divine sex toys and my lubricants
and my leather strappy things and my collection of happy open-minded
perversions and my active account at Blowfish.com and my tattoos and
piercings and love of massage oil and vibrators and things that go ooooh in
the night. Come on over, Mr. Ashcroft, I have something to show you.
You see, I know you're there, all of you. Sour politicians and conniving
Wal-Mart execs and desperate reality-TV creators and gluttonous SUV
manufacturers and poisonous garbage-food purveyors and all-'Murkin
homophobes and the dumbed-down lowest common denominators and lip-twitching
hyper-religious crusaders and anti-everything GOP lizard people, Rummy and
Rove and Rice and Ashcroft and Dick, et al. I see you. We see what you are
trying to do.
We feel you seething and churning and eating away at the soft rainbow
underbelly of the culture, feeding on the weak and the poor and the
ignorant, doing your utmost to lower the collective vibration and thinking
you are somehow all-powerful and significant and invincible, the center of
the sociocultural universe, when in fact you are but a strange and banal
rash on the ass of time.
I know you want to shut us down. I know you would love nothing more than if
all resistance was mowed under and all perversions were bleached dead and
all nuanced questioning of your malicious antihumanitarian agenda was numbed
to the point of blind flag-waving psychopatriotism, one born of fear and
misinformation and photos of the bloody mutilated bodies of Saddam's demon
sons. Damn, you try so hard.
I have news. I have a revelation. It is timeless and ageless and nothing new
and I hold no claims to it, but it needs to be repeated and shouted and
deeply felt again and again and again, because sometimes you get a little
out of control.
Here it is: You are immaterial. You are of zero nutritional value and are
indigestible like corn and just pass right through. Do you understand?
There is so much more going on down here than is dreamt of in your bitter
and small-minded philosophy. I, and millions like me, sense a more luminous
undercurrent, a wider spiritual lens, a richer sensual mother lode.
We know that no matter how much you pule and spit and hiss and spank and
crack down, no matter how many laws and how many restrictions and how many
wars and murders and stabs at the heart of meaning and sex and divinity, you
cannot touch what really matters, you cannot really have any lasting effect.
Oh, it might seem like you do. You can make daily life very grating and
tiresome and make people sick with your chemicals and desperate with your
slashing of jobs and guilt ridden with your hammering sin and pain and guns
and fear.
We watch you spin and hype and rage and scrunch your face in intense bogus
prayer aimed at your bitter and self-righteous and homophobic God as your
testes wither and weep. Man, have you got gall.
Maybe this gives you the illusion of power and control. Maybe this makes you
feel all phallic and handsome and virile as if your toupee isn't rank and
askew and your slacks wrinkled and your children in rehab and your sexless
wife popping Zoloft like M&Ms. Titter.
But here's the thing: You affect only the surface of things. You are like
the little swarm of gnats you have to pass through on the path to the cool
summer lake. You are the tainted oyster in the vast ocean of time and sex
and love. You are a jagged pothole on the highway to hell and the broken
step on the stairway to heaven. But you are not real. You give no light.
You contribute nothing. Not where it matters.
But please, by all means, keep trying. Keep ripping away at the rich dense
frantic fabric of this gorgeous inexplicable life. You represent all the
dark threads, the ugliness and the tension and the low vibration and you are
necessary to remind anyone who's paying attention of what to watch out for,
what to methodically purge, what to use as easy leverage to vault forward.
Look. You cannot reach me. You are nowhere near. You have no true power and
no true connection and have yet to make any sort of splash in the calm lake
of open-thighed soul. But it's OK. We understand. After all, as the saying
goes, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. And the divine only
smiles, licks its lips, and shimmies on.
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