The Dyspeptic Tank
Thursday, November 04, 2004
It's Time to Go Underground
¶ 7:24 PM 0 comments
The Children's Crusade is over. All the genial, above-board grassroots activism of the past two years has failed utterly in removing the most rotten, corrupt, incompetent presidential administration in American history. We smiled, we met up, we went door-to-door and accomplished exactly nothing except to make the deep disappointment we feel today even more bitter. We made lasting friendships that are now a bond of shared misery.
We lost to a sociopathic pseudo-Christian pseudo-cowboy who pays lip service to the sanctity of frozen blastocysts while gleefully slaughtering dark foreigners guilty only of living over a sea of oil. We lost to a magic lantern show of terrorism that distracted us from the real issues of poverty, intolerance, economic recession, and compromised civil rights. We lost to an incestuous elite that owned the rigged video poker machines on which the votes were cast (and miscast). We lost to masters of innuendo and propaganda both overt and covert, from Fox News to those leafletting car windshields in church and Wal-Mart parking lots. We lost to ignorance, hubris, testosterone, fundamentalism, bigotry, corruption, misperception, indifference, imperfect empathy, and folly.
It is now obvious that our good intentions and honorable actions were not sufficient to counter these forces. Our shining morning faces and our pure hearts were no match for the creeping, poisonous things hiding in undisclosed locations. If we want our country, our government, and our democracy back, we will have to soil our hands and tarnish our souls a little. We will have to learn to fight filthy.
Does the other side distribute circulars at churches describing Kerry and Edwards as cohabiting sodomites? Then we must begin, now, printing up flyers describing Bush as a closet abortionist who sacrificed babies in Satanic rituals in Skull and Bones. If there is a note of verisimilitude in our accusations that appeals to the conspiracy theorist and paranoiac in every American, so much the better. There are TRUE things about Bush and Company that are more scandalous than anything they could make up about the other side. We must get in touch with our inner Karl Rove, and smear all Republican allies of Bush at every level of government--the nastier the implication, the better. We may feel the need to go to confession or to take twenty baths afterward, but I can see no other way of prevailing against evildoers except by turning their own weapons against them.
The other thing we must do is to get control of those infernal voting machines. If they can be rigged for evil, they can be rigged for good. Tech-savvy moles need to infiltrate Diebold and all the other companies now trafficking with Republicans, learn their odd ways and secret handshakes, and destroy the opposition from within.
These methods, and others like them, are not for the fastidious. (I don't even think they are for me, particularly.) But, short of another bloody American Revolution, they are the only ones that will work. If there is a fear that we become too much like our enemies by imitating them, remember that our cause is just. The eggs that we break in making this particular omelet need breaking before our society, our country and perhaps even our planet are irreparably broken.
