Anyone else plagued by a persistent, deep foreboding... the sense that the fix is in?
This sensation's become the occasional, droning companion to my thoughts, a mosquito I can hear but somehow not quite swat. It is not yet an epic tale, but it feels like we're getting there, we're getting there.
Closest I can come to explaining the goose-bumped phenomenon: It's akin to The Feeling That Descended Like a Cloud of Ice Fog in 2000, when SCOTUS suspended the Constitution, and Our Democracy, and installed its own choice of president to power.
We yawned, shrugged, scratched, stretched, and embraced that decision -- which should have been cause for another round of hair-raising alerts. It was suddenly clear that we would accept anything.
That mosquito whine continues -- distantly heard, as in half-awake sleep, triggering the willingness and readiness to slap oneself black and blue, all over, trying to get it, trying to make it stop...
The raised hairs on my neck is close to another feeling -- one that arrived like an uninvited troop-and-funeral train onto the sidings of the rail yard of my thoughts -- when it became clear the U.S. would stop at nothing now, and that yet another goddam war of choice was hellbent to start. Iraq, again.
What? You didn't get quite enough last time? Need to outdo daddy? Still some damn money left on the table -- what?!
Honorable, decent, or meaningful reasons need not apply within, said the moquito whine.
And, of course, the warning was right: It would get far worse later, under the auspices of the Bush Treasury Removal Service, lugging off trillions for war profiteering -- during which time more than 30-thousand injuries and deaths were visited upon military men and women, recklessly chucked into one more meat grinder of conflict -- another perfect, military oxymoron: ordered chaos.
You remember: Wholesale rending of lives, families, culture, civilization. The thoroughness of war-crime-levels and scales of civilian casualties and death: A million? 600,000? So hard to keep score during the kill, all that red spray and meat flying through the air, said the mosquito whine.
The Inescapable Feeling was telegraphed by hairs standing on end. They were like gun cotton soaked in napalm and white phosphorous -- a drenched, icy, heavy blanket draped across us all. The warning was nonspecific, but burdensome. Weighty.
Timing is everything: Somehow, Doom always manages to announce itself at the door, just before crossing the threshold into this world and making itself right at home. It did so again, at that moment. It was absolutely correct, as it happens.
The hairs standing erect, the gooseflesh bunching like subsurface waves, both announced The Great Misery: a pair of wars slapped on the nation's credit card. While expenses skyrocketed, revenues were slashed, and taxes cut for the richest and most privileged Americans. And, members of the non-silver-spoon set were directed into the jutting jaws and bottomless maw of war.
There are only two ways to change behavior: Reason and Force. And, as Reason was never a strong suit of the Bush Treasury Removal Service, that left them only one other choice...
There were many bonus side-dishes at the "All You Can Take" Buffet: a global economy wobbled by Wall Street gambles and greed, and the shaking of our own economy's foundations by the High Priests of the Corporate Currency themselves. The High-Wire Segment of Collapses and Bailouts was heaved into the community cauldron and made to stew in its own -- and our own -- juices.
And all the rest of it, plus, an improbable -- no, impossible -- election that inexplicably happened nonetheless, and without warning. (The Neck-Hair-O-Meter was of course broken by then, having repeatedly pegged itself out into the red, bashing its indicator tip to pieces, leaving only a shattered stump that weakly twitched and quivered every now and again.)
Running simply on unscientific neck hairs and goose flesh, the predictive track record of Impending Doom is quite stunning. It having had such a storied and unexpected past in my small realm, I pay close attention when the indicators are restless, rising and falling, expanding or contracting.
They have been on the march lately, gathering strength day by day, and I know what they seem to say, although I cannot yet repeat the words or entirely face it -- not yet.
Instead, there are attempts to explain them away, these echoing indicators, using facts and reason. There is no satisfaction or rest in any of these attempts, nor does it quiet the mosquito whine by so much as a scant fraction of a decibel.
The possibilities for that chill feeling: Is it just a side effect of the pundits pummeling us with how close the race really, really is -- a bill of goods sold to us to help keep us tuning in for more, keeping their ad revenues high, as they'd planned?
Or is it something much more insidious?
The words are difficult to form: Another rigged election?
Or is it the fact that -- shades of Jeb Bush and Katharine Harris! -- one of Romney's sons has company links to voting machines in a key battleground state?
Or is it the unnerving quality of Romney and Ryan's ability to deadpan and lie faster than the speed of sound, leaving no meaning or substance behind, carpet-bombing the hell out of the truth?
Mysteriously, their followers are strangely invigorated, spouting and spewing the full-bore lies, half truths, misinformation, and talking point blurbs they'd just heard...
Is that it, what's triggering this feeling?
Or is it the amount of ramped-up Republican dirty tricks in evidence everywhere -- voter suppression efforts, voter confusion efforts, voter intimidation efforts already in place, and yet to come?
Or maybe it's just the accumulated madness and contamination from Citizens United, from billionaires hoping to purchase some elections, from PACS and SuperPACS and PNAC and other such think-tank and funding monstrosities and freedom-gear grinders and strippers? Is there more or less of that skunky scent in the air than usual, stinking of Karl Rove and Frank Luntz?
Maybe it's eau d' Grover Norquist, the stench from his words still hanging in the air, when he said, "We are not auditioning for a fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We just need a president to sign stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president... His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared."
This sounds like the pump has been primed, the plans have been made and set, and the spring-plate just needs to be set. And then triggered, November 6.
Or, is it that slimy feeling that Romney is Dubya, back again, ready for a third term? Just what we need: Another privileged and entitled person from birth, with no concept of most people's lives, steered and guided by almost all of the same neocon, con-job advisors, getting us ready for another re-run on Dubya, but this time, on mega-steroids?
Or is it that the voting system itself in this country is as porous as a sieve, and that our votes -- the most sacred citizen token of democracy that there is -- are entered into machines third-graders can hack, that no-one gets a receipt, that there's no paper trail, and that many votes, provisional and not, will be idly jettisoned, for little or no reason?
Or that the same flushing fate awaits votes not technically, flawlessly precise and absolutely perfect? Or that special IDs are needed -- or not -- from place to place, judge to judge? Step right up -- spin the wheel and take your chances, see what rules are in effect today!
Or is it that we have the reality of international observers coming to keep an eye on the legitimacy of the vote -- something we nervously joked about in 2000 and 2004 for humor relief, but which is now a chill reality? Or is it the observers pushing back against the attitude they've been handed, to just butt out and stay out of the way?
Or is it the Republican war on women that just never stops -- from psycho candidates and current officer holders babbling every form of nonsense possible about rape and women's health care, to overwhelmingly voting in majority against a small, fair idea, like equal pay for women?
Or is it the intensity of racism that keeps breaking out and ratcheting up, everywhere -- even places previously thought civilized? Is it the suspicion that the Old Rich White Men's Club is tired of pussyfooting around, and sees to have one of their own installed once again?
Or maybe it's the overwhelming tide, coast to coast, of morons shouting the incumbent is a socialist, not having the slightest clue what that might actually be -- and not even dimly aware the man now in office is a pretty good Republican, for a Democrat?
Maybe that's what some of that mosquito whine is -- the almost deafening trill of the contagion of ignorance, the strangled gargling and gurgling of a nation submerged and self-waterboarded, holding itself down, far beneath dunce-waters too dark or deep to take daylight.
There are so many moving parts here, and almost all of them appear dangerous, objectionable, or threatening to us and democracy in a host of ways.
Is it the growing suspicion that we'll be queued up at the cinema, waiting to see "America the Beautiful and Free," knowing we'll get kicked aside at the last moment, given the jackboot to clear way for a special midnight showing on election night of Dubya 3: Who Gives a Mitt!
* * * * *
The hairs, like they were starched, standing out straight... and that incessant mosquito whine in the ears...
The words are damned difficult to form: What?! Another war?! Iran?!
Why else all the Republican chest-beating and warmongering chitchat in public? The war contractors all seem nicely primed for another gorging at the public tax trough, don't you think?
Why else would the U.S. be out Christmas shopping for spots from which to let slip a few dogs of war toward Iran?
Why are these goose bumps still rippling?
Why are these hairs refusing to lay down?
Again, I mean -- like last time... before those other elections, before those other wars.
No, it's not April, it's not Paris, and it's not Count Basie. But it's sure been feeling like we're all going to get the one more once, whether we like it or not.
War casualties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war
Civilian casualties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Tagg, you're it: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/278-76/14144-focus-america-land-of-shady-elections
UK says no to U.S., re: Iran bases: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/25/uk-reject-us-request-bases-iran
Observers: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/25/us-usa-elections-texas-idUSBRE89O01720121025
