Sorry, I've just lost the will to blog.
Maybe it happened New Year's Day when I found a piece of confetti in my stool.
Or maybe it was brewing sometime before that epic event, when the realization that, in our country as we now experience it, the febrile intoxication of hope and change has reaped the cold despair of thwarted expectation and bitter frustration.
Happy new year!
Government has finally revealed itself to be professional wrestling for ugly people in business suits (except for that hunky John Thune. Wouldn't he and Sarah Palin throw some good looking calves? I see a future first couple!). It's very exciting but staged to within an inch of its approximation of life: lots of rivalries and fouls with occasional moments of authentic drama, but at the end of the day the outcome seems lamely predetermined.
Did we really think the young man from Chicago would actually change the way the game is played, merely by being inspiring, articulate, highly educated, benevolently ambitious and a vaccination against every diseased policy the previous administration and its grassroots apparatchiks spewed forth?
I belch a resounding "yes."
But the game, it seems, is bigger than him, bigger than all of The People.
Because it uses The People. It uses them as fuel and as fodder; it bleeds the hope from them and substitutes it with fear; it is run by tyrants steeped in a tradition of oppression. Only they don't oppress with the immediate application of armies and gulags and stormtroopers. They oppress gradually, slowly, steadily...with sugar. They suppress with intoxicants. They dazzle the eye with semblances of old pride and faded glory, both too diluted to have any practical effect upon a sated and dispirited population.
They have successfully bamboozled The People into having faith in a system which is incapable of reciprocation.
And so my president, for whom I have the utmost respect, is the most visible of dupes. Hell, given his savvy, he probably even knows he and his country have been rendered incontrovertibly, tragically superfluous.
Yeah, it's easy to lose the will to blog when the game's in the bag.