Ezzam Week

You know what? I had a nice little banal entry written here about soup and midterms and ants on a log, but HEY, who cares about that? - because Osama bin Laden says Bush is an idiot, which means floods of people are going to go vote for Bush just because bin Laden insulted him.

The largest part of me is disgusted by and infuriated with Bush for making 300 million people look like idiots through his own inability to speak English, his refusal to believe that anything he does is wrong, his disregard of an incredibly intelligent and effective person like Colin Powell in favor of Rumsfeld or Ashcroft or any of those other Yes-Men he's got running around behind him.

But the rest of me - I'll just come out and say that it's the elitist part, I have no problem with that - is equally disgusted by a group of 150,000,001 people who want to vote for him in spite of his utter idiocy. Why? Because being inarticulate and probably functionally illiterate is "comforting". It is more important for our president to be an Everyman than a Smartman, an Observantman, or even a Goodman. Now, because bin Laden issued a tape giving Bush a verbal noogie, they're going to rally behind the worst president since Herbert Hoover in the name of pride.

If Bush wins, I don't want to go home. That's not because of the next four years of incompetent governance we'll get (I wonder how much deeper he can drive the national debt?), the prospect of more terrorist attacks, Patriot Act II, or even because there'll be another fundamentalist and assuredly anti-abortionist white man on the Supreme Court. No, I don't want to go home because it will force me to finally confront the fact that the average American is ignorant, evangelical, and hopelessly stupid.

"...Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president...started by challenging me. 'You think he's an idiot, don't you?' I said, no, I didn't. 'No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!''' (Ron Suskind, Without A Doubt, New York Times Magazine, Oct 14 2004).

I'd tell them they could have him, but if they take him they take Duke and Durham and Myrtle Beach, Buffalo and Elma and East Aurora, Pinole Creek and Wilmington and San Pablo...and those are mine.

I hate the majority.