Comedown

As I write this I have several unwatched TV programmes relating to the US election sitting on various video tapes at home. I no longer have the heart to watch them, to wallow in information that in the space of a few days has become hopelessly anachronistic. Once the result was confirmed, like a flicked switch the world stopped caring about everything it had been pursuing so passionately for what seemed like forever. The polls, the scenarios, the minute-by-minute updates…even that sense of hope that we could be rid of Bush that swam around like low level fog, obscuring the cold reality that when it comes down to it, more Americans simply like George W Bush. Not necessarily his policies – mainly his hokey Texan idiot-boy smile and dark conservative recidivism.

So to hurl myself back into that acid pool would do some strange and gruesome things to my state of mind; those videos will remain exactly where they are. In fact, I am surprised to find myself chucking words onto the screen about the subject even now. But this is part of the comedown, the cold turkey of political addiction. Part of some kind of twisted version of the Twelve Steps, perhaps…but that would require us to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves who could restore us to sanity…who, Bush? Cheney? Fox News? To hell with that. The world is being led into insanity, we're all becoming gibbering inmates ruled by a faceless power, and as each day passes those powers find out more cruel facts about the human mind and mob mentality that allow them to force us down some very bad pathways. These paths are shrouded in the blackest night and will soon lead us into that ultimate conservative nirvana where authority is all and nobody has the heart or balls to challenge a damned thing…100,000 Iraqis dead? Who cares when Bush has promised to cut your taxes…now keep eating your Soma, and don't forget to leave the television set switched on at all times…

Jesus…where did that lot come from? Page one of Orwellian Rhetoric for Dummies?

Well, I don't know. We have discovered this week that Bush's first election success was not a historical blip thrown up by a weird electoral system, and that there are many, many Americans who believe that Bush can keep them safe in their beds at night and to hell with the world beyond their shores. A week or so ago I wrote that anything is better than the uncertainty of a dead-heat campaign. Four more years are going to tear that statement to bits like a child ripping a cranefly apart, limb by limb.