** MUST READ ** A great email sent to me summing up election reaction

(on edit: fixed the crappy-looking hard returns)

Subject: To My Friends from Other Places

It would be difficult to fully communicate my disappointment in a simple email. On the other hand, slipping out into the hall and drowning myself in the mop bucket would mean that someone else would have to feed my dogs.

Kerry has not yet conceded defeat, but I have. Even if someone finds that crate full of votes for Kerry bobbing down the Cuyahoga River, the American people have spoken, and they have sent the world a message:

"We're barely bright enough to chew our own food."

Incompetence, incoherence, inarticulateness, pettiness and random savagery apparently do not deter the majority of Americans. The thing that really, REALLY matters to Americans? Gays. And foreigners.

Both must be stopped at any cost.

Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of bigotry, amending state constitutions around the country to prevent same-sex couples from having any rights beyond the right to live on the margins of society. We clearly have far more to fear from The International Homosexual Conspiracy(tm) than we do from North Korea and the collapse of the American health care system.

Apparently, we are truly a nation of slackjawed yokels, awed only by grotesque displays of wealth and violence, reverent only of the bossman and beholden not even to our children, since we seem content to mortgage their future in favor of a $300 tax refund that we have traded for decent jobs, healthcare, and a just society.

We make pious noises about worshipping a Just and Merciful God, while doling out destruction and horror upon the innocent, pausing only to pat ourselves on the back for waging a "just" war to rid the world of tyrants that audaciously aspire to exist after they lose their utility to us in endless low-level conflicts to control the world's oil supply.

We seem to have become cheap, venal, vulgar and petty while we apparently don't have the ability to reason our way out of the dilemma of taking care of the sick, watching out for the elderly, and teaching our children not to be credulous, callow dupes.

To my friends from the UK, France and anyone to whom they choose to forward this, I feel that I owe you an apology. It is as if I have
brought an orangutan to high tea... While he flings shit at you and tries to snatch pastries from your plate, I am left wondering how I might make it up to you.

The world's richest and most powerful nation seems to have lost its moral compass. We have lost interest in leading by example in favor of taking by force. I would like to say that I believe that one day in the future America might regain its senses. Unfortunately, I am not terribly optimistic. The best I can offer you is to remind you that Nixon also won a second term.

Your friend,

Patrick

"If pigs could vote,
the man with the slop bucket
would be elected swineherd every time,
no matter how much slaughtering
he did on the side."
-- Orson Scott Card (1951- ) Novelist

and maybe those machines did not tally the votes the same way they were voted.....

B