A Rational New Year, For Victory

I enjoyed the recollection of this past year. Someone said if we remembered pain, women wouldn't ever give birth a second time. Worry and frustration are a part of my nature, it's day to day, oh I am a wounded animal, a 'man of constant sorrows', my knitted brow, my unconscious scowl. Then I look back and those were good times, even miraculous times, in my third year of sobriety.

What did you get for Christmas? What'd you get for living another year, then?

Love, shared laughter, even some material possessions I'll keep as mementos of the love and laughter.

So many good friends. I love 'em all. All my life I've been blessed---my mom will point this out to me frequently---with the best of friends. People who have stood by me for years, even twenty years, still around. It's a boast, but more to do with my finding the best people to hang on to.
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2007 looked to be a frightening year in human history, and it was, almost through-out. But Israel was not attacked again and wasn't forced to go on the attack. With Rumsfeld's minimalist experimentation coincidental with this war, we'd sunk into disaster to the point where even conservatives had to re-argue the Iraq battle itself, but that has reversed itself with his resignation.

This was a year I turned on the "E" channel, out of emotional fatigue, out of anger at the press and the opposition. But fools were put in their place, or found their place. Larry David's wife suggesting we use two squares of toilet paper. Rosie O'Donnell comparing our troops to the jihadists and leaving The View, humiliated, unable to deny the record. 9/11 conspiracy theorists were hooted down. The New York Times had to fore go most of its corrections as week after week they were proved wrong about the war. ...Humorists like Colbert were hilarious but every joke was on some false premise. Only South Park can be funny and honest simultaneously.

Al Gore won his Nobel Prize even as the British schools were issuing an errata list to accompany his dishonest movie on global warming. On the right, we still wait for noxious fools like Bill O'Rielly and Sean Hannity to be disgraced and replaced by the likes of Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt. Or, Lileks himself, who has a long radio career already and in his 'Screeds' can be as polemical as the best of them, but with good cheer and a likable personality.

Some isolated disasters slip the mind now, such as mass, random shootings like at Virginia Tech and the Amish school. These were extra-ordinary crimes, true abominations, nothing we should be accustomed to but alas since Columbine--- that hated word! ---those two demons with human parents!---maybe we have become accustomed. The question is whether these crimes were a sign of our age, and I think they were not. Madmen, like dogs with rabies, appear from the low mists. We know there are monsters, despite what we tell our children.

2008: another year for America to come close to making a terrible mistake. We can only hope for a low voter turn-out. We gamble that the ignorant rabble will be apathetic, not stirred with promises of free food and drugs and a war on the successful or privileged. Let the Clinton gang come out again so we can have a fresh look at their P.T. Barnum politics, their cringingly phony sympathies, their corrupt alliances. I feel sure that sober America will win through once again.