Mandate

Just once I wish I could be satisfied with anything.

But satisfaction is not what I feel today. At last Israel pulls out of Gaza, but Hamas assholes are screaming that it is a victory for them. Guantanamo is given a firm date for its closure, but the torture that happened there is still legal. Millions of Americans got fired up for an election, but less than 24 hours later they are back to their armchairs and couches watching reality TV and belching "Yes We Did!" in their complacence. At the last possible minute, Obama got a gay Episcopal priest to speak the day before Dick Warren was given a national, nay global, platform to spew his homophobic, tribal shit-vomit, but HBO cut the former from its coverage of the concert on Sunday- with apologies to all for its inadvertent slight.

I'm not saying I want to change my vote, just that I was genuinely fooled when I was told this wasn't merely a return to Clinton-era mediocrity (still an improvement, I ashamedly admit).

When I was busy being an Obama-nut for the previous year or so, I warned myself privately, and others aloud, that if Obama turned out to be a compromiser rather than an agent for "change we [could] believe in" that I would become his harshest critic. I was warned in return that I was being silly and idealistic. They were right, and they were smart. They are also complacent.

And I say complacent with every kind of venom and rancor that I can squeeze into 10 letters. They ignore the fact that it was a lack of complacence that put this man into office, and it this selfasme lack of complacence on the part of the other side that can take him out again. If I, if anyone, gets complacent, gets jaded because we were handed something we were not expecting, when we were promised even more, and if that happens towards November, and god forbid it happens in a year that is a multiple of four, we'll get another George Bush. And it'll be what we deserve, just as we deserved it last time.

My complacent friends will get better jobs and fatter paychecks- in at least a year, suckers- but they will also bear a responsibility for living in a country where torture is legal, and is ripe to be taken advantage of again in the next election cycle.

The tragedy is not really that, though it's pretty bad. The tragedy is that we are allowing our mandate to be squandered. We were ready to hitch our pants up and get our hands dirty, and through that work become clean. Now we may not get that chance. In 50 years some insufferable ass like myself will argue that all the economic and infrastructural gains we will (I pray to god) have gained were not worth the price. Someone willl point to Obama's equivalent to the New Deal, and he'll point to Obama's equivalent to Executive Order 9066.

And he'll have no more of a solution than I have. All I know is that now is not the time to rest on our laurels, and these screams of "Yes We Did!" were never meant to stand for an election alone, but for a greater act that remains as unfinished and incomplete as ever, and that "Yes We Can!" is a promise we made to ourselves that we really don't want to break.