Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Read this piece by Mz Wypplesbruegerski at C-punch:

http://counterpunch.com/wypijewski12102007.html

... with all innocent curiosity, and got IED'd -- didn't a sour bomb go off in my mortal soul department (such as it is), and I've been off and on nauseated for two days since.

Heres the entryway to my tour of boomer rad post-9/11 ground zero:

"I don't think either mere cheerleading -- we need the will! we need the courage! another world IS possible! -- is much of a solution to anything. There are world historical forces afoot here, and one of the jobs of anyone who considers herself on the left is to try to understand them. I don't think the Left in the heady days of empire really thought too much about the privileges and distortions being children of the empire conferred on it, except to say, in some quarters, We don't want any part of it! But opting out only goes so far, and is delusional even if understandable. Now that the empire is exhausted at the top -- and we could disagree about that, but I think the signs are more indicative of fundamental weakness than of strength even if the US can still kill everyone in the world many times over and still 'afford' billions of dollars a day doing that in one way or another... Radicals are feeling what it means to be part of the general decline. How do we deal with it? That's not an idle question, or one that has an obvious answer. There was a certain amount of chauvinism attached to the American Left in the sixties, a sense of being at the center of the political universe even if people did make their trips to Hanoi or Ghana or Paris...."

...And from there off she went into the malaise gauche:

Sometimes I think that at a minimum we ought to be encouraging people to join -- anything. The PTA, the Kiwanis Club, the local pathetic chapter of the NAACP, the local tenants group, the freelancers union, the local Democratic club or libertarian club, whatever, just to start remembering how to think together. And even if it prompted people to see what they don't want to be part of, maybe it would encourage them to create something that they do. This sounds pretty lame, I know. But the situation is pretty lame...

As I read this sober, "baby-steps" assessment (as Joanne herself chracaterizes it), I felt like Orson Welles' character must feel as he slides, glides, staggers, and tumbles into the gunblast-shattered climax of Lady from Shanghai. And as I type this, see me, in overhead crane shot pullaway, running like a ten-year-old apple thief, if for nothing else, at least to preserve my sense of invincible personal insanity.