Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Election Day. Part One.

Last night I dreamt I was swallowed by a fish.

Down there, in that cavernous pit, feet swishing in six inches of dank salt water, I wandered. There was no light and when I reached out my hands into the black all around me I could feel no walls and no end.

In the distance, then, a match was struck and I began to walk towards it. When I reached its source I stood over a young man of medium build wearing a white shirt stained with fish guts, a tie, a black vest, and tuxedo pasts. He was filleting a fish that our host had swallowed whole. The man might have been thirty, but not a day more, but there was something worn in his posture, a tenseness straining his shoulders. He looked up at me and offered a faint smile.

“Hi Bill,” he said as he carved out the flesh beneath the fish’s gills.

It was odd that he knew my name. I opened my mouth to speak, but to my surprise, no words came out.

“I hope you voted Bill,” he said now sluicing guts from the fish’s belly. “I wish I could have followed that old Richard Daley maxim: ‘vote early and often.’ Ya know? Because they let me out of here every now and then and the one thing I’ve been able to count on these past seven years is some daylight on election day.”

I was curious to ask who this ‘they’ was but once again found myself mute.

He was now slipping a flat edged spoon underneath the fillet to check for remaining guts.
“The darkest day in the history of this country was not to soon after 9/11, the day that Bush urged us all to go out and shop.” His voice landed on the word ‘shop’ with elongated disdain. He snapped off the fishes tail. “I won’t argue with anyone who says 9/11 was a horrible tragedy, a national disaster. But if it was a turning point, any hope for progress died with the utterance of that word.” The fish’s spine was now exposed. “And when we as a nation quietly and quickly gave our resounding yes to that directive, we gave our very soul right over to the next seven years of lies and manipulation. We flushed our world standing right into the shit can. And for me, Bill, that’s what this goddamned election is about. Reversing those vacuous words that set us spinning into every goddamned disaster we’re staring at today. And it’s about having the goddamned balls to stand up to the soulless operators of endless campaigns and say, fuck you buddy, fuck you I get it, fuck you I understand that your lame brain candy-coated lace lined version of the American motherfucking dream is the crap we’ve all been buying for years, the crap that has us playing Rome the world over. That’s what the Bush boys and girls asked of us and we did it, most of us anyway, we did it: Be Nero, they said. Fiddle you fucks. Fiddle and watch it burn. We’ll just be right over here, barely out of sight, hell, sometimes we’ll be in plain sight, siphoning off the ashes of your American dream.”

He snapped the head off the fish.

“That’s what this election is about. Fuck hope. We got a couple of years before we can start this ‘shining city on the hill’ shit again. I’m voting for Obama, if they let me that is, because I know it’s the only chance we’ve got in this country to start making the kind of hard choices that will make us last. I think a vote for McCain is a vote for history and its ill-tempered tides. There’s not a lot of real truth in this world, Bill, but if we put the Maverick and the Pitbull in office, I think we’ll get a front row seat to the fall. America has been unbelievably fortunate, historically speaking. And we can either embrace the work that it’s going to take to restore that fortune, or we can embrace the blind, vacuous sycophancy that has guided us the last seven years. The unfettered American dream. Shop. Jesus.”

And he started eating his raw fish, picking the pin bones out of his teeth. I stood there for a while and watched him eat.