Living the Dream

Dear George,

You guys never fail to amaze me! You nimbly skip from lie to lie with all the grace of a drunken rhino, and people still believe you. You went from Iraq’s WMDs to Iran’s nuclear threat and the Democrats followed right after you like a bunch of tom cats following a bitch in heat.

Granted, the one thing the Democrats hate is acting like an opposition party because they are afraid of appearing divisive, but still…

Now you’ve trotted out your latest scam: offshore drilling as the panacea that will bring gasoline prices down. The Democrats could have blown you out of the water on that one simply by pointing out that your own Department of Energy has said it will be ten to twenty years before we’d see any of that oil, and even then, it would have zero effect on gasoline prices.

But this hasn’t stopped McCain from changing his song from “Bomb-Bomb Iran” to “Drill-Drill Offshore.”

One writer caught one of your minions crowing, “Without even realizing it, the GOP drilling offensive has become a new contract with America.” It’s funny how all these “Contracts with America” resemble tubes of K-Y Jelly.

The problem with the Democrats is that they concentrate on issues without realizing that in our age of MTV campaigning, issues are so yesterday. You guys always win because you concentrate on focus groups instead of vision and are more concerned with demographics than governance.

And your favorite demographic is not the soccer mom or the NASCAR dad; it’s the voter whose attention span has been atrophied by the media saturation that surrounds him. Dancing screens flash image after image in rapid succession. Over time, the mind is conditioned to accept rapid change as the norm. Slowly the brain loses the capacity for long-term memory that is the foundation of the ability to concentrate on something for more than five seconds.

Our leaders are constantly invoking the Greatest Generation that came out of the Great Depression to defeat the forces of fascism in World War II. This is the generation that returned home to lead America through the prosperous fifties and sixties.

The Greatest Generation is dying out, and we have a new generation of leaders replacing them—the bored children of prosperity who have never known hardship. They are the Now Generation that has introduced America to a new age of barbaric capitalism.

The Great Depression has faded from their memory and they are convinced they will never see another as long as they keep the quarterly bottom-line looking good by hook or by crook.

Our leaders live in a world of fantasy and are kept in power by an electorate that favors dreams over reality.

McCain shares their dream world, which is why I look forward to his inauguration.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones