Gin Haikus.

Cutting limes for gin,
I prick my finger on the knife.
A drop lands on the glass.

Making Gin & Tonics,
I think of you and lose track.
And start again.

The Dark Side of American Politics.

Years ago, I exhorted not just my friends and ideological mates to vote, but also every American who was eligible. The right to vote is not an inconsiderable one, but it's a right we don't (myself included) exercise enough. It is, after all, one thing to vote for President, and another thing - similar only in that you mark a candidate - to vote for your cities sanitation director, your sheriff, your alderman. But if consistent knowledge of politics, local and national, is approaching the height of civil responsibility then perhaps I have fallen to the bottom. For the last four years, I am afraid that I've mostly just tuned out the entire process as depicted on American media outlets. Where I used to watch CNN and C-SPAN for more news of the Senate and Presidents actions, after a plethora of vile national antics, I couldn't really handle it anymore.

I knew that I was disgusted, and I knew that if my outcries and letters hadn't been answered yet, they would likely never be remedied at all. Our president, who has demonstrated perhaps the least wit and capability since  the June Harrison administration. Personally, I think I'd take William Harrison over what we ended up with. Maybe he's a little stiff, but he probably won't declare war on Iran.

I've never been totally sure what allowed us to fall so far. A cursory glance at the news told me that our administration was doing awful things, allowing for awful things, with a total pass from the top in the name of stopping terrorism. Pundits threw around words like 'traitor' and suggested liberals be hung as criminals. I think I can tell you that it's a little uncomfortable to be around people echoing these sentiments in a professional setting, where I had never personally allowed my own, admittedly radical, political views to shine through. These were business owners talking about dragging me behind a pickup to teach me a lesson in civics.

Of course, that's the dark side of politics or, at some point, ideology. It's easy to go on television and talk about people and to echo those sentiments later in a move that proves to be among the greatest of propaganda movements of recent history. The tendency to remove the faces of people we know and replace them with our constructed ideological enemies is a simple and powerful one. It is the root of fascism and the kind of extremism that births militants - not freedom fighters - but terrorists. If we must use the 't' word, then apply it equally. It belongs not just to Arab men possessing of box-cutters on our airways, but also to those who echo the violent refrains of those in power in order to silence their political enemies with the threat, implicit or overt, of violence and harm.

We have allowed this to happen as a nation. It is to our shame, and to our detriment, but it is not new.

There is a new election on the horizon, and I'll be voting for Obama, whose platform is change though I remain cynically skeptical. My vote would not be unconditional except that McCain is clearly, clearly a worse choice; a choice that will continue (perhaps rapidly) down the doomed path of our last president. However, let's not forget that even though the country seems fed up with our current leader, he was elected not once (shame on him) but twice (shame on us). The dialog in our country has been toxic, and we've allowed too many atrocities to be done in our name.