Little By Little, A Diatribe Brewing

      After writing this morning's little spiel "Federalize It Or Let It Go... Ten Years On" it occurs to me that I've been succumbing bit-by-bit to partisanism over the last year or so.  Granted, since my teenage years I've borne political opinions of one sort or another.  Hell, I'm human!  But I've generally been able to keep my opinions to myself, and even those fairly moderate and obligingly vague.  Politics held an interest for me as an operating system, and I felt rather liberated from its more emotional wiles.
      And then came the 2010 midterms, and the national rumblings of a sweeping new movement.  Not that it's much of a new thing, this latter-day populism.  Proponents of Ross Perot, Southern Democrats, the Know-Nothings and Bull Moosers; America has a long, colorful history of political sub-groups that raise furious hub-bubbery and don stupid names.  The Tea Party is no exception in this regard.  Neither new nor in fact widely popular in the grand scheme of American politics, Populism is inherently energetic and thus the fairly unstable, poorly-organized yang to the dual party system's more sedate yin.  It takes issue, it rages, and it wanes; perhaps leaving behind some small legacy, but always survived by the the powers that be.
      Given the charged nature of the rhetoric employed and at times melodramatic (and occasionally ludicrous) aims of such movements, it is little wonder the nation's founding fathers sought to marginalize the impact of popular politicking on such crucial entities as the Senate and Presidency, and keep people altogether removed from choosing our highest judges.  In touting the merits of the creators of American democracy, many people forget the Adamses and Madisons and even Jeffersons were wary of the unbred masses.  Utilizing them from time time, surely, but after the elections try and keep them as far away from decision-making as humanly possible.  It is a system that even to this day largely operates on the notion that most people don't care about politics, and that those who really do are too far-out to matter.
      So why be bothered?  If it's merely another political El Niño, why get so up in a huff?  I suppose I can't really say why, but I feel irritated by this somewhat badly-timed uproar coming so soon on the heels of what I'd supposed had been a national triumph.  America had elected its first black president, and a charismatic and outspokenly progressive one at that.  It was a change I thought people had finally come to recognize was needed, still coming down from the cataclysmic crest of our questionably low-regulated bank and trade policies, from a drawn out and again questionable war against something as marginally frightening as 'terror'.  From dinosaur technologies that keep Americans tethered to the gas pump and living beyond the sustainably feasible.  
      We'd won, I thought at the time, and it was our turn to begin setting things right (better late than never, eh?).  Right for the environment, right for our infrastructure and our tax base.  Right for our spending priorities and domestic initiatives.  Restoring our image in the world's eye, vital in this global era of ours.  We were apparently moving onwards and ever upwards.  It would be a slow thing, perhaps spanning over ten or twenty years, but it was a work set in motion and I was excited by it.
      Sour grapes, maybe.  And while I can't quite divine where the nation is headed now I can safely say I disagree wholeheartedly with the direction people are trying to finagle it into.  Less a direction even, and more like an anchoring in place.  A stopping of the cart and slaughtering of the ox, if only to believe we are protecting the American quality of life.  But I dunno... at the end of the day I want to have an opinion, but not at the risk of sounding like any number of angry folk who take the art of argument and turn it into a name-calling match.  To wit...  I don't want to be that guy (or gal).  We have enough of those about already.

"Hickeys"

“Jesus!  Why did you do that?”  With a pronounced sense of dread John tenderly fingers the purpling bruises on his neck reflected in the bathroom mirror.  They were unmistakable, and would probably be so for several days.  “How am I supposed to go out looking like this?”

“Quit your whining and come back to bed.” 

He can see her naked body making exuberant sheet angels on the bed.  John wants to return, knows he can’t, and hates her for it.  “A lesser man would make marks back, you know.”

She laughs.  “Make all that you want, darling, just come back to bed.”

“I can’t,” he stammers, disaster on his mind as he slides into his slacks.  “I’ve stayed too long as it is.”

With an audible sigh she sits up, grabs a cigarette from the night stand and lights it.  “Have you always been so melodramatic?”  She forms a smoke ring or two, a bemused smile on her face as they warble away to wisps of nothing.  “Or were you just born a coward?” she adds with a faint sneer as John hurriedly throws on his spring jacket.  Exiting the apartment with curses on his breath, he can hear her laughing as he trundles down the staircase.  He rubs his neck as he steps out into the chilly mid-October evening.  The leaves had mostly fallen from the trees by now, collecting in damp clumps along the curb and in the windless nooks of buildings.  Winter was fast approaching, and John wishes he’d brought along a warmer coat, or a hat. 

Or a scarf, he thinks to himself bitterly as he hurries up the avenue.  If it had been just one, he might be able to pass it off as a joke, or maybe an injury at work.  But this, this here was a mad assortment of different sized, clearly-defined bite marks on his neck and chest.  This spelled trouble, if not divorce.  Injury at work.  John scoffs at the thought; accountants don’t get injured at work.  That’s why people become accountants.  And bankers, and bureaucrats, and much else that makes do with large amounts of paper.

He checks his watch:  eight-fifteen.  Should have left an hour or so earlier, but then, that’s life?  Putting aside years of responsibility for those hour-long flights of whim?  To this point, John can’t remember life ever being like that.  Life.   Particularly, the life of a certified accountant.  He eats fairly healthily, but without any particular tastes.  He drinks little.  He occasionally goes out with the wife, and seldom with friends.  He watches some television after dinner, catching the stocks on MSNBC.  Golf, five or six times a year.  He is saving for a house somewhere outside of the city someday, something by the sea so he can own a boat.  He lives in a one-bedroom, yet spacious apartment with his wife in a nice part of town.  They don’t have kids, or a dog; he doesn’t know if he loves her enough to, and suspects she feels the same because they’ve never talked about it. 

Life.  Worse maybe than the possibility of divorce, John discovers he hasn’t much of a life to disarrange.  Maybe that’s why he started seeing her.  Or more likely, he didn’t have a reason.  It just sort of ‘happened’ out of convenience.  When he thinks about it, he can’t quite remember how it started.  John can’t even put a name to her; his wife either.  But what’s in a name?  His own name isn’t much by much.  John.  They give that to the unidentified and the anonymous, to bodies and tricks.  But thinking about his life he can’t quite put an essence to himself, either.  Life is so easy, so for-granted; is he actually a born coward, as she had suggested?  What else besides a coward could this man be that trods so sullenly along the pavement, worrying so?

John tries telling himself he is a coward, yet oddly enough he does not feel ashamed or otherwise compelled to change.  It’s just a word, much like a name.  A word that means ‘does not take risks,’ essentially.  It’s his nature, the same that drew him to mathematics in school, the same that funneled him into accountancy among all the other trades.  In fact, the bruises on his neck are the riskiest thing he had ever done, and only for those can he feel ashamed.  It was an act against his nature, a mad act of recklessness.

He comes to a stop beneath the striped plastic awning outside the entrance to his apartment, breathless from having walked so quickly.  He touches his neck again, wondering if he should go up and face things.  Come clean and beg for forgiveness, or maybe fumble through a web of implausible lies?  He unlocks the heavy Plexiglas door and approaches the elevator.  Perhaps she wouldn’t even notice.  Just keep the lights dim and work late the next few days until they fade away.  As he pushes the call button, a sickening chill wells up in John’s insides.  Disaster on his mind and true to form, he heads back out into the mid-October evening to make up his mind some more.