(no subject)

I need to stop talking/writing about the election for a little while, but it's like vomit or diarrhea, I just can't. I was just writing a response to saintpeg about how the Republican voters, regardless of whether they were in the majority or not (see previous post), proved themselves incapable of voting "their interest," instead opting to turn the elections into a referendum on Morality. This really made me understand that I was wrong, that it's not about fear of terrorism, or blind patriotism; those things are just axis around which bigotry and Christian Zealotry are invited to orbit.

I kept thinking, with my commitment to education and independent meida, that it's only a matter of time, that the people on Bush's side haven't seen the light YET. I was wrong. There will be no fiat lux moment, that is the power of totalizing systems. The incompetence of the Bush administration is not the issue, and their supporters aren't stumbling in from the dark. The fuckups or mistakes or even blatant lies (in the old definition of lying, when assertions contradict reality) do not matter. Morality matters, and that will determine politics for the foreseeable future, whether the electoral process is honest or corrupt. That does not matter, because once they win, fairly or unfairly, they have the fundamentalist Tautology on their side: they are chosen by God. The Democrats can babble on about policy crises, about the economy, even about the civilian deaths and moral bancrupcy of the war in Iraq and the result is kind of like when the Yankee tried to explain inflation to a medieval farmer in Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. Reality is irrelevant compared to rhetoric, and it's no longer metaphor or a hyperbole, not since Suskind brought us the new era of identity politics in Without A Doubt. I guess you can only fight fire with fire. The next campaign won by the Democrats can only be dirty, and only if Democrats essentially become Republicans, in the transformative abyss way. There are already echoes of that (albeit defensive) with people accusing Gavin Newson of contributing to Kerry's loss, like why did he have to open the jar of gay marriage worms during the campaign season. The US will only be saved by the Republican Party splitting into two, and by the Democracts shifting so far right that they will make the "mainstream liberal" party affiliation as meaningless as the neocons made the traditional Republican platform. Sounds perverted, right? But that was another big epiphany of this week for me. America perverts everything. Everything that results in positive agendas or at least ideologies in the rest of the world--a tradition of immigration, ethical basis for legislature, high standard of living--is perverted into something monstrous in America. Perhaps that is what happens when you live within Reification, it's like falling down the rabbit hole or stepping through the looking glass.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on` And how do you know that you're mad?'
`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
`I suppose so,' said Alice.
`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'

Moving on.

When I said I was taking off the other day, I meant to go to the coast, to lie in the Esmeraldas sun for a few days. Sun, like vodka, makes me stupid, and very occasionally I seek it out. But I fell sick. I don't know if I am somehow psychosomatically embodying the shock of the Stolen Election, or if the mountain bike trip is to blame, but I was so out of sorts on Wednesday that it wasn't until late in the evening, when I looked out of my bathroom window, saw a giant, neon, glowing Rubic's Cube against the horizon, and couldn't tell whether it was real (apparently it is) that I realized I was running a fever. Probably due to my Soviet education, which taught me to think dialectically about folk proverbs like "a healthy body houses a healthy spirit," I have a Nietzschean/Puritan/Thomas Mann gestalt approach to what ails me. Burning up despite the descent of the freezing mountain night, I decided that a six-hour hike through the subterranean rainforest (home of the twotoedsloth, nota bene twotoedsloth) the next day would simply do *wonders* for me. At six in the morning I was awake, and at 8 in the morning I was in the rainforest. For the first hour or so I thought I was going to die, and then some evolutionary survival mechanism kicked it, and I felt awesome. I also had an epiphany that I would probably make a pretty terrible psychiatrist, because I would cure hiccups with gunshots and depression with insulin shock therapy. By the time I got back to Quito, muttering "I was right, rest only encourages illness," my fever was back. Superstructure-zero, Base-one.

So, um, yeah, today I feel like crap. Excitingly, I also have symptoms of both cold and flu (I checked the Diagnose Yourself worksheet on the interweb), and I had a good time at the phramacy explaining to the man behind the counter that I wasn't sure whether I have El Cotarro or La Influenza, but since I was pronouncing all "n"s as "d"s he kept shoving a decongestant at me.

I suppose the moral of the story, should you want one, is, when you have a fever, don't go on a jungle hike, especially when your judgement is extra-clouded because you are mad with grief.

I took some cool pictures, though.

( Flora & Fauna )

( The Fibonacci Sequence )

( Artsy-fartsy )