Dear Ones,
Perhaps I have descended into some form of insanity--to be so soothed by my own images of the past. Another kind of intergenerational discourse--the old self with the young. The Palin affair knocked words out of me. Just when I thought a window was opening on the stifling airless room so much of American politics has become, a new national ugliness was thrust upon us. I have added my outrage to the all the swirling posts, I have signed all the petitions and as always I have been moved by the fierce intelligence that sparks throughout the cyberwaves--by the creative political endeavors of the You tube progressive generation that use all their talents in video film making to animate the absurd machinations of the Right. Now all we knew about the myth of the "free market" has proven a home grown truth--workers will bail out the super rich, too big to be allowed to fail--proving Hitler's maxim--if you tell a big enough lie often enough, it has the power of truth, a national truth. If you make enough money often enough, the rest of the nation will come to pay for it. Bush walks out of the bushes, mumbles a few words and disappears back into the bushes. He seems a broken man--he has taken a nation and a large part of the world with him.

I keep thinking of the single mother, the other single mother, who is filmed getting up at four in the morning, taking her child to a neighbor's home so she can go off to one of her three jobs to keep her family in shelter. No one comes to bail her out, too small her life is judged, too small her loves are judged, too small her dreams are judged. Katrinas over and over again. America went Rovian and the ruling classes counted on our obedience. Security, security, security, fear, fear, fear, profits, profits, profits--enough is never enough, too much for too few is how to run a country--keep the rest worrying or even better, dying on too many battlefields. We did not take to the streets when Bush stole the first election--what will we do now? How to best serve an imperfect democracy? The Palin affair and the crises on Wall Street, the language of war our government's only way to speak about security-- what will we do? The Palin affair--a woman, a small time politician, drafted to make McClain look young--a woman, drafted to appeal to other women who feel left out of the national narrative, a small time politician who sees some daylight ahead of her, a small time politician, Palin, who stumbles across the national stage in a big time moment--I will not be in my country of birth for this election--I await my absentee ballet in the mail--but that night when we would all sit around the TV together, my old New York friends, my Arizona friends, I will be sitting with you, with breaths too deep for how deep we could fall or how high we could climb.