May God Continue to Bless America

A very strange thing happened to me tonight while watching the State of the Union. Something snapped in me when that guy did the thing where he says, “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States,” and that mentally retarded draft-dodging cokehead alcoholic democracy-subverting fake-cowboy overeducated-yet-still-barely-literate nation- and womb-invading Moron Puppet of Evil strode in. Seeing Powell (the even-toned liar) and Ashcroft (the psycho-religious fascist) and Laura Bush (seated amongst her own handpicked gallery of rainbow-colored honored guests) and Rumsfeld (it really, really makes me nauseous that anyone calls him “Rummy,” as if there is anything even ironically endearing about a man who strategies about killing people for a living) and Cheney (who goes right past enraging me and chills me to my very bones) made it all so horribly real. This is our government. These are the people who are in charge of everything, all the money and all the bombs. There was the Supreme Court in their robes, there were the Republicans, there were the Democrats.

I looked at our whole entire tri-partite system of government, playing their appointed roles in this nightmare/farce/End of History/Inversion of All Meaning, checking and balancing and shaking each other’s hands, standing up to receive the Never-Democratically-Elected non-President of the United States of We’ll Invade Your Country and Replace the Dictators We Supported and Armed Two Decades Ago With Exactly the Kind of Political Vacuum that Creates Terrorism, Not to Mention Civil War and Starvation If We Want to Control the Oil and Have the Sheer Demented Brilliance and Audacity to Call it “Liberating You and Spreading Democracy” and I began to weep.

That never happened before. I rant, rave, or even, on occasion, spit. This goes on for about ten minutes, at which point I am either asked to leave the room, if I am in the company of others or I turn off the T.V. and stomp away, if I am alone. But this time I listened to the whole thing, (less an extended zone-out during the Social Security and Medicare parts). And I took notes.

These are my notes on the State of the Union, with slight augmentation and healthy doses of unnatural rage.

He just picked up and hugged a little girl. She was maybe three or four and African-American. And I thought, “how dare you touch a child, anyone’s child, on national television, and allow this image to imply that you love a) children b) females or c) people of color when every policy you enact or attempt to enact shows that you HATE them and think that they are inferior to the oil companies, drug companies, defense contractors and very, very rich people your policies, if not your rhetoric, prove that you LOVE. Your party hates people of color so openly that only after the 100-year-old segregationist is DEAD does his family admit that he fathered a child with a Black woman, your party hates people of color so openly that its one-time Senate Majority Leader-Elect publicly said that our country would be better off if this segregationist DEADBEAT DAD had become president. And you never cared about the Taliban or anyone else oppressing or raping or killing women until you needed someplace to invade, and your gag rule is killing women all over the world from lack of medical care and illegal abortions and the AIDS they contract from the condoms they’re not allowed to be given or even TOLD ABOUT. So don’t touch that little girl with your slimy, bloody hands! Put the little girl DOWN you EVIL MORON PUPPET!

At this very moment, the Moron Puppet of Evil is struggling to pronounce the word “Casablanca” while he tells a story that sounds like the plot of Lord of the Rings. “The Evil Must Be Defeated,” he says. Except he has this peculiar diction that makes him sound like a second-grader reciting his lines in the school play. He emphasizes the wrong words in sentences in a way only someone who has no awareness of what they are saying can.

Now he is telling Congress, “You need to renew the PATRIOT Act.” It is a startling reminder to me that in the midst of the war we had almost forgotten about your unprecedented attack on the Constitution, and its general ineffectiveness at fighting terrorism and handy effectiveness at containing dissent against your administration. Why, yes, though you passed it on the basis that it was a TEMPORARY, wartime restriction on freedom in the grand tradition of wartime restrictions on freedom that includes such great moments in American history as the Japanese internment, the Red Scare and the FBI’s attempt to undermine the ENTIRE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, let’s now make it permanent, since the 9/11 attacks have blessed America with its current state of being permanently AT WAR.

Now he is congratulating himself on getting rid of the Taliban. Soon, he waxes, there will be free elections and “the boys and girls of Afghanistan will go to school.” Well, except maybe for the ONES THE AMERICAN MILITARY KILLED..

Now he is praising Libya, shining example of an obedient nation. They have dismantled their weapons program. The peaceniks in the American government are really on a worldwide disarmament mission! No one else is allowed to have weapons but us. Because, you know, if other people HAVE them, they might USE them, whereas we HAVE weapons, and, well, we USE them, too, but when WE use them, we are SPREADING DEMOCRACY and when other nations use them, these weapons might KILL PEOPLE. See, weapons in the wrong hands KILL people. But weapons in the hands of the United States, as we are carrying out what moments later Bush refers to as “our special calling, to lead the cause of freedom” LIBERATE people. It’s hard to tell the difference when the weapons are ripping into the flesh and bone of human beings, but that might be because you’re not wearing your CAUSE OF FREEDOM GOGGLES with the SPECIAL CALLING BUILT RIGHT IN.

We needed to use military force in Iraq, he asserts, because otherwise “Security Council Resolutions would be empty threats.” Yes, the United Nations must be respected and heeded. THAT was the lesson we needed to DEFY THE UNITED NATIONS to teach.

And now we cut to Hillary, standingly ovating the fact that we went to war (And I would just like to say thanks, Hillary, for your oft-lauded BIPARTISAN EFFORTS to NOT BE A DEMOCRAT AT ALL), while also having the bad fashion sense to wear, for some reason, a Sex and the City circa third season enormous flower pin on her shoulder. To even out my unsisterly subjection of Hillary to fashion scrutiny, I will add this equally superficial observation: The men who occupy undeserved positions of power in the government that currently occupies our so-called democracy are so repugnant their very physical incarnations are perhaps the only real shot at abstinence education we have. I look at them and I think, “I ABSTAIN.”

“America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.” Translation: America will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and if anyone questions America, we will claim to be “defending our security.” Well, I was just out “defending our security” and I picked up a supply of cheap oil! How convenient!

After a good half-hour of the Bedtime Story of Why America Should—And Does—Control the Entire World and Should Never Be Fucked With or Accused of Such Crass Acts as Killing People or Re-Colonizing Entire Nations Because WE ARE JUST DEFENDING OUR SECURITY and the SECURITY OF THE ENTIRE WORLD, he switched over to tax relief.

“The American people are spending their money better than the government.” The government is still spending the American people’s money. It is spending way, way more of the American people’s money than it gave back. And since you gave the most money back to the people who need it least, and the people who need it most got enough cash to buy a CAN OF DIET COKE, I think the concept of who is spending what money is somewhat flawed in your thinking.

Now he is defending the “No Child Left Behind” Act’s commitment to standardized testing as a form of education. I love when he talks about education, since, you know, he’s illiterate. This so-called Everyman attended Andover, Yale and Harvard. If the “average American” could send his or her kid to Andover, Yale and Harvard and his kid came out UNABLE TO READ, the average American parent would a) beat the shit out of the kid for wasting his hard-earned money or b) apologize for not diagnosing his severe learning disability earlier and send said kid to therapy instead of allowing his DRUG PROBLEM TO RUN RAMPANT and rewarding his failure as a businessman with the FIGUREHEAD GOVERNORSHIP of an entire STATE.

And he has “Doubled funding for abstinence programs.” The only way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sex, he says. AND EVERYONE WHO HAS SEX DESERVES TO EITHER GET PREGNANT OR DIE. Because there is no way to prevent pregnancy or STD transmission 99% of the time. Oh, wait, there is. CONDOMS. But we believe that premarital sex is immoral and evil and contraception is immoral and evil, so we should not tell young people about condoms, because if we do, it will cause them to have sex, which they would not have thought of if we had not mentioned it. Oh, wait, only psycho-right-wing conservatives believe that. But they run our country so we all have to live the way they do. Except somehow I sense that a number of the people in that chamber may have engaged in non pro-creative, possibly pre- or extra-marital sex. If only the God they pretend to pray to really DID exist, and he smote everyone who had done the sick things they so righteously condemn. Then we’d be a nation of the pure and righteous. And lots of Harvard students. I hear an alarming number of them are virgins.

The irony is, the “Abstinence Method” is possibly the LEAST effective, as in PEOPLE DO NOT ABSTAIN. They just don’t and they never will and they shouldn’t. The youth of America should get laid as soon and as often as possible, before we are all killed in the apocalypse the Bush Administration’s violent policies is spoiling for. I have just one question: ARE THE BUSH TWINS ABSTAINING? Because ABSTINENCE BEGINS AT HOME.

He now moves on to his much-anticipated far-right-pleasing clear statement on marriage, having last week just committed $1.5 billion to “teach poor people about marriage” (was there ever a more condescending thought?)

“If activist judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will on the people” he threatens, if states insist on redefining marriage, we’ll have no choice but to turn the Defense of Marriage Act into a Constitutional Amendment. Great. It’ll be like the good old days of the 3/5 Compromise! (You know, when the North and the South agreed that each slave would count for 60% of a whole entire human!) The dehumanization of certain people will once again be written into the Constitution! Now that may not be justice, but you have to respect the honesty.

“Activist judges” force their “arbitrary will on the people” when they make DRACONIAN (and state-by-state) anti-abortion laws. States seem to have plenty of rights when it comes to GUN OWNERSHIP. But the federal government must step in to save marriage from the SICK GAY PEOPLE who, the Moron Puppet rushes to explain, we respect, just not, you know, enough to give them EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW (isn’t THAT already a constitutional amendment? Who cares about the constitution when you are RE-WRITING IT EVERY DAY?).

I only wish the Moron Puppet had had the honesty to frame the same sentiment more bluntly, as in, “Dick Cheney’s deviant dyke daughter should not be allowed to tarnish the purity of the institution of marriage with her deviant Sapphic love.” Though a) how many of those words does he know? and b) How capable of a functional relationship do you think the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL is?

During the marriage stuff, the camera cut to Republican Senator Rick Santorum, clapping with somber approval at the notion of formally defining marriage, while I and thousands of other readers of Dan Savage’s syndicated column gleefully thought in unison, “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex!” (Dan Savage, in a brilliant display of activism, challenged his readers to name a sexual act or thing after Rick Santorum, to honor his display of homophobia.)

See, Santorum thinks that if we let gay people get married, one day, the union of a “man and a dog” is going to be sanctified by the United States government, if not by God. (Though I am confused. You mean the United States government and God aren’t the SAME?) This is my favorite part. It’s the conservatives who claim to be so afraid of perversion who think up the MOST PERVERTED STUFF. A man and a dog?! Ew, Rick Santorum. That is gross. But you know what is grosser? A Senator (and a President) so afraid that they WANT to be done up the butt that they abuse their power to the point of ENACTING UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAWS oppressing people who DO do it up the butt.

Now we are on to blurring the line between Church and State, or as the Moron Puppet calls it, “Unleashing the compassion” of religious organizations that have been unfairly “DISCRIMINATED AGAINST and denied government funding.” Huh. I thought the government denies them money because our country was founded on the SEPARATION of CHURCH AND STATE. When the coffers of the church and state were one it was called MEDIEVAL EUROPE. It is not discrimination against people of faith to say that faith has no place in government services. But I think he may finally have found the one phrase that sums up his entire administration. “The Bush Administration: Unleashing the Compassion.”

He winds up with this charming anecdote of a little girl, Ashley Pierson, “age 2, I mean, 10” who wrote him a letter asking what she can do to help and asking him to tell the troops that, “‘Ashley Pierson believes in you.'” He told her to “study hard in school” (since your family does not control the CIA and the key electoral college states and you might need good grades to get anywhere in life), “listen to your Mom or Dad” (I did! My Dad invaded Iraq and so did I!) and “when you see a person in uniform, say, ‘thank you'” (for being poor enough to have to put on a uniform to get what rich people get without having to RISK THEIR LIVES).

Ashley Pierson, I believe in you, too. I believe that if you decide to have sex before you get married, you don’t deserve to catch an STD just because your school wasn’t allowed to tell you about condoms. I believe that if you get pregnant, you should not be forced by your government to carry a child to term. I believe that if you personally would not end an unwanted pregnancy, you would not want to restrict the rights of other women to do so, because I believe that you, Ashley Pearson, are not especially interested in my uterus, though your pen pal up there on what he miraculously correctly pronounced as the “rostrum” certainly is interested in both of ours. I believe that you deserve a real education, not just a standardized test every year. I believe that you and every single other American deserves adequate health care, and that providing you with education and health care is a loftier goal than giving millions of dollars in tax cuts to people who have millions more, or spending billions of dollars on weapons. I believe that you already live in one of the freest, safest nations in the world, and you should not let your freedom be restricted by the threat of terror that grows more real the more violent your government becomes in the name of preventing it. I believe in you, Ashley Pierson, and that in you and in every American is the capacity to recognize—and bear out—the truth.