Tags: crimes | George W. Bush | Iraq

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities." - Revelations 18: 2 - 5

My Chinese calendar says that 2004 was the Year of the Green Monkey - and that "if this is your year, you are intelligent, liked by everyone, and will have success in any field you choose. Lucky old you!" Lucky old us, indeed. If there were a Year of the Whore, this would be it.

Given the choice between Man or Monkey, America has chosen the Monkey. One might be tempted to comment on the Monkey and his trainers, but in the end he's only a monkey and it's pointless to lay the blame on him. What the choice says about America is another matter.

Lincoln famously commented you can fool all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Unfortunately he was correct. The problem is that you evidently only need to fool about half of the people all the time - and this turns out to be easier to do than anyone in their right mind would have expected.

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I am in shock and awe about the abysmal level of willful ignorance and pure genetic stupidity Dubya's win implies.

In that sense it was a day of vision and of revelation. I closed my eyes and saw legion upon legion of slack-jawed mental deficients shuffling out of decrepit, sweltering shacks from the Mason-Dixon line down to Key West and across to the muddy banks of the Mississippi, taking last giggly snorts of paint thinner and pinching their sisters' nipples before staggering out to vote.

Across the river were the windswept plains of the Midwest, where hard-faced men were beating their children with planks and screaming that they were godless faggots for daring to turn from Fox News to CNN. I saw ten million southern Baptists fingering their own anuses as they listened to the Dubya's coded Biblical revelations in his weekly radio addresses, while the Mormons dressed up in their wives underwear and had circle jerks in the Temple basements while they prayed aloud for the return of national Prohibition.

Dick Cheney was there in my vision, feasting on heaps of eviscerated Iraqi children and masturbating with their entrails. He looked at me and winked, a little brown arm hanging out of the corner of his mouth. "No blood for oil," he croaked. "Blood for Dick. Keep Dick young." Tom Delay was hammering at his own testicles with a wooden mallet, and imbecilic smile full of newly capped teeth plastered on his face.

Rummy and Wolfie were sitting with Ariel Sharon and drawing up plans to relocate the Palestinians to Fallujah after first depopulating it with a neutron bomb. Sandra Day O'Connor was trying to mount a semi-conscious, delirium-stricken Rehnquist, still muttering incoherently to himself about the significance of the Dredd Scott case. The toothy maw of her twat was speaking to him in Aramaic, like Burroughs' typewriter in The Naked Lunch... "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends... go, Bill, go to sleep, it's all over now."

At the head of this motley array was Dubya, dressed in a velvet Green Monkey flight suit costume, dancing a sort of crippled jig and blithering on about freedom marching and enemy body counts and strategic hamlets and doing cocaine with hookers in Alabama in the 1970s while Karl Rove fiddled with the controls of a remote. "f*cking thing always breaks down at the worst time..."

After the Red Sox won the Series the other day, I walked outside and gazed up at the stars and marveled at the wonder of it all. "Anything can happen now," I whispered to myself. "Anything. There are no limits." The awful truth of that premonition is only now making itself clear. Fate is nothing if not ironic.

We know that those who voted for the Monkey are misinformed, ignorant cretins who believe that Iraq had WMD and used them on the World Trade Center at least five or six times; that fake dinosaur fossils were buried by the Archangel Michael six hundred years ago in order to test our faith; that terrorists would have already detonated nuclear warheads in Peoria and Kansas City except for the Alaskan Missile Defense Shield; that lower taxes means lower deficits; that checks and balances has something to do with liberal faggot fetish clubs in Manhattan; and that the earth is getting hotter because of stem cell research and abortion, not SUVs. That they believe these things is not in dispute. But the desperate question is why.

The answer is equally desperate and stupid and obvious: they believe these things because they want to believe them. It is not as though facts are difficult to come by these days. In fact they are hard to avoid. Not to notice that Dubya is a retrograde imbecile with gratuitously criminal instincts is no easy feat but evidently possible.

Overlooking the small item that ten thousand American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead or maimed for no good reason is a bit tougher, and our clattering collapse into national bankruptcy has been so noisy it woke the dog up. The fact that virtually everyone in the world would rather have a sh*t shower than be seen in the same room as us ought to be remarkable, as is the fact that we have been thoroughly bested and subsequently mocked on prime time television by some bearded goat-f*cker who looks like a Star Wars action figure and operates out of a cave in Pakistan.

These are facts with obvious consequences that can only be avoided with assiduous care and effort. This leaves one inescapable conclusion: that these people actually want Dubya for president and, furthermore, understand what that means. They know that the last four years was Dubya-lite: no mandate and with an election to win down the road. The second four will be go-for-broke, double-or-nothing-cause-you've-got-nothing-to-lose, nuke-Teheran-and-declare-a-police-state-at-home.

A Bible in every home and a bomb for every towel-head. SuperSize Dubya: ribbed, for his pleasure.  And if that is the case, if these ignorant blockheads want to hop on the Dubya Express to economic, intellectual, and moral ruin, then that is what they goddamn well deserve.

We tried to help them. We took the high road, gently and carefully pointing out in small and simple words how they would get royally screwed in these bouts of idiotic warmongering and amateurish efforts to dismantle Social Security. We took the low road, pointing out that the GOP is run by a gaggle of hypocritical, lying scum with the morals of thalidomide crack whores and the public grace and dignity of pigs wallowing in puddles of their own puke. We put up a candidate who actually cares about Americans as people, not as pawns in a juvenile game of world domination, who makes policy based on that whole 'reality thing' and can speak in public without humiliating himself and the nation for generations to come.

We offered an alternative vision of America - a nation that is freer and thus stronger, that is more just at home and in the world, that exhausts all options before reluctantly turning to the awful decision for war, and that honors the precious and fragile principles upon which the great American experiment was founded. We offered reflection, wisdom, competence, and balance. Our adversaries offered an apocalyptic vision of mounting paranoia at home, eternal and merciless war abroad against those too weak to defend themselves, of clawing ever deeper into the fanatical blindness of faith in a frantic retreat from the very principles of reason itself.

Somehow this army of the insipid electorate has chosen Dubya's hellish vision with a goofy smile and an aww, shucks slap on the back while simultaneously acknowledging and denying what it is - perhaps this bizarre and dangerous capacity for contradiction is what Gibbon meant when he referred to the "amiable weakness of human nature" as a terminally destructive historical force. You don't need to fool any of the people, actually: you just need to give them an easy way to fool themselves. They want to fool themselves into thinking they're living the American Dream, and that is why the Year of the Green Monkey is doomed to be the Dream's final, bloody gasp.

Sometimes I think the only reason Karl Rove has failed to inscribe GOP mottoes about faith, courage, and peace over the gates of their concentration camps and rape rooms in Cuba and Iraq is that he lacks Goebbels' imagination. All result, no panache.

I remember more than a decade ago picking up Gibbon's Decline and Fall and reading the first paragraph, and feeling an awful sense of foreboding wash over me. This premonition of doom grew stronger and stronger over time, and has today reached its fullest consummation:

"In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.

The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines.

It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth."

Shall I light another candle rather than curse the gathering darkness? I have watched this flame burn down and sear my hand, as have millions of others. Shall I mark this moment somehow, this fleeting instant which simultaneously marks both the apogee and the beginning of the end of the American Age? Scream a warning that down those paths lies nothing save ignominious defeat, tumbled statues and faded, empty glories?

No. It is painful to say it, but the fight may be over. Perhaps it is simply time to let the legions of the insipid, the ignorant and the inbred go their own way, down dark paths some of us will never bring ourselves to follow.

Perhaps it is time to just enjoy the darkness for a while, to gaze in wonderment at the stars, and try to discern whatever alternative American destiny might be inscribed therein for those of us who are left behind. Secession for the northeast and West Coast, perhaps a same-sex union with Canada - leave the rest to stew in whatever hellbroth of violent imbecility they manage to concoct under the guidance of the Monkey.

Who knows? 2005 is the Year of the Cock - my calendar claims "it is the animal that hides in your heart". I don't know what that means. Maybe it means another Series for the Red Sox. Nothing can surprise me anymore. Anything can happen now. There are no limits. God help us all.