Living With America

...it's a funny thing. i've lived along the border most of my life, and it's been my very good fortune to travel to many parts of america, and to get to know some people from different parts of it pretty well over the last 30 years.

i've always considered it one of the blessings of my life, and if i was in a room here or in europe where people were trash-talking about the u.s.a., i'd be the first to remind them of just how much richer their lives were because there was an america... 

i'd talk to them about jazz music. i'd talk about the blues and country, i'd talk about barbeque and i'd talk about the battle in seattle. i'd talk about kurt vonnegut and mark twain and william s. burroughs, about woody guthrie and townes van zandt, i'd talk a blue streak until they would shut up and concede that push comes to shove, there's no way around the fact that all kinds of things came out of america that were magical, amazing and possessed of a power never ever encountered anywhere else in the world...

nobody north of 49 was happier than me for america when obama became the president of the united states. part of it for sure was being happy for all the rest of us in the world who have to roll with whatever crazy shit america gets up to- the good, the bad and the ugly...

but for real i was most happy for everyone i knew as a friend in america, and their friends, and the friends of their friends because god knows they suffered in many, many ways under the eight years of congenital idiocy and straight up, uncut evil in the land while bush the second and his handlers had their fingers on the levers of power in america...

to tell the truth, i was even a bit envious of them... because the leadership options open here were nowhere near as exciting and as energizing as what obama and his crew were saying out loud. and frankly, options, schmoptions, i knew up here we were going to be under the bare knuckles of third rate gubernatorial wanna-be, and lo and behold, we were, and we are...

but i was still happy for my friends in the u.s.- they'd paid heavy dues and what the heck, if something good gets going on down there, we will reap some kind of benefits here- even if it just boils down to my brother and his colleagues in the forces not getting sent off to fight in some god-forsaken corner of the world where no good would come anytime soon.

and now this whole Tea Party teabagger thing is all over the news everywhere, and it frankly scares the hell out of me. i'm old enough to know what might happen when a given number of americans get their hate on like these people seem to be hating...

-tbc-

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