2003-08-15 - 1:55 p.m.

Anyone who lives in Austin knows about the beautiful happyland that is 6th and Lamar. It pretty much has everything you could ever possibly want distilled into five wonderful stores: Whole Food Market, Book People, Waterloo Records, Waterloo Icehouse, and Amy's Ice Cream. You can go to this place and have lunch, dessert, a cd for the drive home, and a book and groceries and only have to park once.

I usually have lunch at Whole Foods, getting something yummyliscious from the deli that is also healthy to boot. There are vegan wheat roasts and pecan crusted catfish and grilled veggies and pasta salads and that's pretty much all you need, but I spent today with soup, guzzling down my own half-and-half bowl of carrot and ginger and potato and leek, aided by jalapeno cheese bread. I also got me some Odwalla juice. So I am extra vitaminated and therefore coming up with my own words.

Then I went to Book People, because not much was going on with the office and I didn't feel like staring at the computer screen, having been vitaminvigorated and all. So I wandered around, ready to cry because I couldn't spend the entire day there just reading everything from books about the yakuza gangs in Japan to Watership Down (which fucked me up as a child) to Charlotte Bronte (which I have to read to study for the GRE, or at least to be informed as I go to grad school), and then I had to go to the bathroom, where I encountered some really cool grafitti.

This being Austin, Texas, the single oasis for anyone liberal (or, come to think of it, anywhere left of the far right) in Texas, there was a message that said "Assasinate George Bush." That wasn't the cool grafitti. What rocked was what was right underneath:

"But, dude, what if he's like Gollum. What if he has an addiction to power that makes him dangerous, but he's instrumental in the destruction of evil in a way that we can't fathom right now. Still, I think we'd be better off with someone else as president."

That was just fantastic.

See, I hate the Stupid Bully, as Sars called him on Tomato Nation. I hate him and everyone that surrounds him. I think he's doing horrible things to this country and it's going to take us a long time to get the stains out, if we ever manage to evict him at all. However, it does me a world of good to envision him as Gollum.

Because they have a lot in common. They both have a huge sense of entitlement. They're both have rather prominent ears. And they both have significant problems with grammar.

Can't you just imagine Gollum up there instead?

"We's promises that we will find biggest weaponses of mass destructionses in Iraq! Yes YEEEEEESSSSS!!! We heard from Master Cheney that there is big booming thingses there, didn't we my precious? And he tried to kill we's father, didn't he, naughty naughty Saddamses. We shall kill him, won't we my precious. YEEESSSSSS!!!"

I'm sure I've heard Bush saying that exact speech. The State of the Unionses, I think he called it.

I really hope he has schizophrenic battles in his head. Or maybe he just does that with Cheneyses.

Of course, the rest of us need a Bilbo. Or a Frodo. For that matter, we could use a Gandalf, a Samwise, an Aragorn, a Gimli, a Legolas, a Galadriel. Right now, we have a Dean, a Lieberman, a Gebhardt, a Kerry, and a Sharpton. Not to mention a Nader. I think maybe one of them is smarter than a Took, and the rest are as bitter as Boromir. It's not looking to good for those of who think that peace involves not occupying another country, and that freedom to is more important than freedom from.

So how do we get a Frodo? Well, Frodo wasn't a leader of men. He was just somebody who had a job put in front of him and had to do it. It's not easy to find someone like that in politics. It's frightening to realize that the person most qualified to be president would be the one who didn't want the job, the one who dreaded making decisions that would affect whether or not lives were lost, who didn't want to run a country but who wanted to make sure that the people in it got to live their lives as they always have, maybe slightly more secure AND more free than before.

That's me, in a way. That's a lot of people I know right now. There's this feeling of standing over Washington like a peevish teacher, thinking, "No, you...no, that's...no, listen, if you...no, you OH FOR GOD'S SAKE LET ME DO IT!!!" But we really, really don't want to.

I'm trying to remember what story I read about rulers being chosen by a lottery, and that only someone who wouldn't want the job would be an acceptable choice. It makes you wonder whether those people, in whatever fiction they lived, might not have it right.

Until we figure things out, I'm just going to keep watching. And whenever a certain someone comes on the television, I'll look at his ears and his puckered mouth think to myself, "We's the American Presidentses, isn't we, my precious!"

And laugh my ass off

previous - next