Dear America,

I want a ride on the Elephant.

You are now Republican through and through. You are

‘God’s Country.’ In the Senate, in the House and in

the Presidential offices. Your new Supreme Court

nominees can overturn Roe v. Wade. You can keep

fighting on in Iraq and take Iran to the brink. You

can keep your deficits, your pharmacare, your tax

cuts, and your big oil money flowing. And keep those

Defense contracts primed up, baby. It’s going to be

wild ride!

You beat the Democrats into oblivion. There’s nothing

left of them. So this morning, given the immensity of

the rout, we are all diminished, we are all

impoverished and we are all possible recipients of

your arrogance.

An election which defines a time and a generation only

comes along about once every fifty years. This time

the whole world was watching. This was the election

where we all ended up liking John Kerry. But it

wasn't good enough.

We wanted to fall in love with him.

We wanted the "Going Upriver" John Kerry, the shaggy

haired 70's one, 27 years old, speaking against the

war at the Senate Committee meetings just arrived from

Vietnam. We wanted the earnest John Kerry preaching

about "commitment" at the Yale debating club offices.

He was the right candidate at the right time. The

Curse of the Bambino had been broken, the stage had

been set and the Kerry storyline was compelling. He

had us and then he lost us. But in the end, the

mythology and the narrative of the campaign didn't fit

the gravity of the times. It was underwhelming.

We wanted so much more. We expected so much more. We

deserved so much more.

Perhaps John Kerry committed the most egregious

violation of all humankind - he failed to inspire when

the age and the time demanded it. We wanted to

believe in somebody again. But he was too wooden, too

much the icon Senator from Massachusetts, too

weathered by experience to speak freely in the kind of

language we were looking for.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The age demanded that we

sing and dance and jammed us into iron pants." That's

how the last four years made us feel. We wanted to

believe again. How many time do I have to say it?

We wanted that kind of Robert Kennedy feeling - hell

we would have settled for Bill Clinton.

John, we weren’t asking for much.

To be fair, John Kerry's greatest moments were at the

debates where he manhandled George W. Bush, beating

him on every point, on erudition, style and

experience, at will. It was embarrassing to watch the

stupefied and awkward President attempting to parry

the blows. If it had been a hockey fight, Kerry would

have been like Tie Domi flipping Bush's sweater over

his head and pummeling him with an endless barrage of

blows. Kerry ended up being the Joe Frazier of

American politics, but we wanted Ali. Kerry was like

the ski-jumper from Wide World of Sports who falls on

the runway and lands on his head in his Moment of

Truth.

If the rest of the world was voting, John Kerry would

have won.

This wasn't just a Democratic collapse of epic

proportions where heads will roll and blame will be

apportioned accordingly. The battle for the swing

states was lost, John Edwards couldn't carry his home

state, Clinton didn't bring Arkansas, Gore couldn't

bring Tennessee and Richardson couldn't bring New

Mexico. Voting for Republican America was a way for

Middle America to flip the bird to the rest of the

world. It was a big, giant "fuck you all" to the

critics of America. It was an affirmation of the Bush

White House and his handling of the wars, the economy,

his leadership and his cabal of right wing ideologues.

But for the rest of us, we will look upon America as

if it's Robert Altman's Nashville – that the “Best

Before” date on the Bush White House passed long ago

for most of rest of the world.

Republican America, you are a nation deluded about

your place in the world, your visions of Empire,

wearing an ideological straitjacket custom fitted by

Pat Robertson and the Christian right.

This isn't a Chicken Little vision of the world, but

things got a little meaner, a little harder, a little

bit more serious after last night. Secular America

was given a drubbing last night.

It’s roll up the sleeves time.

So sleep tight America, everthing’s going to be ok.

The response to the Republican landslide will bring

out the best side of you – the one we like. Your own

citizenry will be engaged in a way that it never has

been before. It will be a litigious time in the

courts, but maybe politics will matter again.

The Bush that America voted for will be remembered as

the most divisive, controversial President of modern

times. But he found a way to win.

So it’s now up to you, people of America, to take back

your country in other ways, to temper your nation’s

excesses, to find a better way. We’ll be watching.

We don’t have a choice.