ELECTION THOUGHTS

Boot Liquor (SomaFM netradio) spilling from the thin plastic Harmon Kardon towers on either side of my MacbookProscreen, a hillbilly version of Gram Parson's In My Hour of Darkness playing, one of my favorite songs. (from thousands) Imagining drunken cowboy music coming from South a Market San Francisco, home to some wild intergalactic cowboys. The city's not known for its cowtippers. But cowboy music makes me think about my long lost land.

i'm not in my SF home where i spent 22 years, my laptop is connected from a small city outside of Cologne Germany... Remscheid. I've spent hundreds of hours reading as many progressive blogs as i can, trying to figure out what will happen in the election, but i can't believe what the country looks like from this perspective. Political system beyond fixing, intelligence quotients at all time lows, rapture-based reality intruding everywhere, economy soon to be bankrupt (think about it), a dinosaur energy policy blind to what everyone already knows, free press destroyed, and the worst mud-slinging most expensive political ad buys ever.

Here in Europe there are still checks and balances, and a comparatively free press. And a vibrant culture, with a foundation trying to build a real sustainable future. america looks like a cancer rapidly metastizing?, with the system so broke it certainly can't be fixed by democrats controlling congress. (Five Blind Boys of Alabama singing Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun.) But here i am hoping the fuckin dems will win both houses.

It's essential that Nancy Pelosi, who in San francisco i knew well enough to respect her hard compromises (but not how she set up the Presidio), be speaker; the first step, so we can get the impeachment process and treason trials going. Not that all the dems want that, but if america wants to regain respect in the world, of which it currently has little, it's going to have to cross that line. Yes, to save democracy in america, it must first be set in deep conflict, with punishment for the abuse of power to set a new moral tone.

I always wonder how people can go about their daily lives in america, with the unbelievably nasty violence carried out in their name, with the utter destruction of a nation (again) on it's hands, with so much killing, with the looting of the nation's treasury, with the replacement of science by rapture-based feeling. i don't know if the votes will be counted right, but if there was ever a time in my life where a single election counted so much, it's now.

I don't understand why the intersections of every city are not clogged with protesters every day, given the level of the shit Bush perpetrates on the entire earth. But now, get out and fuckin try to save this "democracy." We can deal with Rupert Murdoch, hillary clinton and rahm whatever later.

One more thing, as Commander Cody sings Lost in the Ozone Again. It's clear to me that my experience of living at the highest visionary end of the sixties, with direct experience of what really happened and what it meant, means i just might have some skill in bringing vision back when it's needed so much. There's a few decades of high level sustainable energy business in the intervening years, which helped build perspective to the tumultuous '60's. It's time , as the Derailers sing I Love Me Some Elvis, for the visionary elders to reclaim their space.