Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
November 23, 2004 - Letter to the Editor
A friend of mine whom I'll call The Activist recently wrote me a letter, asking if I'd ever published a letter to the editor in Wild Violet.
I told him that no, in fact, I hadn't. And we weren't likely to start, either.
However, when I read through the snarky political-minded letter to the editor that he wrote me, I decided it ought to see the light of day somewhere, and so here it is.
Dear Editor:
A little birdie told me that you were a (gasp) L-i-b-e-r-a-l, and that you were disappointed with the results of the Nov. 2004 general election. That the editor of a literary periodical is liberal should be no surprise to anyone, so I believed the little birdie's story at face value.
Well, I, too, am a lifelong liberal, and yet I am glad Bush won, in a weird sort of way. Let me make my case — and take heart. I, too, am disappointed in my fellow Americans for falling for Bush's fallacies, but allow me to present a new line of logic.
What if Kerry had won? He would have fared worse than (yecch!) Lyndon Johnson in the eyes of the public and the annals of American history. Kerry is too timid to lead a tepid Democratic administration and party through a Republican, jingoistic foreign war, amidst an (eeeek!) Republican-controlled Congress and Senate. Every administration-introduced legislation would have been shot down in committee, every GOP law so heavily loaded with rhetoric and riders that Kerry would have been forced to veto, over and over again, that which America demanded most.
The economy is crashing, international security is a shambles, world opinion pines for a U.S. with honor and integrity — what if Kerry had inherited this? The Democratic Party 's ideals might have been shattered and mocked for years or decades. True, Kerry would have been welcomed by European and Asian and African and South American statesmen and -women eager to take a more equitable share of global resources, but rest assured, the big business interests who favored Bush/Cheney would constantly have thwarted, subterfuged, conspired and plotted against Kerryisms at every sneaky turn. Fired intel operatives, as they did in the Carter years, would foment left-wing and Islamic revolutions, which at a surface level beg for a strong, Republican response — with weak little Kerry left to take the fall.
No thanks! Let the greedy Republican consequences (the results of the lowest of human thought patterns) fall on their own, and be blamed for their true roots. Let not one nationalistic, dogpack-minded, pro-wrestling block redneck be easily able to blame his own failures on liberals at all. Then, when our country has learned its lesson, let the Barack Obamas and other charismatic liberals step into the corridors of power.
See ya' in 2012.
Moral:
To some liberals, the glass is perpetually half-full.
Copyright
2004 by Alyce Wilson
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