Yeah, Bush still refuses to admit he was wrong.
Yeah, he plans to keep the war of occupation going forever; he’ll leave our sons and daughters in harm’s way until he leaves office, and set things up so it’ll be darned difficult for the next leader to get ’em out.
Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.
This moment in the national zeitgeist feels like a moment in one of those multi-band benefit rock concerts–that point where the worst band on the bill, the sluggish jam band that tries too hard to be the next Phish only without the skills or the songs or the energy or the talent, ignores the 20-minute set limit all the other bands onthe bill must follow, and instead plays out its entire repertoire, complete with extended egotistical noodling passages.
Everybody’s waiting for the band to shut up and get off the stage already, except the band itself. The band’s members, in the role of a mutual admiration/masturbation society, are so in love with their own imagined fabulousness that they can’t even imagine the whole room not adoring them.
Now, imagine you can’t simply leave the arena. You’ve carpooled with a couple members of the next scheduled band. You can only (1) ignore the jam band from heck as best you can, (2) repeat a silent mantra to yourself of “This too shall pass,” or (3) take action–start a hearty booing section in the audience, toss empty plastic beer cups stageward, bribe the PA operator to cut off the band’s juice.
Like the jam band from heck, the neocon machine refuses to concede anything–not its control of the stage, not its incompetence, not its delusions of godhood.
And, like the jam band from heck, the con-game operators in DC imagine, nay fully Believe, the world will love their music (or history will avenge them) if they just keep playing long enough and loudly enough.
The analogy’s end limit is that the jam band from hell can’t cause hundreds or thousands of brutal, needless deaths and maimings for no practical cause except the enriching of its friends’ bank accounts.
And the jam band from heck doesn’t have 480-some days in which to continue its reign of error.
