Missive the Forty-First
The Spirit
Of the Might-Have-Been.
DATELINE: Tuesday, December 5, 2000, at 2300 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
The Spirit of the Might-Have-Been is let loose upon the land. It cries like a Harpy, flies madly into the fading away face of good reason.
By Friday the turmoil will escalate to chaos. Vice-President Algore's stung minions will have struck when his foes least expected it. He will have wrestled enough votes from the courtroom to enable things, to enable the enablers, to move ahead of his cowboy rival in the vote count.
What follows Friday's chaos? Mayhem? I think not. Not yet. This coming manic weekend will be mere frenzy and marshalling of arms. The wanton destruction shall come later, most likely 'round Christmas Eve.
The Republicans are becoming wretched o'er the villainy of their rivals, the jurists. I fear they're ripe for a lynchers' party.
Telepathic Remote Control
Makes Him Sound Robotic.
Vice-President Algore appears pale and pasty. Some secret controlling power has a telepathic remote control trained on him. An alien wireless pipeline is being employed to program his speech. The alien technology is so backward it makes him sound robotic, but the odd linguistic cadence the candidate affects before microphones just doesn't matter. The nation's self-defensive denial is deep and blinding, deep enough to make Vice-President Algore's other worldly speech patterns invisible to suspicion, blind enough to render him credible.
Have you taken a moment to watch Mr. Algore's eyes on the arched panel of the television screen? When they aren't dazed, they're dripping with private fears. They dart about in search of answers.
Hey, some of you out there: Do you pushy yellow-dog Democrats, Naderite greenheads, and roach-clipped political agnostics, members of the Republic all…. Do you fully comprehend just how close to the edge of civic explosion the true-believer Republicans are becoming?
The Vision of Their Rage is Fearful to Behold.
Here at Cricket Song the vision of a Rightist Rage, let loose by mad packs of roving operatives and highbrow drifters, is fearful to behold. The vision shimmers on the north wall of the hacienda like a mural from Diego Rivera's nightmares.
"Man, I am scared," Sadie Liz shouts. "Let's move to a different country!"
The social fury these angry Republicans surely shall unleash when their champion is pushed back to second place - I shudder to ponder its dastardly dimensions.
The pure bloods will call a rally at the river to muster their loyalists. O, what a wounded band of the faithful will gather there:
- The partisan extremist cynics and secular co-opters of the Calvinist creed,
- the tax-challenged shopkeepers and invincible entrepreneurs,
- the owners of Burger Kings and Auto Zones and Prudential Lives,
- the dispossessed suburbanites with second mortgages,
- the mothers with schoolrooms in the kitchen and careers on the backburner,
- the V-chippers and clerics turned Solons of the State,
- men with low links handicaps and tassels on their spiked shoes,
- the manager of the check cashing emporium,
- manufacturers of leading edge products for the home or office,
- and NASCAR season-ticket holders on the lam from Babylon.
They Shall March upon the Courthouse,
Set Fire to the Liberal Benches.
These are the followers, maddened. They shall form the legion of right-minded marauders, who will be purposeful in their new movement to punish the Democrats and their sympathizers, who seek to steal their electoral victory and win the cultural war. "Baby killers! Baby killers!" they will be heard to chant as they march on the town squares and urban enclaves to batter down the doors of the courthouse and set fire to the liberal benches. They shall set ambushes on the bike trails and poison the organic vegetable bins.
Recrimination and bashing of foe, death by the clobbering of heads with old rugged crosses, ostracism on a mass scale of all creatures weak and left-leaning: These are among the retributions the legion of the right shall perpetrate on the marginalized unwashed masses.
No wonder some of the bystanders want this Presidential Election of the Year 2000 to be over and done with. It won't be - not before the blood spills, the plate glass breaks, the stocks crash, and the smoke of burning pyres can be spied drifting high over the horizon.
"If we don't watch it, we'll end up with the Senate voting Colin Powell into the Presidency," said Oksob de Opposite, surly and slumberous, most assuredly disenfranchised for lack of a State. (He is a conscience without a country.)
Wizards and a Pale Cantabrian Witch
Gather to Brew a Potion for the Zephyr.
Here in the hermitage have gathered tonight, syntax convoluted, a wee host of wizards, a guardian angel, and one pale witch from the Cantabrian Peaks. We've been cookin' up a spell to cast upon the Zephyr. Our plan is to have it drift to Florida in time to break the deadlock and head-off Friday's debacle.
Thus far we've concocted a mighty mix for the cauldron: powder of antimony and eye of lynx, dye of portulaca and marrow of newt, dollop of chernozem and wing of chalcid, antler of hartebeest and proboscis of sphingid. We need but the ninth ingredient to complete the potion.
Regarding the final constituent, however, we've reached an impasse.
The wizard from the Cascades contends we require three pubic hairs from a virgin stranded on Desolation Row. The pale witch predicts we'll never find one - at least, not before the twelfth gong of midnight clangs in the great room. According to the formula, the only substitute that assures a potent brew is one drop of canker-sore pus from a bush in the canebrake. We've sent the angel westward to Texas to secure one. Let's hope he gets back in time.
WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE FORTY-SECOND
on Friday, December 8, 2000.
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