November 30th, 2004
I haven't done this in a while, and feedback has tapered off as a result. So: I have four questions for you.
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There is something about me that hasn't really changed much since my childhood days: Even now, as a person in my last few years of being young (if you get my drift), I could let myself live in morbid fear of the occurrence of some highly improbable events, or of irrelevant arbitrarily-set rules.
For example, as a child, I insisted on the mechanical regularity of going to bed at 9:00 PM every night. If I was late, I was unsettled. Once in bed, I lay staring at my clock, and if 9:30 PM came and went and I was still awake, then there was a definite sense of alarm. 10:00 PM and it was panic. If, for some godawful reason, I was still awake at 10:30 PM, then I was full of terror and moral desolation. Because, as a child, I knew ... I absolutely knew ... that if I were still awake at midnight I'd be better off dead. The world would, quite simply, come apart at the seams. And so 10:00 PM was only a couple of hours away from a fate worse than death, and 10:30 PM was a scant 90 minutes. Strange when I started thinking about it, but very sensible to my 8, 9, or 10-year-old mind. Well, anyhow, the time I got to sleep occupied the lion's share of my fears for a few years there. And then I turned into a Night Owl, and the only time I go to bed at or before midnight is when I'm sick.
Another example: I am of the generation who grew up mostly in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan (aka Ronnie Ray-Gun) declared the Soviet Union to be the Evil Empire ... and I waited for the consuming flames of a nuclear bomb blast. As a teenager, I frequently asked myself, "If the USSR declared war right now, how quickly would I die? Would I even feel it? What would be the last thing I did and saw?" Because, although I am Canadian, I grew up in Vancouver and I knew for sure that, as a port city in a country friendly to America, we would get ourselves annihilated too. But I wasn't afraid of the Soviets, I was afraid of Ronnie's baffling bravado and stupidity at constantly poking a stick into the midriff of the Soviet Union.
<Digression>
When I was 13 or 14 years old, I sat in a Social Studies class in my high school and watched a film of tanks rolling through Red Square in Moscow. I could see St. Basil's in the background and I thought to myself, "I could never go there ever in my life ... it might as well be Mars."
And then I recalled that moment a couple of years ago as I stood in Red Square and bought a ticket to enter St. Basil's and see its insides with my own eyes.
</Digression>
Where was I? Oh yes: Ronald Reagan scared the shit out of me when I was a teenager. Not because of his power, not because of his politics ... but because it defied all logic or reason that someone so apparently thoughtless, vain, and stupid could be in the position of commanding the most powerful country (including its weapons) in the world! It seemed that, with that one single fact, there was no sense anywhere about anything; that all I had carefully learned as a child about things being the way they should be was a fallacy. In the end, it apparently turned out, there was no stability or safety anywhere. And so, with that fear, came a certainty that the man who was president longer than many of my friends' fathers were around would get us all killed. The only questions left in my mind were about the details of my upcoming thermonuclear death.
I have a young friend whose feelings about GWB are both similar and quite different at the same time. On the one hand, he is amazingly informed about--and heart-warmingly adept at exposing and reciting--the lies, inconsistencies, stupidities, dishonest pieces of self-interest, etc. of this administration. He can see, at about the same age that I saw, how ridiculous this president is.
But he isn't terrified by it the way I was. He doesn't fear for his life as far as I can see. He isn't afraid that the thing he is looking at in any given moment of time will be the last thing he sees before a flash of searing light. He isn't afraid that an airplane will fly into the building he is currently in, and he isn't swayed by the panic-mongering of American Presidents trying to further a purely political agenda. Good on him for that. It fills me with joy to see that he is better prepared for the political world at his age than I was.
Me? Well, GWB doesn't surprise me, and, after somehow surviving Ronnie and his "Evil Empire" crap, I am not particularly worried about him either.
By Creon's cartilage, though, the man can sure get on one's nerves, can't he?