What, me negative? Hah!

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
What, me negative? Hah!				November 13, 2004

I must admit that I was truly touched by an item in last Saturday’s Last Word. The caller showed genuine concern for my love life, and speculated that a lack thereof was perhaps the reason I was churning out cranky columns.

My love life aside, the caller makes a valid point. Now that the nastiness of the election is over, I should chuck my former negativism and concentrate on why I’m so elated that things turned out as they did on November 2.

To begin with, almost 56 million people cast their votes for a liberal Democrat. That’s more than voted for Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. Of course, 58 million cast their votes for a conservative Republican, but, since I’ve sworn off negativism, I won’t go into that. The point is that I’m glad John Kerry did so well, and I’m also pleased as punch that he lost.

That losing is sometimes better than winning seemed to be the thrust of a cartoon that appeared in the New York Times last Sunday. It depicts Kerry standing in front of a pyramidal pile of poop and musing that this could all have been his to deal with. As it stands now, only the perpetrating winners will be forced to muck with the military and deficit-ridden mounds of mess that the Bush administration has created for itself.

But what really lifted my spirits more than Kerry’s loss was the fact that the election was so heavily influenced by and infused with the notion of values. Indeed, you can’t imagine how infected with joy I was when I saw a bumper sticker on a car in the Ewell shopping center that read: “GOP: God’s Official Party.”

I must admit that I hadn’t realized that God needed an official party, since that would rather limit his appeal. I suppose the last time he had an official party in this country was when we were burning witches at the stake.

He did have an official party, called the Taliban, in Afghanistan, but we rather impiously dispatched them after word from on high told Osama to ram planes into the Trade Center towers. At any rate, I’m elated that God again has an official party in this country, and a worthy successor it is. I suspect that this will mean closer ties with Iran, since God apparently has an official party there as well.

Also to emerge from the elections, and presently making its way around the Internet, is a new map of North America. All the blue states have been combined with Canada to form the United States of Canada, while all the red states are now called Jesusland.

Much to my relief, we in Virginia are part of that because we, like most other Southern and Plains states, are heavily into moral values.

For instance, we know that Jesus, though he never mentioned them, and despite his injunctions against judging other people, despised homosexuals.

We know also that Jesus would have been heavily into the right to bear arms and preemptive military strikes. That he made a few slips of the tongue relative to peacemaking, turning the other cheek and loving your neighbor as yourself should not overshadow the fact that he advocated gunning down money changers and uprooting unproductive fig trees.

Nor should we be put off by his rather socialistic views relative to the redistribution of wealth. Jesus connoisseurs such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell assure us of the importance of cash flows and hence playing cuddly with the rich. Obviously Jesus’ demand that the rich give all their wealth to the poor or his notion that the wealthy will fare no better than camels trying to pass through a needle’s eye when it comes to getting into heaven were simply campaign canards to woo the poverty bloc in Palestine.

Nor need we take too literally his idea that we should pray alone in the privacy of our homes rather than in public school classrooms. And just because he’s pro-life doesn’t mean that Jesus would be sickened by the completely avoidable slaughter of all too many innocent children and women in Iraq.

Yes, I’m proud to live in Jesusland, where the values of Jesus are proclaimed and where newly elected senators think that unwed mothers should be skewered in South Carolina and Lesbians hounded out of high school bathrooms in Oklahoma.

Well, maybe not. Actually, what I’m really proud of is that in Jesusland there are people like my friend Bob, who lives in James City and works three jobs to make ends meet. He’s a true son of the South and proud of it, or so the bumper stickers on his car indicate. He loves Civil War reenactments and his hero of heroes is Robert E. Lee.

Nevertheless, Bob voted for John Kerry. For him, keeping his family housed, clothed and fed ranks slightly higher on his values scale than the Archie Bunkerisms being pumped out by God’s Official Party.

Maybe the Democrats should keep Bob in mind the next time they decide to write off the South. That, and a few people to love me, would really make me happy.