As the comedy industry mourns the loss of its main inspiration with the end of the Bush The Younger Era, another industry rises. Such is the cyclical nature of life. Taking up the slack in ready-made entertainment will be the neo-conservative revisionists, already earnestly telling the world that what we witnessed and luckily survived for the past 8 years wasn’t what we thought it was. It seems that Bush The Younger wasn’t really a neo-con at all, but a liberal. Who knew? Their message is that Bush somehow infiltrated the Republican Party, got elected president and then secretly went about the business of implementing a leftist agenda, and that’s why he left the country in such a shambles! Interesting theory. While this betrayal theory is complete bull, that’s their story and they’re sticking to it, and it does make for some solid entertainment. Looks like Bill O’Really is going to have a lot of company and some stiff competition in the I-Just-Made-This-Up category of political comedy.
The country being in such an awful mess, we’ll take our laughs where we can find them. While the regular comedians recover from the shock of having to write their own material again, we look to Bush The Younger’s former cheerleading squad for off-the-wall diversion. Hell, this Obama guy is way too normal and well-adjusted for real belly laughs, and hasn’t done anything major yet to for the neoconmen to sink their fangs into, so for now, it’s fantasy time. And if you’re a conservative, neo or otherwise, fantasy is the only sensible refuge these days. LIke a scientist faced with his life’s work being proved completely wrong, the facts just do not compute as a state of shock shields the mind and body from trauma. Nature is good to us like that, preventing countless head explosions.
Denial is is a powerful force within us, often serving to soften the blows of harsh reality. With most of us, that gradually breaks down into acceptance of what is real. But thankfully not with all of us. This would be a boring word if everybody was sane. The neo-cons, for years armchair geniuses confident that their theories and policies were the only proper approach to politics and life itself, all of a sudden got to implement their ideas in 2001. Their moment in the sun had arrived and they made the most of it. And for 8 long years they put their ideas into practice and it turned out that they were of the flat-earth variety, one disaster after another in the unforgiving arena of field-testing one’s theories. Some say that catastrophic events, namely the 9/11 attacks on America, changed the dynamic of the experiment and skewed the results. Never mind that political theories are supposed to work in good times or bad, war or peace. Either the earth is flat or round, period.
Well, it turns out the world really is round and voters agreed so these people are back to doing what they do best; being angry misunderstood geniuses. It’s better that way, for them and for the rest of us. They get to write and broadcast their delusional gibberish and we get them out our hair and enjoy the resulting entertainment value of their whining. It’s a win-win situation while clearer heads go about the business of straightening out the mess Bush The Younger and his neo-con gang have left us. There’s not many laughs in smart people doing their jobs properly. Many of us will miss the slapstick government, the fascist tendencies and the sheer bumbling incompetence of the past 8 years. After all, it was quite entertaining, if you don’t pay too much attention to all that devastating pain and loss.
Not only that, those 8 years served to focus our minds on what was really important, the values that made America America in the first place. Like they say, you don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it. It turns out Americans sort of like The Bill of Rights and do not like attacking other nations for no reason at all. We’re also not so crazy about torture and secret prisons. It seems we wouldn’t mind a little policing of the financial institutions that power our economy. We also enjoy it when the government doesn’t allow our major cities to drown when natural disasters strike. Maybe we’d like to see some actual science applied to solving some real tough problems. And we like our neo-conservatives where they belong: out of power and back to their customary job of providing us with solid comedy entertainment.