My laptop seems to have become possessed lately. Everyday, something else denies me access, and it looks like I'm gonna lose ANOTHER hard drive. I tell ya, it ain't easy exorcising these gazlans (yeah, I know it's probably supposed to end in "im", but in AMERICAN Yiddish you can ignore a lot of those fine points). Any minute, I'm expecting a ghostly voice to come out of my speakers, and up here in NH there's no chance of hooking up with a "wonder rabbi". Of course, I COULD try the local priest, but he'd most likely just tell me to take the thing in to a technician. Then again, I'm registered as a Democrat, so maybe this dybukk is actually the ghost of Lee Atwater. I DID vote for Kerry, y'know. Too bad Georgie Porgie won. Maybe this the initial assault of the new Republican Moral Majority---cleansing our sinful hard drives of political heresy and--- Oh, all right, I'm joking. Still, this stupid laptop is driving me NUTS. I've gotta get this novel blogged before the month is out, or at least MOST of it, at any rate.
As it is, I'm not too happy about going back to the 1950s, which is where most of these Republicans want to take us. They think the 50s were wonderful; you know, total conformity and all that. Well, I'm just old enough to remember how the 50s REALLY were, and wonderful they weren't. Sunday had to be the worst day of the week, as NOBODY would dare stay home from church and have the neighbors think they were ATHEISTS, God forbid. In THOSE days, atheists were pretty much synonymous with COMMUNISTS, so even JEWS had to be careful on Sundays.
I lived in the suburbs down around Philadelphia then, just across the river from the oil tanks, in fact, and there was no privacy in that land of identical cracker-box houses on postage-stamp lawns. Neighbors felt it was their moral and patriotic duty to keep others on the straight and narrow; after all, we were in the midst of the Cold War then, when Commie-Pinkos were hiding under every bed---just WAITING for the signal from Moscow to start burning down the churches. I mean, people were so terrified of being different that every other house looked exactly the same, every other person DRESSED exactly the same (and on Sunday you had to dress up and STAY that way all day, so you can imagine how us GIRLS felt with all that stiff crinoline under our dress skirts), and NOBODY dared to subscribe to any periodicals that might look INTELLECTUAL, because everybody knew that those pointy-headed brainy types were just the ones TO join the Commies.
What a time that was! My parents were absolutely petrified to raise their voices when arguing because "what if the NEIGHBORS heard them and called the cops?" Yes, that's right. And don't think THEY wouldn't have reported any neighbors who did the SAME, too. Paranoia was a virtue back then, I swear. I can remember one time when I'd awoken before sun-up and decided it'd be the perfect time to ride my bike down Westfield Ave. into Camden---something that was too dangerous at any other time of day because of the constant heavy traffic---and when I got back my parents were LIVID. Didn't I have enough sense, they went on, to know that the neighbors might have reported me to the POLICE for being out so early like that? Gee, the sun had just been coming up when I'd left, so it wasn't DARK out. And then there was the time in 1964 when I couldn't sleep, and figured I'd go downstairs to the den, switch on the radio, and read until I felt sleepy. Well! My mother came flying in minutes later to warn me I'd better turn off the light before the neighbors got SUSPICIOUS; after all, DECENT people didn't stay up all night---unless they were up to something illegal, immoral, or UNAMERICAN.
So you can see why I'm rather uneasy about this Republican sweep. They do tend to think this should be a CHRISTIAN country, God help us, and I've heard countless callers on C-Span piously proclaim that they were going to vote for Bush because he was a Chrrreeeshtunnn. As if Hitler wasn't, right? Okay, so he left the Church, but he had still been raised Christian, not atheist. Frankly, I'd sooner trust an honest CROOK than a hypocrit, if only because politicians have to do some industrial-strength sinning to get to be president. Maybe you've read Moliere's play "Tartuff", about a slick con-man who finds that public piety can be quite lucrative. It's easy enough to Act like a saint around others, while still enjoying one's sins in private. We do it all the time. But to elect a PRESIDENT on his supposed "moral superiority", especially when this guy's the leader of one of the most powerful nations on earth, is scary. To ME, anyway. I like to know my leaders are COMPETENT, first of all, and maybe, just maybe, even one of those "pointy-headed" BRAINY types as well. Certainly DUBYA could never be said to have either of those traits, and his absolute conviction that God is behind him all the way should scare ALL of us.
