2002-05-06 - 4:56 p.m.
Am I the only one out there who thinks the parallels between the recent French and American presidential elections are rather interesting? In France, the leftists either stayed home on election day or voted for idiot-fringe candidates and thus wound up with a choice between a slimy-but-moderate professional politician and a rabid right-winger who makes Pat Buchanan look like a bleeding-heart liberal. In the U.S., the leftists voted for the idiot-fringe candidate over the slimy-but-moderate professional politician and wound up with a choice between George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or John Ashcroft.
Well, at least the French fascist lost.
As often as the French annoy me--and every other member of the English-speaking world--I must say that they do street protests much better than Americans. It would have been nice to see a few hundred thousand demonstrators shutting down Washington D.C. back when Dubya was stealing the 2000 election--but what we got instead was James Carville screeching uselessly on Crossfire and Ralph Nader justifying himself and Al Gore doing his best Kevin-Bacon-in-Animal-House "Remain calm! ALL IS WELL!" routine. And yes, I am still bitter.
It wasn�t much better in the �60s, though. Old �60s radicals like to claim that they ended the Vietnam War--which is a whole other crock of shit worth digging into at another time--but back when they were dropping acid and levitating the Pentagon and spreading their legs for the Black Panthers and basically doing everything to make sure Richard Nixon got elected, what were their Frog counterparts doing? Practically burning down fucking Paris, that�s what.
Radical politics in America is nothing more than a game that the overprivileged play in between exams and cappuccinos--and it has been for 40 years at least. It�d be funny as hell if it weren�t so sad.
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But enough politics. I have a question for Badsnake: Have you tried masturbation?
OK, I know you�ve tried it. What I mean is, have you tried it as a substitute for cigarettes? As a sort of incentive-and-reward system to keep yourself on task?
It works for me. That�s all I�m saying.
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