Just basking in the zeitgeist…

So, I’m breaking New Year’s Resolution #52, which was “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t blog about anything at all.” It was a stupid resolution, anyway, and one that resulted in nothing short of a total injunction for someone like me.

I spent much of January in that weird state of liberal angst that involved holding my breath, waiting for January 20, because I just couldn’t believe it would actually occur: That we would be rid of Bush and his cronies and a new day would be upon us. Or that the new day would come, but that Obama would muck it up royally somehow, a la Bill Clinton, or that…well, anyway. There was about a week or so there, post January 20, where every morning was like a little Christmas. Each morning’s paper held some new policy change that repudiated some of the topsy-turvyness (and that’s putting it nicely) of the last decade. Hey, let’s allow funding of birth control in impoverished, overpopulated countries. Hey, let’s take another look at the shreds of the Endangered Species Act. Hey, let’s talk to other countries, rather than using large-scale bombing as an opening gesture. Not too shabby.

The depths of my disillusionment with people were revealed on the day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson. While Sullenberger was being hailed as a hero on the news, I was suspicious. I had this awful feeling that–as with many other “heartening” news stories, this one would turn out to be some sort of fakery, a scam. I thought “He did it on purpose. They’re probably going to find out there weren’t any birds.” When it turned out he is part of an airline safety consulting firm, I smelled a rat. Did you? Didn’t you get that tiny little qualm in your stomach that said, no way, too good to be true? (And, yes, I am quite pleased that I was completely wrong.)

But, there are so many opportunities for cynicism and so many good stories that turn out to be big fakes, it’s easy to preemptively brace yourself for disappointment these days. I mean, we’ve got Wall Street banksters whining about “excessive” restrictions on how much bailout money they can transfer to their offshore bank accounts, corporate exec dudes whose profit-blindness allows them to guiltlessly send out contaminated peanuts to make children’s food. We’ve got women of questionable mental stability foisting 14 children on the state of California’s taxpayers, not to mention a doctor who thinks creating eight little fetuses all at once is a good career move. Some of these things almost make me wish I were a Catholic, so that I could at least rest easy in the knowledge that there’s some awful place where these people will end up. Or, better yet, a Hindu: Then I could imagine their karmic reward of returning as something like a disabled cockroach.

All this, and I haven’t even mentioned the “stimulus” package. I read a quote from Lenin the other day, which said “Fascism is capitalism in decay.” I thought I smelled something funny.