Who would have guessed that disillusionment would come in the form of a Democratic majority?

I've been growing old.

I've been settling down quite a bit, lately. Not that my life was really ever all that exciting. But I've been getting more grounded, lately. Many ways nice.

One way not so nice.

I'm learning to live by the rules. All of them.

And I am growing old, quickly.

This is not a favorable way to grow old. It's just something over which you have very little control as a mature adult. You learn to compromise with all the petty ways that others seek to control you, whether they have an business controlling you or not.

This is why people talk so badly about growing old. It may be the reason why so many peoples' music sounds so uninspired in their old age or why they often get meaner and more defeated as they get older.

Because there is nothing inspired or inspiring about this kind of growing old.

The sad thing for me is that now I get to join the millions of other old people who harken back to their freer days of youth and wait for young people to inject inspiration in their lives because they've had all the winds taken out of their sails, ironically, by the very rules and controls that they so passionately advocate and self-righteously believe to signify their still passionate commitment to...something.

Most adults are kind of petty and small-minded, is the truth. But knowing that about others and less about themselves, they advocate all kinds of stupid shit in their lives that creates cynicism for all of them.

I say them because I barely feel like an adult, in this sense. I've definitely made peace with the idea that mature adulthood involves learning to compromise with the power-hunger of my fellow and far wiser grown-ups.

But I have no interest in wanting to control others in the way that my wiser brethren advocate. I think it's because I'm naive about people. I just don't recognize just how much wiser my fellow countrymen are than me and how much better position they are to know what is good for me and everyone, really, than I am myself. I'm trying to learn to do the bidding of others better. I'm just not a very grateful servant, I suppose.

And the irony is, really, that the time when my disillusionment and cynicism would be most pronounced in my life is when I became a servant for the party that presumably wants to lift everyone from servant status.

The Democratic Party.

(Except when you stop to consider that it was the Democratic party that defended slavery and segregation in the Old South. They were much wiser than those servants too. Some things never change, I suppose).

It's terribly ironic, really, except when you consider that Democrats have always wanted to liberate every servant but their own. Something tells me that Teddy Kennedy does not do his own laundry. But thank goodness I have him and President Bush to look after me and other ordinary Janes and Joes like myself who just wouldn't know what to do in this big bad world without them. That's why those guys deserve the big bucks and the big power. Because house slaves like me just wouldn't be able to survive outside of the plantation without their generosity.

And just like when I was a kid and the only thing I could do to maintain any kind of sanity with adults who were barely literate and who barely hid their hypocrisy always telling me what to do and what was good and right in the world, the only way I can maintain my sanity as an grown man is to comment on the bizarre and yet curiously similar state of affairs of adults who are barely literate and who barely hide their hypocrisy always telling me what to do and what is good and right in the world.

Who knew that disillusionment would come in the form of a Democratic majority, the party that I have identified with for, by far, the largest proportion of my life (I voted Republican in my first election, out of identification with my conservative friends and coach, at the time. Otherwise, my life has been as liberal as a John Lennon's male hairdresser smoking crack; except for this next election, so it looks.)

Hope springs eternal in a democracy, I suppose. That's what makes it the best worst form of government. Even as you sit through Robert Byrd's Democratic bloviations or Jesse Helms' Republican bullheadedness, there is always hope that blowhards and bullies don't run the show.

Until being a blowhard and a bully becomes the central governing philosophy for the majority party, that is.

Here's to one of the most important qualities of a democracy: the capacity to throw the bums out.

Democrats. I'm already sick of them.

Love,
Ben