A friend of mine sent me this excerpt (without a link) from a sports article.
“…When Jared Jeffries awoke from an anesthetic stupor on Tuesday, his first concern was not his surgically repaired wrist. It was his stomach. “I hadn’t eaten for like 20 hours; I was delirious,” Jeffries said. So much so, he said, that doctors told him he awoke babbling about a rather vivid dream: “I was following a hobbit in a cotton-candy field, chasing chili dogs.” So Jeffries’s sanity might now be as questionable as his broken wrist.”
Years from now, when people ask me what it was like blogging from 2005-06, I am going to say, “I was following a hobbit in a cotton-candy field, chasing chili dogs.”
I think it is equally descriptive and cryptic, and people will likely get a better idea than if I try to get into specifics. A lot of the time I have felt like Captain Ahab. Or I worried I was Captain Ahab, despite the fact that our President more nearly fits that description.
In Moby Dick, Melville recounts a whaling journey on which the MONOMANIACAL Captain Ahab chases Moby Dick, the gigantic white whale who once dismembered him and thereafter became his representation of everything EVIL in the world. Ahab brings along 30 sailors of many different origins who unknowingly enlist to pursue his solitary CAUSE. In the end, however, the whale defeats Ahab and takes the entire crew (save the narrator of course) and ship to the depths of the ocean. The key to reading this novel in relation to my comparison is Ahab’s character and how his SINGLE MINDED PURSUIT OF JUSTICE RESULTS IN FAILURE AND LOSS OF LIVES.
And that is the generous interpretation of Bush’s actions. The pursuit of global energy resources would be a less exalted explanation. Whether it will be George W. Bush, or me, that will be brought to the bottom of the ocean has never been quite clear to me, or to my family and loved ones, but my obsession has been no secret.
Have I been following a Hobbit (the Democratic Party) erroneously, deluding myself (cotton-candy land) that they can or will take me to the chili dogs (read: Bush) where he will finally be vanquished? That remains to be seen. Step one comes on Tuesday. As Rick Santorum explained:
“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.”
Proper exegesis of that statement could occupy a dozen Dominican scholars for a dozen years. But I think it means that Dick Cheney has been worried about the wrong shit and that we are about to make him pay.
It’s all very confusing. I’m not sure but I have a sneaking suspicion Atrios is the Wizard Gandolf and that the following explains the custom of providing trolls with recipes.
Bilbo goes off with the dwarves and the wizard. They are nearly eaten by three trolls, but Gandalf tricks the trolls into staying up all night arguing on how to cook the company whereupon they are turned into stone by the first light of dawn.
If everything goes as planned, the Democrats will control both houses of Congress in January. Bill Frist and Rick Santorum will be gone. Carl Levin and Ike Skelton will be overseeing our armed forces. Jay Rockefeller and Alcee Hastings will be overseeing intelligence. Pat Leahy and John Conyers will be overseeing the Justice Department. Teddy Kennedy and George Miller will be overseeing our education system. And so on.
Will they pursue justice and fix what Bush has broken? I don’t know. Time will tell.
