I saw this video at Ezra’s and started to choke up, like the giant nerd that I am. The idea of America has seemed so unlikely for so long that I thought it was most likely dead for me, but turns out that my hopes could surface once again with the mere application of a folk song that expresses the best of our national character, instead of the worst that’s been given license to run a path of destruction for the past 8 years. A friend of mine said that she knew the minute that they certified Bush’s election that we would be at war within a couple of years, but I doubt even the most prescient of us could have predicted that we’d see a major American city all but wiped off the map under his watch. We’ve lost so much. In fact, I’m choking up again thinking about it, and not in a good way.
Eight years is a long time. My memories of the debacle of the ballot count of 2000 are all mixed up with my memories of my first major adult relationship finally falling apart years after it really should have been put to bed, and so it’s a doubly painful memory for me. Sorting CDS and thinking about hanging chads. Packing the car and thinking about the Florida riots. Putting on a Clash CD so that I could go another hour of late night driving and wondering if the right to choose would be gone soon. Hanging up the phone angrily and thinking about if we were facing a potential economic catastrophe. Being happy to be back home in Texas, but being ashamed that Bush was from Texas. Spending time with friends who I feared I’d left behind for good while worrying that we were too late to fight global warming. There was, in the months of the year 2000 turning into the year 2001, a sense of dread hanging over everything. And so when a friend called me on the morning of September 11, 2001 and told me that a plane had hit the WTC, I was not actually that surprised. I was still on the phone with her, turning on the TV when the second plane hit. And somehow, I still wasn’t surprised. I didn’t expect disaster to come in this form, but somehow I expected disaster.
In retrospect, it was a fucked up thing to think. Unlike the war or the tanked economy, which were in our future, the events of 9/11 were not Bush’s fault. I mean, there were competence issues that came out later, but unless you’re a crazed 9/11 Truther, you can’t really lay this one on his feet. And really, I think that the ransacking of the country that happened in the years after that did in fact put the tragedy firmly in the past for everyone but a few wingnuts who will cherish the trauma forever, because it makes them feel like victims, which is their comfort zone. Bush still had many years to show us what willful destruction he could rain on this country.
Eight years, looking back, is a giant chunk of my life. The Bush administration ate up my 20s, which means that the country spiraled down the drain and lost its way as I really found myself and built my life. It’s enough to make one superstitiously wary of a better administration, if you’re prone to that sort of thinking, which I’m not. In trying to wrap my head around the past 8 years, all my memories are grounded irretrievably from domestic settings. New Year’s Eve 2000: a Man Or Astroman? show at Emo’s where the sense grew in the room that this was somehow the last night of some kind of era, and you should party like it. I remember the build-up to the war as a series of TV viewings from a secondhand couch while wearing boxer shorts and wrapped up in a fuzzy blanket. Fights with my then-boyfriend about whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq. (My stance: “Bush is lying.” His: “There’s bound to be something.” We were both completely against the war, so I fail to remember why there was fighting.) The quiet, dark room around me as I started to put together my first blog to talk about these issues, with cats sitting curiously in the windowsills next to me. Going to bed at my one owned home Mouse Manor when I though Kerry had won. Going to work at UT where people were crying quietly at their desks when it was certain he’d lost. Watching Katrina approaching New Orleans while sitting in my gun metal blue office at Mouse Manor. Unpacking my things post-break-up in my new apartment and getting a panicked phone call from my mother, who was worried that Hurricane Rita would somehow be a problem for me in my new place. Having a cute boy drunkenly telling me about getting arrested at the 2004 RNC. Going to Amsterdam and having Dutch people give me pitying looks when I said I was from Texas. Having to abandon a trip to go see Obama speak in 2007 because the landlord wouldn’t let me break a lease to move in with my new boyfriend. Selling my truck after paying $50 at a gas station to fill up. Moving into a badass new condo as Obama transitioned into being the certain Democratic nominee.