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LAST STAGE FOR TOMBSTONE
11/11/2004
Resplendent in his emblematic keffiyeh and a flowing hospital gown, Yasser Arafat spent several days lightly treading that narrow hallway between life and death. Comatose in a military facility outside Paris, the Palestinian leader finally passed on, unshackled from questions surrounding his funeral and his final place of rest. The PLO accepted Egypt’s offer to hold the ceremony in Cairo and successfully negotiated with Israel to bury Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Initial conflicts over Arafat’s demands had enflamed passions on both sides and had threatened to spark a political crisis. Mufti Ikrema Sabri declared Arafat “willed to be buried in Jerusalem and from a religious perspective, we must and need to honor his will,” further noting Arafat’s desire to be near the Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest shrine. Israel's justice minister, Yosef Lapid, angrily countered that holy city is “where Jewish kings are buried and not Arab terrorists.” Personally, I think Arafat had the same right to a Jerusalem burial as Ariel Sharon has to a crypt in Mecca’s Grand Mosque.

All these ministrations over death conjure up a thought that losing this election was akin to watching a close friend die. We held out hope until the very last - and maybe even beyond that. Standing in front of a headstone and a mound of freshly turned earth, we are left only to digest the cold reality that faces us. This is, to say the least, difficult. Many of us remain in denial, making vaporous arguments that Kerry would have won if not for ballot fraud in Ohio. Some rationalize that the colossal fiscal and military blunders of his first term will constrain Bush’s ability to bring us to even greater damnation. Still others hide their fear and sadness behind a curtain of laughter. A cartoon with huge ears protruding out of an oversized cowboy hat or pictures of George juxtaposed with a monkey. Or that red and blue map of America, showing a wide swath of stupidity spreading out from the Mississippi River like a flu epidemic feasting on creationists who chose bibles over vaccines.

Given the despicable events of 2000, however, we are doomed to seek electoral slight of hand anywhere we fail to embrace the results. This is not all without justification, mind you. “It's a screw-up,” confessed Hamilton County Board of Elections chairman Tim Burke after voters in suburban Cincinnati received absentee ballots devoid of John Kerry’s name. Instead, the Democrats were replaced by the words “CANDIDATE REMOVED.” Meanwhile, electronic voting systems at a precinct near Columbus gave Bush an extra 3,893 votes and exit polls statewide showed Kerry winning with 52%. These numbers add up to a rather unintelligible calculus, but in the end, even the candidate himself saw no way of tap dancing past 135,000 hardcore rednecks. Oh well, you know what they say down in Texas: fool me once, shame on me and, uh, the second… oh, hell, ya can’t fool me.

Federal District Court Judge James Robertson certainly couldn’t put one past John Ashcroft. After ruling that Guantanamo’s so called enemy combatants are entitled to a hearing on the question of their POW status and to confront any evidence and witnesses in the case against them, Ashcroft bailed out. “While I have indeed relished dismantling America’s civil liberties, these obstructionist judges seem intent on fucking things up.” President Bush quickly nominated White House counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. “His sharp intellect and sound judgment have helped shape our policies in the war on terror,” the President offered. Yeah, like withholding evidence from Congress, unilaterally vacating the Geneva Convention, and constructing the legal framework that allowed the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib to flourish.

Quietly, another member of the Bush posse, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, rode Ashcroft’s early stagecoach out of town. With the economy beginning to show life, Evans was nonetheless subverted by the plunging dollar (it now takes $1.30 to buy one lousy euro) and the Federal Reserve’s incessant series of rate hikes. The latest move brings the fed funds rate to 2%, sharpening the odds that the housing bubble may soon be popped. The departure of these two wranglers no doubt sets me and the 56,249,863 other terrified citizens of our territory to wonder: how do we get the hell out of Dodge?