Get with the program, folks. Here we go.

Sorry…all that storm- clock change-and election nonsense quite distracted me, and I freely acknowledge I am a bit peevish. I got out the flag to take down to the farm for the maiden flag-raising ceremony this weekend. It is a trophy flag, a 5×8 American national flag that I got at the Hillary Clinton fire-sale at her Presidential Campaign HQ next to my office back in 2007.

I am going to fly it with pride, and maybe smoke that nice cigar the Republican Operative gave me on Tuesday, thinking his side was going to win.

Thankfully the weather was not so bad here last night. I left work at four to get ahead of whatever was coming on the .7 miles commute via back streets between the office and Big Pink, poured a drink, and did email for another couple hours until my co-workers finally got someplace out of Blackberry range.

Eight inches of snow up in Long Island made me shiver but all we got was cold wet rain. I still have learned my lesson about Washington and The Weather. “If it’s snowin’, I ain’t goin’.”

On the morning after the morning after, I am hearing about the crap that might have been a campaign issue. I completely agree with the nice people on the radio that we are looking at fiscal disaster. As I thought during the big fight on health care in 2008, what are we doing?

I can’t believe what some people are saying, which is that this sequestration thing might be what the President’s people wanted all along. Which is to say, a dramatic restructuring of the budget priorities away from defense and into social programs. I guess that is what we voted for, right?

I am interested in learning more about how the “smart money” is surviving in the disintegrating Euro Zone. The markets around the world reflected that this morning, tumbling down two or three percent, and with rumors that stress was penetrating even the vaunted German economy.

I certainly hope to NOT find out that the only tactic available to the Europeans is to offshore their assets in USD accounts. Jeeze, If that is the case were are well and truly hosed.

I cannot even consider the Renminbi as an alternative reserve currency. A man has his pride, right? Or does that goeth before the fall?

I forget.

I do understand the criticality of social issues to both sides of this thorny (and possibly insoluble) divide. I understand why young single women felt sort of warm about that “Julia” version of the future, with the helpful Federal Big Sister there to help out at the tough times in life. If I were female, the number one threat to my life would be those idiots who want to play politics with my body, not that both sides were not.

This winning coalition is still razor thin and quite fragile. The Progressive coalition has elements that are naturally conservative, and in the case of Hispanic Americans, largely Catholic. Another approach by the Stupid Party might have worked to blunt the cynical tactics of the Corrupt Party, but Mitt was too nice to try it and phrases like “self deportation” were like self inflicted wounds. So, now here we are, freed from the shackles of the Patriarchy, but broke and out of ideas.

The exploitation of secondary social issues in the campaign may have resulted in a narrow triumph for the President, but it has changed nothing about the calculus of power here between the house on Pennsylvania and the one on the Hill with Harry Freaking Reid still in control of the Senate.

No mandate for anyone, but at least there is going to be lega pot in Colorado and Washington State. I have been thinking that I just ought to get with the program. The fiscal cliff that looms in exactly 58 days will impact everyone that does business with DoD. We will see how that goes, but I think the recession is about to arrive in Arlington.

Maybe it should have been here all along. But like I said, I just have not got with the new agenda. I should just cut to Winston Smith’s final vision in 1984 and get on with it. Apres nous, le deluge, right?

Maybe I should start dating guys and get married in Maryland and then move out West to start smoking weed. That is how absurd this all is: with the biggest economic catastrophe in a century staring us in the face, that is the sort of crap we expended our collective energy on.

The Republicans are toast, in my mind. I will continue to caucus at election time with those morons, but they demonstrated that an effective Ground Game is something that eludes them. They should go back and read Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Blaming a corrupt-but-effective Chicago-style political process doesn’t make stupid look much smarter.

Maybe you feel the same way. I am on Bullshit Overload. After completing the office mail, I fell asleep yesterday evening in my brown chair while watching “Elementary,” a new Sherlock Holmes interpretation with Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson. It was good, commercial free, and had no crowing Mainstream Media in the background.

That is one of the things that I couldn’t handle anymore, and is worth further discussion. The New Media is killing the old. Everyone knows that. The interesting angle to that is the fact that polarization is enhanced with the ability of the electorate to get their facts from The Daily Koz or Caller, and both are so intrinsically biased that we may never actually be on the same sheet of national music.

E pluribus unam? Ash heap of history, gang.

Oh well, life goes on, I think, and maybe with the time change and the election behind us I can start sleeping regularly again.

But I am old now, and maybe I have passed a tipping point on that, too.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com