In the Event of a Romney Presidency

I do hope that this post will be moot, but here it is anyway, just in case. I’ve been steeling myself against the  prospect of a Romney presidency, purely as a matter of self-defense. When Bush junior was elected — twice! — it really brought me down and impaired my happiness,  and this is something I should not have allowed, and I will not allow it again.

Back in  the Reagan era, I wrote a  poem called The Last Liberal: “I’m the last liberal in this country, and I’m not feeling well.” And I worked very hard with some very decent elected Republicans to  do all we could to improve the laws of the State of New Hampshire. There were Democrats in New Hampshire back then, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. So I guess I averted depression during the Reagan years by  positive action. In my spare time, I brought down the Soviet Empire, but that’s another story.

The elections of Bush Junior really ripped my guts out. This preppy twerp with a fake Texas accent was disgracing my country. There’s stupid and there’s stupid. When hundreds of millions of people all over the world tell you you’re making a terrible mistake, and you make it anyway, that’s a new level of stupid. I know classmates of Dubya who can state with certainty that he did not have that drawl when he was a cheerleader at Andover, nor when he was a law student at Yale.

I think Bush Junior depressed me more because I wasn’t doing anything about it. That’s not going to  happen again. If Mitt Romney is elected, he will face an implacable enemy – me. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the fields. I will fight him in the streets. I will fight him in the hills. I will never surrender.

I will cause his allies to betray him. I  will force him ‘out of the books’  onto unfamiliar ground where he will have to rely on his wits, and he’s a stupid man. When I’m finished with this guy, his legacy will be likened  to Warren G. Harding’s – corrupt from top to bottom. Because the Republicans always get careless. They go into a feeding frenzy, and along comes a methodical guy like Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh with enough grit and determination to expose their corruption.

The problem, of course, is that people don’t care that their government has been sold  to corporate interests that have poisoned the food supply and contaminated the environment. They’re content to sit home and watch Honey Booboo. I’m working on that, too.

I’m going to wage war on indifference. I’m going to expose the corporations that have created the diabetes epidemic, and the heart disease epidemic, and the cancer epidemic, and expose the cost to our country. My ally here is Dr. Mark Hyman.

And I won’t be stopped. I will be aided by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and so many others who gave us this opportunity to forge a working democracy.

And I will never forget what is at stake. Looking at a photograph of Mitt Romney makes my skin crawl. Seeing him in a video makes me ill. This man is vile, and so is Ryan. I am reminded of the world’s greatest orator, Winston Churchill on June 18, 1940:

“…the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

I’m not being dramatic here. Perverted science is what the GOP and their corporate masters are all about. And, friends, there is still hope, even if Romney is elected. Again, I defer to Sir Winston:

“…in casting up this dread balance-sheet, contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair. During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced,…nothing but disaster and disappointment, and yet at the end their morale was higher than that of the Germans, who had moved from one aggressive triumph to another.

“During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question, “How are we going to win?” and no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us.”