BY TAYLOR DASHER
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We live in a blue state.
It was blue before Ohio succumbed to the red menace, but it is even bluer now. The sad, disheveled masses shuffle dazedly with their eyes puffy from crying themselves to sleep. Confronted with the red pill and the blue pill, fifty-one percent of the Neos in America took the red. Many here suspect it’s not the only pill they took on Election Day. Blue folks have begun indulging in pharmaceuticals themselves because once they’ve had a bitter pill to swallow, they may as well put their newfound pill-gulping skills to more enjoyable use. A vengeful few have left the state to shut down Midwestern pharmacies suspected of trafficking in stupid pills.
But the happier folks were able to just tear up the return flight tickets for their planned vacations to Europe. Those fatalists accepted the truth: the Democrats lost the election. The nation has taken a turn for the worse. The downward spiral will continue for another four years, and it is hard to think what may occur in that span and still hold on to hope. The world is bleak, cold, and cruel like never before. The wheels of progress have not only come to a screeching halt, but have also been smashed to smithereens and kicked back down the mountain of time. This marks one of the worst periods in history as a new Dark Age arrives from which the world may never rise. Evil reigns. The sky has fallen. Forget the earth burning, seas turning to blood, and the Four Horsemen, this is surely the apocalypse.
It’s only a little time before South Americans start referring to their continent as “North Antarctica” because they don’t want to unfairly besmirch themselves. Mexico will have an immigration problem overnight. Canadians will stop acting polite and start believing they’re from a separate country. Conservatives will turn public playgrounds into government-subsidized industrial parks for Gideon Bible manufacturers while hatching plans to divide eastern and western Europe into the creatively-named colonies of ExxonMobil-land and Tyco-guay. A civil war shall erupt, and it will make Grenada look like The Hundred Years’ War since the red states have a near monopoly on people crude enough to own a gun and crazy enough to use one. Millions of damnable pickup-driving Heartland Americans with three teeth and two billion spittoons between them will rape and pillage the East and West coasts.
Women wearing pants will be shot. Birds will stop singing. Heretics and butterflies will be dunked in kerosene and hurled into bug zappers. Locust swarms will descend on Toys “R” Us stores everywhere and devour children’s playthings, right down to the last Pokemon. Pokemon playthings will devour children, right down to the last lazy, immature little baby. Children will devour parents, often with a spicy side dish of baby seal. Squirrels will tie acorns to their feet and dive headlong into the Charles River. Rainbows will be tortured. Unicorns on the way to glue factories will cry for the sprites and fairies being sold into the sex trade. And Santa Claus will euthanize his reindeer so they won’t see how it all ends.
But if Kerry had been elected, we could breathe easier. It would be as if after a few millennia Frank Capra had finally replaced Quentin “Should-stop-casting-himself-in-movies” Tarantino as the director of the story of the world. The situation in Iraq would instantly make leaps of progress and continue to improve for four years because the President of the United States did not have “Dubya” for a nickname. The economy would boom because a man named John Kerry sat in the Oval Office. There would be no tired, no poor, no huddled masses. Everyone in the world would love us, and we’d love them, and they’d love each other. France and Germany would be so happy that they’d give us their firstborns bearing little care packages of wiener schnitzel, crepes, wine, and BMWs. All the world’s children would hold hands and sing in perfect eight-part harmony, which would be beautiful when it really happened and wouldn’t seem the least bit cliché or creepy in a “Children of the Corn” kind of way.
If the Democrats had won, there would be no tuition payments. There would be a chicken in every pot and a sensible hybrid car in every garage. We would all win the lottery. I could have all the ice cream I wanted near the soda water fountain at the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings on the big rock candy mountain. I would stop being a neurotic cynic who thinks life will never really be that great and that there’s very little any one person (officeholder or not) can do to improve things or make them worse. I would become a happy, well-adjusted human being. And I would have hordes of beautiful women lining up to bring me Hefeweizen and lustily kiss its sweet froth from my lips. If only John Kerry had won.
Instead our current president is a multi-millionaire Yale-educated American male born into privilege with Yale-educated progeny. A man expressing concern about national security and claiming he insists on carrying out Iraqi national elections in January. A fellow who says he wants to stimulate the economy and slash the deficit. A person who talks about improving education in this country. A career politician whose words must be taken with at least a grain of salt and probably should be taken with the whole shaker and perhaps the pepper too. A dude who makes us scratch our heads and ask, “Over a quarter of a billion people, and this is the best we could do?” I’m shocked there was such a candidate, but what would have happened if there had been two? Not only would it have legitimized my political apathy, it would have been a coincidence so bizarre that it could only have been a sign of the apocalypse.
Taylor Dasher is a 2L who wouldn’t get off his butt to vote and only finished this article because he wouldn’t leave his chair.