the otherwhirled

West Virginia ~ every time i hear the name of that state, i think of an old song by John Denver (Country Roads). It’s at least a much more pleasant mental picture than this:

A black West Virginia woman was sexually assaulted, stabbed, and tortured while being held captive by her white abductors, one of whom told her, “That’s what we do to niggers around here.”

That’s one thing I find difficult to wrap my head around. I’m just not the kind of guy who’d have sex with someone—even forcibly—if I hated them. That’s just not the way I roll, you know?

Which brings me to ponder how alike President Bush and I seem to be, on the surface, and that’s an important consideration because he also seems very much like the people arrested for this hate crime in West Virginia. So, a favorable comparison between him and myself is a bit unsettling. Nevertheless, I’m objective enough to at least give it some consideration.

I see that while he goes about things the wrong way by pretty much all accounts, he says he does what he does because he loves America. That’s right, he fucks the ones he loves! And, so do I! Although Mrs. Other and I really don’t call it “fucking”, per se. And she doesn’t have to bend over all the time. And if she needs a little lubrication, well, I’m kind enough to provide some. And sometimes we cuddle afterwards. Maybe even spoon a bit. We never seem to get that from our President, though, do we?

Hrm. Whew! So, really, I guess we’re not that much alike, the President and I. Thank goodness! Indeed, Mrs. Other and I share a love that is like John Denver’s version of “Country Roads”. Peaceful, serene, sometimes even contemplative. Meanwhile, President Bush’s “love” for his country seems to be a lot more like a hardcore thrash-metal version of it, and probably with some uncited sampling loops going on.

Now, sometimes I forget to do all the right things for Mrs. Other, and sometimes I do the wrong things. I don’t do these things, or not do these things, intentionally. I’m male, I’m forgetful, and I get caught up in the things I do, because I also love what I do. So, these crimes I commit against Mrs. Other are really more like love crimes than anything else, right? But I have to wonder, when I look at President Bush standing behind a podium, scowling at the audience, threatening other countries, telling us all to remember to be scared…well, is that love? I wonder. Oh, I hear what he tells us, that he’s making the best decisions he can for us because he loves us so much, but that long ago passed the limits of credulity for me.

Listening to him talk, it seems to me he’s a lot more interested in hating brown people who may or may not live in other countries than he his interested in loving the multi-colored people who live in his own. The economy, especially the housing market, is starting to fail, our military is over-extended, our ability to respond to disasters in our own country is severely impacted, and his best response to all this is to have an employee cast immature word-stones at the genitalia of our supposed aggressors.

To me, those sound a lot more like hate crimes. And to me, it seems that those actions are born of a hatred that is more insidious than the one cited above, for they constitute a cold, impersonal, dispassionate, calculated rape and sodomy of the very principles that give these morons in West Virginia the freedom of movement and personal independence to be the idiots that they are.

Oh. Was this a comparison between President Bush and domestic terrorists? You bet it was. It’s only fair, after all. And if pointing that out is a crime, it’s a crime of love.