You Stand In The Middle Of The Road, You Get Run Over By A Truck
This week saw the paperback rerelease of the Orson Scott Card novel Empire, yet another take on the fabled Second American Civil War scenario. This time the schism is between the red states and the blue states (AKA "Civilization")...and the blue states are the villains, with the story POV being centered the whole time on a couple of red staters.
What's truly hilarious about this is that Card, a red stater himself who was quite in favor of the catastrof#*k royale that we lovingly call "Operation IRAQI FREEDOM," has the audacity to include an afterword where he claims to be nonpartisan and wishes we could all just get along. Given that Card is a Mormon, I'm reminded of that Captain Kirk line in Star Trek IV where he tells Gillian that Spock was a former hippie who did too much "LDS" in the '60s.
As anybody who was a social outcast in their teens will tell you, when those who've consistently been a jagoff to you suddenly want to be pals, it's only because they require something that only you can provide, and will promptly return to being a jagoff to you once they have it. This remains true with the red state/blue state enmity we currently enjoy. The gops, despite the Solid South Strategery they've employed for years, can never win without the North, even though the Democrats can win without the South.
There's a Yiddish adage that says you pick a side even when you don't pick a side, and that side is the status quo. And the status quo today is the gops defecating on everyone else. Now that Card and his fellow gops (he's a registered Democrat? Yeah, him and Toby Keith, and Toby's been exiled over his circa 2003 views, too) are losing, they're hoping that being nice to us after four years of accusing us of treason simply because we disagreed over how Iraq was being dealt with will buy him a reduced sentence come January 22, 2009. We will neither forget nor forgive how we were treated during the Monkey Boy Administration, Mr. Card.
