Waiting on the Big Flip

He knows too much about too much, and he makes the rest of us look bad. On top of that, as the first black president America has ever had, he's been crippled by his own sense of decency. So brace yourself, America. Prepare for the Big Flip--and a set of drastically different, and even more unmanageable, circumstances for our country. Smarts are on the way out; mean and stupid is coming in.

Moral: don't stand out from the crowd or dare to provoke envy from the gods by being too smart or too fortunate. Instead, flaunt your stupidity, exult in your meanness, and produce Olympic levels of dick-swinging (a la Karl Rove) until you finally can smell the sweet, sweet smell of success. Just keep on bending the form to your own image until it snaps, and you win.

"Yes," Michael Moore wrote this week on Anna Wintour's blog, The Daily Beast, (referring to the recent incident when a female reporter was thrown down to the pavement by a Republican handler at a Rand Paul rally, and viciously stomped on), "one big boot is poised to stomp out whatever hopey-changey thing we might have had two years ago and secure this country in the hands of the oligarchs and the culture police....The young woman's name is Lauren Valle, but she is really all of us. For come this Tuesday, the right wing--and the wealthy who back them--plan to take their collective boot and bring it down hard on not just the head of Barack Obama but on the heads of everyone they simply don't like." If they win on Tuesday, warns Moore, they will not search for compromise, bipartisanship, nor will they look to find the middle ground. These Republicans mean business. Their boots are shined and ready.

In case you were wondering, the Senate GOP leader from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, has already made clear his own job description. The "single most important thing" Republicans want is to help Obama become a one-term president.

"Make no mistake about it," Moore writes. "A perfect storm has gathered of racists, homophobes, corporatists, and born-agains, and they are on fire. Two years of a black man who secretly holds socialist beliefs being the boss of them is more than they can stomach....They won't need a rope and a tree this time to effect the change they seek."

"I draw the line in the dust...and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," declared the firebrand North Carolina governor, George C. Wallace in his 1963 inaugural address. Plus ca change, as the Frenchies like to say, the more everything remains the same. "History doesn't repeat itself, Mark Twain wrote. "But it does rhyme." You really have to wonder about this path of so-called human evolution and enlightenment. "I know that we're in the final days of a campaign," Obama says, in his peculiar, semi-opaque way. "So it's not surprising that we're seeing this heated rhetoric. That's politics."

Really? Is that what it is?

Now 79 years old and ever cheery, another world-renowned black leader, the Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, recently told Time magazine that the chief lesson he has learned is that "the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable--there's no doubt at all that they will bite the dust." And then he roars with laughter: "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Wonderful!"

"Now there's a flip I can believe in," says Virgil, relishing the chance to butt in. "I really like this man with his ballerina costume name."

So what do you think? Has the Archbishop Tutu discovered the culminating secret of the universe, or is he just singin' in the rain? Are we Rome, or could we maybe be South Africa? I think I'll let you decide, because my horoscope today claims I have to give the impression I am on top of the world. "Everyone," it says, "wants to associate with someone who is positive and confident." Today I want to be a crowd-pleaser, so I'm giving it a shot. I won't say anything really bad. It's all in your hands.