RECENTLY I PAID MY REPUBLICAN family a visit in Arizona.
It was an excellent getaway, a celebration for my mother’s 50th birthday at the Grand Hotel in the old miner town of Jerome. The site was once an asylum, later a hospital then a brothel before a couple bought and turned it into a tourist destination.
It’s reported to be one of the most haunted places in the country. Coughing is heard from long-dead tuberculosis patients. There’s a deceased little girl often found giggling, and a phantom singing cowboy. And of course where there were no ghost stories to tell, as in regards to the room where my sisters and I stayed, they were quick to make them up.
It was a weekend full of mirth and the occasional good scare, such as when my lovely siblings tapped into my primal fear and rigged the closet by my bed as I tried to sleep. They had been insisting since our arrival, you see, that a man once hung himself in there. After a long night of drinking and listening to ghost stories, I was terrified, stirring under the covers, anxiously waiting for the closet door to open.
Then it did. I leaped from the mattress and assumed a karate position. As if I stood a chance against a poltergeist.
I can still hear the uproar from my fiendish kin.
But it wasn’t their hoax that put a damper on my weekend.
It was the presidential election. I was forced to endure yet another caustic diatribe from my brother-in-law about how I am “brainwashed” by the media because I will likely be voting for Barack Obama.
If Carlos weren’t my sister’s husband, I’d have knocked him upside the noggin for being so stupid. Brainwashed, he called me — and he really believes it!
I tried to explain that insulting me with such erroneous accusations only made him seem, well, brainwashed.
My self-righteous relative was espousing the usual Republican rhetoric that if elected president,Obama would raise taxes across the board to finance his diabolical social programs, the most terrifying of which, he believes, would be a plan to make health care affordable to most Americans … at taxpayer expense!
God forbid we have an administration that attempts to address real structural problems in our country instead of giving our money away to defense contractors and white-collar businessmen.
And some people still wonder why I left Arizona.
What I think Carlos, who works in the mortgage industry, fails to realize, and which I think is apparent to rational people, is that whoever becomes the next president of the United States will be spending his time in office rectifying the crucial problems associated with our current commander in chief.
Universal health care, protecting our borders, strengthening our schools, filling our potholes, whatever worthy cause our hard-earned taxpayer money might be used for will remain a utopian scheme for another decade or so. That’s not because these do-gooder programs are necessarily impossible to achieve, but because our next president will be too busy cleaning up the mess that’s been left us.
The grandiose plans — real or imagined — those treacherous Democrats might have had in store to help their fellow countrymen will have to wait for another generation. The Democrats will probably be blamed for the delay, too.
Only time will tell what will prove to be the greater debacle for the nation: a war initiated by the current administration with zero strategic relevance and no end in sight that has cost the public more than $750 billion to date; or the bailout of a greedy mortgage industry which, along with many customers, have overextended themselves by $700 billion the same administration, due to its backfired de-regulation, is now passing on to us.
What might I look forward to from these disasters except the opportunity to pay more taxes to right the wrongs that a responsible government would have never allowed to occur in the first place?
Can I expect a check in the mail for living within my means?
I hope in the future my Republican family members will do me a favor and hold their tongues before warning me of the dangers of the big government they have helped usher to power. I’d rather have fun harboring an irrational fear, like that of ghost and ghouls, than the real anxieties that come knowing the era our shameless leaders and the fools who follow them brought.
RYAN HYATT is a former Daily Press staff writer and author of the nouveau western, “The Death of Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Biography of Darrell Breedlove.” He is seeking a publisher for his next manuscript, “Stay Younger Longer,” a sci-fi thriller that takes place in LA in 2046. He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 25, 2008. Read the original PDF.