On Tenterhooks

Don’t a lot of people think the word is “tenderhooks,” because that’s the situation you feel yourself in, hanging tenderly on hooks? According to my trusty, at-the-elbow 20lb Webster’s Third, a “tenter” is a device to stretch and dry cloth, the hooks being what held the material there, straining.

I’ve been disappointed by American politics for close to thirty years now (I was precocious) and I’ve lived the long slide into corrupt reaction, so it’s hard for me to get my hopes up that McCain will be beaten. It never ceases to amaze me how lies and bullshit so often triumph. How hate, fear, and the exploitation of ignorance, the GOP’s only notable ideas, keep winning.

But… the record turn-out sounds promising. The weather seems to fair in most places, which is always to the good. True, the outrageous delays in voting remind us that our masters don’t actually want us to vote, so I hope the O-drive is strong enough to stand hours upon hours of waiting in the swing states. There were six-hour delays in pre-Election Day voting in some places, so I’m guessing there will be all day vigils today in the swingers.

Personally, I want to see a GOP bloodbath, a tsunami flushing out the Augean stables. I want Mitch McConnell, as perfect a specimen of oligarchy as King Coal has produced in a century, to go down in Kentucky. I want to see Bush’s ass-wiper Norm Coleman bite the Minnesota dust. I’d love to see Indiana, klan-central 80 years ago, go to Obama. And North Carolina, where the ghost of Jesse Helms still rides in the night, wouldn’t that be sweet? I want to see the hideously reactionary Prop 8 in California voted down so that discrimination isn’t written into that great state’s constitution by theocrats. I want to see those western anti-women initiatives soundly defeated… yeah, I want plenty. And I bet you do, too. Let’s see what we get.