You Are Being Fed Airplane Food

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. Hunter S. Thompson (adapted from the Buddhist adage)

I'm sitting in an Embraer 170 jet airplane some ludicrous number of feet above the surface of the Earth and on my way to Houston, Texas for a superficial tour of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. There is no excuse for this-flying, that is-or at least something about it makes me feel dirty. Recycled air. Sneezing passengers. The food. Even the goddamned soft drinks taste worse when you're up in the clouds. I just asked one of the flight attendants for a can of Coke. She glared at me with the contempt only an airline employee can muster and returned with a glass filled to the rim with ice. I didn't belabor the issue. I will be in the air for less than two hours now and must conserve my faculties if I am to claw my way out of the Lone Star State alive and still possessing the frontal lobe of my brain.

The simple thought that, at any given moment, I will be surrounded by any number of armchair despots who fully support ritual execution of retarded people is enough to put me on edge. Then again, I will be within the city limits and safe if the scavenger birds haven't caught my scent already, but with Mother Sky jostling this little air pill around, I'm beginning to doubt we will make it all. This fucking turbulence is jangling my nerves so severely that I can't possibly get into heavy shit for at least another few hours, and by the time I finally do land at George Bush International Airport, I will have no desire to be carrying around a notebook with filthy names like Mike Gravel, Fidel Castro, or Karl Marx written in it. Not down there.

Hell. Mike Gravel is the most brazenly leftist person involved in a presidential campaign since FDR came onto the scene, and anyone with even an elementary grasp of national politics ought to know that Roosevelt wouldn't stand a chance nowadays. Admitting as much is difficult for me. Gravel is the only politician who strikes me as genuinely honest (except possibly for Kucinich or Nader) since I had any concept of government whatsoever. I was smart enough to know back in the second grade that George H.W. Bush was a mindless crook and that no one should ever trust saxophone players. That was 1992. Fifteen years ago when Bill Clinton took on a form not unlike Obama's unearned existence as a synonym for change. You can never trust superstar politicians, whose fame is explainable for little to no reason at all, and you certainly cannot trust someone (not fully, anyway) who is able to raise $30 million in a single fiscal quarter to fund a presidential campaign.

That sort of money doesn't come cleanly. The proof of this statement will be evident within the first week of an Obama administration and should already be suspected of Hillary Clinton, whose financial ties have been suspect long before her husband's regime became bogged down amidst news of bad blowjobs.

Obama might be alright for the most part, but there is something in him that reminds me of the Smiler-a character in the graphic novel Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis-who runs for president on the same sort of delusional catch phrases Obama spits out whenever the cameras are around, only to decimate personal liberties and turn the country into a paramilitary zone. It is why I don't entirely trust him [Obama], in fact, and consequently, it is why I know Gravel is my man. Anyone with the guts to go on television and tell 3 million viewers that American is not Number One in much of anything-not even close-is the man you vote for. Any man willing to filibuster the Senate and read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record during that paranoid Age of Nixon has a better track record than the rest of these career politicians put together. He's the honest one, and he has nothing to lose. People like Gravel and those voters who are tired of being spoon-fed campaign slop know that the real Audacity Of Hope is to anticipate, yearn for, and believe in the day that a dark horse candidate rides that drooling beast into the White House, stopping only to let it take a well-deserved shit in the Rose Garden before getting down to serious business. It will signal the end of the stagnancy that has been wrought by our idiotic notion that the nation houses but two political ideologies. The unfortunate dynamic of modern-day politics will force a massive reevaluation of what it means to be involved in the political process.

That is what Obama will never truly understand and what Hillary Clinton wants to prevent us from remembering. Indeed. The Poodle and the Pitbull will fight to the death for this one because our country lacks the imagination to call bullshit when they see it.

It's always been this way, though-whether you're on a plane trying to stop from emptying your stomach onto the person in front of you or in a dockside bar sucking down cheap whiskey for the one-thousandth night in a row. We go with what's safe, if we can, and make progress a novelty bar graph to be printed in future U.S. History textbooks-the same textbooks that call Davy Crocket an American Hero and Andrew Jackson a humanitarian.

The whole thing is very simple when you sit and think about it. We're in a rut, and ruts tend to get deeper until the rain loosens up the soil a little bit or, in my case, until these wheels hit the tarmac in Houston and I am able to barricade myself inside the hotel room and set up a reliable perimeter just in case the FAA has been tracking me since Chicago. The terror level today was Orange, after all, and we are not living in the United States of America we learned about in school. Certainly not.

This Land of the Free is riddled with electric fences and mean, mustachioed men wearing Confederate flag bandanas, just waiting for an excuse to test out their new government-issued 6000-volt cattle prods on humans.