i wanted to sing last night as well, perhaps with as much rage as hope, though for me the two often are inseparable, but i didn't have anyone to sing with or talk to so instead i just walked around Boston listening to my Ipod and trying to figure out how to organize against the bush regime and its new "mandate" bought with the spectre of bin laden, with cunning exploitation of a carefully engineered homophobic panic, and with a thoroughly postmodern willingness to entirely abandon the shibboleths of reason and truth in order to create a spectacular image in which preppy fratboy cheerleader senator's sons, born into five or more generations of silver spoons in hand, become populist cowboy heroes for informatized suburbia. The bush presidency is not 1984 and it isn't Bush-Orwell, because Orwell was thoroughly modernist and thought there was some fundamental truth that totalitarian and fascist regimes distorted but understood as omnipresent if reducible to the point of obsolescence. As Rove has pointed out, (thanks Thomas,) the Bush administration understands that the polity is a text, that it can write its own national imaginary on the flesh of however many dead or poor, queer or muslim or outcast or immigrant or black bodies it wants. In some bizarre appropriation of Neal Peart, the ones who hold high places have indeed built a new reality, closer to [their] heart[s]. So they win, unless we understand that the only way to beat these fuckers isn't obliging them and trying to beat them within the parameters which they thoroughly own and control, but instead of participating in their sham of an electoral process while sarcastically noting all the ways in which they violate their own strictures with impunity, tearing open the posibilities they attempt to foreclose and creating new trajectories for particpatiry, democratic, and creative organizing.