[AGL] Thank god for Mark Morford...

[Frances Morey]

   Gratitude Not Dead After All 
This just in: Feelings of genuine thanks return to U.S., unpack bags, 'might stay awhile'    By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
  Friday, November 17, 2006 
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  It is time to be giving up some thanks, good and juicy and now. It is time -- somewhat shockingly, somewhat unexpectedly, mostly beautifully -- to take this crazy new opportunity to say, Oh my God I can't believe it and I didn't think it was possible but here we are again, in a thanks-giving mood. Who woulda thunk?   It has not always been this way. It has, lo these past half-dozen bleak and Bush-stabbed years, not felt the slightest bit worthy of any sort of gracious thanksitude. Have you not noticed? Of course you have.   It has, in fact, felt like quite the opposite, like there were no more thanks left in the well of human gratitude, like we were barren and impotent and thanks were like a family of starving immigrants, shivering in the corner of the barn and wrapped only in a threadbare blanket and staring blankly at the roof and saying, Oh my God please kill us now.   Remember 2000? Early November, specifically? Neither do I. I believe I have blocked it out entirely.
 I believe I am, like tens of millions of Americans, much like a plane-crash victim, my brain mercifully protecting me from the deep traumatic horror of that election, the feeling that the nation's heart had been ripped through its teeth by Karl Rove's rusty toenail clippers.   But I do remember this: Thanks were at an all-time low. No one felt a shred of gratitude for the galling wickedness that had been unleashed. Thanks packed its bags and vanished like a spurned lover and left only a scrawled note saying goodbye and farewell and screw you, you clearly don't want me here anymore, I'm off to France.   It was understandable. After all, what did we have to be thankful for? IPods? Babies? Dogs? Tom Cruise movies? Hardly. It was all lost in the titanic bleakness. I mean, who besides the most bitter and righteous right-wing Christian could stare into the gnarled face of the leering, lurching, lumbering BushCo beast and say, Oh my goodness yes, thank you for what you are about
 to do to this fair nation? Thank you for the imminent abuse, torture, death, misery, divisiveness, irresponsibility, loutishness, grammar abuse, embarrassment, Cheney, scandal, war? No one, that's who.   And yet, and yet. Even during these darkest of days, even after the cancerous BushCo pall had installed itself over the country, even after the evangelicals swarmed over the cultural agenda like hyenas and the environment took a severe beating and even after Bush lied his way to a second term in '04 and thanks screamed its pain into the night, even then, some of us still gave thanks. Even then, authentic gratitude was eked out, like squeezing a single drop of juice from a desiccated pomegranate.   Back then, we gave thanks that at least our situation couldn't get much worse. We gave thanks that Bush would eventually go down in history as the worst president ever and karma would slap him hard and sharp, right on that compressed monkey smirk. We gave thanks for copious
 alcohol and cheap drugs to numb the savage pain as we tried to enjoy the fact that everything moves in cycles and that this dark ugly period too shall pass, like a gallstone, a cancer moving into remission. We even tried to believe it.   It was not, alas, a happy sort of thanks. Not in a way full of hope and sunshine and enthusiastic oral sex and good port. It wasn't the kind of thanks we are beginning to feel like giving again now.   Now, thanks is back, has some heat and juice and even a sly and knowing smile. Thanks might even forgive us our trespasses as we forgive the BushCo that trespassed against us. Thanks was shocked as all hell by this last midterm election and said, Wow, you're serious about getting your s-- together? OK, let's give it another shot, but don't mess with me this time, all right?   This Thanksgiving, we have more to be genuinely grateful for than at any time in the past six years. A tentative return to "real" democracy. The desperate curse of
 corruption and misprision being lifted. Many of our nation's most sneering demons -- Pombo, Santorum, Hastert, Rumsfeld, the dogma of the Christian right -- all gone, all like so many slowly fading nightmares. A Democrat-run Congress that might actually serve a comparatively humanitarian, progressive agenda not based in war and scandal and a violent, judgmental God. Thank you, thank you, thank you.   But wait, is it cosmically just to parse and appraise gratitude this way? After all, the wise ones and the mystics tell us that thanks should have no such qualifications. We are to offer thanks for the hardship as well as the joy, the failure as well as the success, death as well as life, the Bush as well as the Clinton. It is all of a piece. Each is just another facet of the Great Teaching.   In other words, we are to offer, always and without reservation, thanks for this life, as it is now, in this moment, no matter how ugly and dejected it may feel, because it is precious
 and delicious and always full of simmering electric joy, if you just know where to look. It is, of course, a wonderful sentiment. It is karmically right and true.   Then again, these guys didn't endure "I'm the decider," "Is our children learning" or "Make the pie higher." It's enough to make even Buddha groan and cringe and say, Oh holy hell, that Dubya guy just ain't right in the head. I mean, come on.   No matter. Thanks is back. Thanks has returned to the tip of the tongue of a wary and war-torn nation. It is unpacking its bags, settling back in, buying some nice, at least moderately progressive furniture. And if we do this human evolution thing right, it might actually stay awhile.   And for that, we can all be grateful.   
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  Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.    Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.     As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.   


 
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