Eating Crow

I sit here, a large letter “L” emblazoned on my forehead, fork in one hand, knife in the other, eagerly awaiting a certain meal. My choice of cuisine may not be considered delectable by many, but it will be a feast to celebrate to me. It is the meal I wish for with all my heart after the 2008 Presidential Election—a steaming, heaping plate of crow.

All of my friends know my political leanings; I am a hard core, diehard, unrepentant, middle-of-the-road Conservative. I espouse the tenets of common sense, compromise, and affiliation with the person, not the party. I have tried to remain open-minded and reasonable my whole voting life. I never have quite been able to fathom why I have ended up carrying this “L” after every election, but I have come to realize it’s not all bad.

I know the “L” shows up because very few of the people I voted for won, or proposition’s outcomes turned out the way I wanted them to. My confusion results because I can’t see how so many so-called rational adults can disagree with me.

Yes, I’m disappointed listening to the elections results, but in the long run I’ve always had the last laugh. It’s not my candidate facing indictment. My choice never got caught receiving too much in gifts or kickbacks from lobbyists, breaking laws faster than he could enact them, trying to squeeze excessive pork from the barrel. This is not to say he wouldn’t be as crooked as the next politician if he’d won, but since I’ve been on the losing side seven times out of ten, we’ll never know for sure, so I can bask in the illusion of the unknowable, and hope and pretend my choices were the most rare characters of the type—the honest politician.

Even after all the practice I’ve had, I can’t say I’m a particularly good loser, but I’m trying extra hard this time. The reason I’m cutting our new President more slack than usual is I think at this juncture he has been elected to the worst job in the country. The economic situation currently sucks big time, and as the United States goes, so goes the world. Just a few of the related problems: unemployment is skyrocketing, crime is on the increase, the quality of public education is plummeting, you name it and the situation looks bleak. Does anybody think our Mr. President is going to look especially used and abused in four years?

I must admit I’m not yet impressed by his first few days in office. I am more than a little disturbed by his choices of people to surround himself with, but I knew that before he took the oath. Didn’t anybody else recognize more than a few of those faces from CNN and 60 Minutes as persons being given credit for engineering our current economic woes? Sometimes I think most Americans are afflicted by a couple of syndromes I like to call MA & PA.

MA stands for Monetary Alzheimer’s and PA is the acronym for Political Alzheimer’s. Everybody knows those two are often in bed together, so I guess the public’s convenient memories shouldn’t surprise me.

I didn’t expect his first policy announcement to be one that I think makes the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack, the closing of Guantanamo Bay Prison, but that’s just supposition on my part at this point. I’m not going to set my opinion in mental cement for the first year, or the first big event, be it pro or con.

So, until that point I’ll just make this plea. Please, President Obama, do great things for this country that will force me to admit I’ve judged you incorrectly. I know the Dove is the bird usually associated with an olive branch, but in this case I think I’ll use the olive branch as garnish on my dish of Crow. I’ll season it with my spicy anti-you words, and cover with a conciliatory sauce of apologetic rhetoric.

I hope crow tastes like chicken. I wonder if I’ll find out in the next, say, 4 to 8 years.