it’s something in the air that makes people tag buildings or want to start fights with republicans or vote for the first time and feel shafted when it doesn’t work out. some even start e-mailing unsolicited opinions about the current state of affiars to your son, ex-colleagues, siblings and high school friends. dad did that last thing tonight.

i come home to find an e-mail from my father, to me and the abovementioned people. i'm struck, as i repeatedly have been lately, by these almost random - but completely explainable - bursts of confusion and frustration tinged with sarcasm that people have shown since the election.

here’s a bit:

Hello all-
Politically speaking, I feel like a stranger in my own land. I haven't been this disturbed by an election since 1972 !

I guess I'll have to get myself back to a fundamentalist Sunday school in Texas to learn the "correct" moral values ( the ones they are talking about in exit polls.) All along I've been worrying about things like the right to affordable healthcare, scientific research that will benefit mankind, educational parity, poverty, housing, wealth distribution and
"just/unjust" wars. I thought those were moral values. I still haven't let go of the old operating principle called " a Christian Imperative" that I grew up with. Silly me. I feel so ignorant ! Maybe I should ask George W. to recommend some books on morals and ethics that he found especially helpful.

my father is an infrequently sarcastic person, and in a way, this is his www.fuckthesouth.com. i think we all have our own version of that these days, and his strikes me both for its apparent evolution in thinking and the degree to which we seem to inhabit the same intellectual world.

i never really doubted either of those things, but at a time when every one of us who thinks remotely the same way and shares the same sense that the words and actions of those who would lead us for the next four years are so fundamentally at odds with what honest faith and morality demand, it’s good to know that dad and i are for the moment on the same page. and that the milkman was just that. a milkman.

holy shit, that’s the beer talking. we never had a milkman.

i can imagine not relating to your parents but thank god they were blue staters...

oh, and i was right about ashcroft. now bring on that gonzales fucker...