happiness

1976. It requires a certain complexity of emotions to sing an optimistic number about your divorce while the ex-husband in question plays the bassline, but Christine McVie did it in ’76 with “Don’t Stop.” I think everyone was getting divorced in the ’70s, not the least of them five different members of Fleetwood Mac, so it went to number one; “Don’t Stop” also nicely captured the ginger exhale of the Carter era, the thoughts of a country resigned to broad optimism, in lieu of imagining what could possibly be next.
In 1976, Vice President Dick Cheney was but a glimmer in the devil’s rheumy eye, back in “doubleya-why-yo” ciphoning gas from military commando death-squad tankers or some shit.
I was born in WYO in ’76, which has everything to do with the fact that I spent all summer dreaming of that cheerful eulogy, “Don’t Stop,” crawling beneath its fingernails for this “project” I’m “doing” which “jumps off” in or before “the year 1991,” the year Bill Clinton and James Carville repurposed the song (and its implications) for the campaign. After August, I thought I was through with that song, cause I was reeeeeal sick of its 4/4 bobbleheadedness after the 178th listen–but it came on the stereo in the coffeeshop on Sunday AT THE VERY MOMENT I was reading Judith “How do I live with myself?!” Miller’s essay in the Times about her grand jury testimony, aka “How I learned to stop worrying and GIVE WHIG A FREE PASS BACK INTO THE SHADOWY CREVICE OF HADES.”
WHEREUPON “Don’t Stop”‘s biting social meaning on Oct. 16, 2005, hit hard in the last paragraph, WHEREIN Scooter Libby is described as “MISSING” Miller’s REPORTAGE. Which part was he missing–the part where he fed her false information about yellowcake, or the part where she disseminated said information to the american people via the Times like an airborn pathogen–information which Libby (and crew) then recycled to drum up public support for an unjust war? That, incidentally, made their bosses’ clicks astronomically wealthier? Gosh. In J-School they might deign to label that shit “DISINGENUOUS.”
Reportage.
I cried.
Then I laughed. On the preceding page, the Times (paper of record/paper of ill repute) had printed a “charticle” detailing the “satisfaction” of workers in various government agencies. The employees at the Department of Homeland Security clock in a score of 19.2% job satisfaction on a scale of 100. The General Services Admin., however, is fucking STOKED at 68.1.
Today, though… today I know no irony. Only joy.
“Don’t stop, thinking about tomorrow,
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,
It’ll be better than before.”
Word to Atlantic Ave, Rumors and the look on the little man’s face. Somebody gimme a megaphone: NATRONA COUNTY 4EVER!