Are you ready for the war on vampires?

Probably the most sickening thing about the US election result is the way meaningless nonsense won it for Bush. Kerry won every debate, but Bush still managed to scrape overall victory using vague, sometimes unintelligible, emotional waffle.

A typical Bush speech resembled one of those T-shirts you can buy in the Far East, where someone obviously thinks English words are cool but has no idea what they mean, resulting in Thai kids walking around in blissful ignorance with statements like 'Milk accident robot babe' on their chests. Similarly, Bush's speeches were strangely impressionistic, and it's only a slight exaggeration to say a typical speech ran something like this:

'America! Freedom! Security! Family! Freedom world America family! America family trust security freedom God!' etc.

But it worked, appealing to voters who are too lazy, stupid or inward-looking to follow a real argument, and instead preferred to believe in some tough-yet-benign fantasy about Good Ol' America. Vote for a regular guy like George W Bush and he'll keep you safe and kick the bad guys' asses, and probably arrange the wagons in a circle to stop the Apaches raping the apple pie. It was all vague emotional toss, but the strong-yet-kind image couldn't have worked better (except perhaps if Bush had taken Gentle Ben on the campaign trail with him.)

So now it's four more years of the Bush administration, whose mendacity and recklessness have been given the stamp of approval by the voters. God only knows what the future holds, but we can have a reasonable guess...


The War on Vampires

It's possible that the loosely defined threat which is Al Quaeda will sustain Americans' fear of the outside world indefinitely, but we've got a feeling the neo-cons are keeping their eyes open for even scarier bogeymen. And if Al Quaeda has a shortcoming, it's that it's almost too tangible, too physically real. Suicide bombers are scary, but they eat, sleep, shit and snore like the rest of us. Cut them and they bleed, stick a fluorescent strip light up their bums and they'll say 'Ouch'.

What Bush needs is a new threat that altogether less real - maybe micro-terrorists that can run up your nose and lay eggs in your brain that hatch into tiny mad mullahs who make you put your hand in boiling water or believe in scary shit like Allah.

Better still would be vampires. They can turn into mist, enabling them to get at you by seeping under doors, and they tap into a primal fear of being eaten. Perhaps most terrifyingly for American Joe, prolific blood sucking creatures of the night probably carry a high risk of transmitting AIDS. So you'd not only be undead, you'd also get AIDS and people might think you were gay. Which is far, far worse.

In short: expect a War on Vampires quite soon.


God to be placed at the heart of American politics, where he belongs

By an amazing coincidence, God has exactly the same views as right-wing Republicans. Thus it's likely that God will soon manifest Himself via a series of policies designed to appeal to religious nutcases and the sort of morons who think that God is taking a strong interest in their personal well-being, despite the fact that they live in a trailer park, resemble Jabba the Hutt and are so ill-educated they have difficulty concentrating long enough to make it to the end of Peanuts.

The knives are already out for Roe v Wade, and many states have decided to ban gay marriage. But why stop here? There are a hell of a lot of things God probably wants George to do, like kill all heathens. Bush and God have made a start on the Muslims, but they're going to have to raise their game if they're really going to make a big dent in the population. And there are still all those pesky atheists, Buddhists, Jedis, etc. This is going to require some radical action.

In short: expect a two-pronged strategy. Abroad, it's time to kick some I-ranian ass. At home, it's time to print school science textbooks depicting Barney the Dinosaur helping out with the chores on Noah's ark.


Bullshit quotient to be increased

As mentioned, Bush's brand of neo-con politics thrives on vague notions of a firm-but-fair, kindly and ethical USA that is a kind of giant picket-fenced hometown populated by hard-working, decent folks - a kind of Aryan Cosby Show, or Little House on the Prairie 2004. Close your eyes, think 'Aryan Cosby Show', and it's almost as though unsettling things like Abu Ghraib, Marilyn Manson and the Columbine massacre don't exist.

Much has been made of the similarity between Bush's war on terror and the perpetual war instigated by Big Brother to keep the proles in line. But now it's time for the next phase: Bush has to create a newspeak that removes problems and dissent by eliminating the actual vocabulary to express them. Thus words like 'Democrat', 'poverty', 'gays' and 'Michael Moore' will be removed from the American language.

In short: eventually, when an American tries to say 'Belligerent fucking right-wing assholes', all that will come out is: '.'

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