A Refugee Coloradan for Barack Hussein Obama

You shall live in interesting times.

--Chinese proverb

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One hundred large showing up for Obama--in Colorado?

As a refugee from that state, that number beggars belief.

I lived there for nearly forty years. I left friendless, ripped off, violated, homeless, hopeless. Long before I did I saw that once-idyllic state fall to a form of extremist suburban strip-mall corporate "individuality" utterly devoid of friendship, of honesty, upon which it spread like a festering, metastisizing tumor. It is no mistake that James Dobson's milquetoast-named Focus On the Family is based there: an organization founded on hate, homophobia, racism, and awash in a sociopathic Messianic neo-Christian apocalyptic worldview that, employing a wholesale rejection of the sixth commandment to not kill, urges Christians to arm themselves to take over this nation and turn it into a Taliban-like theocracy, where women are second-class citizens, martial law is an ongoing daily reality (as commanded by such Old Testament tomes such a Deuteronomy and Leviticus), and all non- or unbelievers are killed or shipped abroad.

Bush has cited Dobson as one of his spiritual advisors. Enough said there.

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Obama shows in Colorado--and for the first time in over eight years, I find myself proud of my native state. Earlier this week McCain showed up, and, campaigning before five thousand of his closest racists and haters, urged, of course, more hate, more racism. John Elway entered stage right to support him, and it was then that I realized that lo, though one might be a great athlete, a great saleman, a great car dealer, that says nothing about your character, about your person. Elway's support of McCain and Palin reveals a clear and abiding character defect, a deep and distressing one that knocked him down several thousand pegs from where I once held him. The support of John McCain and Sarah Palin, as with George W. Bush, unmasks that character defect in all who do. For McCain and Palin are about nothing but hate, greed, hypernationalism, and the evisceration of the planet's quickly dwindling resources in order to feed a consumptive, piggish nation, one that swallows up over a quarter of those resources. It reveals a desire for empire, for dominance, for repression and oppression, for the annihilation of the Constitution, for the complete repudiation and rejection of the New Testament, where Jesus commands his followers to, first and foremost, "love one another, as I have loved you," to care for the downtrodden and poor, to take care of the world.

Five thousand show up for McCain, and the Denver Post spins it like it was the Second Coming of Christ. It will be great to see the spinmeisters from this second-tier rag take on one hundred thousand showing up for Obama today. To watch them struggle to play down the number and spew out McCain/Palin "talking points" (lies) in order to further a shrinking, pathetic, morally and financially bankrupt campaign.

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I live in Imperial Beach, California, the southwesternmost town in the contiguous United States. I live, literally, at the intersection of Mexico, the United States, and the Pacific Ocean.

Imperial Beach is a small municipality of thirty thousand surrounded on three sides by metropoleis: by San Diego east and north; by Tijuana, Mexico south. Six million human beings on three of four sides; the Pacific Ocean like a great gateway, a getaway, west. Imperial Beach, however, is, by way of geography, "out of the way" from these six million, a little jutted out into the ocean, which makes it a very quiet bedroom community, one rarely visited by these enormous numbers.

But it is a deeply racist, deeply angry bedroom community. Skinheads like the ones in American History X live here (I saw a couple just last week on the Pier harassing Hispanic kids, wearing shirts that proudly proclaimed their status as haters, shirts that, in five-inch Old English script, said "SKINS"). The local paper is so far right that Hitler himself would blush at some of the jingoistic, slobbering nationalism and shortsightedness it upholds as journalism. The San Diego Union-Tribune, like the Post a failing second-rate shill for Republican causes, endorsed McCain this week; the local rag will, I'm sure, do the same thing very shortly here. (It's published once a week, is free, and boasts a readership of six thousand, but in truth is less than one-tenth that.) Angry over the McCain endorsement in the U-T, I wrote the Eagle & Times, offering them my endorsement of Obama. It is an act of actual courage to do so: Republicans here have been known to shoot at their opponents.

I was given a maximum of 250 words; here is what I wrote:

Barack Obama for President

Republican Colin Powell, endorsing Barack Obama, said, "I think he is a transformational figure, he is a new generation coming onto the world stage....” He is not alone in voicing these sentiments, most notably by a rapidly growing list of Republicans, from Ken Adelman to Scott McClellan or even John McCain’s own advisor Charles Fried, who endorsed Obama just last week.

Obama holds a comfortable thirteen-point lead in most national polls of note, and the reason is easy to see. After eight long years of conservative policy, policy that has wrought disastrous consequences for Americans and for our standing abroad, consequences that will take years, if not decades, to repair, Americans have finally had enough. John McCain has run a campaign of divisiveness, of racial hatred and race-baiting, of dishonesty and dishonor, a dirty campaign roundly condemned even by members of his own party! His advanced age, lingering questions over his health, the fact that he voted with Bush over 90 percent of the time, his denial of global warming, his endless lobbyist connections (Big Oil, Big Pharma, among others), his continual flip-flopping on vital issues, and his Neanderthal selection of an incompetent, corrupt governor from Alaska as his running mate has turned the voting public solidly against him. As well it should.

America wants change.

General Powell: "Obama has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president."

On November 4, cast your vote for Barack Hussein Obama.

Thank you,

SM Montaigne

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The last letter I wrote to this paper was butchered (purposely, I'm sure) by the editor; it came out reading as though a third-grader had written it. Should the Parrot-cage Liner & Fishwrap publish my latest, I'll post it if they do the same hatchet job on it as I expect them to.

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The Republican politics of fear has gripped me for most of my adult life. I've feared declaring my progressive politics, both in my writing and in person, but no more. Criticism of government and its leaders is, in fact, one of the highest forms of patriotism. Especially when that government has fallen into totalitarianism (like China and many others) and corruption (too many to list here, all vying for number one). I've hesitated declaring myself for fear of losing friends and clients, of turning off readers and potential fans of this novel. But the stakes are too high now for me to remain silent. The survival of the United States, not to mention the planet, are literally those stakes. An Obama presidency would pull us back from the Olduvai Gorge, if even just a few steps.

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