Outrage fatigue

It has been a very long time since your blogstress last occupied her own breakaway republic; would that she could tell you why. Oh sure, she’s been mighty busy, doing the things one might expect a blogstress to be doing--singing torch songs, shopping for lingerie and watching C-SPAN, with box of bon-bons at hand. Yet, instead of turning her taunting wit to the plethora of scandal and perdition now gripping Our Nation’s Capitol and all in its realm, your cybertrix finds herself adrift in a sea of listlessness, barely able to raise her well-manicured middle finger in the direction of the White House. In short, your Webwench is consumed by--for lack of a better term--outrage fatigue.

So shamelessly consistent are the thieving hucksters who control the executive and legislative branches of our superior form of government that, with each successive outrage--say, the revocation of food stamps from several hundred thousand single-parent families even as Congress stands poised to give America’s wealthiest citizens a $70 billion tax break--one feels one’s capacity for indignation diminishing. We’ve been breathing the toxic waste of lies and blood and graft for so long that we’ve developed a sort of emphyzema of the soul, gasping for truth as we wheeze out a wimper of protest.

Perhaps your net-tête should return to the third person singular and speak only for herself. Perhaps you feel nothing like her exhaustion in the face of news about our government’s torture of prisoners, the name-calling of combat veterans who speak against the war, the revelation of the president’s demolition plan for al Jazeera, the attempt to throw Hurricane Katrina survivors out of their government-funded quarters, the fleecing of taxpayers in the post-Katrina contracting, and Vice President Cheney’s plans to skip the White House Christmas party in order to attend a fundraiser for the indicted Tom DeLay. Perhaps you are out there, screaming at the top of your lungs, blogging three times daily, calling into C-SPAN and writing your congressperson. You would then be a far better man than your blogstress.

But if you are like your blogstress’s many friends, you instead whisper in her exquisitely delicate ear about fascism--e.g., we’re on the cusp of--fearful of being overheard lest one be branded an alarmist nut, or worse. Indeed, in at least five different settings over the last week, your écrivaine has been presented with that partcular F-word--not in angry invective, not as a mindless perjorative, but, rather, as a description of a state of being towards which les amis de la cyberscribe fear our nation is marching.

Said a friend who works on the Hill: “I know that Goebbels wrote a book; I’ve been thinking I should read it--just to know what they’re up to.”