So, waking up this morning was a bit like a movie:

You go to bed full of hope in the future, confident that tomorrow will be a bright and sunny day where nothing wrong can happen any more, all that, you know…

And when you wake up, there are undead people running across your lawn, destruction and desolation clutter every horizons and the teenage girl from next-door is devouring your boyfriend’s brains.

Or something along that line.

Indeed, I was completely off in my previsions. Seems like the perspective of a full decade of Orwellian neo-fascism and general hatred and resentment from the rest of the world wasn’t motivating enough for most youth to turn off MTV and go out voting. Or at least that’s what I like to believe, since the thought that the “future” of American electors might have gone out and consciously voted to keep Chimpy in place for 4 more years is even less palatable.

I won’t even dwell over the implications of all this: the popular “mandate” (like he needed it the first time anyway), the blank check that goes with an absolute majority in both Houses, the ability to name Justices that could tip the fragile balance of the Supreme Court over to many decades of conservative rulings, the surrendering of every first-born child for Rove and Cheney’s weekly black mass sacrifices… We’ve all got our crazy conspiracy theories and certainties about how this is gonna go. One thing is sure: it won’t be pretty.

All that needs to be said is that, after this, the American people just aren’t gonna get any slacks from the rest of the world. That small benefit of the doubt, you know, the idea that, after all, they hadn’t chosen him. Well, this time, they have, and it makes a huge difference, in my mind and in the mind of billions of people throughout the world.

I mean, if I am giving up on the US and its people today, I’ll let you imagine what’s going on in the mind of the average non-US world citizen, let alone the average Iraqi teenager, standing by the ruins of his house and family, while his country is slowly but surely sinking to a level of civil war that is starting to make Saddam Hussein’s regime peaceful in comparison. Oh yea, that kid sure is gonna grow up to help make America safer.

But as I said, and many other pointed out, perhaps this whole thing was needed, perhaps it would have been just too easy to get away with it, erase it all, as a bad dream that never happened.

At least now, no one will be entitled to say that the past four years were just a small hiccup in the good functioning of this proud democracy. A mistake. A slight misunderstanding.

While I sure would like to be proven wrong, I have little doubt that this decade will leave a stain big enough in History books that it can’t be ignored by the next generation. A testament to how wrong things can go in an alleged democracy, how dumb the masses are and how easily they can be manipulated.

Too bad it has to happen during our lifetime.