Closing Argument (Rude Version): Rise Up, Assholes, and Get Your Lives Back:
One of the things that the last eight years, if not the last couple of decades, has demonstrated is that, with lots of exceptions, we have become a nation of assholes. Indeed, the story of contemporary America is that of an unprecedented combination of Republican patriarchal politics masked as democracy, multinational corporate control of media and the means of production, cheap electronics and cheap credit pouring into the hands of people who have no business with either, and the propagation, through the government, the corporate media, and the churches, of a mighty myth about the primacy of the individual above all else. And that has turned us into a bunch of assholes.

We're self-righteous pricks, convinced that each of us is so goddamned important that people actually want to read about our every move on Twitter or Facebook. Or that every conversation we want to have with another person is so goddamned urgent that we need to have Bluetooth shoved up our asses and the ability to blink out a text message. Every filthy-mouthed tool with a laptop can blog whatever dribbles out of his or her deranged mind and believe that people should give a shit about reading it. We have become such mega-consumers that the act of consuming has been subsumed into our identities, with all things merely a couple of clicks away on our iPhones. And the people mentioned above would have it no other way. The more blinking lights mesmerize us into thinking we have it all, the less we think about everything that's going haywire.

There's shit that could be tolerated. The Clinton years lulled the assholes into blithe acceptance. 9/11 should have been the beginning of some assertion of asshole activism, but we were told to go about our business. And we did. We fucking did. Then, even as a deep anxiety was already creeping into American consciousness, Katrina happened. And the war went haywire. And now the economy is on life support. When you fuck with an asshole's ability to stay self-involved, well, that's something that has to be dealt with. Harshly. When the failures of the Bush administration finally pierced into the Tivo-numbed skulls of America, it was like shoving a fist up the ass of a sleeping giant.

What we're witnessing this election season is the ultimate triumph of American assholism: don't you fuckin' tell us we can't change things. Maybe the end result of selfishness is self-empowerment, the belief that, yeah, goddamnit, we are important enough to transform this shit. Because this ain't about McCain, this ain't about Obama. It's about us. That's what Obama has tapped into, and that's what we have responded to. Barack Obama hasn't asked us to transcend our asshole ways. He's asked us to use them, to turn the tools of egotistical expression into weapons, to act like righteous motherfuckers to those who have power. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground and the SDS were fuckin' jerks. The civil rights marchers were rude and impolite to the status quo.

Now is the time, this final confluence of events, that has allowed us to be able to say, "How dare you have done this to us. How fucking dare you." It's why for so, so many people race doesn't matter. It's why even the South and West are in play this year. Even an asshole can do what's right.

No policy talk here. No comparisons with McCain. Let's keep this clear: By making Barack Obama president, we return to a simple American idea, one that the Founders embraced when they were such jack-offs to the British: this land is our land, my land, your land. But it ain't fuckin' their land.