Mixing up my tonic for a blue mood

Now that those wonderful folks who gave us God, grits and cowboys have defined America’s course for the near future, it’s time to determine just exactly who on the other side is to blame: Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg or the Dixie Chicks.

They were among the many high-profile individuals whose anti-Bush, antiwar outbursts caused conservatives to circle their wagons in defense against those they considered the “Hollywood elite� or, in more graphic terms, the liberal pukes.

There were others, of course, but the aforementioned come immediately to mind as I try to clear the vapors of peaceful small towns from my head and get back into the kind of wired city mood that justifies what I do for a living.

Returning to the noise and the crime and the cultural angst of this City of Angles, I’m suddenly longing again for places like Markleeville and Etna, where I’m not certain they were even aware that an election was coming up, other than perhaps for constable or town crier. We drove through one city in Oregon -- appropriately named Boring -- that was so quiet the dog slept through it without a single bark.

The first evidence of postelection depression I encountered upon coming back to L.A. was a terrific sobbing that seemed to emerge from those places where liberals are known to gather. When they’re not in cocktail lounges drinking pink martinis or those rum things with little umbrellas floating around on chunks of pineapple, they’re out among the trees. Liberals love to cry in the outdoors, where many species of plants and creatures are becoming extinct.

Between sobs that racked their frail, Hollywood-thin bodies, threatening to shake loose their snail-darter replica jewelry, they kept asking, “What went wrong?�

After calming themselves with a few sips of organic apple juice, the pukes began wondering aloud if Karl Rove had managed to plant spies and saboteurs among them to confuse the campaign for John Kerry. Those inclined to tilt left are easily addled by the roar of right-wingers bellowing like wounded elephants into the sensitive ears of effete intellectuals, as they were known during the Spiro Agnew era.

One of the liberals was a pale, tear-stained man in a flowing white robe reminiscent of ancient lords spiritual. He struck an Aristotelian pose and asked, “Who among us would best fit the loud, undignified, unkempt, eerie-eyed image of a Rove Republican and be able to cause fatal damage to our cause?�

There was a good deal of debate in response to the question as they tried, without success, to come up with the likely person who could infiltrate their ranks and disrupt their efforts to such an extent that the red people in the heartland of America could return Napoleon to the White House.

Just about then, Michael Moore slogged by carrying the sledgehammer he had used in his widely viewed “Fahrenheit 9/11.� He had on baggy dungarees, a soiled Izod shirt and a baseball cap with his name on it in gold letters. He was unshaved, his hair was uncombed and he was wearing the kind of bewildered grin that made people wonder if he really understood the situation.

Moore went around high-fiving everyone and was about to leave when a wannabe actress in decolletage so revealing that when she leaned over you could see her hemp-woven sandals, stood, pointed at Moore and said, “ j’accuse!� That’s French for “That’s the S.O.B.!�

For a moment, it appeared as though the normally pacifistic, humanistic, altruistic, all-embracing, flower-lovers might disavow their credo of nonviolence and kick the liberal traits right out of Moore to determine once and for all if he was the Rove Republican infiltrator among them.

But then, someone pointed out, he had also written, produced and starred in an anti-gun movie and no Republican, even in spy mode, would take on the NRA. It would be the emotional equivalent of the Vatican challenging the biblical concept of virgin birth.

So Moore skittered off, never to be seen again, and the lords spiritual slunk away into mists of guilt and confusion, wherein they occupied themselves with tears and mutual flagellation. But while they sobbed and bled, the rest of America was singing a tune of conquest and contentment, because the reds had conquered the blues and they had what they wanted, the continued existence, not of liberal treason, negativism and ambivalence, but of a positive attitude to carry them forward.

No more anti-everything. Now it was a nation of pros: pro-war, pro-greed, pro-God, pro-two-gender marriage and a deep belief in the sainthood of George W. Bush. Well, to paraphrase the old T-shirt slogan, I guess a man’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have a martini.