WITH JORDANNA THIGPEN

Photo by Jack Huynh, Orange Photography

The Teen Queen

By Jordanna Thigpen

April 14, 2006

It's time for this country to grow up.

Has it gotten to you yet? Waking up every day and watching Mornings on 2, picking up the Chronicle from your porch or the hallway outside your door, taking a copy of the Examiner from the stand on your way to work and assimilating American culture... and just not feeling that there are enough italics or CAPITALS in the entire world to express the rage, vehemence and breathless pallor that you're feeling (all in the same moment) about the sorry state of our union.

It started in 2000 with the well-financed Broadway hit, sadly destined for an eight-year run: A Marionette Goes To Town. Starring, the marionette we all know and detest, the marionette made to look precisely like a chimpanzee that had lost its bananas from too many years in an isolated lab cage, with too many days of its parietal lobe exposed for testing the latest formula of Revlon ColorStay foundation.

We have had electronic voting machines (the 2000 election, the 2004 election), the forced resignation of Victor Baird of the Senate Ethics Committee, War on Terror, the Valerie Plame leak, Tom Delay, Duke Cunningham, War on Terror Ad Nauseum, and phone-jamming. We have had those g-damn little smirks and the feckless gleam in those beady little eyes for going on six years. We have had a vast and increasing deficit. We have had endless war-profiteering in which we are admittedly made darkly complicit because it drives our hegemony, our standard of living, and keeps us in proverbial silk right here in our sacred Democratic stronghold.

We have been juvenile.

It is time for all Americans to stand together, rich and poor, Democratic, Republican, and Green. It is time for us to graduate from high school and elect a Democratic Congress in November 2006.

The hallmark of American democracy has always been our individualism. This is both our greatest attribute, and singularly has already begun to seed our own destruction. We are each talented, beautiful, brilliant - and we know it. As Americans, we really believe that each of us can be our very own Idol.

The Republican Party is the Party of I. As a Republican, I am powerful, I am wealthy, I am fabulous even though every time I reach into my wallet, I pull out money that is dripping in crimson.

The Democratic Party is the Party of We. We are in this together, we are suffering shared social problems for which we must all be responsible; we don't need to agree on a single goal because there's something for everyone.

For a nation of individualists, which has been more attractive?

Every American has been rendered void, irrelevant, by the current administration. Do you have a voice left in you? Can you say you have done your part to oppose the Culture of Corruption? What can we do besides watch the latest installment of Marionettes Gone Wild and feel that hot rush of rage, just like a first run of China White, pure and deadly, taking maybe four hours off our lives every time we pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV?

Where is your outrage? It's time to own it.

If we are really Americans, if we have any bit of that bright and gorgeous optimism left in us, then by God, by Allah, let us stand in unity and beat the living hell out of the sadistic war profiteers that are running our country into the ground. Let us rise up and take back the House and the Senate. Let us ensure that only Democrats are serving as Secretaries of State, and let us engage in a massive reform of our voting technology and mandate optical scan ballots, with each Secretary of State united around the common cause.

The Republican Party has proven one thing over the past six years: it is the Party of our collective adolescence.

True, adolescence is a necessary part of development. Ladies and gentlemen, did you ever run amok as a teenager? If you didn't have the lonely sordid pleasure of doing so, might I say that you are finally getting your chance, just by being an American in this time.

But teenagers, even wild ones, grow up.

District 6 resident Jordanna Thigpen is an attorney, small business owner and President of the San Francisco Small Business Commission. You can usually find her at work and she doesn't get to Ocean Beach often enough. Email Jordanna at jgthigpen@gmail.com.