Goodbye, 2008

And so comes the death of another month and another year. It was a year of incredible revelations and stunning inaction from Congress, a time when a woman--among many other defendants, I presume--was run to her death by federal prosecutors and the Court, and warrantless surveillance was legalized allowing 60s radicals to say, "We told you so, we weren't paranoid."

It was a year when the economy began crashing as it would inevitably do under the GOP, and we can thank whatever deities we worship that it hit on their watch. Curiously, Americans never blamed the Bush II administration for its failure to prevent 9/11, but that's just too complicated for most folks to understand, I guess.

2008 was also the year that Alex Constantine made peculiar legal threats towards me after calling me a liar several times on his own site, not giving him very solid ground to stand on, and a year when I angered a few thousand readers and subjects (often the same thing!) with my writing. This is ironic, considering the number of liars and barracudas I've encountered in the whole Palfrey saga, it didn't paint a pretty picture of most of them. Somehow, I'm not supposed to have opinions on such things, at least according to some out there. Too bad for them, because I'm not going away anytime soon.

What's interesting is this: they're just my opinions, ostensibly my right as an American. I got a right.

Have hope, we're about to be freed from the shackles of consumerism and overwork, my strong belief of what's to come. It won't just happen, however. We have to make it happen with demands, very strident ones. I believe Obama is going to be an improvement only because there's nowhere else to go but up.

America is being pushed very far leftward by events birthed by very right-wing individuals and institutions who have wrecked their own blessed "market economy." This pleases me to no end: the GOP has potentially pushed us closer to being a socialist economy than FDR or LBJ ever could have.

This gives me a great deal of hope. Why? Because if we had kept going down the road we were before our economic problems began, we'd truly be doomed--there would be no hope at the end of that. Additionally, economic and political elites are now going to be forced to deliver on the promises of prosperity and a reaffirmation of the social contract. They know the options are few and more unpleasant.

On that note, have a happier new year, and make a new friend, someone who has your back for real. If they don't, they aren't a friend.

--Matt Janovic