Accidents Happen

My daughter snuck a purple Hello Kitty bracelet on my left wrist while I was working on a story. She told me that it was very special and will grant me super powers to protect the world. I said, "The entire world?"

"Yes," she said. "All of it."

"Wow. That's a lot of responsibility."

"Yeah, but if you can't, that's okay. It's not your fault. Accidents happen."

"Accidents happen" is her new favorite phrase, though I'm not sure where she got it from. When she marked our couches with pink marker, she said she was sorry and that she didn't mean to miss the paper. But accidents happen, you know? It's a logic I find tough to argue against.

How can you? Maybe there's no reason to find blame anymore, especially when the person who's culpable is beyond reproach, because the very fabric of society could unhinge itself if the truth be known. See Chinatown, or more recently, the Bush administration. How will this affect our notion of revenge tales?

Hamlet's father was murdered by his uncle, who, in turn, married Hamlet's widowed mother. Hamlet could understand a man usurping power through murder, but for his mother to then marry his uncle in a matter of months? Jesus, how dare she? But we know how it ends. Hamlet was bigger than them. He put the past behind him, got drunk with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for the remaining three and a half hours of the play, until he married Ophelia, a woman he may or may not have loved. They then moved to a two-story, coldwater flat in Copenhagen. Tragic.

I know Bush's eight years of service are old wounds. We should put the past behind us, like Prince Hamlet, even though most of the past is still our present. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I prefer to see someone who committed a crime go to jail. When Todd Gillman asked Bush if he was excited about his new home in a posh Dallas neighborhood, Bush responded, "Why do you care?" Oh, that Bush and his humorisms!

Todd should have responded, "Well, thing is, a lot of us expected your new home would be smaller. Oh, and with bars."

So, we had a few protests in the streets. We made a few movies about the man. Wrote a bunch of books about him. Some of us became so outraged that we couldn't even function in society anymore. All of this, however, was after we gave him the benefit of the doubt that he would act in accordance with a few minor cobwebbed-laced documents, like the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. I mean, we didn't say shit when Bush's only accomplishment within his first hundred days was banning snowmobiles in national parks and not going to war with China (which was still a little too close).

Yet, Obama has not even been in office for one hundred days, and there are Republicans mentioning words like "secession", and others talking of violence over the mention of higher taxes. Can we just let the man wade through this shit-storm a little bit before we talk about dissolving the Union or playmaking that the Redcoats are coming?

I know, I know. Bush is in Dallas and is no longer the president. They had their martini shot in Crawford and broke the set. Jolly good show, everyone! We had them fooled, by golly! History books given to our children will have glowing remarks about Bush's wonderful service to our country in a time it needed him most.

Now, all we hear about on the news today are Les Miserables songs, tea parties, and pirates. I was surprised when he brought down our country, in awe when he brought down the entire world's economy, but I'm speechless he knocked us back to the 18th century. Hey, we all make mistakes, right?