In retrospect
Sunset over east coast USA, 11/04/04
Four years ago today I flew over this county. Bush had won again. I looked down on the land passing below me in bitter shock. For some dumb reason I thought reason would prevail in the 2004 election. I thought Americans would look at all the things that had gone wrong, all the impeachables, all the destruction, and go nope, you can’t fool us again. The sun set during my flight, and I watched the darkening land and wondered where the hell I was living. In a bubble, apparently. The liberal, educated bubble of Portland, Oregon. (Or, as dubbed by Bush senior after a particularly unwelcome visit, ‘Little Beirut‘.)
Fall 2004 was one of the busiest times of my life. I was teaching at PNCA, while also trying to work out a way to live life differently from the highly-stressed and underpaid existence of a 4/5ths-time college professor. I was on my way to Baltimore, to present a paper on the Efficacy of Political Art at a conference at MICA. My head was full of those clever anti-Bush videos, ironic Photoshop collages, and witty propaganda posters that were flying round the Internet at the time. We’ll never be able to measure their effect, of course, whether they contributed in some way to a shift in attitude — or maybe they reflected a change in attitude that was waiting in the wings. But they did keep some of us from going insane during those dark days.
Four years later I am looking back on the second anniversary of launching into full self-employment, the first anniversary of running a successful web design studio with collaborator Jimmy Thomas, and a likely Obama landslide. (Which, with my new status as an American, I helped along a little.) I am now a business owner during a shaky economy. Blue Mouse Monkey had grown exponentially the year before, and this year with the slowing economy and word of layoffs all around, I am grateful our work remains steady.
Hey, it’s never going to be perfect, but it’s going to be better.