Don't Spoil The Party

[Robbien]

by Athenae at First Draft

I have to admit this is the part of the annual White House Correspondents' Sploogefest that always escapes me. How do you party with people who hate you? How do you overcome the nausea when sitting next to somebody who thinks, who honestly thinks, that the country would be better off if you and everyone who did your job did not exist?

I don't get it, I'm sorry. How can you take yourself so lightly as to think, as White House reporters so famously did, that missing WMDs are funny? That you should be laughing at the same stuff these people are laughing at? How do you get there? Tell me the turn-off so I can avoid it when I pass it on the road.

That's not about a difference of opinion about what constitutes humor, that's about a disconnect from what's actually happening so profound it approaches psychosis. It always strikes me at moments like this that for all the "we are at war" rhetoric and "moment of national crisis" portentiousness that emanates from the administration and the talking heads who love this shit, nobody actually conducts himself or herself in the off hours like there's a war on, a crisis underway.

It's like they know, in their tuxes and tulle, that it's all a big show, and I could forgive them for that, for indulging in humor about the fraudulent picture they paint every day of a world in which they do not live, except for all the bombed out buildings, the bodies, the laws, the lives lost in the painting. Except for the coffins. Except for the fact that there really is a wolf, and the world is caving in, and the sky actually is gonna fall down on us. And maybe I'm just the girl who can't take a joke, but I think that's worth ruining the barbecue over. I think that's cause enough to be impolite, decline the invitation, leave the stage.

And say, maybe, on the way out, that it would have been the best party ever, but the dead bodies piling up really are a downer, and you'd much rather dance somewhere else.

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