"The Waves We Were" - Commentary by Tony Seton

The Waves We Were

The whales are swimming south. I don’t know whether they wait for after the New Year when there are fewer crowds, but the last few days, looking out a couple hundred yards from the beach, I could see all sorts of spouting. There were also seals cavorting close in to shore. There was also an older Volvo sedan, parked in one of the several spots where people do that so they can look at the ocean, and sitting inside under a roof-racked surfboard was a fellow playing a flute along with some source of music in the car.

It was a late afternoon, but unseasonably and deliciously warm, with young lasses frolicking barefoot along the boardwalk. When the sun did its final descent to the winter West, past Point Joe, hundreds of people stood on the beach in pairs and alone, for ten minutes or so, watching as the last sliver of reddish-orange disappeared beneath the sky and into the there-black sea.

It’s curious that this event has such a fixating effect on us. It suggests that there is something more than spiritual, intrinsically mystical, about the setting of the sun, that it locks busy lives in place, entranced, and then releases them after the final curtain. They’re all standing there, facing in the same direction, like cows do and birds do, and then they disperse.

It’s not significant in the general scheme of things. Not compared to the Hamas victory at the Palestinians polls. Ya gotta wonder why we are spending $45 billion a year on military intelligence and they didn’t see that coming. But why wonder? They missed the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the nuclearization of Pakistan, virtually everything about North Korea, and those pesky WMDs that weren’t in Iraq.

What’s a sunset compared to the donkey-party supplication to the Alito nomination? He could turn out to be someone other than he appears; Earl Warren made a far greater contribution to American jurisprudence than it looked like he would on paper. It borders on obscene that most of the 100 Senators will take the such a dreadful chance with our nation’s future.

As glorious as was this one sunset, it pales in importance to the Bush Administration telling Congress it can’t have the documents that illuminate its gross failure to cope with Katrina. And with the President’s refusal to hand over photographs of his corrupt self, schmoozing with that ultra-corrupter Abramoff. So dumb; it’s not like everyone doesn’t know that they bollixed up the whole preparedness thing, that we were lucky, in fact, that the hurricane didn’t leave more dead. And everyone also knows that The Bush Boy is as dirty a campaigner as anyone ever; I mean, he stole two national elections. Abramoff is a tiddly-wink in comparison.

One sun rose. Oprah Winfrey called on the carpet the prevaricating author of a book she had promoted because she thought it was uplifting because it was true. She had publicly defended him, and then learned that she had been duped. She declared that she had made a mistake. She apologized for having mislead people.

This was over a book. Hey, Bush-Lite, take a cue. You slaughtered tens of thousands of people and destabilized the entire Mideast over a mistake you refuse to admit. Of course there’s a difference: you knew all along you were lying. Hence, your logic would be that you didn’t make a mistake, so what’s to apologize for? Um, murder.

I have been hoping so strenuously it’s almost been praying that the American public might be waking from their narcoleptic denial and get outraged at what has been done in their name. That they might feel a shred of shame for the greatness of our country being despoiled; the very principles of democracy and freedom and rights being slandered without a care. That they might rise up and demand an impeachment hearing. Are Americans so inured from any but the most superficial thought that they think the nation’s manhood is affixed to this reprehensible failure of a man?

Up from the beach, across the links at the Spanish Bay resort, a bagpiper skirls out his clarifying notes on the patio to the rich clinking crystal within. As the surfers make their final run below, darkness begins to settle and all are left to privately ponder on the waves we were.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.