[BRIEF NOTE] On the mid-term elections
When I heard the pleasant news from the United States' mid-term elections about the Democratic party's victory, and learned of the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld from his poistion as Secretary of Defense, I was reminded of a scene from the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

Towards the end of the film, Sam Waterston's Nick Carraway was sitting in a hotel lobby somewhere in the New York City megalopolis when he saw, much to his surprise, Mia Farrow's Daisy. By this time in the film, three people had died because of Daisy, after she had run down her husband's mistress in her car, driving the woman's husband into a state of madness that ended in his death and in the death od Daisy's lover Gatsby. As one would expect, Nick was stunned by his friend's tragic death, but in this scene he was more stunned by the way that Daisy kept carrying on, smiling and giggling and chatting to her husband as if nothing happened. She didn't pick up on this shock, or, perhaps, she chose not to react, and together with her loving husband, she left Nick behind.

I'm quite pleased that, after six years of uncontested rule, President Bush finally has to contend with a Democratic majority in Congress. I just wish that the Iraq war was a recognized trigger of the Republican Party's defeat, not from the perspective of the American military dead, mind, but rather from the Iraqi perspective of such a straggering toll in lives lost and ruined. It's bad form to discount the lives of the people you've smashed up.