No Rest for the Guilty

Was out last night with Tommy, a couple of the Belfast Boyos, Leon and a couple of his Dub friends bouncing around from pub to club. It was our second night out in a row so I was on the water (one hangover a week is more than enough for me) but it still ended up being a pretty late night. Sometime round closing, Leon's Dub friend copped on to my American accent and decided to bring up American politics...and I thought to myself, Here we go again... An hour later, having been talked at about Americans and oil and Iraq and 9/11 and all the rest of it by an extremely drunk lad with a serious Dublin accent and a penchant for close talking, I have to say that I started to lose my patience. Yes, I do have multiple problems with American foreign policy, with American domestic policy, with the arrogant way in which we go about bullying the UN and indeed the rest of the world with our ass-backward neo-con ideology but ultimately when having these conversations (as I do frequently) I have to ask, "What the feck do you want me to do about it??" I didn't vote for that clown George W. I don't drive an SUV. I write to my senators regularly. I take public transport. I'm not a born-again and I certainly don't think I have all the answers or should tell other people how to run their countries fer fuks sake. I am as outraged as the next person over the dangerous incompetence of the Bush administration and No, I don't drink oil for breakfast and wash it down with a few Iraqi children for lunch... So the next European who goes on a diatribe about evil America is not getting an apology from me (especially when they happen to be a Drunk Dub trying to tell me what Americans are all about when they've been to New York city once for 5 days.) I don't think so, mate.