Overcome by Shotgunfreude

Is it wrong to react to Dick Cheney's current predicament with a little shotgun-incident-related-schadenfreude - or Shotgunfreude?

It's just so poetically, mythically perfect - Sophocles would not have been able to top this.

The truth has a way of making itself known. Thanks to Cheney's (pansy-ass Italian) shotgun, the sort of grander truths usually produced only in the distillation of literature breeze in the faces of all the goppers in denial about this administration, with a forceful simplicity that cannot else but shake a few more of them loose, and drop them back on the rational-thought side of the great national divide.

I had been honestly worried for quite a while, uncertain whether American democracy really has a Seldonesque destiny of impervious potential for betterment, or whether it was a fad on the fade. Cheney's mis-quail has restored my faith in the culture of democracy having passed a point of no return. Maybe the Open Society really is too powerfully open ever to close again - if someone with such a will and such means to govern above the constraints of Constitutional accountability can be forced to answer for himself to his fellow American people in some fashion.

And I've been telling myself for so long, the last thing I need is such a perfect time-hooverer like a blog. Which is still painfully true. Oh well.

[UPDATE] - Jonathan Alter captures the sense of shotgunfreude in The Imperial (Vice) Presidency: "The shooting could hardly be a better metaphor for Cheney. It neatly packages his faulty judgment, insularity and arrogance in a story that is not cataclysmic on its own terms but will prove hard to forget."

I came up with a wording to define shotgunfreude: "delight experienced at the unraveling of antidemocratic forces." As in, the errant shotgun blast that might have triggered the next barrage of revelations on the White House's secret machinations - revelations that will help end its anti-Constitutional push to exalt itself above the legislature, the judiciary, and the Bill of Rights.