Jet Lag Turned Me into a Right-Wing Republican

I'm declaring my jet lag officially over.

It was bad for a while. It was a short but anxious and confusing time when I questioned my character, when my fragile mental state evolved , with each passing hour of listlessness, into a John Kerry-hating, Bush-Cheney-Pawlenty loving right-wing Republican.

Lying in bed, thinking as if In a daze, I spared no one from my blistering, negative analysis, especially myself. I determined that I was using jet lag to cover up something that was more sinister, more permanent: No, this was not about my trip to Madrid, not about something I did, which may elicit guilt. This was more about who I am, something that should definitely elicit shame.

Let's face it, I thought, I had become a lazy bum, like those men in the movie Deliverance, who sat in rocking chairs on broken-down porches with long-eared hound dogs lying leisurely beside them, drinking home-made whiskey, playing guitars and pondering a life that never was. (And I can imagine a social worker or some governmental worker dropping by and shouting to the people on that porch in utter frustration, "Why don't you people put down those guitars and banjos, get off that God-awful porch and do something about your miserable lives!!!").

I saw myself as a bored inner-city teenager, a disconnected high school dropout and lucrative gangbanger, working the street like ticket takers on a stock market floor, soliciting sales with my trademark question "You alight?" getting young girls pregnant as a short cut to manhood, and shooting into rival gang banger's houses to keep up my rep and to give me a little thrill at the end of the night.

And curiously, I saw myself as a woman, not just any woman, but a Black woman on welfare, living in public housing, avoiding work as much as possible and pumping babies out of stomach like water out of a faucet.

So what did this wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime trip do for me? It made me feel great to experience the charm and beauty of another people's culture and forget my cancer and other problems.

What did jet lag do to me? It elevated a temporary illness into seemingly a permanent character flaw.

It turned a political progressive into a foolish, disgusting RIGHT-WING Republican (a character flaw if there ever was one) with an ideological addiction like i've never known!

Now, to stave off intervention, I must own up to this ideological addiction and seek help from family, friends and a sponsor. Now, I must begin all my 12-step meetings by declaring in public, "My name is Mac Walton. I'm a recovering right-wing Republican." Now, I must confide in friends that I have an addiction, and beating my new disease may take a while.

Mac