How do I gloat without gloating?

How do you celebrate a major election victory without smirking and saying, "Ha, ha! You lost!"?

I've tried to write a proper post-election article several times. I've tried several different takes on the subject. I've tried to approach it from several different angles. And I've abandoned and/or thrown out all of them.

The problem is that I just can't keep from gloating.

I may live in a blue state, but in a very red corner of it. This means that I have a lot of conservative friends. (Along with a few liberal friends. And libertarian friends. And one or two socialist friends. And a few gay friends. But most of the people I know are conservatives.) I like my conservative friends and I don't want to unnecessarily offend any of them. Sadly, many of them don't seem to feel the same; I am daily inundated with conservative and anti-Obama memes, and the passing of the election doesn't seem to have diminished this flood by all that much. But I can live with that.

And if I am going to be at all sensitive to conservative feelings (and they deserve a bit of sympathy right now) I don't think I should be posting the equivalent of "nya, nya, nya-nya, nya." Even I have standards; I am not the sort to open a wound then rub salt in it. I try not to be, anyway.

(It doesn't help that I'm meaner and more cynical than I used to be. Less likely to empathize with anyone. I can't say that this is anyone else's fault -- I really can't blame any of it on anyone but myself -- but much of it is due to major upheavals in my life that I had little or no control over. But I digress into melancholy. And it's dark down here.)

So rather than drag all of you down that path with me, I choose not to go down that path.

Well, not too far down that path, anyway. I think I did find a way to write something about post-election America without gloating too much, and I get to ridicule an asshole in the process. (One of my favorite things to do, by the way.) But that's for my next article. Tune in tomorrow.

So I'm not going to finish or publish "The (Sour) Grapes of Wrath" or "We won. You lost. Deal with it." or "'Are You There, Reality? It's Me, Mitt...'" or any of the other efforts at pure meanness that I can't seem to help writing. 'Cept for one...

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.