Only if it means Vice President Jackie Chan

I remember 1994. At 20, I was solidly post-pubescent, meaning I had all my adult wits about me. The employment of same was spotty, but the gears were all in place if I did have some trouble with the clutch now and again.

Kurt Cobain was already dead, that I remember. I was doing the junior college thing and driving a 1974 Ford Galaxie 500, the primary feature of which was irony: it was more than large enough for fully-reclined multiple-partner sex in the backseat, front seat or the cavernous space in between, and yet the car itself guaranteed that no woman would ever consider climbing into it. Most of this is because the passenger-side door didn't open so much as not.

I also vaguely recall, in the early days of my politicization, a lot of red-faced white-people on TV, standing at podiums outdoors, really really mad about how hard it was to be a white person in America. Being in control of everything all the time was very stressful, apparently. The Man always had his hand in your pocket, fucking with your fundamental rights to tax shelters and limited financial damages in the case one was civilly sued.

The stress was so much, that some of them had to find an an outlet to release all that stress while simultaneously trying to impeach the president for doing the same thing. It seems quaint now, but you have to remember this was in the days before free internet porn had really come to the fore. If a man doesn't get regular sex, he can get really sick. It's true.

I also remember those same red-faced white people codifying a bunch of promises that mostly had to do with what GOP policy is usually about: sex negativity, persecution of those least able to defend themselves and washing up Ronald Reagan's wrinkly balls something fierce.

But, as I recall, it was also a list of stuff they were actually going to do. Arcane and narrowly focused stuffed wrapped up in a bacon-and-batter layer of populist hooey, deep-fried in reheated post-Cold War anti-socialist claptrap. But there were verbs in there, I know it.

Because I haven't recently suffered any kind of penetrating brain trauma, I also remember 2010. With the young-ish Democratic president struggling to find his footing, spending all his political capital wrestling a health-care reform bill through Congress, fighting through a serious recession left over from the previous GOP-dominated political era, we're one blowjobbing intern away from 1994 all over again.

Now we've even got a new list of stuff the once-and-future Masters of the Universe are rallying around.

Things have evolved, though. Maybe it's just a function of memory, but the atmosphere 1994 seems so quaintly polite by comparison. It's natural to view the crises of the moment--what with their impolitely unknowable outcomes--as the most difficult moment in history ever. It's hard to say it's that much worse now. In some ways we seem a lot more tolerant. The president is a black dude. And Republicans just nominated a witch to run for Senate. Lots of things have opened up.

This new list of stuff, though, just reads like it was written by scared people for scared people. As far as I can tell, they're too frightened of themselves to even come out and say they're going to do anything. Mostly it's just a list of stuff that's kind of a bummer, man. Taxes, job losses, bad legislation... the whole document is a total downer. And maybe they're just not telling us what the solutions are because they don't want to ruin the surprise.

As a card-carrying Kenyan Muslim Socialist myself, naturally I'm drawn again and again to something Karl Marx said.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

The only hope I take out of that is that the first time we got Barack Obama; if the Marxian pattern holds, the next black president will definitely be Chris Tucker. And there, now we all have something to look forward to.