This year, it’s different for me. This winter, the unseasonably warm weather has me feeling out of place. At the same time, I’m watching America’s political landscape continue its slide toward the Right, though I had for years hoped a restoration of balance could take place after George W. Bush left office.

In short, I’m feeling exhausted. Yet, the idea of Groundhog Day this year provokes within me some hope for renewal of energy. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that this is what the Groundhog Day celebration has always been about.

Punxsatawney Phil is a gimmick who stands at the mouth of a burrow that runs deep. The groundhog represents a re-emergence of life into a world that had been in darkness and death, a symbol of rebirth out of the womb of the Earth quite similar to, if more hairy than, Persephone, the stolen bride who returns to us the warmth of her youth for a short time.

The Christian holiday of Candlemas held about this time is a borrowing from the Celtic holiday of Imbolc, honoring the goddess Brigid, who foretold the weather of the weeks to come by watching the behavior of a snake that emerged from the ground at the base of a sacred tree. This mythological basis for the holiday was lost only after St. Patrick waged his campaign against the snakes.

Whatever animal is seen to come out of that hole, be it reptile or rodent, has something of the cthonic character of mystery that is found in the world’s most ancient surviving art, in the ritual caves of stone age Europe.

Nobody really knows what the future will be like, shadowy or sunny, of course. In hazarding a guess about the storms to come, however, we’re engaged in a sort of reflection on the cold and hard times we’ve just been through.

For what it’s worth, the first flowers of spring emerged here yesterday. The bright yellow of winter aconite is in bloom a full month and a half ahead of its usual schedule this year.

This year’s Groundhog Day ritual has become something of a joke, as we all know that winter has not yet obtained a solid grasp on us, even in the far north. Punxsatawney Phil may say that there are six more weeks of winter, but that could only be true if we had six weeks of winter already, and though the astronomers may tell us that winter has been here regardless of the warmth, the rest of us know better.

From now on, Groundhog Day should become more to us than just a quaint tradition of weather divination. Groundhog Day, after all, is a day that recognizes a warmer future. What better holiday could there be, then, to dedicate ourselves to a renewal of activism to the cause of contending against the global warming we have created as a result of our desire to tame the rhythms of nature, rather than observe them?

When I say that the threat of Saul Alinsky is “looming”, I’m not being quite accurate. It’s closer to the truth to say that the threat of Saul Alinsky is loaming.

That’s because Saul Alinsky has been dead for over an entire generation.

Of course, what Newt Gingrich is warning us about when he talks about Saul Alinsky is the remaining cadre of Alinskyites, trained in the art of dangerous Socialist politics by Saul Alinsky himself. Prime among that new Socialist cadre is Barack Obama himself.

Just think of it: Barack Obama was ten years old when Saul Alinsky died. Ten years old. Get it? Obama was just at the right age to have been taught to ride a bicycle by Alinsky.

Bicycle. Do I need to say anything else? The very word causes shivers to run down the spine of every red blooded American capitalist. The bicycle suggests a lazy self-sufficiency that is a virus in the nucleus of prosperity.

Socialist Europeans love to ride their bicycles down quaint little streets to get long, phallic-shaped loaves of bread that were made with flour grown by farmers’ cooperatives. Yes, by cooperatives, comrade.

Every bicycle ride that an American takes is five dollars of profit stolen from the oil industry. It’s a car that isn’t manufactured, leaving our factories idle so that we can’t fight back when Red Ivan decides to invade, and you know what happens next, don’t you? Yes, your children will be saying “vodka”, and they’ll never learn about how Jesus wrote the Bill of Rights.

I’m not ashamed to say that Saul Alinsky makes me quiver in my boots, because the truth is, he wanted to “enfranchise” low income workers. Now, think about this: Why would anyone want to encourage losers, who can’t even figure out how to earn a million dollars for themselves, to vote? It’s like publishing an advertisement in the newspaper asking for unemployed men to come and date your daughter! Why poison the gene pool?

The truth that the Maoist media doesn’t want you to know about is that enfranchising poor people is tantamount to disenfranchising the successful job creators. After all, every voter who refuses to be bought is a hundred Super PAC dollars that have been wasted, and that’s bad for the economy.

Yes, you should beware Saul Alinsky. His liberal zombie fingers are pulling the vitality out of the American dream, one Spanish-speaking ghetto at a time!

Post Script Of Terror!: It turns out that Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, was palling around with Saul Alinsky! That means Mitt must be a Manchurian Candidate… there’s no other possible interpretation! Run for the hills!

Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, suggests that Newt Gingrich is like that villain from the James Bond movies who sits in his remote island fortress, stroking a white kitty cat on his lap as he concocts plots to destroy humankind (was that Dr. No?).

What’s your selection? Which pop culture icon best represents the combination of absurdity and cruelty that is Newt Gingrich?

For some time now, conservative magazines and newspapers (also funded by very wealthy people) have been declaring that “liberalism is dead.” We’ve even heard tell that “nobody calls themselves a ‘liberal’ anymore. They’re ‘progressives.’” or that “on the left, the word ‘progressive’ has started to replace ‘liberal.’”

Is that so? Let’s check out a few indicators.

Google’s chart of search trends in the United States:

Google’s chart of word use in the news in the United States:

Number of Twitter posts containing the word “liberal,” January 20 2012: 1,267
…containing the word “progressive”: 1,258
…containing the word “centrist”: 270

Number of Twitter posts containing the word “liberal” 1/20/12 with a positive tone: 284
With a negative tone: 26
Number of Twitter posts containing the word “progressive” 1/20/12 with a positive tone: 256
With a negative tone: 12

Number of pages on Facebook.com containing the word “liberal”: 6,590,000
…containing the word “progressive”: 16,600,000
…containing the word “centrist”: 99,200

Number of Google search results for “I am a liberal”: 2,910,000
… for “I am a progressive”: 967,000
… for “I am a centrist”: 168,000

There is a liberal helping of reference to the words “liberal” and “progressive” on various social media of the Internet. “Centrist” is the teensy third partner of the triad.

But what does it mean?

What makes this the particular time to restore the future? Why not tomorrow, or next year? Why not restore the future in, you know, the future?

How can anyone restore the future, anyway? The future hasn’t even been created yet. Yet, if the future can be restored, the implication is that the future was already created in the past. What’s more, we have to believe that, at another time in the past, the future was altered.

But, if the future was altered, how? How can the future be altered, if it’s the future? Through supernatural magic? Through time travel?

I also want to know, if Restore Our Future is going to restore our future, how it will accomplish the task. Does the Super PAC have a cabal of wizards casting its own time altering magic spells?

If that’s the case, shouldn’t that magical activity be revealed in Restore Our Future’s reports of its independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission? Is this omission illegal… or is Restore Our Future just blowing hot air?

Seriousness descending into silliness.

This year, he is promoting a mandatory tooth brushing law, in spite of civil liberties concerns about the “dental police” and the shadowy “preventive dental maintenance detention centers”. He has denied rumors of plans to use DNA splicing to create a species of winged monkeys to act as tooth fairies.

Unlike other presidential candidates, he does not mind admitting his ambition to become a leader with totalitarian powers like those of Big Brother. He explains, “I am a friendly fascist. I am a tyrant you should trust. You should let me run your life, because I do know what is best for you.”

There is some new controversy in his presidential campaign, though. He has been accused of flip flopping to a pro-zombie position. “Zombies are not just to run away from any more,” he says. In order to solve the energy crisis, he proposes hooking up zombies to giant turbines, so that as they stumble and shuffle, they can generate electrical power for American cities.

Also on his presidential platform is the unique idea of full federal funding for time travel research. Upon the completion of his time travel research program, he pledges to go back in time and kill the infant Adolph Hitler with his bare hands.

His name is Vermin Supreme, and he is running as a Democratic candidate for President, with a place on the ballot in today’s New Hampshire primary, in competition against Barack Obama. We’ll keep close track of the number of votes he gets tonight.

I got this stack of sticky notes as a stocking stuffer last year. Every time I use one, I wonder if, somewhere, there’s a person writing notes on a piece of paper with the words “unimportant stuff” pre-printed on it.

It was this sort of accidental mechanism of collective meaning that popped into my head when I stumbled upon Fight Club yesterday. Fight Club was a book, and then a movie, in which the main character experiences a psychotic split in his identity, and ends up organizing a network of rebellion against powerful social systems that suppress vigorous individuality. In the climax of the story, a group of the rebels set explosives that demolish tall skyscrapers containing corporate headquarters.

This story was told just a few years before the successful attacks against the Twin Towers in New York City.

A few years before Fight Club came out, Bill Moyers sat down with Joseph Campbell for a televised interview in which the pair mused about the meaning of the tall skyscrapers in New York City. Moyers asked Campbell whether he thought that there would emerge any mythology from these towers. Campbell replied that we would have to wait and see.

When the two towers in New York City were obliterated, the mythologizing began immediately, and the American people took to the storyline of the emerging myths eagerly. One could interpret this eagerness as a kind of collective schema, a cultural readiness for towers to be taken down.

Moyers and Campbell expressed trepidation about the towers. Fight Club expressed the desire, from within American culture to attack the towers and bring them down through acts of domestic terrorism. Timothy McVeigh succeeded in just such an attempt.

Yet, the most successful mythologizing of tower hatred came when Americans could ascribe this rage to an outsider, an enemy who could attack these architectural monuments in sympathy with the terrorist fantasies of our own culture. We could have our towers destroyed, and claim to mourn them, too.

The booklet tells the story, in cartoon form of the life of “a little Christmas tree, whose dream and purpose in life is to be someone’s Real Christmas Tree”. Well, you know what happens when someone grows up only wanting to be someone else’s dream. They end up with psychological issues. They find partners who will abuse them, or they end up with a “cutting” problem.

Such, it seems is the case of the little Christmas tree, who describes with happiness how, “Once a year, the workers used their big, sharp knives to trim my branches and give me a nice shape.”

Poor little fella. He kind of reminds me of the pig in the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.