I watched the presidential debate yesterday. How can anybody still be undecided, for heaven’s sake?

Bosnian news magazine BH Dani [BH Days] features a column by Aleksandar Hemon about eerie parallels between the Bosnia just before all hell broke loose and today’s U.S. I know that only one and a half people who read this can actually read it, but I felt compelled to share it. The text is about the time that the columnist recently spent with an American friend Andy and the inability of “good Americans” (pretty much everybody outside the current administration) to imagine the world they are slowly being dragged into. He compares it to his own reaction to a speech full of fear and hatred by a Bosnian Serb leader in which he threatened Bosnian non-Serb population with genocide. Here is my inept translation:

In other words, I could not even begin to imagine what was already his reality and what was – while he was giving the speech – becoming our reality. That was a moment of total defeat of imagination – a moment when my reason and my imagination were not able to comprehend that which was already happening.

While I was telling him all this with a paranoid passion, I saw in his face that he cannot conceive that which is already happening. In that moment, I understood that Bush had already won because the reality he created cannot be conceived by good Americans.