November 3, Election Day, still, kind of, 2004

Yeah, I don’t know

There’s this kid at work. I don’t know his name… maybe it’s Robert. He seems like a cool kid. He has blue hair. I've talked to him a few times. He’s friendly, seems reasonably non-conformist, and I don’t get a ‘stupid’ hit off him. Anyway, I was over watching the election coverage on one of the TVs at work tonight (I work 3 to midnight) when I was supposed to be answering customer email, and he was there, too, because his cubicle is right near the TV.

He’s a grunt; one of the majority where I work that answers the phones and takes customer shit for a major telecommunications company. As such, he’s tethered to his cubicle by his headset. But call volume had been down for a month now, so he had like ten minutes between calls.

I should have been over in the back room in the other wing where my particular team works, but we don’t have a TV. The 3 to midnight shift is largely unsupervised, so tonight I’d answer a few emails, then log off and drift back over to the other wing to watch the election for awhile. And I started talking to this guy, whose name may or may not be Robert, I really don’t know.

Robert, as young people who are still a little naïve and a little idealistic have tended to, especially over the past couple of months, kept expressing disbelief that half the country could really vote for the malignant idiocy known as Bush-Cheney. I’d been having this talk all night with a guy on my team who, despite being a Born Again Christian who thinks homosexuals all suffer from a form of moral, spiritual carcinoma, nonetheless is mostly a social liberal and who voted for Kerry.

So I was a little tired of explaining it. “What can they be THINKING?” this kid, whose name might or might not be Robert, kept repeating. The answer, of course, is that they aren’t thinking. The thinking people vote for the other guy. The people who vote for Bush are primarily feeling. They are people who do not like to think, and who do not trust other people who do habitually think. They are the living embodiment of slogans like “don’t worry, be happy” and “go with your gut”. They vote what they feel, and for whatever reason, George Bush makes them feel safe, while John Kerry makes them feel threatened.

Actually, it’s not ‘whatever reason’, it’s because George Bush acts like he’s no smarter than they are, and they like people who aren’t smarter than them. Whereas Kerry clearly is smarter than they are, and, well, they don't like that at all.

But that wasn’t what I explained to maybe-Robert; I’d been explaining that all night to my teammate and I was tired of it. Instead, I said “Look… there is no real left in this country any more. All there is now is moderate, and totally deranged right wing nutballs. Half the country, pretty much, is totally deranged right wing nutballs. And that’s why this election is so important to that half of the country, why they are working so hard on it, why they are putting in so much effort, why they will do absolutely anything to carry it. Because this is about the future of freedom in this country, and they know it. They hate freedom. They hate individual choice and original thought. To these people, freedom means the freedom to be just like them. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say what they want to hear, freedom of religion means the freedom to worship God in a good decent Christian fashion, and you’d better show up to church every Sunday.”

I stopped for a minute, to gather my thoughts, and then went on “If they win this election tonight, in ten years you will not be able to live in this country unless you are a loudly professing Born Again Christian. They know that, and they want that. They are tired of sharing space with people who do not believe what they do. They want us out.”

Maybe-Robert looked at me and said, softly, “Jesus.”

Behind him, in a row of cubicles, a girl who was maybe 22 said, loudly “Somebody say something so I don’t have to listen to them,” and in response, several people around her started chanting “Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush”, I guess to drown me out.

I ran into my youngest brother yesterday while I was coming back from the ATM. He pedaled by me on a bike I hadn’t known he owned, then spun it around and came back so we could yak for a couple of minutes as the cars went whizzing by on Gall Boulevard.

I hadn’t talked to him since he’d lost his job at a nearby Circle K. We chatted a little, and he told me he’d been messing with an old lady at an intersection carrying a Bush-Cheney sign, telling her she was carrying the wrong placard, and like that.

I think it’s a waste of time to argue with fools, especially elderly ones, but I just shrugged and said “So, are you voting tomorrow?” He looked sheepish and said “I totally forgot to register.”

So that’s one we didn’t get.

Of course, knowing my youngest brother, if he had registered, he’d have slept in today anyway and blown it off.

I wound up registering on the last possible day, so I shouldn’t sound all self righteous. I mean, I was still registered in my old neighborhood in Tampa, but the odds of me getting back into the city to vote were, well, none, so I did need to re-register out here. I’d thought there was time, and in fact, kind of just kept absently waiting for one of the dozens of people wandering around with clipboards registering anything that held still or moved slowly to walk up to me. But it didn’t happen, and the paper told me it was the last day, so I walked like a mile over to the post office, filled out a form, and mailed it.

Then ten days later I got a note in the mail saying I had to send in something with my address on it, as I was a first time voter in Pasco County. So I sent them a copy of an old utility bill, and about a week after that, I got my voter’s registration card.

It told me I was voting at some place called Alice Hall. I didn’t know where that was, and the map was useless… it showed one cross street, and had one building marked on it (Alice Hall). I called the local Board of Elections and they had no clue where it was because they were in nearby Dade City. I called our local City Hall and at 2 in the afternoon nobody would pick up the phone, because, well, the tiny little dump I live in is like that. I called the Chamber of Commerce and the woman there was nearly clueless, but allowed as to how it was on 5th Avenue, which is also our Main Street. (A few months ago, for about a week, it was renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard, but the rotten little burg I am now apparently trapped for life in made world history by becoming the first municipality in history to rescind such an honor, mostly because about 40 white people screamed bloody murder about it.)

I assumed Alice Hall must be this place I used to walk by all the time when I worked at the Village Inn, and relaxed, because I knew where it was. And this morning, I was up early, so I walked over there. It was on the other side of Gall Boulevard, probably about a mile and a half from my duplex.

So I got over there and it wasn’t Alice Hall, it was the St. Joseph’s Community Center, and according to people waiting in line, Alice Hall was down 5th Avenue and on the other side of Gall Boulevard… you know, back over on the side I live on.

So I walked maybe another mile and found Alice Hall, which was, actually, about five blocks in a nearly straight line from my duplex.

The things we do to vote, he sang, stealing the melody from an old 10 CC song.

After everything I’d been led to expect, it was anticlimactic. I am 18 days from being 43 years old, and I was the youngest person in the building, probably by an average of 15 years. While I am reasonably sure nearly everyone else there was voting for Bush, nobody so much as gave me a mean look. Nobody challenged my right to vote there or tried to not find me in the rolls. The touchscreen voting machines seemed to work fine. I got in, got out, and got on with my life.

I am, of course, pretty much always annoyed and aggravated to live in Florida, but tonight I am ashamed to live in Florida, also.

But, on the other hand, I’m proud to be a New Yorker tonight.

Even if Rudolph Guliani is one of the bigger turds in the Western Hemisphere.

I guess it’s going to come down to Ohio. That’s what they say.

I keep going back to what maybe-Robert asked me. How can people be stupid enough to vote for Bush, again? Before, the damage he could do was theoretical. Now we’ve seen it. Four fucking years of it. In 1999 and 2000, all any thinking person knew about Bush was that he wasn’t qualified to lead a Boy Scout troop. All his self starter businesses went broke. He stole and lied. Texas under his governorship became a gigantic strip mine that executed a record number of blacks, Mexicans, and mentally retarded women. He wasn’t very smart, and would always do exactly whatever the interests who paid him the most told him to do.

And to be fair, he didn’t win. Lots of morons voted for him, but he lost the election, and then his smarter friends stole it back for him, and, as The Boondocks put it yesterday, as payback we egged his limo.

But it’s four years later, and everyone in the world loathes us, and the bodies are lying by the thousands in pieces all over Iraq, and all our jobs are somewhere overseas because Bush’s corporate friends save on taxes by doing that, and nobody has health care coverage, and we’re killing our biosphere, and still, still, half our country voted for him.

Actually, a little more than half.

I guess Kerry could still win. He’s digging his heels in over Ohio. I want to have some hope about that, but Ohio is as tightly corrupt a Republican satrap as Florida, and a lot depends on, you know, judgement calls being made by largely Republican election officials as to whether or not certain provisional ballots are valid, and you really have to think that an awfully large number of ones marked ‘Kerry’ aren’t going to be, somehow.

So I keep telling myself, ‘you can survive four more years’. I tell myself that. It’s probably true.

I try not to wonder how many teenage or twenty-something American servicemen and women can’t and won’t.

I try not to wonder how many Iraqi children will get blown up, Iraqi men will get thrown into prison for nothing and tortured and raped, Iraqi women will be left in bombed out hovels to die without family to take care of them, in the ‘four more years’ that half my countrymen are deliriously chanting for, as if it’s somehow a desirable thing.

I try not to wonder how much deeper the bodies will be stacked, how much less of the ozone layer we’ll have, how much warmer the globe will be, how much more hated my country will be.

I try to hope that, four years from now, a small percentage of my fellow Americans will be sickened enough to turn away from electing this shitheel’s younger, better looking, smarter brother.

I wonder if, eight years from now, I’ll be kneeling in front of a pew somewhere, smiling grotesquely down at a hymnal, straining to see, with my peripheral vision, whether my boss (the deacon) can tell I’m just mouthing the words or not, and if she can, whether or not I’ll have a job the next day…

I try not to wonder how bad it can get. I try to look on the bright side.

At least I’m not gay.

Or Islamic.

Going down, again

Jesus. I feel like there are zombies loose in the streets, or something.

Kerry couldn't even hold off on conceding until all the provisional ballots were in. What the hell, right? It's just the freedom and future of the entire world at stake...

There's a woman at work who is pretty much intelligence-free... a nice person, but not at all bright. She's deeply conservative, and last night, as I was conversing with a like-minded near-liberal about how poorly the election was going, she said, in a ponderously teasing tone of voice, "Geez, you guys are getting a little obsessed with this, aren't you?"

I snapped back, "Well, geez, it's only the freedom of the entire world at stake, why would we be obsessed?"

She came back with "Well, it's only the de-moralization of the whole world..."

The demoralization of the whole world.

See, of course, what she was doing (she's not very articulate) was essentially making up a word. Like all conservatives who only believe what other people have told them to believe, this woman uses the word 'morals' like a junkie uses smack. What she was saying, of course, was that, if Kerry won, the entire world would be stripped of every last shred and fiber of moral pretenses over the next four years.

I wanted to snap back at her, but I didn't. Arguing with fools just wastes your time, and annoys the fool.

The demoralization of the whole world.

Yeah. Mission accomplished.

There's this quarter-second passage in the new Dawn of the Dead that is probably the best moment in the entire film. Our heroine goes to bed in a normal world, having come home from her job at a hospital, had some good sex in the shower with her boyfriend, and drifted off to sleep. She wakes up, and the zombie hordes are out in the streets, and a young neighbor we saw her saying hello to briefly the night before pushes in her bedroom door and attacks her boyfriend, turning him into a zombie when he quickly bleeds out from a gushing throat wound.

More by sheer luck and pluck than anything else, she gets out of the house and gets into her car. Around her, the world is in chaos. Her now undead boyfriend pursues her out the door, and in this new movie, these zombies do not lurch nor stumble; they are fast as hell. She starts up the car and screeches away from him in nearly blind panic, and he's running along behind her very single minded, not giving up...

All around her, chaos. It's a snapshot of a world at the transition point. Civilization is taking its last shuddering breaths. Living people are all around her, some being chased by zombies, others still asleep, oblivious, in their beds.

One of her neighbors is out on the front lawn, watching everything in horror, in her housecoat. We see her, for just a second, as our heroine speeds by her in the car... and the pursuing zombie boyfriend suddenly breaks off and leaps on the neighbor, who screams as she goes down under the onslaught, and, presumably, dies...

I feel like there are zombies in the streets, right now.

I feel like it's a snapshot moment.

I feel like we're all standing on our front lawns, dazed and numb and disbelieving, watching the horror all around us...

The first election I voted in was the 1980 Presidential election. That loss was bad enough, but I was barely old enough to vote, and didn't know much about politics. I knew enough, even at that age, to recognize that Reagan's campaign speeches, slogans, and advertisements were frighteningly content-free, and I wondered how people could not see that... but, anyway, it didn't hit that hard when he won.

I just didn't know.

In 1984, though, I was sick of Reaganomics and paying a little more attention. I voted for Mondale and went home. I didn't own a TV then, ah, sweet bird of youth, so about 2 am that night I called a buddy of mine named Karl and asked him how it had gone.

"Democrats are burning their uniforms on street corners," Karl advised me gravely.

It hit me in the pit of my stomach... my country had been through four years of brainless, ignorant, conservative intolerance, with handsome men in crewcuts and handsome women in modest dresses telling everyone what to think and what to do and what was right and what was wrong, with a truly frightening lack of introspection or tolerance for debate.

And now we were heading into four more years of it.

It hit me, and I think my knees went a little weak.

"Democrats are burning their uniforms on streetcorners."

"It's all about the demoralization of the whole world."

I feel like there are zombies loose in the streets.

And they have all the guns, too.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.