In general, I think taking topic requests might be a great way to keep writing and often think about opening the Request Line over at iFanboy.com but don’t, because I am ****ing terrified by what sort of requests I would actually get.

Anyway.

Searching my site this evening, I was stunned and appalled to see that the original Reagan post did not survive the transition from SnipSnap to Wordpress. And so, dear reader, I reproduce it for you now, with the understanding that I will very soon– I promise– do more than just copy and paste old entries I know you didn’t read.

—–

Since you asked:

I voted for Ronald Reagan twice, both times proudly and enthusiastically. During the 1980 race, I even went so far as to join his campaign, fashioning and coloring an elephant of construction paper (what an elephant had to do with strong defense and tax cuts, I still do not entirely know; I think that in 1980 I decided that the kindly old man behind the podium on television looked wrinkly and large, and that that must be the idea) and attaching it to a straw to make it into a crude picket sign. My zeal before the polls closed had very little impact, then as now; in the Sacred Heart kindergarten election, Jimmy Carter crushed my guy in a landslide. (Then as now, it was obvious that the electorate had no idea what they were voting on. Didn’t they see how boring Jimmy Carter was? Weren’t donkeys obviously lamer than elephants to anybody who gave it even a moment’s thought? Didn’t their dads ever make them turn off cartoons to watch the stupid, boring news?) Had the fate of the free world rested in the tiny hands of Sacred Heart, today page 14 of the newspaper would be mourning a genial old actor and union leader who died “after a long illness,” and I’d be saying, “Why do I know that name…?”

Fortunately, the right to a vote that actually counts has only been extended to people who are emotionally kindergarteners, so we got eight years with America’s grandfather. I remember liking President Reagan unreservedly; I would even go so far as to say that disliking him never occurred to me as an available option. Last summer, when I was surer than ever that the current president was going to bring about my speedy personal death, I went on a maniacal Reagan binge at the library in an effort to convince myself that the simple, prosperous times I remembered from childhood were actually just as complex and fraught with peril. (We didn’t start the fire; it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.) What I learned, other than the fact that it turns out I had no idea what was going on around me in the 1980s unless Optimus Prime was involved, is that there was indeed an option to dislike Ronald Reagan and people exercised it with such vigor that you could almost see little bubbles of spit froth forming in the corners of their mouths. Everyone everywhere loved him except for people who really, really hated him a lot.

At the time, though, I never ran into these people. (The only one I remember is John Cougar Mellencamp, on the 80s retrospective “Decade” that MTV ran in December 1989, ranting and raving like someone who was smart enough not to have written “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” You owe it to yourself to borrow this tape from me one day; there’s something about looking back nostalgically at a nostalgic look back that makes you feel like a bad mimeograph. Plus, kids, it counts as a primary source now.) At the time, my every day was Morning in America. Of course we were going to prosper. Of course we were going to triumph over the Reds, the ayatollah’s terrorists, the Decepticons. If cartoons were anything to go by, our enemies couldn’t even aim right.

I remember loving it when Reagan would interrupt shows to have press conferences. Which, I might add, he seemed to do all the time. Remember that? When the president was always on TV daring people to ask him questions? And then he’d answer them like it was his job, with wit and some off-the-cuff facts (most of which, we would learn the next day, he made up off the top of his head?)

(And remember when finding out the president was making stuff up off the top of his head didn’t bother America at all because he was so awesome? I just remembered for the first time in years the phrase “the Teflon president,” which increasingly bewildered pundits used to call Reagan because nothing ever stuck. We let him get away with anything; we didn’t even care! He was gonna kick those Commies in the ass! I never would have even entertained the notion that we were going to get nuked into our component atoms. Ronnie’s steering the ship! So what if he said trees cause more pollution than cars? He scares Kaddaffi more than he scares me, and my dad paid $.35 in taxes this year and bought me an Atari game with the leftovers! Ms. Pac-Man, muthaf***a!)

I remember one time, I had just seen the totally awesome Back to the Future, and then Reagan gave a speech and quoted Back to the Future! He was always referencing movies and giving medals to Michael Jackson (yeah, some of those are real) and sending his wife to visit the Drummonds on Diff’rent Strokes. And then, when I was ten, he tried to make Star Wars real! Laser machines in space?! Are you sure I can’t vote for him a third time?

(SDI aside, the real connection in my memory between Star Wars and Reagan was when I came home from the store one day with a new Empire Strikes Back pop-up book to learn that Scooby-Doo was not going to be on because the president had been shot. That was one time his surprise appearance on television did not interest me, though it seemed to grab my mom’s attention pretty effectively.)

I think I was more interested in presidential politics when I was nine than I am now, and Ronald Reagan was the reason why. (When you’re nine, all you need is a president who quotes movies and cracks you up. At twenty-nine, I’d settle for a president who quotes anything and cracks you up intentionally.) I remember his speech after the Challenger explosion like it happened this afternoon. I remember his debates with Mondale in a way that I don’t remember my most recent meal. The only thing he ever said that made my spider-sense tingle was when the debate moderator in ‘84 asked him why, if he was so moral, he never went to church, and he replied that his presence would be too disruptive and a Security Threat. “mmmmThat smells a little funny to me, Mr. President,” I remember thinking, though I was probably just annoyed that someone else had figured out a way to skip church and still make it sound like he was doing something good.

In later years, of course, there was Iran-Contra, but I couldn’t engage long enough to figure out what was going on there. Something about shredding Oliver North’s papers or something; all that really registered was Fawn Hall’s big ol’ hair. I was in seventh grade by then and had other things on my mind. I do remember a lot of Carson jokes about a presidential astrologer. (Now, Carson, I still miss.) By then, I guess the lustre had started to fade a bit. None of that changed the fact that, when Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address from the Oval Office, I sat alone in my living room and did everything I could not to start crying. In 1989, I had only really gone to one school in my life and had only really had one president, and now both were ending pretty much simultaneously. All my friends and authority figures were scattering into the sunset, leaving me with George Bush and high school and who-the-hell-knows-what-else. In hindsight, it would have been nice if someone’d tried to walk me through that one. As it was, I was left sitting in front of our 3-ton oak-paneled television with a severe case of Ending Overload trying not to choke up.

Strange that I would feel that way then and not now. I suppose that’s a kind of secondary symptom of Alzheimer’s. My grandmother had it for roughly as long as Reagan did, and when she died in January it was almost like we had been at her wake for ten years. We were no less sad that she was dead, but we finally got to go home and get out of those clothes. Six or so years ago, I went to visit her and she asked me if I was still in the service. Six months later, she couldn’t narrow down my gender. Shortly thereafter, she went nonverbal and nonambulatory. Then she got stuck there in a thick, murky, sooty fog for years. She would get sick; she would pull through; she would sit there, either unaware of it all or unable to do anything about it. When they called and told me she had pneumonia this year, I said, “Oh my God, that’s terrible. I guess. Relatively, you know. I hope she… gets better? I don’t– help me out: what should the prayer be here, exactly?” I’m still not sure I know.

The Long Goodbye aside, time does all sorts of things to perception. I sometimes wonder about what I would have thought of Reagan if I were twenty years older, if I hadn’t been looking at the space lasers and exploding rocket ships through the eyes of a ten year old, if my mind wasn’t processing the Soviets and COBRA as roughly equivalent. What is it like to be a fully cognizant adult who turns on the television in time to see your president hold up his veto pen and say to congress, “Go ahead; make my day”? To hear your president call the world’s largest non-you superpower, which has the money for leaky nuclear weapons (to point entirely at you) and essentially nothing else, an Evil Freaking Empire? I would have had a daily coronary with my waffles. “What’s in the paper this morning?… Hmm! we seem to have bombed Libya. Didn’t see that coming! How does our leader explain this, I wonder? Ah, there it is: ‘They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.‘ I see. Sounds good! I’ll be back in bed.”

Would I vote for Ronald Reagan today? Oh, probably not. It’s all moot, of course; if my older cousins are anything to go by, if I’d been in high school in 1981 I’d have been too high to care about any of it. Also, to a large extent, I no longer have to wonder what global presidential hijinks would be like. Just typing the paragraph above gave me a powerful feeling of Eeee!ja vu. The current president is still trying to build a magic missile shield, and he has assured me that his mission is to wipe out the Evildoers, particularly those in the Axis of Evil, evil evil evil, etc. It’s kind of encouraging, in a roundabout way; we did, after all, live through the eighties. I thank Mr. Reagan for that (and any number of other things) wherever he may be.

“Jim: do you now regret your caution, pessimism, and dourness in the face of overwhelming polling in Obama’s favor?”

Nope!

So, Obama wins by more than any Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson. Record-breaking turnout, record-breaking results, unequivocal victory. Whatever happens next, we have it coming. That feels good.

So, these new justices that the president is going to finally, thank God, at last save the Constitution with in the next four years… what exactly are they planning to do that they cannot currently get going with a mere 7/9ths appointee majority? If 7/9ths won’t get it done, I’m not sure I want to know any longer what “it,” “done,” or “get” is. Are they worried that O’Connor’s going to be a holdout on that amendment legalizing eating the homeless? What sort of cases should I be looking forward to?

If you can imagine this feeling, you have a sense of how I feel every second for the week before Election Day. And once the day actually arrives… up on the housetop, click click click….

This campaign, and the eight years that preceded it (well, seven) have worked me over like a loan shark in a back alley. The cynics in the Beltway have succeeded in at least one of their goals: I now earnestly believe on a primal level that, if I step into a voting booth and color in the wrong circle, we are all going to die. At the same time. On a date you could mark on a calendar you already have. I am completely electorally paralyzed; I cannot trust myself with this kind of responsibility! Even when I am confident I’m making the right choice, I think, “Of course, everyone I know who’s making the opposite choice is equally confident that my guy is the Angel of Death, and they’re not kidding. What if they’re right? What if I’m right, and my guy loses? What if we actually have entirely bad choices? What if I picked the right guy, but the other side is a bunch of sore losers and keeps him from getting anything done, including stopping that shipping crate full of ricin that breezes through a port in Jersey next spring? I need to go have a lie down.”

My friends, I have many a lie down.

For a long time– and the campaign has gone on a very long time, longer than I have been a father or even a father-to-be– I believed that I would be the winner of this election no matter what happened. No matter what, the old guys and all the geniuses they brought in the door behind them were going back to Texas to hide their Yale diplomas and pretend like they were ranchers who didn’t summer in Kennebunkport for my entire childhood. (Did you really think I would forget a word like “Kennebunkport”? How did you get the rest of the country to forget it?) Among the crop of new guys, there were relatively few who put a tingle in my tailbone. Of course, I did publicly declare that I would take my own life if my only choices were Giuliani and Clinton, but fortunately his haunted house didn’t work and she packed up her carpetbag and went back to whatever volcano her lair is hidden in. When the field began to narrow, I took a look around and thought, “Hey! Could be worse. And I speak from experience now.”

Back then, I was under the impression that John McCain was that guy who ran in 2000. The guy who got smeared by push pollsters, as opposed to the guy in 2008 who hired those same push pollsters. This new guy. . . I feel like this is a guy who decided, “Heroes who take the high ground lose to Yale ranchers,” and started signing away one piece of his soul at a time in order to sit in the big chair. I don’t think there are too many pieces of the old guy left. Maybe I’m reading him wrong. I hope I’m reading him wrong. It would be great , six months or a year from now, if the old guy emerged from the husk of whatever this new guy is and sat down for an interviewer or a ghost writer and spilled every remaining gut with bridge-burning, gasp-inducing candor about what Decision ‘08 reduced him to and how broken the system is. I imagine him saying something like, “My campaign tried to turn inspiring people into a negative! Can you believe that? We sarcastically compared him to the Messiah and Paris Hilton, in that order. What does that have to do with levees, or stop loss, or subprime mortgages? I can’t believe I did that; I was a war hero. My bad, everybody.”

This, of course, assumes he loses tonight. Not nearly enough people I know are even considering the possibility that he won’t. Listen to me, friends: start thinking about Santa’s fangs.

But first, before Obama loses, before you turn over my car and set it on fire tonight, consider with me the remote possibility that there is still a decent, bright guy in there despite it all. The other guy does not want to hurt you; he just has a different idea about how to help you, an idea that half the presidents for a century have had without plunging the nation into the sea. (Never mind this last guy, President Mulligan. No matter what happens, let’s all get busy trying to forget the living shit out of this bozo. That is why the campaign’s gone on for two years, right? Everyone’s been bouncing on the balls of their feet, waiting to move the hell on?) My dad occasionally says, “If two people believe two different things, they can’t both be right.” Don’t be like Dad. Even if every bad thing you ever tried to believe about McCain is true, begin 2009 assuming that he has learned the lessons that come with taking over for the least popular, possibly just least president in history. Assume that it will take him a while to dig us out of this hole. Assume that he wanted the big chair to fix what’s broken, and that he will do the best he can to achieve that before dying of cancer six months in and leaving us in the hands of one of my mom’s friends. That’s when it’s time to buy the canned goods.

Oh! And I guess there’s also a chance Barack Obama might win. Which I think might be good. Of course, a lot of people I know think it would be so good, and are so excited about it, that sometimes it seems almost ludicrous. Whenever I start to talk about him, I imagine my diaries behind glass in a museum where a curator is saying, “And these were found in the ruins. It seems almost darkly funny to read them now; this was before President Obama ripped off his mask and announced the construction of the forced labor camps.” I feel bad for my parents, who don’t think what I just wrote is a joke. It’s okay, Mom. Just read the thing I wrote about McCain up there and replace all the names. You voted for Bush a second time; now’s the time for some more of that optimism.

-In 2000, a “late night” to me was staying up to watch the beginning of Conan. In 2008, I routinely stay up long after Conan despite the fact that I get up earlier now. This helps to explain how I have retained my matinee-idol looks.

-The “documentary” I describe actually turned out pretty well under the circumstances, even though it was edited on a home VCR. I have recently seen movies about the campaigns of Oliver North and JFK that were no better. So… take that. Or whatever.

-The record indisputably shows that, in 2000, I voted for John Ashcroft. I did this based on his qualifications, namely that unlike his opponent, he was alive. At that tender, innocent age, I was not yet in a place where I was ready to vote for a dead Democrat and hope for the best. Try me again today and see what happens.

———

Election Day

4:40 a.m.

Severe sleep deprivation is something I haven’t given myself a chance to appreciate in a long time. In college, it was a way of life, almost an ethos: anything worth doing was worth doing at 3:00 a.m. the night before it was due. In my public speaking classes, I got my best grades by vowing never to prepare more than ten minutes in advance, and my paper writing career had much the same arc. The philosophy (drowsism?) served me well; I graduated without ever having written a first draft that was not also the final draft, although those final drafts often cited “Telepathy, mental” in their bibliographies and contained unusually frequent instances of the phrase, “and, oh, let’s say….” Not a lot of libraries stay open until 3:00 a.m.

My post-academic career is nothing like that. Rarely is anything “due,” for one thing. Any late nights are self-inflicted now and usually center around the opening statement, “God, I haven’t seen Conan O’Brien in forever.” And I never, ever have to get up before 8:00. Except when friends of mine are running for office.

Returning to the all-nighter lifestyle is like running into an old friend just long enough to remember why you weren’t in touch anymore. I had forgotten the sensation of weird pain you get in your spine as you’re setting your alarm clock to go off at a time that seems mere moments away. As the numbers tick by on the digital readout, you think about all the things you would not be able to finish during that brief period if you were awake. “4:30. I couldn’t even read two chapters of my book between now and 4:30. I could maybe get the laundry and some of the vacuuming done. That’s a nap, maybe.”

So I compromise. 4:40. Much better.

Eventually 4:40 a.m. comes, and I dutifully rise from my bed. Today is Candidate Joe’s big day. Months of planning, phone polling, and going door to door with informational leaflets with pictures of Citizen Joe shaking the hands of the elderly. It has come down to today. We have to get the name out there one last time. When the voters of Joe’s district show up at their polling places today, each and every one of them must see a bright, diligent representative of his campaign exactly twenty-five feet from the door with a leaflet and a smile. This representative should be knowledgeable and friendly. Or at least alert. Or at least well propped up and not audibly snoring. This representative should not look like he set a 4:40 alarm in the midnight hour.

As I step into the shower, I wonder if Citizen Joe ever bothered to go to bed at all. Last night, I dutifully planned to turn in at 9:00 or so, but I was overtaken by hubris and my camcorder. I’d been filming the campaign in action, and I just couldn’t resist the idea of being there during the final crunch before election day. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted to capture this, to get a shot of that. You know, for the ‘documentary’ that nobody but me would ever willingly watch. One of the things making my movie so great was that I hadn’t broken down and bought the camera until two weeks before election day, so I decided to go over to HQ, helping a little and filming a little.

People are getting pretty goddamn sick of the camcorder.

They’ll thank me in a year, I tell myself as the cold shower jolts me into alertness, assuming they’re still talking to me after today.

I also went over last night because I began riding a swell of Catholic guilt about my friend’s campaign a couple of weeks ago. I’d skipped campaign meetings, telling myself that I was useless and that nothing big was getting accomplished at the meetings anyway. I told myself I was helping in other ways, like… oh, let’s say sending positive vibrations to the chakras in his district from the comfort of my couch. As November approached, I began to think more could have gotten done if I’d just flexed my blowhard muscles, putting down the camera and adding to the dialog more. As I drifted off to sleep on some of those October nights, I’d started saying Acts of Contrition for all the things I hadn’t done; Sister Marie Carol would have been proud. I walked the precincts, putting literature in people’s screen doors. I talked to neighbors and got chased down the street by their f***ing unleashed dogs. And If there was anything that needed doing the night before the election, I was going to be there.

So I went to campaign headquarters, known more commonly by locals as “Joe’s parents’ basement.” I drove some carless volunteers back to the university, which the candidate had mined for support like a forty-niner. I picked up a button maker with Joe’s girlfriend MC. After we went back to headquarters, I hung around for a while filming before coming to the conclusion that I was useless and wasn’t getting anything accomplished. I packed up and left at 11:00 or so. Joe was still wide awake, making buttons and studying the huge map of the district on the wall by the ping-pong table.

5:30 a.m.

A dozen or more of us are standing in the parlor of Joe’s parents’ house. At our feet are a dozen Office Depot bags full of stickers, buttons, flyers and refrigerator magnets with Citizen Joe’s name and/or picture on them.

The magnets are a stroke of genius. Everyone throws away the paper right inside the door. Even the supporters throw away the paper. When was the last time you threw away a magnet? It could have a swastika made of penises on it, and you wouldn’t throw it away. Even in this age of wonders and pocket phones, you’re never too old to be impressed by metal that sticks to metal.

I thoughtfully gnaw on a donut and stare at the bags while Joe ties his tie. He is effusive and cheerful. He has hit the ground running this morning. I have seen no evidence that his batteries ever need recharging. He is the Atomic Candidate.

I wonder what it’s like to be surrounded by this stuff, to be Joe in a world of Joe leaflets and Joe magnets. To drive down the street after a hard day’s Joe work and see great big red, white, and blue Joe signs with your Joe name boldly printed on them everywhere you look up and down the street. To be the most humble person anyone in your group of friends can name while simultaneously being surrounded by an entire staff of people devoted solely to the cause of Joe. People signing up, pulling strings, networking, taking off of work and school, giving evenings and weekends and money, putting on buttons with your face on them and going into the Joe business. What does it feel like to have dozens of people in the You business? I find it deeply bizarre just knowing the guy whose name is on the signs. Does that humility survive the experience? If you don’t lose, I mean? It has to be the most incredibly surreal experience possible for a person, unless that person is some kind of a-hole. The opponent is running for the third or fourth time. It must be addictive.

At 5:30 a.m., I cannot imagine anything addictive about any of this. But I am psyched to be in the Joe business.

Joe and MC hand out the volunteer schedules to us, his coordinators, and give us our marching orders. I’m spending the day at Daughters of America, which is apparently some kind of grown-up sorority for the wives and widows of veterans. I grab my literature and a map and head to the car, thanking God that somebody gave me a map. The south side is a vast Escher labyrinth to me; if I weren’t in the Joe business, I would never go there. In the dark, I pass the Daughters of America twice before seeing it. I later learn that in a nod to tradition, they are still using the building’s original unpainted unlit sign.

Good call, Daughters. After all, signs are on buildings for the people who already know where they are.

Standing next to me at the polling place is our opponent’s sister. We each say hello politely but are eyeing each other suspiciously right from the start. I wonder whether we’ll warm up to each other. During the primary, the gaggle of volunteers outside the retirement home where I was stationed were like Woodstock. It was a great big love fest. We had two opponents then, both Democrats who hated each other, and by the end of the day the volunteers were practically making out and sharing flyers. Standing outside for thirteen hours and being swatted by voters who don’t want your damn papers instills a kind of solidarity, I think. You become a community filled with differing single-minded personality traits. Like the Smurfs.

7:00 a.m.

A quirk of campaign volunteerism: As people walk down the street, I am engaging them in conversation and asking them to do something for me. A second later, a woman facing me from the other side of the sidewalk is politely asking them to do the exact opposite. She and I are required to disagree about most things. Each of us is trying to make the other’s loved one unemployed. For most of the day, the only people we have to talk to are one another. To date, the language has not developed a word for this kind of discomfort.

Political campaigning takes everything I am wired not to do and combines it in one place, like a Swiss Army knife with twenty different ways to stab me in the comfort zone. Knocking on strangers’ doors to prod them about their core values is just the beginning. Even under ideal circumstances, in well-lubricated social situations where everyone was invited by a friend of mine, I don’t like walking up and talking to people I don’t know. I become shy, I feel like I’m bothering them, and it generally makes me feel like I’m covered in spiders. Today, I know for a fact I’m bothering each and every one of the people I talk to, and I’m here aaaaaall day. In order to do the best job I could, I’ve been preparing for this day for weeks, building up to it by trying to be extra friendly to grocery clerks and neighborhood dog walkers. Unfortunately, that didn’t prepare me for the fact that my opponent at the polling place would be on a first name basis with every f***ing pedestrian in the ward.

“Hi, please consider voting for Joe for–”

“Stevie! Long time no see, ha ha! How’s your wife Pat doing? Did she enjoy dinner last night? You guys are going to have to come by again Wednesday! We’re having butternut squash! Anyway, go on in and vote, you scamp!”

My morale is starting to take a graceful swan dive. This is a Democratic neighborhood in a Democratic city, and although I am wearing a button that reads “I’m A Democrat For JOE,” he is not a Democratic candidate. Many of these people are straight ticket voters, and some can barely contain their disgust with me for selling out the human race by not burning Joe’s house down. I do not need to stand and watch them chitchat about little league with the enemy to put a spotlight on how unpopular I am here. I’m too far right (approx. rightness: 1 centimeter) for any of these people to talk to me. When I go back to HQ, I’ll be too far left for any of those people to talk to me. Democracy is awesome.

7:30 a.m.

It’s got to be 45, maybe 50 degrees out here.

In retrospect, some kind of coat would have been an above-average idea.

The Miscellaneous Democratic Party volunteer is a really nice lady. She too knows everyone who walks by, and she tells me all of their dirty laundry and peccadilloes with relish after they go inside. I can’t quite figure out what’s going on with her; she seems to either work here or work for the party. She’s campaigning for one side, but she seems to be involved with the election officials. Her husband is one of them. He brings her coffee. I keep my hands warm by alternating them inside my mouth. We gossip and laugh about the foibles of this candidate and that, and then someone walks by and we hand them directly contradictory pieces of literature. Woodstock returns.

9:00 a.m.

Our ranks have swelled. A guy from the Dick Gephardt campaign is here, as is a kid trying to get people to sign a petition about home rule. The kid was apparently plucked off the street by the special interest group and paid $60 a day to get signatures. He, too, is a Democrat, but he doesn’t know anything about the issues (including the very petition in his hands) so we get along well enough.

When we arrived this morning, all of the candidates’ signs had been yanked from the earth and thrown down onto the grass. The Democrat woman learns from her husband that one of the signs was not 25′ from the door like it was supposed to be. One of the retired senior citizens the election board had hired to be an election official for the day had come out and plucked every single sign as a show of his temporary might. The Gephardt guy has a hammer, so he fixes the Democrat signs. He refuses to fix mine, since I am the enemy, but he does allow me to use the hammer myself. It’s all about principles.

Shortly thereafter, a Republican voter comes by (!) and notices that none of the Republicans’ signs are up. A minute later, the senior election official du jour storms out, marches up to the signs and uproots them right in front of us. His haughty, unblinking gaze says, “This is the first time I have had power over anything in twenty-five years! Fear my wrath! Yoink!” and the signs are on the ground again.

“What are you doing, man?” we ask.

“These signs are too close to the door!” he rasps.

“There’s no way that isn’t twenty-five feet,” I say in unison with about three other people. “Get a tape measure out here.”

“We don’t have a tape measure. They need to go across the street, or I’m calling the board of elections.”

“Across the…? Buddy, I’m 6’ tall. If I have to lie down four times between here and the door to show you how far away it is, I will.”

His eyes flash a warning not to tempt his righteous anger, but all he does is go back inside. We get out the hammer and immediately put all the signs back up in a bipartisan effort to fight The Man.

10:00 a.m.

A police car pulls up with election deputies in it. They carry with them a piece of chalk and 25’ of kite string. They mark off the perimeter of the polling place. All of the signs are 37’ from the front door. The senior is outraged. He seems to shake his fist at us, though in fairness I think his fist always shakes. I feel like I was just in the f***ing Boston Tea Party. Possibly the most trivial election impropriety in the history of democracy, but it beats staring at the sidewalk and waiting for voters.

The polling place has already seen a 42% turnout for the day. All the elections are close. This Bush/Gore thing is obviously going to be great for the country. I can’t wait to get to the party tonight and find out who won.

11:00 a.m.

A new wrinkle. The Republican supervising “election judge” has come out to say hi. He is wearing a gray zippered jumpsuit, six earrings and wrap-around sunglasses. His mullet is longer than my leg. He is not a bath fan.

He goes back inside and my gossipy friend informs me that he is a multiply convicted felon. Apparently, he is an election judge as a way of working off some kind of community service. He is not eligible to vote in the election, but he has been put in charge of it.

He comes back out to hit on women. He jokes about needing to borrow my car. After the third time, I realize he is not joking, nor does he plan to stop asking. An additional volunteer in the Joe business arrives, and with a hearty “screw this” I go home for my coat. On the way back, I take Joe and MC some lunch.

7:00 p.m.

The rest of the day is humdrum. Everyone has made up their minds already, but I am polite and see to it that they get some scrap paper anyway. Rumors begin to circulate by means I cannot detect. People in another precinct weren’t allowed to vote. Scandal! The polls may be kept open until 10:00.

The felon/judge is irate. “This is f***ing bulls***. I’m gonna miss my f***ing bus! They can kiss my f***ing a**.” He goes inside to stab someone.

At 6:59, not even the people running the polls know if the polls are open. They take the American flag inside and lock the doors. I take down Joe’s signs and load them into my trunk.

At 7:01, a police car comes screaming up the street. An election official runs up to the door, but can’t get in. She throttles the knob and says, “The polls are open! The polls are open!”

The man inside comes to the door and says through the locked door, “Sorry, ma’am! The polls are closed!”

I decide to leave before Curly comes out and hits me with a pie.

HQ is in chaos. Nobody knows if they’re allowed to leave their polling place. Joe comes in and gets on the phone. Stay at the polls, he says. He goes to rescue carless volunteers. My job is to await anybody arriving for the victory party. In the meantime, I’m to get on the phone and call anyone who said they’d vote for Joe during the last phone poll. If they haven’t voted yet, I need to tell them the polls are still open. I feel like my head has been emptied out and filled with whipped cream.

8:00

Never mind. The polls are closed again. The people who sued to keep them open got sued.

I love this city.

Now, all we need to do is watch the results and see who won.

9:30 p.m.

Nobody won! Yee hee! It’s a tie! I guess Bush gets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Gore gets the rest of the week. Oh well. They love the country more than they love power; I’m sure they can be counted on to solve the whole thing like gentlemen by tomorrow morning.

I can’t wait to see what Joe did.

We all gather ‘round… the county’s mid-day results have been reported…

…Joe… is…

winning?

Hell yes! Winning! Ohhh, what a relief. Ideas do triumph over cronyism and knee-jerk party lines. That is the deepest breath I’ve taken all week. Now, to go party and hit on some people. You know, after standing in a cold wind all day, when I look and feel my best.

11:30

Oh dear.

I’m sorry. Did I say winning? That seems to have been a bit premature.

Oh, dear.

It was a good showing. Make no mistake. Considering the odds for a first time candidate against an incumbent in an “unfriendly” district, 37% to 59% is pretty good. We have a lot of intangible things to be proud of.

Too bad some of us had our minds set on some tangible things.

That moment when the totals went up on the dry erase board will still be with me years from now, only partly because I caught the whole thing on video. I have never heard air go out of a room like that before. Everything hung there like it was trapped in amber. This was unexpected. What do I do now?

We are all out of the Joe business.

Citizen Joe only pauses once. He’s the only one I never see deflate. He is offering me a drink within moments of conceding the race. Atomic. If that were me, I would have a jagged vodka bottle to somebody’s throat by now. Hell, I may do that anyway; I’ve been up since 4:30.

I stay until 2:30 in the morning watching results that aren’t resulting in anything and talking to people. I have learned a lot today. There’s always that. Mostly, I learned that my support is the kiss of death. Nearly everything and everyone I voted for lost. My state is now represented by a man that has been dead for a month. My country may now be run by a drunk driver who as a governor installed a turnstile in his state’s death row, a man whose foreign policy is to build a magic missile shield in the sky. At least if he’s president someone else will be driving his car. People even voted against the ones I thought were home runs. Propositions that promised sunshine and milk for sick babies got voted down if I was for them. I may opt out of participatory democracy if I can’t get non-dead people elected.

Joe is eternally gracious, but I am wiped out. I think I needed him to win more than I realized. A lot of other parts of my life had kind of quietly taken a turn for the worse lately. The campaign gave me and a lot of other people hope that we had needed at just the right time. In a few days, I’ll realize that the hope was as valuable as any other product of the race. I met and got to spend time with a lot of wonderful people I wouldn’t have otherwise known, and the campaign caused me to have a lot of incredible experiences I’d have otherwise missed. I have a buried feeling that someday soon we’ll be saying, “Thank God for that loss. It turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to us.”

Someday. Today, that feeling is buried pretty deep. Today, all I can do is go home and be grateful that I took tomorrow off. I won’t be getting out of bed any time soon.

_____________________________________________

I imagine being picked as the candidate for vice president. I imagine that, the week I get picked, the press immediately starts comparing me to some obscure TV comedian I’ve never even heard of just because we both have dark hair and glasses. I chuckle warmly the first couple of times people ask me about it; I guess I can see it, I say.

Within a week and a half, every time I check my goddamned e-mail, another one of my “friends” has sent me a link to some Youtube clip where this “comedian”– this asshole– is dressed like me on national television making fun of the way I talk. When my little sister used to do that thing where she repeated everything I said just to get on my nerves, it was all I could do not to punch her out, and now I’ve got someone walking around behind me for the whole nation to enjoy, aping my every mannerism in my favorite suit. Great; guess I can never wear that suit again now. Thanks a lot.

And then my advisors start weighing in, like it’s a campaign issue. They want me to go on the stupid show.

“You have to show the voters you have a sense of humor about yourself,” they say. “You seem more relatable and human if you show you’re not bothered by it.”

“Not bothered by it”? Mark my words: when I take office, the first order of business is to dispatch a small squad of Secret Service guys with silencers to take care of this clown once and for all. Sure, I have a sense of humor! For example, you know what’s hilarious? Having the IRS audit the shit out of a sketch comedian. We can share that little joke in January, joker.

In the meantime, I have to stand here like a yutz in front of 10 million people, watching from 20 feet away as this bozo mimes what an idiot I am and a studio audience laughs and applauds the whole thing right in front of me. And oh, joy, here comes Alec Baldwin. Maybe someone from Nickelodeon can just come pour some slime on me from the catwalk now, then douse the whole thing in feathers and call it a night.

Ha ha, America! See how well I’m taking all this? See how the smile never falters? That’s electability, huh? Laugh it up, America. You’ll get yours.

Marky Mark now. How did I get here? If you had told me two months ago….

Oh well. Apparently this is the way people decide who to vote for now. And they’re questioning my qualifications. What qualifies you to decide who runs the free world, geniuses? Make fun of all the pageants you want; the talent competition factors into my final score all the same.

_____________________________________________

I also imagine what it must be like to be the comedian who resembles the candidate and gets pressed into satirical service, even though I have my own show to worry about. Here I am onstage, going, “I’m gonna be VP, duh duh duh!” and I can literally see the person I’m making fun of out of the corner of my eye, staring at me intensely from 20 feet away. I wish I’d foreseen this evening when I told that reporter I would “leave the planet” if the Republicans got elected. As we pass one another mid-sketch, I get a look that I’ll be describing to my grandchildren one day. Oh yeah. Tonight’s afterparty is gonna be super comfortable. It’s still open bar, right?

_____________________________________________

For that matter, I wonder if anyone who ever wrote a campaign song ever stopped to think about what’s going to happen if their guy loses. That single is out in the world forever, dating you to new fans, reminding old fans of the sting of defeat. It turns from an anthem to a dirge overnight, and if your cards really suck people start to resent you for getting the Adlai Stevenson song stuck in their heads. Every time I hear a bad poll for the Republicans, I think about that guy who wrote “Raisin’ McCain” hearing the boos rising up from the crowd, thinking, “It could be worse, right? I could be a Dixie Chick.”

_____________________________________________

One day’s news, compressed:

“If there is any single upside to this economic crisis, if there is one positive outcome in our behavior, it is that this brush with the Depression should finally be the thing to shake this consumerist, credit-obsessed culture out of its irrational spending. This could finally be the thing to get the American public to live within its means, to conserve, and to spend less of its money frivolously chasing the latest status symbol instead of responsibly OH MY GOD A NEW MACBOOK IS OUT! It’s made of one piece of aluminum instead of five pieces of aluminum! I have to go call my lender!!”

_____________________________________________

I imagine being an older conservative guy. Actually, I imagine being someone like one of my dad’s friends. You’re a little older; the eighties were pretty good to you, and you worked your way up the rungs into management so long ago that when you look at a union guy your mind’s eye sees him turn into a giant cartoon rat. Your faith is very important to you, and your brain is burning way more calories on the pro-life movement than anyone you know even realizes. You see the poll numbers for this Obama character on the TV, and you feel like the anchorperson is going to turn into a Cheshire cat and vanish before your eyes at any moment. A ten point lead, for a community organizer? Is something psychotropic being put into the water supply? So when the McCain campaign has a rally in the suburbs of your town, you are standing in line outside bright and early, singing “God Bless America” to drown out the protesters across the street.

You get inside, and the rally is a moderately loud, manageably fun party. There are dozens of people with signs that say “Give Em Hell, Johnny” and “Blind Deer Hunters For McCain” and all of the things you would have expected to see among your people. There are also some other signs, though, that don’t mention McCain at all. They’re all about Obama. Some of the things the signs say about Communism and al Qaeda give you a little bit of pause, even if you worry too on some level about the things they allege.

Then the candidate comes out, and the place goes nuts. For a while, you can forget about the polls and the signs and the presidential approval ratings and the worries and just enjoy John McCain, the man you want to give the keys to the car. Let the other side have their electrifying celebrity orator; the steady hand of the Maverick on the wheel is all the inspiration you need. For now, you can let your guard down among your own people and enjoy being like-minded in a world that seems to have gone crazy. Even without the singing and the shouting, it’s a great time just knowing everybody in the room is on the same page as you. You don’t have to watch your tongue for fear of getting into it with anybody. It’s like a warm blanket. It’s like being at Cheers.

Then McCain mentions his opponent, and the two guys standing next to you– younger guys, a little rowdy and unshaven– shout loud enough to be heard on the other side of the auditorium. “Terrorist!” one screams. “Kill him!”

Kill him. These people are standing right next to you. You could reach out and touch them if you wanted.

What do you do? How do you react?

Do you recoil? Do you look over at them disapprovingly and say, “Now, now, fellas”? At this moment, do you hear the anger in the shouting all around you and, your own pro-life passions weighing suddenly heavily on your shoulders, look around the room thinking, “What sort of company am I keeping? What have I signed on for?” Does it stick with you in the car all the way home, and for days thereafter? Or do you stand there clapping and put it out of your mind?

_____________________________________________

I suck at donating. Years ago when I was unemployed and living on macaroni and NPR, I swore I was going to give money to public radio one day. In the end, it took so long I just stopped listening to public radio. I am a drag on society.

I haven’t given to a campaign in years either. It’s the balloons that do it to me.

I watch the conventions every four years, and every four years the candidate gives his triumphant speech and 70,000 balloons descend from the rafters. Those balloons have to come from somewhere. Someone had to sell them; someone had to ship them; someone had to inflate every single blessed one of them and get them up there. Very few of those someones did that out of the goodness of their hearts. Money changed hands for that minute forty. And then someone had to clean that popped disaster up.

This year, Ted Kennedy spoke to the Democrats for what unfortunately was likely the last time. He took the stage to thunderous cheering, and thousands of the delegates in unison began waving uniform, professionally printed “We Love Ted Kennedy” signs. It was very moving, to someone; I kept looking at the Ted Kennedy signs individually and thinking, “That’s my donation right there. I cracked open my piggy bank so Barack Obama could pay his staff, and he spent the money on two ‘I Love Ted Kennedy’ signs.”

Imagine what it must be like to be that little kid who sold his bike to donate to Hillary. Remember that stump speech? Little Timmy’s not gettin’ that bike back. Though I’d certainly try if I were him.

That doesn’t mean we get a free pass on human decency. A man is dead.

There is a dark, sharp, sticky corner to the soul that not everyone has taped off, a corner that tries to turn some deaths into a cause for celebration. Every once in a while, a bullet will find its way to your Uday Husseins or your al-Zarqawis and a guy in fatigues will go up to a podium and proclaim, “We got ‘im!” and a crowd will respond, “Hooraaaay! Someone died! He probably had some kids!”

I’m not sad that some would-be Batman villain has been prevented from hurting any more innocent people, but I can’t really bring myself to break out the party hats either, catchy though “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” may be. I’m not upset that the world had to part with Uday Hussein, but I’d much rather he had to live with the consequences of his actions and sit in the mess he made. Every day he’s alive is another chance to work on him, to open his mind, to make him think about his actions and atone for them, or at the very least to make him live in a great world where his way lost.

And that’s the thing. We have forever lost the opportunity to change Jerry Falwell’s mind. He will never stand in front of his congregation and say, “I still think God is great, my brothers and sisters, but I got a lot of the other stuff wrong.” He filled the heads of his flock with a lot of crazy douchebag rambling, and he went to his grave believing every word of it and never set it right. I mourn for that, no matter how tempting it is not to.

Here’s to your speedy repose, Rev. Wherever you’ve gone, I hope it’s more like I imagine it than like you imagined it.

Interesting. You know, they’re going to execute Saddam Hussein this afternoon.

Ooh! Are they going to broadcast it?

—

December the Deadliest Month of War, So Far, But Never Mind, Hanging

I have to admit this alarms me, because I have publicly declared that if the ‘08 race is between McCain and Hillary Clinton, I will die by my own hand. I could have fallen back on the ol’ “moving to Canada,” but ohhh no. I had to lead with suicide. It’s all about raising the bar. I blame Howard Stern.

My problem with this inevitable campaign is that Hillary Clinton is a Republican and John McCain is a whore. And not one of those pretty, expensive, high-class kinds that let you kiss them on the mouth, either. In recent weeks, in my home, I have become very, very fond of my “John McCain will suck your c*ck for $.45″ routine. My wife, a decent, country, churchgoing woman, has put up with about as much of this as she will ever stand. It does not elicit a smile from her. She is worried that, by the time ‘08 rolls around, there will be children in the house and I will still be talking like this. (Little does she know that, best case scenario, I will be long dead. After all, I have a rep to uphold.) Ultimatums have been issued. I cannot go around with this “Reverend Falwell, I reckon I’ll swallow that penis” talk in the living room during the family hour for much longer. Upshot? Expect to see a lot of it here.

RUMSFELD GONE; Jimski’s Phone Tapped by Genie; Rush Limbaugh Feeling Ill?

I don’t know why I’m thinking about that today. Congratulations to the Democrats now controlling the House and Senate; I look forward to the blossom of bipartisanship.

Since everything is still in the hope-and-promise stage, I can say that I am amazed at the extent to which I woke up to exactly the world I wanted this morning. They even voted out Kevin Federline. Why oh why didn’t I remember to wish for ice cream and a million dollars?

There’s one thing I’m especially loving today that I shouldn’t. In my day, I overhear a lot of other people’s small talk, a lot of people I would not voluntarily listen to. These people are very vocal, very opinionated, and very… out of practice when it comes to losing elections. Normally, headphones go on before the monitor goes on; today, the office small talk is my soundtrack, and the music is coming from inside my soul, my petty, petty soul. Let’s see how you like it, f– oh. right right right.

Yeah, I know. “Sheldon.” But the Whitehouse more than makes up for it. All night long, my wife and I have been doing the shtick.
“President Whitehouse!”

“Yes, Professor Bighead.”

“Mrs. Sippi just came back with Dr. Laboratory’s latest findings. You won’t believe it; it says here we’re living in a vaudeville routine!”

Congratulations, Senator!

I’m not checking the results again until morning.

What he doesn’t know is, if I understand his situation correctly, he’s going to die of old age sitting in that courtroom.

The Iraqi prime minister announced today that he was reversing the deBaathification policy that we implemented in the early stages of the occupation. You may have forgotten this policy: after our invasion of the country only took three days our adrenaline was still through the roof, so the Coalition Provisional Authority had to figure out a way to ensure that things would continue to explode for a while. They settled on marching down to the barracks and announcing, “Hey, listen up, you army. We’ve cancelled your paychecks. Everyone in the army is fired now, and unemployable. Just take your machine guns and– hang on, I’ve got a call coming in… Hello? Yes? Horrible, disastrous insurgency? Got it. Thanks.” But all’s well that ends well.

Don’t forget to vote today! Unless you’re voting for the incumbent, in which case your franchise will not be required today. You take it easy. It’s so cold out.

I’ll say this while it’s early: this revolutionary sweep where the Democrats take back the government? I do not believe this sweep is going to take place. Maybe I simply dare not allow myself to believe such a thing is possible, but there it is.

The mayor wants me to vote myself a tax increase to fund a couple of rec centers, but he can come to my house and rip up my Liberal card, because that also is not going to take place. I always vote against basketball. Maybe we could talk about an arcade.

Kerry really needs to get it together and get a campaign manager who can keep him on message; we’re in November, for crying out loud. At this rate, he’s gonna blow any chance he has of getting elected.

What’s that?

He’s not?

Two years ago, you say?

Then what the frig are we–? Never mind. I’ll just change the station. Kelly Clarkson? Kelly Clarkson will be fine; “just walk away”! Apt.

Some guy got mad at Streisand’s little Bush skit again and threw a drink. How much do you think really good, drink-range seats for a Streisand show run you these days? I’m seeing $1300, $3000. You have to be a pretty big Streisand fan to drop that kind of cash; it’s hard to believe anybody would blow three large only to get there and go, “What is this? She’s insulting my president…! My God, Barbra Streisand is some kind of liberal. This is bullshit.”

Yet it’s not like the thrower was some kind of protester who went expressly for this purpose, judging from the plan’s overall lameness. “Okay. Okay. Stay cool. The large Dr. Pepper is purchased. We are ‘go.’ Traitor is almost in range; don’t fire till you see the glint of her sequins; wait for it; this one’s for all the marbles; LAUNCH! The Doctor is aloft! Sic semper tyrannus!”

It’s the irony of our times: the most radical leftist in the music industry has priced herself so that only Republicans can afford to go to her shows. A couple of widely circulated coupons could make all the difference here.

A high-tech machine used to sniff out explosives has been sitting idle at a Lambert Field checkpoint since June because airport and security officials disagreed on where to put it.

Tonight, it will be disassembled and put in storage.

…Lambert’s unit, which never has been plugged in, is the only one being mothballed.

So, all clear for your explosives. Honestly, we’re not all that concerned; this is the most dangerous city in America.

remember 9/11, somehow. if you can.

Speaking of celebrities, image, politics, and offending me: Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J. Fox has done a local campaign ad for stem-cell-lovin’ Claire McCaskill. Rush Limbaugh, upon seeing Fox’s mannerisms in the ad, suggested on his radio show this week that Fox was trying to drum up sympathy by going off his medication for the commercial.

Of course, being on medication is something Rush is intimately familiar with. I can’t even get mad when I hear him say stuff like this anymore. “Well… he is probably high. Will no one answer his cry for help?”

So, all we need is for that guy to take over for KJI, Castro’s grand-nephew or whoever to be a big fan of “Desperate Housewives” and “American Idol,” and the next president of Iran to be converted by Pat Robertson’s missionaries and we’re all set. Everything will be fine under those circumstances.

Here’s the thing, though: this is Bob Woodward’s third book about Bush at War, and the first two were entirely about how great it was for Bush to be at war. About what a kickass Commander in Chief we had. All the damning, horrible facts being exposed in State of Denial had all happened and were entirely true when Bob Woodward published his previous book, Bush at War II: I Am Typing This With the President’s Balls in My Mouth. He just didn’t find those facts out or choose to pursue them until the war had been going on for three years, which is funny considering a lot of people who don’t have Donald Rumsfeld’s phone number managed to find them out several years ago. But Bob followed his heart and took his time, and then he wrote his new book, which– spoiler alert!!!– reveals that the war has not gone great. In fact, our reasons for going to war appear not to have been entirely on the up-and-up. –END SPOILERS–

Well, welcome to the f***ing party, Bob. We weren’t sure you were going to make it. Most of the hors d’oeuvres are gone, but I think we still have a little salsa in the kitchen.

I appreciate the effort. Bob’s book just would have come in a lot more handy during the period when Bob was doing the president’s laundry. Let’s all keep that in mind before we greet him as a liberator.

I was thinking about that today while I was reading a two-week-old Newsweek (dammit, I paid for that subscription and I am going to read every single issue; two weeks is the closest I’ve come to catching up since May) and I saw a brief piece about determining whether or not Iraq is engaged in civil war. Every time I hear this debate, I think, “Is this really that hard to agree on? It’s like having a prolonged, heated debate over whether or not a baby is sleeping. A debate over whether a thing is or is not a duck seems like it should be shorter. At this point, it’s harder to figure out whether or not Marvel Comics is engaged in Civil War.”

According to this Newsweek article, it turns out the debate is ongoing because the CIA says it all depends on what your definition of “civil war” is. Never to be outdone by the Clinton administration, Bush’s guys have gone behind closed doors to craft a secret way to tell when a civil war is a civil war, and then they classified the definition.

So, do you want to break it to them or should I?

“I’m telling you, it’s a duck. It has feathers and webbed feet and a bill and it quacked and tried vociferously to convince me it was wabbit season.”

“Nope. Sorry. Not a duck.”

“Then what the hell is a duck, then?”

“Can’t tell you. Top secret.”

“Great. Whatever. We’re going to go have some roast Classified, then. You’re not invited.”

The plan appears to be eliminating ducks by calling them manatees. 

Later in the same issue of Newsweek, I read about this fascinating new gaming phenomenon called World of Warcraft. You may have heard of this game from the two out of every three people you know who have been playing it since it came out nearly two years ago. If not, you probably heard about it on your local news, when three guys worldwide got so into the game’s virtual world that they forgot to pay their bills and every Action News Team in the country did the Cover Story, “The Video Game That Can Kill Your Child.” I hear next week’s Newsweek piece on Napster is going to be a barnburner. Music, right through your modem. How will this affect the Spice Girls’ sales?

I am, in fact, carping about the timeliness of a two-week-old article.

As a news consumer, I’m looking for a very specific product that I don’t think exists anymore, if it ever did. In the digital age, Time and Newsweek and the like are all written and edited under the assumption that the reader already actually knows all the latest news. She checks the headlines online; she watches Jon Stewart; she reads that goddamn ticker on the bottom of, well, everything; she has all those bases covered. That hole pre-filled, the magazines try to set themselves apart by offering news analysis and slices of life and deep background. They give you something beyond the news, which is to say not really all that much of the news.

But what is there for the man who subscribes to a weekly newsmagazine because he wants, desperately wants, not to have to check the headlines twice a day? Or ever? Is there a Factual Summary magazine? Just What Happened? Your Dry Bullet-Pointed Narrative?

Ooh! Do they still put out that Scholastic Weekly Reader? I’ll bet that would do the trick.

1. Apparently, the pilot of an Air Canada Jazz jet got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of a flight a couple weeks ago and returned to find that he was locked out of the cockpit. Not to worry, though; after applying a little elbow grease, he managed to take apart the door and get in just in time to land.

All’s well that ends well. They just took off the cockpit door, and they got around the whole “locked” problem.

Which part of this story is supposed to bother me the most? Would it be wrong of me to prefer the headline, “Canadian Plane Crashes the Hell Into Mountain; Cockpit Security Tight as Drum, You Jihadist No-goodniks”?

It may or may not be good news to learn that we as travellers are either so tough (or so petrified to move on planes) that a guy in a pilot’s uniform began breaking down the cockpit door and nobody even got up. Imagine you were on a plane and you learned the pilot was on the wrong side of a locked door from the controls: do you think you would freak out, or do you think you would freak the f*** out? “Put your hands up in the air and wave them like you just don’t care” is just the opening move. Um, hey, everybody: free drinks from now until we land!

Anticlimax: the first officer was inside the cockpit. But the articles I’ve seen about this paint Air Canada’s first officer as something of a Gilligan figure.

2. This is real this is real this is real: when the Maine National Guard ships men and women off to fight Islamofascists, they are now helping the families cope with the prolonged absence of their loved ones by giving the families cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.

Yes, they are. They call them Flat Daddies.

Yes, they do.

“I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket,” said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. “The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I’ve tricked several people by that. They think he’s home again.”

At the risk of thinking about this more than Maine has, that’s already Norman Bates creepy if Regular Daddy’s making it home. Can I really be the only person who’s pictured the kids pulling Flat Daddy around at the funeral home? I mean… uhhuhhuhhghhh wibbly-jibblies.

Happy Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas, everybody!

How were your family’s celebrations this year? Did you get a chance to catch any of the parades and decorating ceremonies on TV today, or any of the many specials and movies that they rerun at this time each year? This year, CNN.com started running a 24-hour marathon of themed programming, which is sure to become a holiday tradition for the whole family to enjoy in years to come. Signs of the season were everywhere today; all the cubicles at work were decorated, and many local radio stations stopped their regular programming to bring us horrible, stomach-turning sounds of the horrible, stomach-turning season over and over and over again.

Not commercial-free, mind you. What, are you kidding me? Everybody’s listening to talk radio on Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas; you’re never going to find a better time to sell American Equity Mortgage. This year– and this is absolutely true– I heard an excerpt of a Tony Blair speech about the way They Hate Our Freedom played over the Battle Hymn of the Republic, followed immediately by a chirpy pitch for Dobbs Tire and Auto Centers. So presumably they were the sponsors of that hour of audio of people on fire.

I don’t know how your family chooses to celebrate, but my wife and I like to get some cremated remains from the funeral home and just roll and roll and roll around in them.

“Never forget”? “Remember 9/11″? Is that supposed to be a fucking joke? What else have you been thinking about for the last five years? I don’t remember the last time I went a day without hearing about a plane being urgently diverted by air marshalls, but 9/11, yeah, that I remember pretty okay. Thanks anyway for rerunning the footage of people jumping to their deaths. Could you trot out some more of the victims’ kids? Thanks again. My memory’s gotten fuzzy in the last couple seconds. September the which now?

I was going to say “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since 2001,” but that’s not true. What is true is that I have not had a pleasant awakening since 2001, starting with that Tuesday five years ago. At the time, I was working with friends at a company with no dress code and a 9:00 a.m. start time, so I usually got out of bed at about 8:46. That day, before my alarm clock had a chance to get to squawking at me, my friend Chris (who worked at a real job) woke me with a message on my machine telling me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. At the time of his call, it was just the one plane; I can’t remember now whether his message made it sound like a small craft way off course or the first wave of a coordinated attack. I only know that it was armageddon on the radio by the time I got into my car and headed to work. It must not have sounded intentional when Chris called me, because I don’t think I even bothered to turn on the TV before heading out the door.

I remember that everyone showed up for work, and that nobody did any. I remember somebody produced a flippin’ 17″ television from Mary Poppins’ satchel or somewhere and set it up by my boss’ office. I remember my boss asking me if anyone was getting anything done at about 11:00; I thought he’d be mad if I said no, so I assured him that, oh yes, they were, nothing is more important when WWIII starts than daily tasks at a bullshit internet company. Had I been honest with him and said “no,” his plan was to let everyone go home. As a manager, this is probably only one of the many ways I inadvertently screwed over the people under me during my tenure.

I remember my friend Nicole, a school counselor at the time, calling me from Texas to ask what was going on. The kids were being kept away from all the information, so she was in the dark too. I wish I’d had more to tell her, but as you may remember the things you were hearing that day were about 85% crap. A plane had been shot down headed for the White House. A car bomb had gone off outside the State Department. They just found a big pocket of survivors in the rubble. They found a stewardesses’ bound, severed hands on a nearby rooftop. To this day, there are a couple of those that I never verified or debunked. For all I know, they were true.

I remember– and this is one I never hear anybody else say in this era– that the World Trade Center meant absolutely less than nothing to me on September 10th. In the aftermath of the attacks I would hear about everything it had symbolized to us as Americans in its heyday, but I had never given it a moment’s thought, and probably neither had you. I also didn’t know anyone who’d said a kind word about Rudy Guliani; at the time, he was mostly known around these parts for letting his mistress shack up with him in Gracie Mansion. A few months earlier, Virginia and some other states had complained about the excessive amount of New York trash that was being exported to their landfills; Rudy’s response, as I recall, was “New York is the cultural center of this nation; you are lucky to get our garbage.”

I remember driving home from work that night past abandoned streets and businesses. The city’s most upscale mall had been closed in case more attacks were on the way; even that day, the idea that United 93 was headed for Frontenac Plaza struck me as somewhat unlikely, but only because I knew bin Laden had never tried to shop there.

I remember that gasoline shot up to $1.25 the next day for no reason, and that the price never, ever went down again. Given that none of our pipelines or refineries had been attacked and we were still on good terms with the Arab nations that provided us oil, I thought that $1.25 a gallon was a scam and an outrage.

I remember that everybody was nice to one another for a good long while, and though there were reports of isolated foreigners chuckling at our fate the nations of the world rose in solidarity with us. We were all Americans for a while. We really had a chance to do some excellent things.

I remember driving to work on September 12th and, in the midst of the end of the world, seeing a lone woman in front of Planned Parenthood with a poster of a fetus. Though sympathetic to her cause, at the time I wanted nothing so badly as to murder her with the bumper of my car. “Really, lady? Right now??” I decided that, in such desperate times, it became all the more important to cling to the vestiges of our normal lives. Me, I defrosted my refrigerator for something like four days. Maybe if my new fridge didn’t self-defrost, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Ever since, my alarm clock has gone off with the sound of the day’s terrible, frightening news of the people who hate us and our plans to torture them till they like us again. This morning, already a Monday with a sky that looked like death on Halloween, I awoke to the sound of the president saying, “…must never forget that there are still people out there every day that want to kill us.” When did we forget? Will anyone ever get the chance to forget?

Oh?

Poll: Most Americans Angry About “Something”

I feel as though these stories share a connection. But what…?

Love that lead; it sounds* like people are just walking around full of directionless rage. Most Americans are angry! About what? I dunno! Something!

*accurately

REPORTER: A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn’t gone in. How do you square all of that?

BUSH: I square it because… imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein, who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who had relations with Zarqawi. You know, I’ve heard this theory about, you know, “everything was just fine until we arrived” and — you know, the stir-up-the-hornet’s-nest theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned! The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East. They were…

SMART REPORTER: What did Iraq have to do with that?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

SMART REPORTER: The attacks upon the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing.