Public safety

On Friday afternoon, a 19 year-old was arrested for attempting to use his cell phone to detonate a bomb in a van parked very close to Pioneer Courthouse Square – commonly called Portland’s living room – a lovely public space downtown where I’ve passed many hours over the years drinking coffee, eating burritos, shopping at farmers markets, attending festivals, waiting for people to show up and, most memorably, just watching the comings and goings all around. The young man, known to his friends as MoMo, believed he had found a group of co-conspirators, but they turned out to be FBI operatives. His mission was to blow the van up in the midst of the tree-lighting ceremony, which was attended by thousands. After the first call from his cell phone failed to do the trick, he tried again. Then he was arrested on an attempt to use a weapon of mass destruction.

It’s a strange story, I think, and I’m not going to comment on the nuts and bolts of it, because when it comes to dealing with the feds, I’m illiterate, and I intend to stay that way. But there was, of course, plenty of aftermath.

The first thing that happened was that fire was set to a mosque in Corvalis, a town not too far from Portland that is home to Oregon State University (The Beavs), where MoMo took courses. I’m not sure if the KKK has an official presence in Oregon or not, but its spirit sure does.

Running a very close second in the ignorance department, if not an outright tie, is the washed-out hag who earns a living at an AM station that pays her to fly her banner of white, heterosexual supremacy in the service of degrading and dehumanizing as many people who do not look, sound and think exactly like her as possible for four hours each weekday. Here’s what she had to say yesterday about the city’s response to the incident. Isn’t it outrageous that the people from the city who are going to meet with the leaders of Portland’s Somali community are a gay guy (the mayor), a chick (Amanda Fritz) and a wimp (the new police chief, Mike Reese, who had the audacity to say he sees his job as one of peacekeeper rather than gunslinger, which of course set off lots of conservatives, many of whom seem to enjoy it just a little bit when people, especially black people, get shot by the cops). Don’t the people at the city understand the Muslim community’s “pecking order?” the hostess wondered. At first, I thought, wow, that chick is earning her keep today, insulting gay people, women, men who do not grunt and groan and paw themselves in public, Arabs and Muslims all in one sentence. It’s impressive. Then I thought, wait, if a panel assembled by the City of Portland consisted of only outwardly heterosexual, married men, wouldn’t that imply a concession to the Muslim “lifestyle”? And aren’t we supposed to hate them? But my confusion was short lived. A few minutes later the self-appointed oracle of white suburban victimhood screeched that when you’re dealing with Arabs, “you don’t send a gay guy, you send a man.” If I didn’t have other things to do – like earn a living – I’d organize an excruciatingly clever, humiliating and effective protest of businesses that advertise on her show until her sorry ass was taken off the air.

But best of all, I found something inspiring, believe it or not, on Facebook. I am “friends” with a persona whose sole mission seems to be to rid the world of the damaging burdens of organized religion. And the persona never fails to deliver. On Monday the status update concerned the use of cell phones at tree-lighting ceremonies. Following the methods of the TSA, the status update read, should cell phone usage be allowed at future ceremonies? Why I didn’t think of that myself I cannot say for sure, but I’m glad someone did. The logic, I think, is beautiful: one incident and everything gets revised. We didn’t start measuring shampoo and lotion and personal lube until someone – one someone – tried to use those ingredients to make a bomb while seated in the coach section. We didn’t start taking our shoes off until one person tried to bring a plane down by blowing his up. So I am hoping that the unfortunate incident in downtown Portland last Friday will be the beginning of the end of cell phone use not just at tree lightings but at any and all public gatherings. There are enemies everywhere, and danger all around, and we need to act accordingly.

A good transition

Though I do not indulge as much as I used to, there is nothing I enjoy quite as much as rearranging furniture. It’s fun to move shit around, I think, and, if done correctly, it’s like having a new room when the job is done. Light moves differently among spaces that are reconfigured. The same table that looks like a ship stranded in the wrong harbor in one corner of a room appears to have been built quite specifically for another. On Saturday afternoon, I moved one of my two identical bookshelves. They’re tall and narrow, but for the past few years I’ve had them side by side against a wall right beside the desk in what I call “the office.” On Saturday I moved one of the units – I cannot think of another word – into the living room. My shelving units take up very little floor space, but they soar toward the ceiling and, like the Hong Kong of the furniture world, have an amazing amount of actual shelf surface.

Moving the shelves required moving all the books and other things that had come to rest on them. Even though I donated most of my books months ago, there are many left, and I was grateful for that on Saturday afternoon. Books were stacked on the coffee table and on the couch, haphazard towers of print waiting for order to be imposed. Although I don’t follow my own guideline absolutely, I do tend to segregate the shelves based on whether the author is living or not. But that can be tricky: Does John Updike really belong on the same shelf with Walt Whitman? I don’t know.

I have no doubt, however, about Flannery O’Connor. I fell in love with her work via her short stories, which I read for the first time when I was in college. Her stories are about desperate people in desperate situations. Most of the desperation revolves around religion. For Flannery O’Connor, who spent most of her unfortunately brief life in rural Georgia, religion was the only theme worth the ink. Before you let that turn you off completely, consider this: Unlike today’s cheap renditions of what we’ve come to think of as “spiritual,” Flannery O’Connor appears to have actually read that big old book, and she appears to have understood it enough to inflict upon her characters an eternal moral dilemma that revolves primarily around reconciling one set of beliefs with another. Her work, like many of my relations, is funny in a way that I’ve yet to see anyone match, funny in that weird way that’s anything but.

Over the summer I read two of Flannery O’Connor’s novels: Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away. Before I read these books, my main impression of her wasn’t necessarily what she’d written but something she’d said. You haven’t experienced grotesque until you’ve read her short stories, and once an interviewer asked her why her characters and their lives were so outrageous. Well, she said, I think that when you’re talking to the hard of hearing, you need to shout.

If you ask me, that’s damn-near perfect.

But in Wise Blood – tucked in among the car whose color is referred to as “high rat” and the self-inflicted blindness of the main character, Hazel Motes – I found something that seems to have superseded, in my mind, her comment about the hard of hearing. In writing, in all types of writing, I think, the most difficult thing is moving forward. To do this effectively, you need to know how to write a good transition, one that seems as natural as a bookshelf being pushed across a floor from one room to another. There are millions of ways to accomplish this, of course. You could write about the changing seasons. You could write about aging by describing a person’s face. You could convey the years by focusing on how a man regards his wife.

But here’s another way to do it, taken from Wise Blood, which sits alongside Walt Whitman and Mark Twain:

Some time passed.

Let's have a play date

Man, I have got to hand it to Barack Obama. If there is such a thing as the Political Maneuvers Hall of Fame, and if he had anything to do with it, the unveiling of the recommendations from the panel convened to determine how to get the national debt under control after the elections should be inducted. Many of our conservative countrymen and women have been quite indignant over the national debt. And since Obama has been president for almost 23 months now, it is his fault. Many of our fellow conservatives arranged their campaigns neatly around this simple message: You balance your household budget, and so too should ‘the government.’ It’s a great “message,” and many of them won. And our president, or his advisors, or someone decided that it would probably be best to not clutter the already cluttered pre-election messagefest with numbers and projections and that sort of thing.

So, a week after the elections, with a thud that caught even the most in-the-know pundits completely off guard, came the recommendations: the national debt is a big problem, and getting it into order is going to be a big and painful undertaking.

Before I go any further, I have a confession of sorts. I loathe Rand Paul, the newly elected senator from Kentucky. I loathe his over-simplified, smug brand of saviorism. I loathe his whining, his condescension. I loathe his tone of voice, which says, to my ears anyhow, you should know the answer to this question, but since you don’t, let me explain it to you, even though I shouldn’t have to. I would love to say that I’m open to Rand Paul’s ideas, that I’m open to listening and watching, but that would be a lie. Though I criticize conservatives for taking the same approach to dethroning Obama, what I’m looking forward to is watching Rand Paul walk into a trap from which even his most sermon-esque foolishness won’t liberate him.

And on Sunday morning, on Face the Nation, I got a little taste of exactly what I’m hoping for: Rand Paul, being asked what he thinks, now that he’s elected, about the recommendations to balance the budget. The recommendations, which are not pretty, call for, among other things, a dramatic reduction if not elimination of mortgage-based tax breaks, raising the retirement age, cutting social security for wealthier seniors, reducing the size of the federal government by reducing the number of employees and, best of all, raising taxes.

We should not cut defense spending, the soon-to-be senator opined. Strong national defense is the most important thing. And we shouldn’t look at reducing the salaries of soldiers and other military personnel, because the sacrifices they’ve made are amazing. And we should not raise taxes at all, because, you see, America is inspired by the private sector, by entrepreneurs, and raising taxes isn’t good for that. We should definitely reduce the number of government employees.

The best part of the discussion had nothing to do with the issue (it rarely does). Rand Paul was asked if he’d heard from the president, who is apparently “reaching out” to the newly elected. No, he has not. What will he say to him when they speak? Well – and here he laughed that gross little ah-shucks part laugh part grunt of his – when he talks to the president, he’d really prefer the conversation not be all about politics. Because there’s more important things. What he’d really like is for his kids to play with the president’s kids. Isn’t that adorable? He’d like for the little white kids to play with the little dark kids.

And that’s when it occurred to me that this is going to be far more entertaining than I’d ever imagined.

Precious junk

I was going to write a bit about Rand Paul, but then a bigger dick came along.

The guy who ranted at the security guards at an airport the other day about his “junk,” recorded it all on his cell phone and then posted it on YouTube where it “went viral” is even more tiresome than Rand Paul. In case you don’t know the story already, and in case you do not make a conscious decision to stop reading right now, here it is. A man went to the airport. While going through the security line, one of the inspectors informed him that there would be a bit of inner-thigh patting down (that’s my wording) to which the man said, “If you touch my junk I’ll have you arrested.” More words were exchanged, and at one point the inspector told the guy that the pat down was procedural and not a sexual assault. “It would be if you weren’t the government,” was the reply.

So here we have a guy who is not only quite taken with his own penis but who also thinks it’s his mission in life, provided the camera is running, to take on “the government.” Much like the balloon boy and the JetBlue flight attendant, the story, and the dweeb at the heart of it, became something of a sensation. So much so, in fact, that our beloved Katie Couric carried the story at the top of her show. The PBS NewsHour also did a segment on it. I was shocked that the show included our most current renegade’s call to arms. At the same time, the NewsHour focused more on the Congressional hearing convened to address the issue of cargo, and some wonderful phrasings ensued, including “high-risk packages” and “blowback” over tighter security restrictions.

It all did make me wonder, though. Are we really that anxious to talk about penises? I mean, I think they make for good discussion myself, but my God. I wonder what kind of reception the story would have received had it been a woman who decided to take on “the government,” and then I couldn’t help but wonder if this might be a little bit of a window into why people are damn near feverish with curiosity (to the point of voting about it) when it comes to what the homos do in bed, or on the floor. I wondered whether or not there will be follow up on the fine that this clown may be smacked with compliments of the TSA. One of the few things I actually learned from this story is that it’s illegal to start going through airport security without finishing the procedure because that opens up the whole security system to terrorists coming to airport to test their latest tactics. The fine is $10,000, and I hope this guy gets double that, or triple. Part of his rant was that if procedures that fail to recognize the sanctity of his penis are not banned, he’s going to stop flying. Please, do. The fewer male types who blow the significance of their dicks so far out of proportion to their actual relevance we have on airplanes, in security lines and on the roads and highways leading to and from airports, the better. I wondered, briefly, how many seconds it would take for this guy to start blaming “the government” if someone will ill intentions were to make it through security. My guess: about two. And I wondered, of course, why it’s even considered a news story, but I’ll spare you that part of it today.

But the best part of the story, for me, is that this guy is a software engineer. That’s a perfect detail, I think. Software engineers are cool, they’re hip. They “get” technology, they’re “super smart.” They’re here to show us the way, to save us from ourselves, and they know it, and they’re paid for it. Having worked with software engineers for a decade now, the ego behind this story doesn’t surprise me at all. This particular software engineer is so focused on his “junk” that he filmed his trip through security and then shared it with the entire world, assuming, of course, that the entire world is as interested in his “junk” as it is in his software. Based on the obscene amount of coverage, I have to admit that he’s right.

Cat stories

On Friday night, just for fun, I watched the six o’clock news. It was cold, my dinner was still warming and I had nothing better to do. On the news there were not one but two stories about cats. The first was about a cat that had been rescued from a house fire. In Portland, even though the schools seem always on the verge of bankruptcy, even though we cut bus schedules while raising fares, even though the Humane Society is often overwhelmed by cats pulled out of hoarder homes, our fire and rescue folks are equipped with masks for cats caught in burning buildings. I had no idea. The second story was about a cat named Agatha Christie. She’s lived in a small-town library (not in Portland) for most or all of her 12 years, but she’s getting old, and her health isn’t what it used to be, so she’s leaving the library and going to live with a family. The library – and here’s the news hook – threw a retirement party for Agatha Christie.

On Saturday morning I was telling a friend of mine about the kitty cats on the news. “That is nothing,” my friend said. “I talked to Ruth last week.”

Ruth is probably the strangest individual I’ve ever met. She’s my friend’s friend, not mine, although I’ve done lots of drinking with her when she’s been in Oregon. Ruth is known for her hair, her makeup and her nails, all of which are truly exquisite.

Until the tale I heard about how Ruth chose to get rid of 17 feral cats, the thing that best defined the tedious, exhausting madness of her existence was her house. It’s a two-story house – I’ve seen the pictures – sort of cottage-esque, perched in front of a large, mature, very cared for yard. The only problem is that there are no stairs connecting the ground floor to the second story. Instead, there’s an opening in the ceiling. There were no stairs when Ruth bought the house a decade ago, and, as of Saturday morning, there are still no stairs. There have been ladders, and pulleys, and platforms and one thing and another. Her son, the one who is no stranger to restraining orders and other court-issued formalities, has moved in and out many times under the pretense of building a staircase. Ruth has pulled muscles and sprained one thing and another, dealing with this problem. Once she decided that to recover from one of her injuries what she needed to do was go to bed. For a year. Which meant she couldn’t work, which meant she lost her job, which caused all kinds of drama with her daughter – not that there was any shortage of it before – who took it upon herself to deliver, weekly, Ruth’s library books by the dozen and Ruth’s groceries, which wreaked havoc on Ruth’s plans to lose weight because Ruth’s daughter favors frozen pizza and boxed macaroni and cheese, and for Ruth to ask her daughter for specific items from the grocery store would have made her appear ungrateful.

The thing about Ruth, to me, is that just hearing about her is aggravating. Ruth’s quite altruistic with her troubles: she not only shares them with everyone, she inserts everyone into them, gives everyone a role to play. It’s the grown-up version of my grandmother letting me “help” put icing on the birthday cake when I was five years old, sort of. I have a tendency toward this type of behavior myself, believing that life, when lived properly, is participatory, and that’s probably why I find Ruth stories so infuriating. I see a bit of myself in Ruth’s antics, and it horrifies me.

Fortunately I don’t have cats. Nor does Ruth, because she ran an ad on the innernets and found someone to trap them in cages in the back yard and blow their little heads off with a shotgun, which, as it turns out, was not registered with the authorities because it was owned by a guy who’s “got restrictions” (whatever the hell that means), so now there’s trouble not only with the law but with the cats’ rights people as well.

Which brings me, of course, to the cats. Ruth’s son found the original kitty in a parking lot and decided to bring it – or her, as it turns out – back to the house. Ruth’s son used to be a personal trainer, but he hurt his back trying (and you know you saw this coming, just admit it) to build a staircase for his mother, so he’s had to give up that line of work. This is Ruth’s fault so, although he’s well into his forties, she let him move in with her. And then he moved out, and then back in, and so on. He’s been on painkillers, which make him groggy, so he didn’t get around to taking his new pet in for surgery. He did, however, get around to meeting a woman at a bar, where the two of them eventually almost made finals in the shuffleboard tournament. The girlfriend loves, loves, loves cats, so imagine the joyful sense of wonder they experienced, together, when the first batch was born.

Unfortunately, their joy was short lived: Not long ago Ruth’s son tried to run his girlfriend over with his car and in this case Ruth sided not with her flesh and blood but with his girlfriend. She turned her son in. He’s now in jail and Ruth has a new roommate. Since there is no way to get upstairs, Ruth’s bed is set up in the dining room, and the girlfriend sleeps on the couch in the living room. “It’s cozy,” my friend told me. And Ruth’s daughter is sending hostile e-mails every hour on the hour, in which she accuses Ruth of setting the entire thing up as revenge for the unfinished – unstarted for that matter – staircase. While I don’t doubt her ability to do so, I have no idea how Ruth would have gone about orchestrating such a chain of events, and believe it or not I did not ask after the particulars.

What I did ask was why on earth you’d run an ad to deal with the cat problem rather than calling the Humane Society. “Oh, oh,” my friend said. “Because, her son’s girlfriend really likes the cats, and Ruth was afraid that if the Humane Society showed up it would be totally obvious what was going on and that it would upset her.” Of course, I thought when I heard that, because the rest of it is so subtle.

It's so unfair

Before the vote was finalized, before John Kitzhaber made a speech, before Chris Dudley conceded the race for governor not in front of his supporters but in front of a restaurant in Lake Oswego, where he was meeting his wife for margaritas, before any of this the whining and whimpering began.

This time around we’re not crying about miscounted ballots or other election irregularities but about how unfair it is that Multnomah County, which is where a large portion of Portland sits, has more than its fair share of influence in statewide elections. This sort of stupidness is to be expected on the comment pages of various internet sites, and it’s standard procedure among the right-wing talk shows hosts, whose main job is to demonize public figures they don’t like not by analyzing their legislative records but by giving everyone in agreement implicit permission to be a victim of the politician whose ass happens to be on the rotisserie that day.

Last week it was John Kitzhaber. He doesn’t respect rural Oregonians. He has no regard for people who live beyond the small stretch of state that connects Portland to Salem, which for reasons I do not understand is our capitol.

Since I do not rely on ratings to determine how much my station can charge for advertising, which would in turn determine how much I earn, and since I do not plan to ever run for office, here’s my take on it: If you live in rural Oregon, please shut up. Registered voters in Multnomah County each get one vote. Since there are more registered voters here, there are more votes. In the same way that California sends more people to the U.S. House of Representatives than Oregon because more people live there, it’s simple. It is not a plot against you. It is not a union conspiracy. I have lived and voted in Multnomah County for 16 years, and I have yet to have a “state worker” hold a gun to my head and force me to fill out my ballot accordingly. Though I wish you wouldn’t, if you live in rural Oregon and are feeling cheated, there are plenty of homes for sale in Portland. If you live in rural Oregon, what I really wish you’d do is stop and think a bit before yielding to the directives of the talk shows to regard everyone in Multnomah County as an enemy and yourself, therefore, as a victim. If it weren’t for Multnomah County, the rest of Oregon would have to absorb a lot more people, which would make the rest of Oregon, quite simply, less rural. Your way of life would be “threatened” by new people who would compromise the luxury to which you’ve become accustomed, the one that comes only with the confidence attained when your sphere consists mostly of people who look just like you, good people, people you’ve known all your life. And the government assistance that’s doled out in non-urban settings wouldn’t go quite as far because – here’s another bit of basic, basic math – it would have to be divided among more people.

As I said, I expect this sort of divisiveness to be fueled by professional scapegoaters, but I was truly surprised last week when it seeped onto Think Out Loud, a local talk show on OPB. The guy who called in to whine about the unfairness of Multnomah County was actually from Clackamas County, which may be partially rural but is also partially a part of what’s commonly called Portland. So I’m not sure if his call would be a symptom of the “urban-rural divide” in Oregon, or maybe something new, like the “mostly urban-partly suburban divide.” When it comes to identifying yourself as a victim, I suppose the possibilities are endless.

Book report

For the past few weeks, the Tolstoy book club has been a bit irregular. One of my nieces in Saint Louis turned 13 on Halloween, so my sister was busy with that, and last weekend my sister in Oklahoma was in New Orleans with her husband, who had to attend a doctor’s conference there. My sister in Oklahoma, who does not go to bed until 3:30 in the morning, did say that they’d be home by 10:30 Sunday evening and suggested we all get on the phone at midnight, which would be “early” in Oregon, but my sister in Saint Louis, who has a job, said no.

So from time to time I’ve been kind of ahead of schedule with War & Peace. I’d gotten to the part where Napoleon’s army is starting to disintegrate, where Rostov has just met Princess Marya, the sister of Andrei Bolkonsky, Andrei being one of the most interesting characters I’ve encountered on paper in a long while. He’s easy to hate until you begin to like him. His wife (“the little Princess,” whose main characteristic is her weird mouth and her mustache) dies during childbirth, then, rather quickly, he falls in love with Natasha Rostov, who loves him in equal measure until Anatole Kuragin comes along and attempts to elope with her. And Pierre Bezukhov decides to go into battle in spite of his harsh criticism of it – by this point he has become a freemason to cope with his marital misery – but he goes into it as a tourist, as if the war were an amusement park. He is shocked by how graphic death by sword can be. Pierre is interesting as well. He may be married to Anatole’s sister, but what really stirs his heart is Natasha and, even more so for my money, his friendship with … Andrei. It’s all quite delicious.

Much to my surprise, I hope War & Peace never ends, but surely it will, so to slow that process down and to be as current as possible when the book club does meet, I’ve strayed from my vows to book monogamy and had a few affairs along the way, two of which I recommend.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter would be an amazing accomplishment even without knowing that its author, Carson McCullers, had not yet turned 25 when it was published – that’s right, not written, published. If you aspire to write quality fiction, and you’ve passed 40, or 30 for that matter, reading it is a bit of a slap in the face, but an enjoyable one. It’s all good but the scene that stands out in my mind is when one of the white characters goes to the black doctor’s house, where trouble is brewing, and is treated, in a private, black-owned and black-occupied home according to the same rules that apply in public: blacks defer to whites, removing themselves from the table and standing against the wall when the white man, a total stranger to them all, is seated and served coffee not in chipped, stained cups but in the best china in the house. Many generations, sketched in three, maybe four deft, capable sentences. The scene is written with such a lack of urgency or outrage or condemnation for that matter that the particulars of it did not occur to me until two or three pages later, at which point I went back and reread it.

I think I’m becoming a bit of a slut for Ian McEwan. Like Saturday, Amsterdam is about fairly ordinary people. A composer and a newspaper editor have been friends for years, and both have had affairs with the woman whose funeral opens the novel. Most of the story takes place in London but it ends in a hotel in Amsterdam, in a way that I think would seem contrived in the hands of most. The language, though, the language. I’m sitting here trying to think of a clever way to describe the way Ian McEwan uses language, or the seduction of it, and I can’t, so I won’t.

Joy Williams is a writer whose work I have admired for many years. When I was in college she published a story called The Blue Men, about a grandmother and her grandson living a fractured life in Florida, where the boy’s father and the grandmother’s son was awaiting execution on death row. One night they’re driving; the grandma loses control of the car, it flips over, then rights itself and they continue on their way. A sheriff witnesses this and follows them for a couple of miles in complete disbelief. When he finally pulls them over he asks the grandmother why she didn’t stop. “We thought it was a dream,” the grandmother says, “so we kept going.” And that one line of dialogue, which has resonated for me for more than two decades, is my main objection to The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams’ novel about three teenage girls in Arizona. In the map within my mind, the prime minister of the country called Short Stories is Joy Williams, and reading a novel by her – and this is strictly my opinion – is as unlikely as reading a short story by Leo Tolstoy.

The Pelosi problem

So now there’s the issue of Nancy Pelosi. Before I write another word, I have to confess that she makes my skin crawl. What really bothers me, though, is that I have no idea why. Without giving it much thought, I’d say my main problem with her is that whenever she opens her mouth I begin trying to determine what percentage of what she says is completely false compared to what’s not, and then how much, from the “what’s not” category, is partially true compared to what’s almost entirely factually correct.

More succinctly, Nancy Pelosi makes my skin crawl because she’s just as bad as any other politician. It’s embarrassing and humiliating for me to admit this, but evidently I am every bit as susceptible to Republican-generated bullshit as anyone else. Nancy Pelosi is every PR person's dream come true: the messaging document has transcended bullet points and words and is now political scripture, and it goes something like this: Nancy Pelosi is an unapologetically liberal politician. She’s a rich bitch. Since she represents San Francisco, she’s an elitist, she’s out of touch with real America and the people who live there, and she should be disposed of immediately.

I woke up, sort of, one night not long before the elections when I happened to tune into her being interviewed by Charlie Rose. Speaking of crawling skin, Charlie Rose, along with Oprah, is one of the worst interviewers I’m aware of. He does more talking than the guests – that alone should get you fired, I think, but that’s just me – and most of his talking is beneath banal. And Nancy Pelosi was having none of it. If there is a man who has man-handled Charlie Rose more effectively than Nancy Pelosi, it’s a spectacle I’ve yet to witness. The next day I looked up her legislative record, which I realize is sort of an elitist thing to do during election season, and my reaction is hard to describe. Blown away, perhaps. Stunned. Guilty. Maybe all three. It seems to me she is one of the last remaining politicians who didn’t succumb to Pappy Bush’s degradation of liberalism by referring to it as “the L word” during the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. Pappy was a man’s man, a national father figure and a direct link to the most revered president of our time, and his smears were interpreted by the majority of Democrats, including the Clintons, as guidance from the invisible hand of God to shift from the left to the center, which they’ve been doing dutifully now for 20 years.

For the next several days I listened to many, many people on the radio and television and internets reiterate over and over again how forward they were looking to voting against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. All of the bellowing was done with zero regard for the fact that there was not a national election last week. Also absent was any acknowledgement of how far from or close to San Francisco the orator or his or her audience lived. No matter: according to Mama Grizzly and many others we fired Nancy Pelosi and put Barack Obama on a performance plan last week (we did neither, in my opinion, but this is hardly the time for technicalities). As I listened I was overtaken with the same sense of quiet dread that usually accompanies the dreams I have where I’m in houses I’ve known for decades, only the rooms are completely and irrationally rearranged, and no one but me seems bothered or even surprised.

Are we really that retarded? I wondered through it all. Am I really that gullible? Yes, and yes. And I suppose I should show some gratitude to Charlie Rose.

Those are scary thoughts and questions for me, but, as always, there’s more: as Nancy Pelosi was being demonized with a measure of misogyny so vehement it made the Salem witch trials seem like a mismanaged but harmless badminton tournament, where were the Democrats? They were hiding, as usual, caving. It’s a very bad thing to be associated with Nancy Pelosi, so the script said, and so they bailed. Until, of course, it was too late. Once the Republicans had reclaimed control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, nervy woman that she is, decided she wanted to retain some sort of leadership position even though her party had been dethroned. And since the commercials had run their course, her fellow Democrats decided, with ringing clarity, at long last, to stand by their leader. For this reason and thousands more, it’s not at all surprising to me that the Democrats lost the majority in the house, but that they ever managed to attain it in the first place.

A prediction

Now that the countdown to 2012 is officially underway, I have a prediction: I believe the Republican candidate for president in 2012 will be Marco Rubio, who was elected to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by the people of Florida.

I heard him on the radio on Wednesday evening, and he’s perfect.

He’s young – he’ll turn 40 in May – and reasonably attractive (by suburban heterosexual standards anyhow). For college he won a football scholarship, so he’s no pussy. He’s married to a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, which is awesome, and together they have four children, meaning he can legitimately get misty eyed when regurgitating the sermon about how wrong it is to pass Obama's debt down to our children, our grandchildren and beyond because, having shown zero regard for reproductive responsibility, he will, theoretically anyhow, be represented in greater numbers in future generations of citizens who will, also theoretically, pay taxes

After going to law school, he served in the Florida legislature (for two years as its speaker) so he understands people. He used to go around the state holding what he called “idearaisers,” and based on those events he wrote a book called 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. He’s conservative and he’s a Republican, so he’s really good at simplifying things and, in the process, really connecting with people just like you and me.

When he speaks, he does so in that flat yet sing-songy Republican cadence. In a way that’s probably similar to what a deer experiences when the rifle is silently aimed at his head or his heart on what started out as an ordinary Saturday morning, I recognize this vocal shift instantly. Describing it is more challenging, but here’s my attempt: It’s condescending, but in a circuitous way. It's a way of speaking that reaches out to the ear and then, drawing on the full aresenal of horsepower behind tone and inflection, invites the ear to join the voice in speaking to anyone who happens to fall into the category of “other” with one side or another of the lower lip slightly upturned.

Thanks to NBC’s insertion of itself into a state election, he already has national name recognition, and in 23 months and three weeks Marco Rubio will have served in the U.S. Senate for close to two years, and you know as well as I do how his supporters will respond to any suggestion that he doesn’t have enough experience.

But, speaking of comparisons to Obama, here’s the best part: Marco Rubio is not white. He’s Cuban American. That makes him a Latino!

Marco Rubio will certainly face some obstacles, but I believe he’ll overcome them all, and beautifully. As a Tea Party candidate, he is beholden, of course, to Mama Grizzly, but by the time 2012 rolls around, she will have realized that it’s time for her to do what real women do, which is to shut up, offer cream and sugar with the coffee and let the menfolk do what they were put on this earth to do. Otherwise, she’d be veering into feminist territory, and that’s an expressway to Lezzy Land. The second big challenge for Marco Rubio is his religion. He’s a Roman Catholic by birth and breeding, but he and his family now do their magical thinking at an Evangelical church, so, in terms of fundraising and the inherent rightness of bringing more babies into the world, I think that could easily be turned into an advantage for him. Plus, it’s clear as crystal that he is not a Muslim, so we can all rest a bit easier, a bit more peacefully.

Here, though, is the best part of Marco Rubio: his parents are from Cuba. This concerned me initially, with the Tea Party’s hard line on immigration and all, but I’m probably over thinking it. I look to the Marco Rubio people to trot the issue out full throttle with a brass band and lots of fireworks. Marco Rubio truly understands the love of country, the power of patriotism, because he was raised by two people who endured an amazing conflict. They loved Cuba, but with equal fervor they hated Communism, and they hated Communists. Naturally, when Castro took over their hearts were so broken that they came to Miami and, like many of their fellow travelers, became Republicans. I was on the edge of my seat, fearing that those painful labels might ruin an otherwise beautiful scenario: immigrants, illegal immigrants or, the worst, illegals. But my worries were for naught, because Marco Rubio is not the son of immigrants, he is the son of exiles. And that one word alone makes his story one from which we can all draw inspiration.

I want a better show

I have to hand it to the people who call the shots on the television, the radio and the Internets, for conducting themselves in a way that is indeed fair and balanced. If you thought the fact that they started crowing about the midterms before Obama even walked onto the stage in Chicago to give his acceptance speech in 2008 was unfair to Democrats, think again. Because here, word for word, is a bit of story seeding from Wednesday morning’s headlines:

Hold the celebration. Most voters expected Republicans to win control of the House of Representatives on Election Day, but nearly as many expect to be disappointed with how they perform by the time the 2012 elections roll around.

And a few hours later, this headline, on MSN:

With elections down, all eyes on 2012.

Down? Was it a hunting adventure? And in terms of eyes, who exactly constitutes ‘all’? Speaking only for myself, my eyes, and my ears, were on Multnomah County, Oregon where they were counting ballots to see if the keys to the governor’s mansion were going to be handed over to a guy who, as best I can tell, never so much as ran for student government. (The answer, for now, appears to be no.)

You might expect me to be critical of this, but there’s one piece of information that’s changed my mind. The cost for the game show that ended for the most part on Tuesday evening was $3 billion, which I believe makes elections, officially, an industry. And with the media publishing polls about the next election before the current election is finalized, coupled with the high court’s wisdom about the spending rights of corporations, it’s only going to get better with time.

And another thing that might surprise you is that I am looking forward to seeing how far this goes, and given the fact that we worship the almighty dollar – and why not? – I predict it will go all the way. I picture a more user friendly future for our elections, where people cast their votes via text or cell phones or e-mail, or all three perhaps, plus Facebook and Twitter and some red state/blue state iPad app and whatever new moronic thing comes along between now and 2012, and at the rate we are innovating there will surely be many. I can see shapely women in sparkly gowns gliding to and fro in the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol, walking people in and out depending, of course, on the results, and allowing them to comment briefly from time to time about how it was either the best time of their life or how much they’re looking forward to serving the people of our great country, especially the men and women in uniform and the men and women – but mostly men – who once wore a uniform but now reside, tax free, in graveyards. It gives me chills, just thinking about it. And I picture, or hear, a soundtrack of some sort, maybe an orchestra, or a pre-recorded theme song since the acoustics at the Capitol are terrible.

But what I really want in my elections is some personality, and the perfect way to achieve that, I think, is to have some judges. Not the black-robed sorts, but some real rabble rousers, some real personalities, who could give hand signals or put ping-pong paddles with numbers up to cast their vote. The former governors of Illinois, for example, could do a season with their parole officers in tow, just slightly beyond the camera’s reach, but very slightly. Or maybe a panel of jilted political wives. The possibilities for putting some lipstick on the old pig are truly endless, and with only 24 months to go before the next season finale I think we better get moving.

Do you believe in magic?

John Boehner, the future speaker of the house, didn’t waste a nanosecond last night in reminding everyone that his party’s wave of victories does not constitute “a revolution,” but I think he’s being admirably modest. I am quite confident that by this time next year we will be living in a very different place, one where there is little if any unemployment, where spending is under control, where there is not much of a deficit, where quality healthcare is available to any and all and where, most importantly, questionable deal making and compromising one thing for the sake of another are as obsolete as a handwritten thank you. John Boehner’s modesty aside, The American Dream was revived yesterday after its two-year stint on life support, and even though Rick Fox, the hot black guy, got voted off Dancing with the Stars last night while Bristol Palin was spared, I for one am really looking forward to the good times.

Talking

The short-term question for today seems to be this. Is your life any different than it was two years ago, when Obama was elected and Democrats became the majority in Congress? In one way mine is radically different. In early November 2008, I still clung to my belief, stridently, some would say, that you cannot blame the media – the media simply serves its audience. The media is not to blame for the message. I was wrong, and for the past 24 months I’ve been eating crow. The media – all of it, the radio, the television, the incessant Internet commentary and chatter and rambling – began priming the pump for the midterm elections not on the day that Obama was sworn in but on the day he was elected. It’s a show, and since they’re hosting it they want to make sure as many people as possible attend. Therefore, Obama takes a dump on a Thursday afternoon, out of synch for various reasons with his regular rhythm, and it is tied directly, somehow, in a way that defies your wildest dreams, to the midterms. A road is paved on a hot summer afternoon; by the next morning the analysts are reporting on it “in the context of” the midterms. While surveying the destruction in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama, who is the president of the United States, refuses to behave like he’s a guest on Oprah and that, ladies and gentlemen, will have an impact on the midterms.

In PR this behavior is called “seeding the story.” It’s toxic enough when it concerns the launching of a new computer program that shouldn’t be newsworthy in the first place; when the “seeding” intentionally distorts and perverts politics for the sake of ratings, I think we’ve taken the concept of sinister to an entirely new level.

So today I’d like to seed a story of my own, one whose primary character is a little boy called Ian. I cringe when people attempt to explain the world with toddler quotes – so simple yet so true, and so gosh darn cute! – but today that’s exactly what I’m going to do. On the morning of the inauguration, Ian and his father, who happens to be my brother, came to my house to watch the festivities. It was a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, cold and wintry, January. Inside we had coffee and bagels and brownies. “The steam coming up out of the mugs, it’s so pretty,” my brother said. Though wasteful, I’d boiled water to heat up our mugs before pouring the coffee. That had been one of our father’s signature moves: warming cups and teapots and such with boiling water. Since our father had died shortly after casting his vote for Obama from a hospital bed via absentee ballot, I’d wanted, in some way, to recall him. It was touching, for a very brief moment, that my brother bothered to notice. Ian, who was about to turn two, trashed his face with cream cheese but managed to get most of the bagel in his mouth. Using both hands, he drank fruit juice from a steamed coffee mug of his own.

There was all sorts of commotion on the television. My brother thought the wheels on the helicopter waiting to carry W. off the national stage looked like they belonged on a toy. I thought Mrs. Obama’s dress was wonderful. We sat on the couch, the three of us, watching. Ian looked up first at his father, and then at me, with a curious but resigned expression on his face, then pointed at the television and said, “Talking.” We laughed, we agreed, we all pointed at the television, and Ian said once again, with more conviction, “Talking.” And for the past 24, hype-fueled months of stories that are at best distorted and at worst completely made up, it’s been mostly just that: talking.