Licorice the Hamster Speaks

You made me go ha-ha. Thanks PD.

Ya think John K. could help resuscitate the hamsters around here when things sometimes get slow?

PD
PD, I thought you might enjoy another witty piece by Colin McEnroe:

The Fluttering Candidate
July 25, 2004

This year, on Nov. 2, I plan to rise early, journey to my polling place, stride into whatever gizmo passes for a voting machine and hurl myself at the line that says "John Kerry." I will press the John Kerry widget many times and inspect the area for hanging chads, ballot butterflies, electoral moths and evidence of anyone trying to disqualify me as a felon. I will then cast several other nice votes for people seeking lesser offices. Then I will press the John Kerry button 20 more times. And then I will leave.

But not before stopping at the table to say, "If any doubt arises about whether I voted for Kerry, I did, and here's my phone number. Have the Supreme Court call me, any time, night or day."

Voting could take a lot longer this year. One argument for switching to touch screens or some other form of electronic suffrage is that people like me, confronted with anything mechanical, might hang by our entire body weight from the Kerry lever, for emphasis. But we're just as likely to put our thumbs through the touch screen, in a similarly emphatic mania.

The reasons are obvious.

1. In 2000, the future of the human race was more or less hijacked by an alligator- and theme-park-infested peninsula full of people wrestling delusionally with a voting process that combined origami with whack-a-mole in a way that left people unsure of what they had just done.

2. The process described in item 1 resulted in the installation of a presidency characterized by an almost impossible combination of two adjectives: headstrong and brainless. Like many other Americans, I believe the country would be run more responsibly by, say, the Corleones. Or border collies. In a matter of three years and change, they have converted the world's greatest democracy into a feared and hated band of marauding, torturing, treaty-breaking, nose-thumbing, scimitar-waving Cossacks. I hasten to add, I mean this as no slight against the people in our armed services. They are simply arrows shot by madmen.

Now, there should be a third reason: my passion for John Kerry.

But I don't have any.

The other day I got up and put on a Kerry for President T-shirt, and wore it for five or six hours to see if I would feel any closer to him, with his cloth on my back, his logo gently brushing one of my nipples. Nope.

In some ways, it's not important. He's qualified, decent, occasionally heroic, intelligent, articulate, experienced. Certainly, if you took all the American people and ranked them in terms of their qualifications and plausibility for the office of president, you could divide the most qualified 1 percent into one hundredths, and John Kerry would be in the uppermost of those tiny particles, whereas the current holder of the office might not make it into the top two-fifths of the total population.

So it's an easy choice. But it would be nice - so nice! - to feel a little something. To feel the bracing tang of a Kerry sea breeze as I left the voting booth.

One problem, I'm convinced, is that Kerry is doing something that we rarely forgive in our politicians. Thinking. The last American leader to do that was Jimmy Carter, and he has been treated, for the better part of 25 years, like the Boo Radley of the Democratic Party, some kind of brain-damaged freak locked up in the attic and allowed out discreetly to broker peace in sun-scorched lands and build houses for the poor. It's no coincidence that Carter is speaking tomorrow at a Democratic convention for the first time in decades.

The unstated theme: What if we tried thinking again? Not saying we're gonna. But what if? (I don't really count Clinton, notwithstanding his formidable intellect, as a thinker. He was a collector and brandisher of ideas. The difference between that and a thinker is the difference between a knife-juggler and a surgeon.)

I could never figure out what Carter's big crime was, anyway. That he used a French word ("malaise") to describe a bad economy? As opposed to the current occupant, who tends to use a dishonest word ("good") to describe a bad economy?

Most politicians tend to come whistling at you and ricochet off your head. It may be that Kerry kind of flutters through the air like the falling apple blossom, and that to understand him, we will have to adopt a more Asian, almost Taoist perspective, one that allows life to unfold in state of ever-shifting contradiction.

Even his biography is kind of Taoist, in its embrace of confusion. His paternal grandparents were Jewish émigrés who changed their surname to an Irish county and converted to Catholicism. His grandfather shot himself in the head with a handgun. His mother is a descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. (Think of it: Jews + ultra-Protestants = Catholic. It kind of works.)

For more of this kind of thing, read the excellent Kerry profile by Philip Gourevitch in the current New Yorker. It's the first one that makes any sense, mainly because it stops trying to make sense, as the Talking Heads advised us long ago.

As Gourevitch notes, Kerry is oddly suited for the moment, because the election is a work in progress, to be buffeted by the changing winds of Iraq, Bin Laden and maybe even the economy. And Kerry doesn't sink his claws too tightly into any one branch on any one tree.

Many of us don't have that option. Even though we know there's a chance that Ridge and Cheney will declare a terrorist threat and replace all the voting machines with butter churns, we're planning to show up on that Tuesday and pull one lever or write one name in the butter. Kerry. Kerry. Kerry. Whoever he is.

Love to eat them hamsters
hamsters what I love to eat
bite they little heads off
and nibble they tiny feet

--George Bush's cat

Quayle's, farmerdude!

Got any trip updates hiding from me somewhere on here?

lol

Farmer, I enjoyed Trillin's poetry from the Dem Convention on NPR. He sure is witty.