Against Obama?

Alexander Cockburn, that silver-tongued rhetorician of the far, far left (so far left, in fact, that he occasionally goes full circle and finds common cause with the far, far right) has come out foursquare against Barack Obama. He urges instead a vote for Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, or, had she not recently revealed herself once again as a paranoid lunatic, Cynthia McKinney.

That, coupled with the recurring debates that spring up with my own readers over whether or not Ralph Nader and his mostly well-intentioned but also somewhat deluded followers are partly responsible for saddling us with eight years of Bushism, led me to revisit this classic George Orwell essay in which the author argues, convincingly, I think, that British pacifists at the time of World War II were, despite their claims to be struggling for a higher, nobler cause by refusing to support the war effort, were actually and substantively supporting Hitler.

"This is elementary common sense," writes Orwell. "If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other." He goes on to rubbish "the idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle" as "a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security."

Now perhaps you see it as a stretch too far to make an analogy between all-out war against imperial fascism and a quadrennial election campaign. But while nobody is claiming that the Bush-McCain axis represents a reincarnated Nazism (well, nobody, that is, except some of the same far leftists who see Obama as merely the flip side of the same totalitarian coin) or that we are in danger of having our democracy and freedom overthrown by invading armies, I think the principle holds just as true for the struggle we are currently engaged in.

What if you honestly, sincerely believe, as Nader claims to, that there is no real difference between the views represented - and the outcome of putting those views into practice - by John McCain and Barack Obama? Well, in the first place, you'd probably be somewhat deluded, or more likely, so taken with the vehemence of your own rhetoric that you have confounded it with reality. A 12-year-old - and I mean no disrespect to the 12-year-olds of the world - could examine the two candidates' platforms and voting histories and provide you with numerous examples of where they differ.

No, what you really mean is that Obama doesn't differ enough, that because he doesn't espouse the full range of leftist political doctrine, despite the fact that views such that extreme are not and never have been shared by more than a few percent of the American public, you are willing to declare a plague on both their houses and, by either voting for a doomed third party candidacy or withholding your vote altogether, help elect John McCain.

Very well; under the rules of our democracy, you have that right. But in exercising that right, I fear, you are exhibiting what Orwell called "a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen." Your "moral stance" does not exist in a vacuum. You can not, as the events of Florida in 2000 amply demonstrated, vote for Nader without simultaneously voting against Obama and for McCain. The only way in which such an action could have neutral consequences would be if you could guarantee that someone on the right would match your action by refusing to vote for McCain.

There is no such level playing field, as Orwell pointed out, just as there was no equivalent pacifist movement in the fascist countries to balance the efforts of British pacifists to undermine the war effort. "But we are not at war," you might argue, "nor are we about to be invaded by a neighboring empire." The latter may be true, but the former is not: we most certainly are at war, and while there's no guarantee that the same wouldn't be true had not Nader and his supporters helped put Bush into office in 2000, it's most likely that the disaster Iraq was to become would have unfolded very differently had some of Florida's 97,000 Nader voters been willing to swallow their pride and/or stubbornness long enough to put Al Gore into office instead of George Bush.

That alone should be enough to illustrate that protest votes, no matter how innocuous they may seem here in our cocoon of material and political security, can have grim and awful consequences for those not fortunate enough to live in a land where battles are largely limited to the symbolic. The mindless carnage - and I say that as someone who was at least partially open to the case for the war - visited upon the people of Iraq by Bush's incompetence was aided and abetted by Nader's claim that there was "no difference" between Bush and Gore, and by those who, for whatever their reasons, chose to believe him.

Is there ever a time, you understandably ask, when one can in good conscience support a minor party candidate, when one doesn't need to be hamstrung by the often unfair and inadequate two-party system? Yes, of course there is. And for all my anger at the disaster that was visited on the world by Nader helping Bush into office, it's only fair to say that 2000 might have legitimately seemed like such a time. After all, we had no way of knowing the kind of events that were going to unfold once Bush took office, nor did we have more than a hint of how extraordinarily unequal to them Bush would prove to be.

But no such uncertainty exists this time. Economically, militarily, even philosophically, the United States - and by extension, much of the world, since America's is a far-reaching shadow - faces greater challenges and dangers than at any point in my life. I grew up in a time when the memories and traumas of the Great Depression and the Second World War were still very fresh, to the point where they colored the thinking and actions of my parents' generation in every way imaginable. My own generation and the generations that followed it have never had to confront difficulties on that scale, but something tells me that we may be approaching just such a moment.

No, Obama isn't the messiah, nor is he anywhere near flawless on many of the issues that strike me as important. And as with all politicians, there is always the risk that he will turn out to be something quite different from what he presents himself as, or that he will be unable to govern with the same vigor and clarity with which he has campaigned, or that his prescriptions for America will turn out to have been wrong after all. But while we can agonize over such possibilities - and given the magnitude of the disaster visited upon us and democracy by the Bush presidency, we'd hardly be human if we didn't - what's at stake today is too vital. We can not afford the luxury of wallowing in nihilism or quixotic protest votes. John McCain may be a perfectly nice, decent man at heart, but in the course of his campaign has repeatedly shown himself to be befuddled, incompetent, and willing to say or do almost anything to gain an office which he clearly does not deserve, and the same is even truer of the vice-president he has attempted to saddle us with.

If you disagree with the above, if you feel that Bush/Cheney/McCain-Palin have served us well and will continue to do so, then by all means vote for them. I respect your opinion even if I disagree with it. But if you claim to be opposed to them but are not voting today for Barack Obama, then you are deluding yourself and risk performing a great disservice to our country and the world. He may not share your views on everything, you may dislike the guy for one or many reasons, but there is no evading the fact that there is one way and one way only to ensure that John McCain and Sarah Palin will not rule this country for the next four years, and the specter of George Bush and the havoc he has wreaked will be put into a grave with a stake through its misbegotten heart, and that is to elect Barack Obama president. You may wish you had a greater range of choices, but you do not. You may spend the next four years protesting that President Obama is too far to the left for you or not far enough, and it is both your right and duty to do so if that turns out to be the case.

But right now there is is one overriding purpose that should transcend all doubts and quibbles: we must restore dignity, decency, honor and respectability to the highest office in the land, and while no man or woman can ever be perfectly suited to that position or perfectly conform to our individual views of how that office should be conducted, not in decades - again, perhaps not in my lifetime - has the choice between two candidates been so clear and obvious. Please join me today in helping to elect Barack Obama president.

More Festifying

I was mistaken; Florida apparently still allows smoking in bars, but whether or not it does, the punks are doing plenty of it. Apparently the first show I attended on Friday had a very low jerk quotient, because I didn't see (or smell) a single person smoking, but such was not the case today. In fact I ended up missing one of my favorite bands because the prospect of hanging out for a several hours in a truly vile atmosphere (lack thereof, actually, if we're taking "atmosphere" to imply "breathable air") was just too much to bear.

So why didn't I simply step outside and wait there until it was time for the band to go on? Well, it's not that simple. Some of the Fest venues were so crowded that you had to wait in line for an hour or more before enough people left and you could be allowed in. And in the case of the popular bands, nobody was leaving and you just weren't getting in. About a hundred of us listened to Dear Landlord from outside on the street, despite having waited nearly an hour to get in. I missed my friend Justin's band the Ringers because the line to get into Common Grounds was held up by painfully slow ID checks. And although we got into the Market Street Tavern in plenty of time to see the Copyrights, the prospect of three hours of not breathing prompted me to give up and leave, which I kind of regret, as I expect it was a completely awesome show. But my lungs are still thanking me.

I actually like both Gainesville and Florida, but there are a few backward aspects, the smoking policy being one of them, that are more than a bit maddening. So too is the way the town is laid out, in old-fashioned drive-everywhere-wasting-massive-amounts-of-gas fashion. Naturally traffic is a massive clusterfuck for several hours every morning and evening; despite Gainesville being a sleepy little college town of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, I've seen gridlock to rival that of New York City.

Another exciting adventure: looking for a supermarket that sold actual food fit for human consumption. Okay, this wasn't the hardest thing in the world; it simply required joining the masses of carbound lemmings and driving several miles out from the city center (there's no supermarket within walking distance) into Walmart land. In fact, I visited an actual Walmart, under the mistaken impression that in addition to cheap TVs, tires, geegaws and doodads, that great American institution also sold food. In fact, I'd swear the one my cousin dragged me to in Northern Michigan had a large grocery department.

Not the one in Gainesville, however. Well, they did have something vaguely resembling a grocery department, but edible food? Of the non-packaged and processed, non-empty calories and non-carcinogenic variety? Absolutely zero. I was looking specifically for fresh produce, i.e., fruits and vegetables. Not too much to ask for in a grocery store, you'd think? In Walmart, it apparently is. They don't even have a produce section. It's a wonder the entire town hasn't come down with scurvy.

Eventually, after another hour or so of destroying the atmosphere and driving a few more species to extinction, I did find another supermarket with a fresh food section, and really, it's time I stopped complaining about Gainesville now, because for the most part I'm still happy to be here at the Fest, and even happier to have spent most of the day at the best venue by far, a bike co-op called the Kickstand, well away, but still walking distance from downtown, where there were no ID checks, smokers were exiled to the outdoors where they belonged, and nearly every band was good to great.

Some highlights: Delay, The Max Levine Ensemble, Tin Armor, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Brook Pridemore and Two Funerals, but seriously, there was almost nothing there that wasn't worth watching. And although the place was clearly crawling with vegans and bike punks, none of the didacticism and bombast sometimes associated with those groups was in evidence. Just a nice comfortable scene on a nice sunny day. Ryan Delay said, "There's really no reason to leave here," and I wish I hadn't.

There was meant to be a 2 am house show featuring Spoonboy, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and Wingnut Dishwasher Union (I met the alleged brains behind the latter operation, and he seemed pleasant enough, though I see from his Myspace that he believes "Any good punk is at least part hippie," and we might have had to have a little discussion about that idea), but when I arrived at the appointed reference there were three police cars with lights a-flashing, hundreds of punk rockers milling around in the residential backstreets, and little if any evidence of music going on. Perhaps I should have stuck around and possibly got arrested, something I haven't done in quite a while now, but seeing one other Fester being led off in handcuffs reminded me that I had never particularly enjoyed it back in the days when getting arrested was a fairly regular activity of mine. Might have made for a more interesting blog post, though.

Anyway, it's now nearly 4 am, and that's including the extra hour gained by the end of Daylight Savings Time. A busy day awaits tomorrow, including the Used Kids, the Monikers, the Unlovables, the Ergs, and a bunch of country punk bands, all of which will probably be subject to unpredictable revision. On the other hand, maybe I'll just stay in and watch 12 more hours of MSNBC, CNN and Fox coverage of the next-to-last day of the election campaign. Well, probably not, but I seem to have developed an unhealthy fascination with their round-the-clock natterings. I mean, it's not like I still need any help deciding who I'm going to vote for, and it's even less likely that any of the candidates will be calling on me for my expertise, so what exactly do I hope to learn by watching this stuff, other than that I really, really don't want to spend the next four or eight years listening to John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Oh, one last Festly tale: apparently my criticisms of Dillinger 4's unfunny comedy act have reached the ears of Paddy, who followed up his normal "I love cocaine" rant with some version of "Fuck Larry Livermore" which may or may not have enlivened proceedings; I don't know because of course I wasn't there, having several more interesting things to attend to. But having just been told about it by someone who was, I was standing in line outside another venue when Paddy himself came up and got into a long and mostly incoherent conversation with the guy standing in front of me.

I actually didn't know who it was, having mistaken him for a particularly unfortunate street tramp, and I have no idea if he recognized me. But some kid rolling a joint up the street did, after a fashion: "Yo, dude, you're Shawn Stern, aren't you? Don't lie, I know you are, you own BYO Records! I love that label, can I shake your hand?" And that, my friends (I told you I'd been seeing too much of Liar McCain!) was when I called a wrap on Day Two of The Fest.

Maybe I Am Getting A Little Old For This

I deliberately stayed a few miles out of town from the Fest, far away from the Holiday Inn, the "official" Fest hotel, packed with four-to-a-room punk rockers, 75% (at least) of whom are mainly concerned with being as drunk and as loud as possible for 72 straight hours. One can only imagine the reaction of the hapless tourist or honeymooning couple who unknowingly booked into that hotel in expectation of a quiet weekend away.

I also can't imagine why the Holiday Inn subjects itself to what, while I'm sure it's fun for the Festers, must be an absolute nightmare for the staff and management. Last year saw a near-riot, when drunk punks rampaged through the hotel, setting off fire extinguishers, throwing furniture into the pool, and in general engaging in all the clichéd dinosaur rock star behavior that punks so like to rail against (Paddy from the Dillinger 4 unreeled a similar rant from the stage before declaring his fondness for that ultimate 70s rock star cliché, cocaine).

The money is obviously good, especially on what would normally be a dead weekend (half the town having migrated over to Jacksonville for the annual Florida-Georgia game), but between damage sustained and the cost of alienating normal travelers who might never set foot in a Holiday Inn again, would it really be worth it in the long run? Well, it's their worry, not mine; I'm quite happy in my very quiet and peaceful hotel, even if it does mean a bit of a commute to the Fest-ivities and an increased carbon footprint (at registration they had us fill out a survey explaining how we'd gotten to Gainesville, and I felt deeply ashamed at my profligate squandering of resources, which entailed traveling by both air and car, and, worse than that, alone; on the other hand, for about 350 days of the year I seldom if ever set foot in an internal combustion-powered vehicle apart from the occasional city bus).

So this morning I was enjoying the free breakfast in the lobby and eavesdropping on conversations at nearby tables. Nearly all of them were about the election, which I found rather heartwarming, especially the one emanating from my nearest neighbors, a middle class family where the father, with the aid of a laptop, was explaining the intricacies of the Electoral College. Then in strode some generic punk rockers of the baggy shorts, wallet chain, slightly to moderately obese variety. They weren't talking about the election, the only things on their minds appeared to be hangovers (apparently there is "nothing like a bowl of Rice Krispies" to cure them) and something one of them had done the previous night involving Sparks and (if I heard correctly) his ears.

From the looks of them - well-fed, many years' worth of tattoos, costumes so carefully stylized that they could have been created by a Fat Wreck Chords counterpart to Calvin Klein - and the fact that they were staying at a slightly more expensive hotel, I deduced that they must be members of one of the Fest's headlining bands, and this hunch was soon verified when I heard them talking about the way last night's show had gone. But the thing that really jumped out at me was the t-shirt one of them was wearing, the back of which was emblazoned with, in four-inch-high letters, the slogan, "SKATE. PUNK. FUCK."

So this is where the "maybe I'm getting too old for this" sentiment comes in. I was genuinely embarrassed for the sake of the family near me. Okay, I'm not naive enough to think that their 12 or 13 year old daughter has never seen or heard the word "fuck;" chances are when she's with her schoolmates she uses it herself. Nor am I claiming to be above employing the word myself on occasion. But I guess I'm just old-fashioned enough to believe that it's not good form to put it very bluntly in the faces of people who very possibly might still think it's a somewhat rude word. Hell, I still think it's a rude word, or at least one which might be appropriate in some environments but not in others.

Hypocritical? Maybe. After all, I used to write and sing songs with that very word in them, and might even do so again one day. But the difference is that if I do, they'll be sung in a setting where people expect to hear rude language, not a middle class hotel lobby on a quiet Saturday morning. And perhaps language is evolving, as it always has done. Expletives, like words in general, come into and go out of fashion, and it's very possible that a word like "fuck" will soon have lost all power to shock or offend, in much the way that the word "nigger" seems on course to do, at least within the black community, anyway.

Nevertheless, I don't mind admitting that all my sympathies were with the family quietly discussing the Electoral College and none with the rather oblivious punk rockers. Whereas if I were a teenager listening to my dad expound on politics and some self-proclaimed rebel against society wandered into the room with dirty words splashed across his back, I don't doubt who I'd be paying attention to.

Oh well, I'm sure we'll all survive, the sun is shining brightly, Florida seems to have finally banned smoking in public places, and in about 20 minutes I'll be off to the Fest to mingle with some more of those rude and ugly punk rockers. Maybe next year I'll be too old for these shenanigans, but at the moment I think I can swing it for another season.

Freezing In Florida

All right, 64 degrees (18C) isn't exactly "freezing," but it's not quite as tropical as one would like to expect after traveling all the way down here from a rather chilly New York. But last night it was down in the 40s, and when I tried to put the heat on in my hotel room, all I got was a burning smell and a jarring blast from the smoke detector.

Things have improved this morning, though, with the sun even showing some signs that it might put it an appearance sometime soon, hopefully by the time I head into Beautiful Downtown Gainesville to collect my official Fest credentials and possibly even watch a band or three.

I hadn't intended to watch any bands last night, and succeeded in that goal, though I came perilously close to it while hunting through BDG for a food establishment other than Subway (not that there's anything wrong with Subway) that stayed open after about 9:30 pm and found myself caught up in a crowd in front of 1982, the place that hosted my favorite show last year.

I wasn't feeling in a particularly punk rock mood, but before I could finish pushing my way through the assembled masses, I ran into Angry Ryan from the PPMB, who I always enjoy chatting to, and by the time we'd finished dissecting everything from the latest band gossip to the Obama-McCain race, I was surrounded by a gang of kids, one of whom was wearing a vintage Lookout Records shirt and gleefully informed me that he "hadn't been born" when Green Day were making their debut album 39/Smooth. Speaking of which, I was checking out the "iQuiz" feature on my iPod and discovered that one of the music trivia questions referred to 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, the title of the CD that compiled their first two EPs along with their first album.

It was an odd feeling, since it was (ahem) I who made up that title, the band having failed to provide me with any alternatives (they'd pulled a similar stunt with the artwork for both the album and the first EP). Then of course I had to spend the next few years hearing from others about how they hated the name, not that any actual members of the band ever told me about it. Apparently the same was true of the Laurie L. "My Adventure With Green Day" story that appeared on the Kerplunk insert, thought I note that it now appears on the band's official fan site, so perhaps they've had a change of heart.

In other news, shortly after arriving in Florida I was excited to hear my very first presidential campaign advertisement. New York having long been a foregone conclusion for the Obama camp, I've neither seen nor heard any advertising there at all, whereas rather the opposite is true here in Florida. I've now been here about 18 hours and have heard enough election adverts to send me screaming for the exits. I've also noted that for the first time I've begun to get a little agitated about the outcome. I'd prefer to simply trust in the good judgment of the American people, even if it should turn out to be different from my own, but there's something about the nonstop barrage of lies and distortions that constitutes the Republican campaign that makes me feel downright queasy at the prospect of them running the country for another four years.

I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the Obama campaign is without its own faults and lily-gilding, but they've been the picture of probity and forthrightness when compared with the brazen pandering and outright lying to which McCain and Palin have stooped. If I were Obama, I'd repeat over and over what he said once last summer, "They must think you're really stupid." It boggles the mind that the party that presided over the biggest spending and the biggest budget deficits in the history of the republic can get away with accusing the Democrats - who under Clinton produced the first balanced budgets and surpluses in decades - of being unable to run the economy.

But before I get carried away and write the whole campaign off as a battle between Reasonably Intelligent and Just Plain Stupid, I need to remind myself that I'm no guaranteed genius either, and that I've picked wrong policies and wrong candidates plenty of times myself. So let's just hope that the public turn out to be smarter than me.

Oh, but speaking of Really, Really Dumb, popping up like a particularly ghoulish Halloween goblin was the tiresome specter of Ralph Nader, back in Florida to try and do again for the nation what he did in 2000: hand the election to the party that stands for the opposite of nearly everything he claims to believe. Naderites still get all whiny and defensive when you point out that despite his claims to be raising issues that the other candidates won't touch, the only, and I repeat ONLY thing Ralph Nader has accomplished by his Stassen-like presidential campaigns is to saddle the nation and the planet with eight years of George Bush. Nobody took Nader at all seriously this year, he having done such a good job of discrediting himself, right?

Well, maybe not. He's polling at about 3% here in Florida. Just enough to possibly tip the state to McCain. If Nader genuinely believes that by doing so he'd be performing anything other than the gravest of disservices to the country and the people he claims to love, then he's ready for the loony bin. God bless him, I know he espouses many excellent positions, and has done some very valuable work in the past, but if his campaign "succeeds" by drawing enough votes to put John McCain (and ultimately, Sarah Palin) in the White House, it would more than negate everything worthwhile he might have done in the past. Please, somebody, put this old goat out to pasture. We have a far better chance of achieving the goals Nader claims to stand for under an Obama presidency, and virtually no chance at all if Ralph's quixotic ego trip helps elect his opposite number president.

Lunching In The Tuileries

I would have posted an update sooner, but the wireless internet in my hotel first went wonky and then went missing altogether. I had an excellent birthday, and thanks very much for all your good wishes, even if you didn't quite get around to sending them. After a rainy night the day dawned bright and clear, but almost wintry cold. It warmed up to about 10C/50F by noon, though, and after meeting up with some friends near the Champs Élysées I wandered along said avenue gawking at the many gawkworthy people and things, and thence into the Tuileries, one of the lovelier public spaces on the planet, and one which, I just realized, I hadn't visited in 28 years.

By the time I'd stopped to gape at a rather excellent juxtaposition of the Eiffel Tower with the Obelisque in the Place de la Concorde and then walked about halfway through the gardens, some black billowing clouds had spilled in from the north, creating a dappled, chiaroscuro effect that was all the more dramatic when splayed across the white marble monuments and buildings that lined the horizons. The effect was breathtaking, but then Paris often has that effect even when the weather isn't providing a supplementary light show.

I remember being impressed on my first visits to Paris over how old everything seemed, but at the time I was a very impressionable 20-something who hadn't traveled much outside the United States. In actuality, most of the city, at least the parts the tourists normally see, isn't that old at all, as France's heavily centralized government was able, when the whim struck it, to demolish pretty much anything it wanted and rebuild the city in a fairly uniform 19th century design. Despite London's having been bombed, burned, and urban renewaled by Soviet bloc-inspired housing engineers, you can still see more genuinely ancient buildings than you're likely to run into on a random stroll through Paris.

The difference is that London is a crazy patchwork of the classic, the post-modern, the stately and the hideous, the banal and sublime, whereas Paris hews to one remarkably consistent design. A magnificent design, a feast for the senses sufficient to make the heart sing out practically every time one turns a corner, but a design nonetheless. Can you imagine someone trying to rebuild New York City along similar lines? No, of course you can't, because you'd have several battalions of lawyers suing you for even thinking such a thought.

But however undemocratically Paris may have gotten the way it did, there's no disputing or quarreling with its undeniable elegance, an elegance which I've become convinced has a beneficent and uplifting effect on nearly everyone fortunate enough to live or work there. I'm trying to remember why, like so many Americans and Brits, I've been scornful of France, and for the life of me, I can't. One minute I'm voting for Obama, the next I'm turning into a full-on sympathizer with the fromage-munching surrender monkeys!

My mood might also have been enhanced by the precipitous fall of the euro against the dollar. I booked this trip just before the stock market crash left me feeling a lot poorer, but since it was already paid for, I didn't see much sense in staying home. I was expecting the cost of living to be shocking, but because the euro dropped about 25 cents in value, it turned out to be no worse than New York, and in a couple cases, even cheaper.

The Métro, for example: I don't remember it being so awesome (or shiny or clean) on previous visits, but if it weren't for the regrettable fact that it still shuts down at midnight, it could easily replace the New York City subway as my favorite public transport system in the world. Not only are there signs telling you exactly how many minutes (or on a couple lines, even how many seconds!) you'll have to wait for your train, the wait is very seldom more than 2 or 3 minutes. In New York and London people run like crazy when they see a train coming because they're afraid if they miss it they might be stuck waiting for an unconscionably long time for another. In Paris people stroll toward the train, because they feel confident there'll be another one along any minute now. And somehow Paris manages to provide this level of service at a price half that of London's, and, provided you buy a carnet of 10 tickets or a weekly pass, cheaper than New York as well.

I had a birthday lunch in an outdoor cafe/restaurant in the middle of the Tuileries. It was a little pricey - the equivalent of maybe $16 or $17 - but a week ago it would have been more like $22, and while the food was fine, I was paying more for the location. Later that night I had an outstanding dinner with some friends near the Arc de Triomphe for less than the price of a diner meal in New York. Speaking of the Arc, I'm sure I've been there before some time in the past, but I never remembered it being so all-fired in-your-face. That is one impressive piece of monumentry, but then nobody ever accused the French of being understated in that department.

Other observations: coffee is quite expensive, but in many cases you're really paying rent on a table for what might turn out to be hours, so you can't blame them. But despite Paris having thousands upon thousands of the best cafés in the world, Starbucks has proven to be a huge success here, with queues of people right out the door waiting for the opportunity to spend five or six bucks on a pale imitation of the coffee that's available on any corner for a buck or two cheaper. McDonald's is very popular in France, too, so go figure.

Also, despite nobody believing it could ever happen, France now has smoking laws similar to those in New York City and California, i.e., no smoking indoors at all. However, they've turned most of the outdoor seating areas into nonstop smokefests and played kind of fast and loose with the law by enclosing them with plastic or other materials to the point where they might as well be indoors. And in those areas that can't be enclosed, café owners are doing their bit for global warming by installing sidewalk heaters every few feet, to the point where even passersby can be tempted to strip off their coats and bask in the artificial summer.

But that was yesterday, and today I'm back in New York for a few hours before - this wasn't the best planning, I'll concede - jetting off again to Gainesville for the No Idea Fest, another thing I booked last summer before realizing that right about now I'd almost rather be staying home and enjoying my new apartment. But somebody needs to go down there and tell you all about the 18 million bands that are playing, of which I'll probably see maybe five or six or ten. And before you get jealous of me for running around in the Florida sun, I just checked the weather and it's currently 38 degrees in Gainesville. Roughly the same, if not a bit cooler, as it is in New York City. So I'll dress warmly, and if any of you have recommendations for bands I should see (or avoid), feel free to send them along. Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow night with a report from the front.

Je Tombe Pour Paris - Encore Une Fois

In the fall of 1980 my friend David won an airline ticket in some contest. Needing money far more than a holiday, he immediately set about trying to convince me to buy it from him.

I wasn't especially interested, having already had a very hectic year of both foreign and domestic misadventures, but he persisted, pointing out that the ticket was valid for any three destinations, and would allow me to stay away for up to a year. The latter point sounded appealing, or would have, except that my parents were making their first-ever visit to California in only three weeks time, and I of course was expected to be there to welcome them.

Somehow David persuaded me anyway, and I took the ticket off his hands and planned a quick trip that would give me one week each in Paris, Rome and Cairo. Why those three cities, especially when I'd already been to the first two? I have no idea, but that's not germane to the story anyway.

I arrived in Paris on the 22nd of October, and was introduced to the obdurate bureaucracy of the Arab world when I tried to obtain a visa for the Egyptian leg of my trip. It took me the better part of a week of traveling back and forth across town before I succeeded in persuading the Egyptian embassy to fill two pages of my passport with an elaborate montage of stamps and licenses, and by that time I'd already missed my flight to Rome. Well, not so much missed it as simply let it go.

I'd taken up lodging in some fifth or sixth-floor garret in St. Germain-des-Prés, and fallen in with some of the local hipsters and street urchins (I believe SGdP was a good deal less posh in those days). After a few nights of guzzling vin rouge and babbling about philosophy until dawn, I figured I might as well buy a beret and a goatee and stick around.

I never actually obtained either item, but a week later, on my birthday as it happened, I took a melancholy wander around the city on what turned out to be a preternaturally warm and beautiful day for so late in the season. I remember spending a long while in the Jardin du Luxembourg and watching a puppet show, and later in the day I found myself sitting across the river from the Eiffel Tower. But as it got dark and a chill set in, I began feeling sorry for myself, what with being alone on my birthday, and decided to treat myself to a full-fledged sit-down meal in a genuine French restaurant (up to this time I'd been mostly living on fast food and takeaways).

I ordered lapin au moutarde - the first, and I believe only time I've ever had rabbit - and a bottle of wine, among other things, realizing that the bill was going to come to something like $25, which at the time seemed like a phenomenal amount. But when I asked for it, I was told that it had already been paid "par les mademoiselles-là."

I looked in the direction indicated by le garçon and saw two giggling girls who were at most about 19 or 20 and did not at all look like they could afford to be splashing out $25 on a stranger's dinner. I tried to persuade them that I was in a better position to pay the bill than they were, but they wouldn't hear of it, and instead dragged me off to someplace called "Club Romeo," a working class disco in some part of Paris I'd never seen before. It was kind of a New Wave version of the place where John Travolta and his oikish mates hung out in Saturday Night Fever, albeit with distinctly French variations like floor-to-ceiling mirrors, in front of which one perfectly coiffed young dandy was intently grooving to, naturellement, Generation X's "Dancing With Myself."

That was the beginning of a 12-day séjour replete with random dashes across town at insensible hours to destinations unspecified, glances pregnant with import that was never specified, and an endless variety of sighs, most but not all inaudible, all played out at a herky-jerky pace and in dimly lit surroundings that made it feel as though our world had gone all black and white. In other words, very much those arty French films I'd spent much of the 70s watching but seldom understanding.

Of the two girls, one was sharp and angular and the other round and slightly squishy - someone less charitable or less under the spell of Paris than I was might have said she was verging on overripe. Sylvie was the name of the edgy one, and despite having barely entered her 20s, already had a careworn and beset look about her face that you felt would not age well. Maryse was the other one, and all these years I've thought of her as "joconde," as in a combination of jovial and rotund (that plus the fact that we saw the Mona Lisa together), only to discover today that except as a proper name, there is no such French word.

Although Maryse smiled frequently, it was most often wan and wistful, and she harbored a deep sadness that only became fully evident on the last night I spent with the girls before flying back to California. Against my vehemently stated wishes, I'd been dragged to see Bette Midler's The Rose, a ludicrous vanity pic in which the normally talented Ms. Midler doubly miscast herself, first as a rock star, then as a heroin addict. I continued to express my dissatisfaction all through the film by sardonic comments and snorts of barely suppressed laughter, and at the end Maryse, literally in tears, called me une bête méchante and informed me that her mother was a heroin addict.

This wasn't the first time emotional fireworks had flared up among the three of us - in fact they were a near-constant - but they were by far the worst, and though we had patched things up by the time I took my leave, the spell had been broken. I may have written to them once after arriving back in the US, but never heard from or of them again. I should mention that the entire time we were together it was never made clear which if either of them I was expected to be with, though it often seemed that they were both vying for my affections, and nearly all the blowups that happened had their origins in my paying too much or too little attention to one or the other.

The plan, as it often is for a young American besotted with Paris and its inhabitants, was for me to make a quick trip to California to see my parents and get my affairs in order, at which point I'd return to Paris, presumably forever. As you might have guessed, it never happened, though it easily could have. In the many years since, I've stopped by briefly on a couple occasions, but never found that sort of connection with the city again. During all the years I lived in London, I never once took the opportunity to hop over on the Eurostar, and even, to my shame, joined in some of the French-bashing that flared up in the US after 9/11 and which has been a constant in the UK since at least the War of the Roses.

Well, at last I've come back, and can't help wondering what would have happened if I had followed through on my plan to move here in 1980. Presumably my French would be a good deal better instead of having noticeably deteriorated, but on the other hand, most Parisians seem to have learned English, a skill they either lacked or refused to display on my earlier visits. It's a bit frustrating, in fact; because it's no longer necessary to speak French, it's that much harder to relearn even what little I did know of the language.

Apart from that, however, the city is as beautiful and wonderful as ever, perhaps even more so, and tomorrow, my birthday, I will retrace some of my steps of that day 28 years ago, beginning with the Jardin du Luxembourg and then on to the Tuileries. I'm not expecting - nor even am I particularly desiring - a strenuous aventure of the sort that befell me way back when, but perhaps I will, just for old time's sake, stop in at the restaurant on the Boulevard St. Michel and order the lapin au moutarde just to see what happens.

By the way, I quite literally fell for Paris last night when I walked into one of those chains that are sometimes stretched along sidewalks at an altitude of 12 inches or so for reasons I've never quite understood - it's not as though they're really going to stop you crossing there, though in my case, I suppose this one did, as I went flying and landed flat on some very hard pavement with a rather frightening thud (at least the couple walking in front of me looked terrified). It's kind of a miracle that nothing was broken; I didn't even do any damage to my clothes, though my dignity was certainly shaken. But it was the kind of fall that in the space of less than a second could change everything - a broken leg or hip or skull could just have easily been the result if there'd only been an inch or two difference in the angle at which I hit the pavement. But it didn't, and apart from some aches and pains in my hands that I used to break the fall, I'm about as close to good as new as I'm ever likely to be and ready to venture out once more into these beautiful autumn streets in search of the perfect batch of pommes frites de la liberté.

Brighton Breakdown

Despite their having left the Copyrights stranded in France, we couldn't pass up another opportunity to see the Zatopeks, so Wes, Georgina and I piled into the behemoth American Jeep Cherokee that Wes unaccountably imported to the UK when he moved over here from Los Angeles and motored on down the A23 to London-on-Sea, otherwise known as Brighton, the town made famous by Graham Greene and inedible rock candy.

Why Wes was so attached to his Cherokee that he was willing to put up with a wrong-sided steering wheel and its gas-guzzling ways in the land of $8 a gallon petrol (now down to a mere $6, thanks to the collapse of the pound against the dollar) I never knew, and for the first few months urged him to sell it at a profit to one of London's many gangsta wannabees, but as time went on and El Jeepo transported us very comfortably, safely and warmly to many of our West Country walking destinations, any animus I might have held vanished. And, it has to be said, even with its exorbitant petrol consumption, it was still cheaper than British Rail.

Our trip down to the South Coast was as uneventful as it was pleasant, and we got there just in time to see most of the Blankheads (the band mistakenly spell it Blank Heads, but it's hoped that they will soon see the error of their ways), who are quite a lively little Crimpshrine-esque outfit, made yet more lively by the addition of bassist/sometime singer Pippa, who stands front and center and plays somewhat the same role as Michelle in the Steinways, only more loudly, brazenly, and with an ear-splitting Cockney/Sarf London accent. You'd think, given the surfeit of Crimpshrine-inspired bands (why, there's a whole festival in Florida next week featuring about 180 of them), there'd be nothing special about yet another, but somehow there is, even if I can't put my finger on it exactly. The shirtless drummer looked as though he'd accidentally wandered in from Dazed and Confused (the movie, not the magazine), the other (male) singer delivered a most impassioned Jeff Ott-style growl, and I can't remember much about the other guitarist except that he was good; somehow it added up to something fresh and energizing, and I hope to see them again. The Gainesville Fest 2009 would be a particularly good fit.

The Hotlines, Brighton locals, drew a big crowd and didn't fail to please, though I was kind of meh about them. Excellent musicians, but undistinguished songs. The Zatopeks then hopped onstage and showed once more why there are unquestionably the best band in Europe, and why they're not headlining Milton Keynes Bowl or Wembley Stadium remains a mystery to me. Then it was midnight and time to go back to London. We traipsed up the hill in the wind and rain to where El Jeepo was resting, only to discover that he was in no mood to continue to do anything else. A lot of strange dimmmings and flashings of lights led one to the inescapable conclusion that either the battery was flat or the entire electrical system had taken industrial action.

Fortunately - extremely fortunately - Georgina turned out to be a paid-up member of the AA (that's Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous, for my American readers) and after a mere 80 minutes on a dark and windy Brighton hillside, a gruff but competent fellow called Steve turned up and put us to rights. Back in London at 3:30 am, I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed about more mechanical breakdowns that left me stranded it various sorts of mountain fastnesses with ravenous polar bears on the prowl, but all's well that ended well, and even El Jeepo stands forgiven; it was a good night out.

Little Britain 1, Copyrights 0

I'd feel pretty bad if seeing the Zatopeks and the Copyrights playing together was the only reason I'd popped over to this side of the Atlantic. Thankfully, I'd rationalized that I needed a little trip as a birthday present to myself (this coming Tuesday, if any of you want to get in on the present-giving action), and it seemed like a good idea to time it so as to coincide with the Zatopeks-Copyrights tour. If I'd known it was going to turn out like this, maybe I would have waited till November and followed Delay around instead.

Well, I didn't do too much following anyway; originally I was hoping to see half a dozen shows in France, Belgium and the UK, but as the time approached, things got pared down to only three shows, one in Paris and one each in London and Brighton. The only one that worked out turned out not even to be in Paris, but in a suburb called Malakoff (not nearly as grim as it sounds; it was sort of the Gallic version of Secaucus if you're a New Yorker or Barnet if you're a Londoner). So I rode the Metro out nearly to the end of the line and saw the Zatopeks and Copyrights play for a smallish crowd in the back room of what resembled a French sports bar. The reception from the Frenchies was a bit desultory, but one got the impression that they were about as excited as they ever get, apart from when they're ripping up cobblestones and beheading kings, that is.

So far so good. I was really looking forward to the next night's gig, even if it was in Brixton, not exactly one of London's garden spots (more or less a cross between Crown Heights and Trenton NJ). But the Windmill pub is a decent enough place, if a bit grotty, and as it would be something of a homecoming for the 3/5 German-based Zatopeks, I anticipated a large and lively crowd.

Well, the crowd was there, but not the Copyrights. Seems they'd tried riding across the UK-French border in the van with the Zatopeks, along with all their merchandise, and were rather rudely shocked when the UK customs authorities proved none too keen on letting them into the country. So not keen, in fact, that they turned them around and sent them right back into France, where they sit at this moment in an F1 hotel by the side of a motorway waiting for the Zatopeks to return and pick them up for the final two gigs in Belgium and Holland.

Everyone seemed genuinely shocked by this turn of events, even though I'd raised the issue the night before in Paris. "I don't think it'll be a problem," declared Fletcher, "the Zatopeks said they go back and forth all the time and have never had a problem."

Yeah, but the Zatopeks are British, I pointed out, while you guys aren't. I don't expect to have trouble being allowed back into my own country, but that doesn't mean I can bring along a few Mexican friends and tell the border guard, "Hey, it's cool, they're with me." But there's no sense in blaming the Zatopeks either; after all, one would assume that since the UK is part of one big happy European Union and since people and goods are allowed to move freely all through said Union, bands allowed to play in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, etc., should be allowed to do likewise in Britain. And in fact traveling between most European countries these days is not much different from traveling between American states.

But Britain has never adjusted to this new reality. A significant body of British public opinion was very much against the Channel Tunnel, presumably in the belief that if you put a hole under the Channel, hordes of Frenchmen and even less salubrious foreigners would suddenly come popping out of it, and while you can now travel from London to Paris with minimal fuss, almost like taking an extended subway ride, the return trip continues to be the kind of hellish ordeal that only British Rail and British Customs could devise, with long queues and nosy border guards demanding to know the purpose of your coming to London (how about because it's there, one of the principal reasons people have been flocking to great cities since time immemorial?).

The ironic thing is that despite its almost obsessive paranoia about maintaining its own separate borders, the UK is probably more awash in guns, drugs and illegal immigrants than any country in Europe, and the authorities seem absolutely powerless to do anything about it. However, the timid burghers of little Britain can sleep comfortably tonight knowing that Johnny Foreigner has not been able to sneak his pernicious brand of American pop punk with an eye to debasing pristine British culture or undermining the fragile British economy by flogging half a dozen CDs and t-shirts.

God knows I love this country and its people just as much as the one I was born in, and I still have many regrets about leaving it when I did, but one thing I don't miss is the incredible bloody-mindedness that still reigns rampant in so many quarters. But before I ride any further on my high horse, I should bear in mind that by all accounts, American customs and immigration is, if anything, even worse. And if you've ever tried taking your band back and forth across the American-Canadian border, you'd know that while NAFTA allows oil tankers, logging trucks, and billions of dollars in goods and money to flow freely between the two countries, a band not big enough to afford a license (aka a work permit) is begging to be taken out and crucified if they're not good enough at dissembling their way across the border.

So, next time, Copyrights (or any other band hoping to enter Britain): get out of the van, pretend you're a tourist, and ride across as a foot passenger. "Even crusties have known that for ages," opined Sean Hard Skin, who stood disconsolately outside the Windmill, having come specifically to see the Copyrights. Well, as the Copyrights themselves put it, "Shit's fucked but what can you do?" The Zatopeks were still awesome, and will be again tomorrow night at the Prince Albert in Brighton.

Back To Normalcy

It was actually the promise of "a return to normalcy" that swept that paragon of Presidential virtue, Warren G. Harding, into the Oval Office and set the stage for one of the most corrupt, exciting and disastrous decades in American history.

The disaster, of course, wouldn't become plain for all to see until some years after Harding abruptly left office, his death only slightly attenuating his claim as the worst President in US history, at least until George W. Bush came along. Apart from a phenomenal amount of corruption to which he may or may not have been a witting party, there was little to distinguish Harding apart from his mediocrity, but as Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska famously declared, mediocre people were "entitled to a little representation, too."

But what put me in mind of Harding's "normalcy" schtick was the collective sigh of relief on Monday when the Dow Jones soared nearly a thousand points and investors, like children emerging from a haunted house, began to allow that they'd never really been scared and how they'd known all along that it hadn't been a real stock market crash. Or, even if it had, we'd now hit bottom and were on our way back to, erm, normalcy.

The euphoria didn't last long, and by Wednesday we were Armageddon-bound all over again, something that might/should have added an extra fillip to the presidential debate, but probably didn't. I say probably only because I saw only bits and pieces of it shown after the fact, just enough to have it made more evident than ever before that John McCain is batshit crazy, and that's putting the most charitable spin on it. He's still trying to convince us that Obama is some kind of dangerous radical, but on present form, the only danger likely to emanate from a President Obama is that of his boring us into stupefaction.

Don't get me wrong; I've come to quite like the guy. But either he's holding a lot back for fear of alienating potential voters, or beneath his carefully cultivated surface there's nothing but more surface. Nevertheless, I'll happily vote for him, which marks the first presidential election I've been able to do that since... well, I don't remember when. George McGovern in 1972, maybe, but I was on 10 hits of acid at the time, and not just any old acid, either, but a dark blue version of Orange Sunshine marketed under the moniker of Midnight Sun.

At the time it didn't strike be as the slightest bit remarkable that someone whose brain waves compared unfavorably with that morning's scrambled eggs was being allowed to help choose the leader of the Free World. I was convinced that if I pulled the lever with sufficient élan while chanting the proper mantra, "the vibes" I'd thereby send out into the system would connect to the neural grid of America's collective conscience and guarantee a McGovern victory.

I walked out of the polling station and into a warm neon rain; back at the hippie house, we waited expectantly for the results to be announced, and I at least was genuinely shocked when it took the networks a minute or two to declare Richard Nixon the winner of one of the most lopsided landslides in history. I was absolutely staggered, gobsmacked, as I'd come to say in my as yet unforeseen English future. How could it be possible that tens of millions of Americans had somehow failed to tune in to my cosmic message? I was so involved in ruminations over this mystery that I completely forgot about the vow I'd made: that in the event of a Nixon victory I would fly to Washington, douse myself in gasoline, and incinerate myself Vietnamese-monk-style in front of the White House.

Well, that was then, and look how far we've come in only 36 years! Well, at least I'm not on acid anymore. And America looks poised to elect its first president since John F. Kennedy with more than two syllables in his name!

Back here in Planet Brooklyn, a couple of developments. Okay, this isn't Brooklyn news per se, but New Jersey's Ergs are breaking up for reasons too sad to recount here. However, they've planned one last weekend of shows which are shaping up to be, well, mega, at least by any standards that generally apply to sort of semi-famous band that's only barely been heard of outside of a very specific, relatively small, but rabidly fanatic scene. At any rate, people are flying in from all over for this, and it feels a bit like the last Operation Ivy show, where 1,000 people somehow crammed into a 250-capacity Gilman to mark the end of an era that hadn't really begun yet.

So too with the Ergs, who while enjoying the passionate, mad, unreasoning devotion of several hundred pop punk devotees in the greater New York-New Jersey area, have only just begun to achieve recognition on a broader scale. They may not go on to sell a million records after they break up, as Op Ivy did (their breakup show was also their record release show), but then again, they just might. At any rate, I'm taking every opportunity to see the Ergs during the next four weeks, and you should, too.

With that in mind, I went down to the rather grandiosely named Danbro Brewery Warehouse in East Williamsburg (aka Bushwick) to see the Ergs open for the Dillinger 4. I suppose it may have been a brewery at one time, but now it just smelled like one, with five hundred or a thousand punks, hipsters, and beardos stumbling, swaying, and barreling (see, there's that brewery theme again!) around. Unfortunately I got there too late to see the Ergs, whose set was rather violently truncated when the stage collapsed underneath them, and had no interest in seeing the Dillinger 4, especially after having endured Paddy's spectacularly unfunny rock star rant about "Brooklyn cocaine" at last year's Gainesville Fest.

I stuck around anyway, mostly for the sake of socializing with the PPMB crew, who were out in force, having braved the unspeakable journey from the nether realms of Queens, but also to take in the atmosphere. The warehouse felt like an old school punk rock venue in inverted commas, slightly contrived but with a genuine frisson of danger. Not so much from the neighborhood, which might have been risk 10 or 15 years ago but is inexorably being hipsterized now, but from teh warehouse itself, which, like the stage, looked as though parts of it could collapse at any moment.

A visit from the fire marshal and/or the police could have yielded enough violations to keep promoter Todd P tied up in court through the rest of the noughties, but this event seemed sufficiently on the DL to forestall that likelihood. Among the less salubrious aspects: liquored-up fatasses jumping off of amps and the lighting tower into the crowd from an altitude of 15 feet or more, porta-potties instead of plumbing, and wholesale violation of the smoking laws despite there being a perfectly wonderful outdoor balcony from which one could not only pollute the air to one's heart's content, but also admire the rugged brick structure of the warehouse and a spectacular full moon on an impossibly warm October night. Fly in the ointment, or perhaps quite a few flies: that's also where the porta-potties were sited.

Anyway, I watched a little bit of D4; they seemed to be playing better and spending a lot less time trying to be comedians than in Gainesville, but any advantage thus gained was more than nullified by the abysmal sound system, which despite possessing sufficient volume to blow the entire assemblage halfway to Canarsie, delivered little more than a massive booming echo chamber through which one got occasional hints of guitar and vocals, but not much more. By the time the show was over, half the people I knew were outside, but a fun night nonetheless.

The reason I was late and missed the Ergs was that I was moving. Yes, again; my third apartment in less than two years in Brooklyn, and all of them on the same block. The new place is a wonderful change from the attic hovel I've been infesting for the past 13 months, but getting from there to here involved carrying everything by hand down three flights of stairs, approximately 200 feet down the street, and up another flight of stairs. I had the much-appreciated help of Nato and Danny's moving services to get my ridiculously giant desk and some other large items out of there, but the following two days it was just me, one trip at a time, each round trip involving eight flights of stairs. I estimate that the move involved approximately 50 such trips, which means that in two days I've climbed the Empire State Building nearly four times. And here I was feeling bad that I didn't get to the gym.

So now I'm settled in, but not really; my desk is here and I'm sitting at it, and the internet is working, thanks to some generous neighbor's unrestricted wireless connection, but nearly every other tangible aspect of my life is scattered somewhere on the floor around me. I have two days to put it into some sort of order before taking off for my birthday trip; the thought of coming back to see multiple piles of rubble still adorning this otherwise splendid apartment is highly dispiriting. As I moved the last couple dozen boxes and milk crates, I found myself devoutly wishing I'd thrown most of this stuff out several moves ago, and wondering when or if it will ever prove fruitful to have held on to all this junk for so many years. Well, it's here now, and so am I, and maybe in the morning I can make some sense out of it. But right now, it's off to bed, perchance to dream of little elves who will come scampering in during the night to sort it all out for me. On the off chance that they don't turn up, however, I'm going to need some rest.

The Lengthening Shadows

I suppose it's inconsiderate of me to disappear for a few weeks and then return with a pro forma political diatribe that offers not a word of explanation as to where I've been or why I seem to have deserted the world of electronic letters.

Yes, well, I have no explanation apart from alienation or sheer laziness or a crisis of the spirit or, erm, sheer laziness. Every day I think all sorts of thoughts, often taking the trouble to craft them into eloquent or at least elegant sentences that cause me to think, "Now that would be an excellent topic for a blog post," only to reflect further that, "Oh, but it's late, I'm tired, I have to get up early in the morning, and besides, what do I have to say that hasn't already been said and won't get me laughed at?"

Unfortunately, the answers that the cosmos (aka the space between my ears) most frequently hurls back at me are "Yes" and "Nothing." So then I stomp around in an inarticulate snit, perhaps run a few laps around the track in McCarren Park (I'm up to three miles on a regular basis now in the unlikely event that you cared), and curse the gathering darkness.

By which I don't mean the economic and political Armageddons looming on the horizon, though they're sufficiently gloom-inspiring all by themselves, but rather the inexorable retreat of the sun toward the southern hemisphere and the shorter days and chillier nights that trail behind it. The corner of the park where I do t'ai chi, a location bathed in sunshine from May until September, will spend the next six months swathed in shadows cast by nearby buildings. The running track still gets sun over all but the southern quadrant, but that won't last much longer either. And soon the feeble bits of sun that manage to work their way through the winter murk won't even put a dent in the frigid winds howling down from the north.

It seems kind of stupid to be whining about the onset of winter at the moment; apart from a coldish spell that fell upon us in the first week of October, we've been enjoying some of the most beautiful weather imaginable these past several days. Even now, after midnight, my windows are all open and I could comfortably stroll out into the street wearing no more than a t-shirt and jeans. And this is supposed to carry on for most of the week to come.

But I'm not fooled; this interval of what used to be called Indian Summer (perhaps it still is; I'm just guessing that some identity politics crackpot or other would have put a stop to that usage by now) makes it all the more clear what lies ahead: three, four, maybe even five months of bundling up in heavy clothes and dashing as quickly as possible from doorway to subway and back again. No more time for leisurely street corner chats or lolling about in the park until three in the morning on one of those summer nights when eternity doesn't seem like such a very long time after all.

Autumn used to be my favorite season and October my favorite month, and not merely because it's my birthday month (if anything, the contrary, since I've a long history of not particularly successful birthdays). But something has changed, and now it's all about summer. The whole rest of the year seems to be about wishing it was summer, anticipating summer, or grieving summer's passing. Probably not the best way to live for someone who insists on dwelling this far north. But then what would New York be like if it had Miami's (or Honolulu's) climate? Very different, I'm guessing, and not necessarily in a good way.

Anyway, I've chosen to live here and it seems as though I should at least make a stab at embracing the nine months of the year that aren't summer, especially considering that at my age, three-month years tend to spin by rather quickly. And life seems to be looking up, despite rampant disaster in the economic sphere. I'm cautiously optimistic about the election, I've just found a new apartment down the block which is about a zillion (well, half zillion, anyway) times better than my current hovel, and at the end of the week I'm off to Paris to see the Zatopeks and Copyrights and celebrate my birthday.

Of course I'm a little concerned that if things continue to deteriorate at the rate they've been, I could find myself overseas the day they close down all the banks and declare our currency worthless, and thus end my days as a vieux clochard in one of the less renowned arrondissements.

Last week my niece Gabrielle Bell and I went to see Alice Munro speak, and it filled me with dreams of Ontario, the flat, nondescript and superficially uninviting southwest corner thereof where many of my ancestors inexplicably chose to settle, and where Munro, who could at this point live anywhere she wished to, continues to dwell. There was something very comforting in her flat, slightly clipped tones that evoked memories of a dozen or more aunts and cousins who displayed that same matter-of-fact devotion to simply getting on with it, a quality I see in Gabrielle herself when she tackles her drawing, even if she's barely ever set foot in Ontario.

I think she and I will make a pilgrimage up there someday soon, the only question being whether to do it now and risk the early onset of a Canadian winter, or wait till spring, which can be a pretty fickle and unreliable commodity in those parts. For me personally, I'd prefer to ramble across Ontario in the bleakness of November than the perennially false dawn of April, but that's probably just me being moody. I should get to bed. Big day of moving tomorrow.

We're All Socialists Now, Comrade

Given that he's writing for the Telegraph, it's not likely that Simon Heffer will see the above sentiment as a salubrious development. But like it or loathe it, it recognizes an ineluctable fact: the radical, ideologically driven devotion to the principles of "free" markets and enterprise that has reigned triumphant since the days of Ronald Reagan is now dead as the Wall Street cat that hasn't managed so much as a desultory bounce during these past ten days of Black October.

It's a bit edifying to see the Masters of the Universe scramble like so many squealing mice for their bailout of government cheese, in much the same that the class bully goes bawling to his parents the minute some upstart has the temerity to bloody his nose, but given that we're the ones expected to pay for this disaster - not to mention suffer its consequences - it's scant consolation.

Like many people of my generation, I grew up steeped in parental tales of the Great Depression, riddled with a gnawing guilt about wasting money or failing to either use or save every scrap of anything that might ever come in handy, and deeply suspicious of any person, corporation or institution that seemed to exhibit a cavalier or proprietary attitude toward the nation's wealth. My father did most of the griping - a clear case of horses for courses, as I'm sure you'd agree if you'd ever met the man - but as it turns out, most of his anti-capitalist bias, including his 1936 vote for Norman Thomas, was motivated by his loss of $300 in a 1932 bank failure. Apart from that, he had a relatively cushy Depression, even going off to study at art school for a couple years in the mid-30s.

My mother, on the other hand, was made homeless when her parents' house was repossessed, leaving her family to shelter in the unheated attic of acquaintances from church, something I never knew until more than 70 years later, when she almost tearfully described the shame she had felt over something she, as a bewildered and frightened 12 year old, had had absolutely no control over.

All the worst tales of the Depression seemed to revolve around the early 1930s, even though some of the most dire economic conditions were yet to come later in the decade. But it seemed as though once the do-nothing (or, perhaps more accurately, the do-all-the-wrong-things) Hoover administration had been turned out of office and replaced by Roosevelt and his New Deal, the spirits, if not the bank balances, of the people never sunk quite so low again.

So in at least one sense we're very fortunate that the Crash of '08 has come at a time when we're only three months rather than three years from an election that could and almost certainly will alter our future as dramatically as any in memory. Note that I didn't necessarily say whether this alteration will be for the better or worse: while I grow more convinced by the day that the election of John McCain - and his eventual replacement by a President Palin that would ensue with the grim certainty of a Greek tragedy - would be a disaster of greater than Hooverian proportions. I know I'm not alone in feeling that McCain has managed to squander the fundamental respect that he enjoyed from most Americans, even dyed-in-the-wool Democrats - by resorting to a mean-spirited McCarthyism and ill-considered opportunism that - I never thought I'd see the day - actually makes the present occupant of the White House look good - well, not so bad, anyway - by comparison.

I don't say this lightly; it was less than six months ago that I could have imagined myself possibly voting for McCain. Back then I thought Barack Obama, despite his rhetorical gifts and statesmanlike demeanor, was simply too far to the left on too many issues. Although he's managed to allay my suspicions in some areas, I still fear he might turn out to be more of a Carter than the Roosevelt (either one will do, but preferably FDR) we clearly need.

And yet, just as we were told - whether correctly or not - about the bank/Wall Street bailout, we don't have a lot of options in the matter. A McCain-Palin presidency would likely usher in a depression on a scale that even veterans of the 1930s might be unable to imagine. At the beginning of that depression, Americans were without virtually all the government assurances and insurances that we've come to take for granted in the intervening 70 years. The government was able to introduce ideas like Social Security, bank deposit insurance, stock and banking regulation, job and infrastructure programs, none of which brought immediate relief, but all of which began the absolutely necessary process of restoring people's hope and confidence that things were ultimately going to turn around.

Today we have all those programs and more, to the point where one of the only tools left to the government is to flood the market with newly minted - and thus increasingly less valuable - dollars, to the point where there exists a very real possibility of the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world doing an Iceland, i.e., collapsing into national bankruptcy. When that happened to New York City in the 1970s, the rest of the country could barely suppress its snickers and Schadenfreude over how the mighty had been brought low: can we expect any different from an international community that feels - rightly or wrongly - that it has been unjustly condemned to live in America's shadow during this past half century?

Right now it looks as though Obama, despite the contemptible depths to which McCain has shown himself willing to stoop, is likely to sweep into office in a landslide, much as FDR did in 1932. Will he be up to the task of uniting and inspiring a nation on the scale necessary, not to mention bringing in the sort of brain trust that will be needed to extricate ourselves from the calamity that unregulated and unconstrained avarice has brought us to? We can only hope, comrade, we can only hope. At this point we don't have a whole lot of other options.

A Sweet Little Bittersweet Story

I was hanging out on Second Avenue, talking over old times and people with Adrian, who, it turns out, used to live in the same house in San Francisco that I did, back when it was inhabited by members of the Cockettes and Angels of Light, and, it further turns out, hightailed it out of San Francisco around the same time I did in 1973 and wound up on 11th Street - as I did.

The difference was that I went skulking back to San Francisco the following year, whereas Adrian has been in New York ever since. From time to time I kind of regret not sticking it out here in the city, but I guess I just wasn't ready back then, and sometimes wonder if I am even today. New York's a very different place - almost unrecognizably so - from what it was in the 70s, but while the sheer physical brutality and ugliness of the bad old days has all but vanished - or at least been driven to the nether reaches of the outer boroughs, there's still a metaphysical intensity that can pummel the soul with the same grim certainty and persistence that the Atlantic unleashes upon the perennially eroding shoreline.

But oh, never mind; I only meant to say that Adrian highly recommended the new movie Ghost Town, which, judging from the previews I'd seen, didn't seem particularly funny or entertaining. Well, I took Adrian's advice and headed up to Times Square to see it, and all I can say is that whoever threw together the trailer should be fired forthwith, because the movie is both hilariously funny and deeply touching. I wouldn't have thought Ricky Gervais had it in him to stretch beyond his usual drolly misanthropic schtick, but I couldn't have been more wrong: while there's plenty of the usual Gervaisian moaning and muttering, the man actually can act. Well, I assume that's what he was doing, to get all of us in the cinema to practically want to hug him by the time the credits rolled. A nice little meditation on how to live, and why. Perfect for seeing one of these melancholy nights as autumn closes in. New York (do they actually make films in any other city anymore?) has seldom looked lovelier as well.

Middlesex Update

All my kvetching of a couple days ago notwithstanding, I'm continuing to read Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex and getting quite a bit out of it. Admittedly I'm skimming over the bits where J.E. tries to get all literary on us, but now that he's managed to transport his first couple of protagonists to 1920s Detroit, there's enough period detail to keep me enthralled.

I especially liked his introduction of the Ford Rouge plant, or the Rouge, as it was known then and during my own 1950s childhood, when it continued to tower balefully over Downriver and with billowing clouds of black, acrid smoke blot out the sun and the sky and most other signs of life, love or hope.

I never actually worked at the Rouge, though I was taken there several times on school or Scout tours. Since it was assumed that half or more of us would probably end up there, I suppose they thought it made sense to get us used to the idea. If you ever get a chance to see the Diego Rivera murals in the entrance hall to the Detroit Institute of Art - the Sistine Chapel of the factory classes, I always called it - you'll notice the portrayal of tour groups who from balconies observe the assembly line workers who in Rivera's rendering have begun to inelectuably merge with the machinery. Local auto magnates tried to have the murals erased when they saw that implicit message, but in one of the rare times in Detroit history where art triumphed over philistinism, were unsuccessful.

Another aspect of Eugenides' portrayal that rang true - despite it being obvious that it had all come from assiduous research and that he himself had never set foot in the factories except possibly as a tourist - was that of the black workers being consigned to the hellish environs of the foundry, where they worked mere inches away from flames that blazed high above their heads. By the 1960s, blacks had made their way onto the assembly line and other less dangerous and more comfortable positions on the factory floor, but in the steel mill where I worked in 1969, the crew shoveling coal into the ovens was still almost uniformly black, and I remember marveling when I learned that for this work - which almost no white man, even the most recent immigrant, was expected to do - they were actually paid less than those of us who did the somewhat cushier - "cushy" being an extremely relative term on Zug Island - jobs upstairs.

Anyway, while I'm still slightly bristling over the Briggs Stadium/Thanksgiving Day parade cockups, I must give credit where it's due: Eugenides has done his homework and looks to be constructing a mighty fine portrait of that often less than mighty fine city (but we love her anyway), Detroit.

The Last Night Of Summer

When I was a wee lad one of the boys asked our Scoutmaster what the definition of summer was. He replied that it was that time of year when you could leave your house wearing only a t-shirt and not have to worry about carrying a sweater or jacket even if you were going to be out all night.

And that's always stuck with me. The true test of the summer is not the long, sunny days - you can have them almost any time of year except in the depths of winter - but the warm, almost tropical nights where you can walk around or ride your bike at 3 in the morning and never even think about putting on something warmer than the t-shirt and shorts you were wearing when you went out that afternoon.

And that's how it was last night for what was literally, i.e., chronologically, the last night of summer. I rode my bike over to McCarren Park to meet an old friend; we walked around for a couple hours, and then I retrieved my bike and got back home around midnight, never once wishing I'd worn anything warmer. Today, the first day of fall, was quite a different affair. The morning dawned sunny but much cooler, and by midday sullen clouds were scudding across and eventually overwhelming the sky.

I went out to the park to do some t'ai chi and some running - a new personal best of three miles, I note - and the weather made it easier yet more melancholy. My supposedly random iPod got in the spirit of things by serving up a topheavy diet of Joy Division and the bleaker, more wintry end of the Weakerthans catalog. In the evening I went off to the city carrying an umbrella but no jacket, my only concession to the change of season being a long rather than short-sleeved shirt, but I'd gotten it backwards. The clouds vanished and with them the remains of the day's warmth; by 9 or 10 o'clock the streets were no longer made for sweaterless walking and I reluctantly headed back to Brooklyn where, for the first time since June, I'll sleep with the windows shut.

A Sense Of Place

One of the things that can almost immediately spoil a piece of writing for me is a wrong place name. I can put up with paper-thin plots, cardboard characters, even - though with great reluctance - playing fast and loose with tense and perspective, but tell me that the action is unfolding on such-and-such street when I know perfectly well it's an avenue, and you're well on your way to losing me.

I'm not alone in this: at least two writers I admire greatly, Aaron Cometbus and John K. Samson have told me how important an accurate sense of place is to them. Aaron in particular can get extremely exercised when someone who purports to know his or her way around Berkeley misspells the name of his favorite cafe, and I don't blame him. It's bad enough when you're dealing with a memoir or a history: the immediate reaction is to wonder whether the writer was even there, or if we're just reading extrapolations from research that could have been conducted on a laptop parked in some cafe thousands of miles away.

But where it's really damaging is in a work of fiction. Unless a writer is an absolute master of the craft, he or she is depending on a certain willingness to suspend disbelief on the part of the reader. A single misspelled or misidentified place name is like the sour note that reduces an orchestra's otherwise sublime and soaring moment to bathetic farce, or when Romeo's impassioned declaration to Juliet is interrupted by a stagehand's cell phone going off.

It's probably why many of the best writers, even when they're clearly writing about the towns where they grew up or currently live, substitute a simulacrum or doppelgänger town. It's also why I've always been hesitant to write about London or New York, despite all the time I've spent in those cities: although I'd like to think I know them both reasonably well, there are always likely to be bits of knowledge that I'll have missed by not growing up there. Hell, I'm even afraid to tackle Detroit, even though I did grow up there, partly because it's been so long since I left, and partly because the city has changed nearly beyond recognition since that time.

Which brings me to my original point: for the last several years people have been telling me that since I was from Detroit, I "had to" read Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Even the Free Press, Detroit's approximate equivalent to the San Francisco Chronicle (figure out for yourself if that's a compliment), got in on the act: "At last Detroit has its great novel," it proclaimed, going on to compare it to Joyce's treatment of Dublin.

Well, that may be, but I'd only got to page 12 before the flowery if not downright rococo narrative delivered a distinct clunker. It was 1959, according to Eugenides, and the priest at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church regularly had to shush the parishioners because they "treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium." Only trouble is that in 1959, THERE WAS NO TIGER STADIUM. A small point, you say? Not to a kid who grew up attending games at Briggs Stadium, which was the name of the place until 1961 (and long after that to those who grown up under the old regime; it had taken my father at least 20 years to start calling it Briggs Stadium instead of Navin Field, and he wasn't about to change again).

Granted, Eugenides had barely been born at the time of the name change, but you have to wonder if he ever attended a game there or had any interest at all in Briggs/Tiger Stadium other than as a cheap and not particularly accurate simile: unlike some other towns, Detroit wasn't renowned for the antics of its bleacher bums, at least not in those days. But I do know that as a kid, I could have told you the entire history of the stadium, from its earliest beginnings as Bennett Park, when Ty Cobb led the Tigers to three consecutive pennants, and I wasn't half as nuts for baseball as some of the kids on my block. You'd think someone setting out to write the epic novel Middlesex is supposed to be could have at least checked with Wikipedia.

But never mind; let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was only off by a couple years, and as a prep schooler off in wealthy suburban Grosse Pointe probably never set foot anywhere near Michigan and Trumbull. But before he's even finished that paragraph, he unleashes an even more jarring solecism: something, he tells us, is "as big as a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade."

Okay, Eugenides, I know your biography says you were born in Detroit, but did you ever actually live there? If you had, wouldn't you know that Detroiters, at least not back then, did not think in terms of Macy's when it came to Thanksgiving Day parades? Why would we; we had our own J.L. Hudson Thanksgiving Day Parade that was as big and wonderful and magnificent as any kid could ever hope for. What did we care if they had some other parade at the same time in far-off New York, sponsored by some department store we'd never heard of?

Oh well. I've now read another five pages without encountering any egregious errors. And, as no doubt or more of you may take pains to point out, Eugenides wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and I'm writing a blog for a few hundred readers, so let's keep things in perspective. Also, all this fulminating has no doubt virtually guaranteed that if I ever do write something about Detroit, I'll make an ever bigger and more obvious mistake.

So I'll plow on with Middlesex and hope to be so wowed by its overall scope and excellence that my present indignation will be completely assuaged. Or nearly so, anyway. But based on what I've read so far, Eugenides is going to have to step up his game when it comes to painting a true picture of Detroit; as of now, Eminem's Eight Mile pisses all over it.

Remember Globalization? Remember Capitalism?

Seeing a MSNBC puff piece for Battle In Seattle, itself a puff piece that romanticizes and glorifies the know-nothing thugs who set out to destroy capitalism by smashing the windows at Starbucks back in 1999, I was reminded of those not-so-long-ago days when, we were told, global capitalism was rendering national governments obsolete.

Multinational or transnational corporations were too big, too powerful, too quick-moving and adaptable to be reined in or even troubled by government. The New World Order (remember that?) would see everything being run by corporations, which, depending on which end of the political spectrum you inhabited, would be either an Orwellian nightmare or a far more sensible and efficient arrangement.

All that ideological posturing and dogmatic folderol vanished faster than John Q. Public's 401(k) when things started getting scary for the financial institutions of the world. AIG may have had its tentacles in nearly every country in the developed world, but just like a trust fund kid who blew his load on whores and cocaine, wasted no time in running back to Big Daddy, Big Daddy in this case being the good old US government and its long-suffering taxpayers.

By the end of the week, capitalism itself had been put in abeyance. A couple of the crankier crankypants on CNBC and Fox were bellowing about how "We might as well be living in the Soviet Union" because their favorite hedge fund had been temporarily banned from short selling what was left of the financial system into the ground, but apart from them, there was near-unanimous agreement that the most radical governmental intervention in the marketplace since the days of FDR was not just desirable but absolutely necessary.

And it's hard to argue against that notion, regardless of what strange bedfellows it might entail. As the Guardian's Larry Elliott put it, "Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs tycoon who became US treasury secretary, have done more for socialism in the past seven days than anybody since Marx and Engels."

The question is, will it work? Although honesty requires me to confess to being as baffled as anyone up to and including President Bush about the precise nature of what is going on in the murky and opaque worlds of high finance, I do have a hunch that odds are probably no better than 50-50. Well, I hope they're better than that, not least because I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to relish the thought of living through Weimar-style hyperinflation or Mad Max Armageddon antics (when I was 20 I would have been positively salivating at the prospect). But I'm not counting on it, because it just may be that America, the banker and fiscal guarantor of last resort for much of the planet, may have already spent itself into terminal decline.

Which means, presumably, that I'd better not be counting on those Social Security payments to cushion the travails of my declining years. Question: in terms of the economy, is it likely to make much difference at this point whether McCain or Obama is elected in November? Maybe. If McCain gets elected AND if he keeps Paulson, Bernanke et al. on board AND if he keeps his own nose out of things (as Bush, in an uncharacteristic paroxysm of judiciousness, appears to be doing), we might muddle through. If, however, McCain, who has been appearing increasingly loopy and demented these past few days (or maybe he's always been a wild-eyed pathological liar and we just didn't notice) decides to put some of his own "ideas" into effect, he could have us waxing nostalgic over Herbert Hoover.

Obama, on the other hand... He has yet to display the Rooseveltian (or Kennedyesqe) timbre that the times call for, but at the same time, he hasn't said or done anything too foolishly awful. With the right staff and advisers, and some plans a bit more specific than "Change We Can Believe In," he could make a difference. For the better, I mean, though if he starts channeling his inner Jimmy Carter again, we're in big trouble.

In the long run I'm sure things will work out somehow, but we all (most of us, anyway) know what Keynes had to say about the long run. If my parents could get through the Great Depression and World War II, I suppose I can handle whatever the Masters Of The Universe (now, apparently, a wholly owned subsidiary of USA, Inc.) have cooked up for us. Eventually, should I live long enough, I may even be able to look back and laugh, but at the moment I'm more inclined to agree with Rudge, who, asked to define history, replied, "Well, it's just one fucking thing after another."

Obama: Too Wimpy To Be President?

The way things are going, you have to ask yourself if Barack Obama really wants to be President. Coming off a triumphant and nearly flawless convention, three to six points ahead in the opinion polls, facing an apparently weak opponent who wasn't particularly loved even by his own party, Obama was blindsided when McCain, who turned out to be far less moribund or dull-witted than he'd appeared, completely outmaneuvered him with his wily pick of the Alaskan pit bull for VP.

Since then the tables have turned completely, and it's Obama who looks like he's sleepwalking into oblivion. Oh sure, he's still putting forth solid, sensible proposals couched in crystal-clear and at times downright elegant language, but suddenly nobody is listening. They're too busy watching Obama get pummeled and pushed and bullied every which way from Sunday by a doddering old wreck and his strident female sidekick.

When it comes to making a scripted presentation to a stadium or lecture hall full of adoring followers, there's no one in the business who comes close to Obama (though Palin shows signs of giving him a run for his money). But in the rough and tumble cut and thrust of everyday politicking, Obama is like a deer caught in the headlights, the skinny kid on the playground who bullies naturally gravitate to, and who tries, usually with humiliating results, to reason his his way out of his predicament.

Americans like a little testosterone in their Presidents, and Obama is showing none. Joe Sixpack can be forgiven for asking how a President Obama would stand up to the Russians or Islamic terrorism if he turns to jelly in the face of insults from an inarticulate old man and a glib but ultimately silly woman. Even I, though I still want Obama to win, can't help wondering if he's up to the job.

This whole ridiculous lipstick-on-a-pig business (a phrase, by the way, that McCain used himself last year, and that Vice-President Cheney used at least three times during the 2004 campaign), for example: it's the perfect opportunity for Obama to stand up tall, and with an appropriate measure of disgust, say to the American people, "They (McCain and Palin) must think you're really stupid." He used that phrase once in reference to McCain's newfound strategy of selling himself as an agent of change, but he should make it his mantra, repeating it every time some Republican operative or talk show host tries to hijack the discussion into the realm of preposterous namecalling and accusations, every time McCain or his minions trot out yet another lie about taxes or national defense or "change."

Instead he staggers from one onslaught to the next, barely able to mount a credible defense, let alone the sort of scorched-earth offense he needs to lay on the bald-faced liars running the Republican campaign. Why isn't he? Either he's being very badly advised or he simply lacks the character.

Obviously I'm hoping for the former but fearing the latter. Could it be that Obama so resolutely plays Mr. Nicey-Nice-Above-The-Fray because he's wary of coming across to his white supporters as an Angry Black Man? Possibly, but if so he's already taken it way too far. Or maybe his mother taught him never to pick on girls, which might explain why he circles warily but speechlessly around The Palin while she's busily running off with his female voters. Or - and here's a touchy subject - could it be his experience with affirmative action, and its implicit lesson that adequate is a reasonable substitute for excellent?

Obama has refused to discuss whether he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but given the period when he went to college and the college he attended (Harvard has been especially assiduous in its pursuit of minority students, perhaps in hopes of defusing its longstanding reputation as a bastion of white male elitism) make it fairly likely. The bitter irony is that, as demonstrated daily by his obvious erudition, he had no need of affirmative action programs, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have been part of one, nor that he didn't absorb one of affirmative action's most pernicious lessons: that second or third best is more than good enough when combined with the "right" skin color.

I'd hate for any of this to be true, and love for Obama to prove me wrong by coming out kicking and screaming and cussing and punching on tomorrow morning's news. But I hope for the best while fearing the worst: that once again the Democrats will hand the country over to the radical right not through a paucity of ideas but from a failure of nerve. If nothing else - if Obama just can't bring himself to say something mean about his opponents - get Hillary Clinton on the case. Promise her Secretary of State or whatever else her little heart desires, but turn her loose on McCain and Palin and I guarantee you'll see some results. You might also get people wondering, "Tell me again why we nominated him instead of her," but that's the chance the Democrats have got to take. Unless of course they - and you - are quite happy with the way things are.