Hello again,
Only a week now until the day 50 or 60 million people will vote to grant George W. Bush "four more years" so that he can finish the job of driving the country and the world into an abyss. I still don't get it. Maybe I'm just wired wrong. Maybe it's not an advantage to have an entirely functional frontal lobe. I guess that's my problem: I think too much. Maybe if I just stopped thinking, I could understand George Bush and the millions who will vote for him.
This dangerous proclivity for cognitive reasoning was made painfully obvious to me after a recent conversation that I made the mistake of starting while perched upon a bar-stool at McCabe's, our friendly neighborhood pub (I think I've mentioned before that we don't live anywhere near McCabe's, but it is in a nice neighborhood...).
Last Thursday, as the Cardinals were putting away the Astros in the final game of the NLCS a woman took a seat to my left and placed a take-out order with Ken, the bartender. While ordering, she made a comment to Ken about the election, but cut off any further discussion by saying "let's not go there." I took that to mean that she and the bartender -- who I knew had already early-voted for John Kerry -- were on opposite sides of the political fence, but I wasn't sure.
A few moments later, the patron seated on my right lit up another cigarette -- probably his third in the 15 minutes I'd been seated next to him -- but had the courtesy to ask if the smoke was bothering me. It was, but it was my choice to come into a bar where people smoke, so I didn't think I was within my rights to tell him to put out his cigarette (we liberal-types, we are accommodating to a fault, aren't we?).
After a few more minutes of choking on this guy's fumes, I decided to move over one seat -- which put me next to the woman who was now drinking a glass of white wine and waiting for her take-out order. Being curious, but not wanting to start anything, I just asked her "Bush or Kerry?" and when she said "Bush," I started to wonder if the guy trying to kill me with his cigarette smoke wouldn't be a more suitable companion for rest the evening.