We got a late start today due to it being Sunday, and an early end, due to it being Fall after the end of Daylight Savings Time, which means that the sun sets long before you get anything of significance done. I was working a Ferguson precinct today, in the southern end of Park Forest and the neighborhoods north of the Blue Course. Park Forest is a sea of falling leaves, and half of that neighborhood was out in their yards, beating the leaf situation into submission.

Had one registered Republican with a huge yard absolutely full of Kerry/Edwards signs tell me with a straight face that he was “undecided”. Apparently this is code for “I don’t want to talk about it”. Given that he was the one with the weedwacker in his hands, I hope he wasn’t feeling “intimidated” or anything...

Is it just me, or are the Kerry/Edwards signs getting redder and redder as the season wears on? At the beginning of the campaign, they were a balanced if garish red/blue field, but lately the red borders are getting fatter and fatter and wider and wider. Almost looks like the “Kerry/Edwards” is drowning in a sea of blood or something. I wonder if it’s intentional? Some sort of peacenik code?

On the way out of the campaign office, I walked past an old coot in an undignified “Kerry/Edwards” t-shirt. He avoided my eyes in a very exaggerated fashion - staring down and away as he circled around me on the pavement. This pissed me off, and I yelled at him something to the effect of “if you can’t meet someone’s eyes, you might want to think again about your choice of candidate”. I mean, he almost seemed... ashamed. No doubt he felt “intimidated” by the fact that there was someone wearing a small “W ‘04” button on the same sidewalk as him, but really, I wasn’t doing anything other than trying to meet his eyes, and smiling.

Oh, well. People say I’m naturally intimidating, even when I’m not doing anything in particular.

I managed to get about five hours of door-to-door GOTV today, before hitting the wall and calling it a day. This is is reason #2312 why being a fat, out-of-shape otaku kind of sucks. Before I crapped out for the day, I managed to hit a good number of houses out in the suburban/farm country between Blanchard Street, Bishop Street, and Rt. 220/Rt. 26 - the "Spring South" precinct. I had thought that area was Benner Twp, I am now properly educated - it's Spring Twp. The houses are pretty spread out up that way, especially along Weaver Hill Road, which did the most to knock my legs out from under me.

The easiest part was the last thirty minutes before lunchtime, when I and the three out-of-county volunteers which I started with charged down Blanchard, skipping from townhouse complex to townhouse complex to get as many households as possible before the out-of-county kids had to take off for home. There are at least three very compact townhouse clusters along Blanchard, which have sprung up in the last five years or so. They're about as close as you get to population concentration in that precinct. For the most part, it's strips of oddly designed suburban-type houses on huge properties interspersed with soybean fields, grazing land, and the occasional farmstead.

There are some really excellent prospects along Weaver Hill Road. If I could actually, you know, afford a house, I'd love a place out on that road. Great view of both the Bald Eagles and the Nittanies, with farmland stretching in every direction. Very Republican folks up there. What few Bush/Cheney signs that have survived to this point are to be found out that way.

I'm going to try and work door-to-door again tomorrow, and then again on Monday. Hopefully my short hours today will mean that I have some get-up-and-go tomorrow.

State College is getting a little freaky. There are Kerry/Edwards signs everywhere, and sign-waving people are starting to get kind of in-your-face about it. Of course, it might have had something to do with the fact that I was still wearing a "W in '04" button as identification for the door-to-doors, and sitting, exhausted, in front of the Republican campaign office. Eh, never mind.

Megan McCardle of Asymmetrical Information, guest-blogging on Instapundit, summing up why she's coming down off the fence in favor of George Bush:

"Ultimately, I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change."

Here is Greenwood, better-known among tedious fanboys like yours truly as Koko wa Greenwood, is a pretty old manga. Most folks in the States know it by the highly amusing early-90s six-episode OAV series of the same name. Viz has started publishing the original manga, and I read the first volume yesterday. I looked at the original untranslated version a long time ago, when a roommate bought the set from a used-manga shop in Edgewater, but enough of the humor is verbal that it didn’t mean much to my Japanese-illiterate ignorance. The translated version made me laugh, repeatedly, in public.

It’s a boarding-school comedy, set at a famed all-boys academy in, of course, Tokyo. Our protagonist is a much-put-upon everyboy who’s living in student housing to avoid his insufferable older brother and his new wife, for whom our hero is holding a silly-school-boy torch - enough so that he was hospitalized for a month with a perforated ulcer. The manga starts more slowly than the anime did, but then, those six-episode OAV series were always, always distillations of the “high points” of their respective mangas, and thus generally came on like a freight train on fire.

The art-style is very much mid-Eighties shoujo, and looks similar to - oh, say, Please Save My Earth, another long-running shoujo manga from the same period, also given a distilled-six-episode-OAV treatment. There aren’t a lot of ziptones, but the backgrounds are well-populated, and this isn’t one of those spare-zen-whitespace affairs, or abstract-emotional-filler-background melodramas. You’ll have the occasional impressionistic arrangements of flowers in the backgrounds, but it’s not like the riot of folliage which Please Save My Earth’s mangaka is inclined to produce.

One of the distinctive qualities of Here is Greenwood is its portrayal of women as mildly predatory, and its teenaged boys as coquettish and aloof. Schoolgirls invade the boys’ dorm on daredevil raids, perform drive-by groping attacks, and chase them through streets to force chocolates on them for Valentine’s Day. Creepy older women appear, and attempt to bribe underage boys into dubious situations.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with it. I look forward to the next volume. If you can get past the slightly dated art style, there’s a lot of low-key amusement to be had.

I was particularly useless last night at the campaign office, but then, nothing much was happening other than ticket-issuance for today's Bush 41 event on campus. The phonebankers had burned through the entire calling list about a half-hour after I arrived on the scene, not that anyone in their right mind would ever put me on a phone bank. One good thing about the Republican way of politicking? One single calling operation, instead of a smallish party operation and dozens of uncoordinated 527, 501(c)3, and unidentifiable "nonpartisan" GOTV outfits, all of them calling everybody two or three or four or a dozen times. They’ll start in on the phonebanking again this weekend, with a focus on uncertain voters, and explicit get-out-the-vote agendas. I think.

The Halloween parade was marching through State College, right in front of the campaign office. It's been years since I saw one - when did the marching band start dressing in costume? We had folks with costumed kids in tow come in and out of the office all night, including a particularly cute little boy costuming as Dubya who came specifically to pose with the Bush standup cutout for a photograph.

Somebody told the underemployed volunteers to start blowing up balloons, for what purpose, nobody was quite sure. So, while one of the organizers was agitating for "cleaning up clutter", we were busy adding to the clutter by blowing up dozens and dozens of balloons, which accumulated in the under-utilized back section of the office. Eventually, we shovelled them all behind a desk at the back of the building, only popping a half-dozen or so in the process. There was some old Rendell material back there, from the last time the Democrats used that storefront for their campaign office.

This "Ode to a Wahabbi Jihadist" is brilliant. Great conclusion.

Some idiot had a "Paterno for Congress" sign out on Water Street down by Spring Creek. Not only are we not in the 17th Congressional District of Pennsylvania, (we're in Peterson's Pennsylvania 5th up here) we're not even close to the district borders. Water Street isn't even the natural road for Pennsylvania 17th voters to drive on the way to and from Penn State games - see this map. Now, I understand why Paterno is campaigning at Penn State home game tailgates - Penn State grads make up a significant percentage of Pennsylvania's voting population, and a lot of those folks come driving up to Happy Valley for the games. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a greater-than-normal percentage in the 17th district - it's a mostly rural, upstate district, and the rural upstates tend to come to PSU instead of the other state colleges and universities, such as Pitt or Temple, which tend more suburban/urban. But don't waste your advertising here on the north end of the valley!

Busy night last night at the State College campaign office. Lots of college kids on the phone bank, while I stuffed envelopes. Not exactly the most productive of volunteer activities, but trust me - my phone skills are not l33t. Ad-hoc phone banks can get pretty cacaphonous, and last night certainly bore that out.

Mmm. Blogspot's been pretty slow the last few days, and now Amazon seems to be broken. Is there some sort of viral storm this week?

OK, I just got some helpful spam carefully and painstakingly directing me to a totally bogus polling precinct over on High Street, which tells me that there’s a lot of misinformation floating around this year about Bellefonte’s poll precinct locations. Here we go, folks:

01. Bellefonte North
Logan Fire Hall, 120 E. Howard St. (Main Entrance)

This is for the north end of town, presumably the Curtin Hill folks, extending out to where Water Street merges with Allegheny Street in front of the water gap. This is the fire company behind the Bellefonte post office, across the street from one of our two FVW halls, and catty-corner from the Bellefonte Library. Turn right off of Allegheny Street driving north away from the Courthouse, or left driving south towards the Courthouse. Don’t take my word for which precinct you’re actually in - check your voter’s registration card, it will give a precinct name and location.

02. Bellefonte Northeast
Crestside Terrace, 602 East Howard St. (Main Entrance)

This is for the northeast section of town, the various suburban tracts out past the middle school and north of the high school - but it’s hard to mark the borders without a proper precinct map, so consult your registration card. Crestside Terrace is a large redbrick retirement home on Howard Street, on a slight rise over the eastern end of Union Cemetery, near the corner of Howard and Wilson Streets.

03. Bellefonte South
St. John's Auditorium, 130 E. Bishop St.

This is St. John the Evangelist Church (Catholic), on Bishop Street, right across the street from the *other* fire company in town, Undine. I’m going to guess that this precinct covers the area between the courthouse and the south edge of town, extending I-don’t-know-how-far west. Again, check your registration card.

04. Bellefonte Southeast
Faith United Methodist Church, 512 Hughes St. (Back Entrance, Room 51)

This is probably the hardest precinct to find in Bellefonte, just because it’s off all the major thoroughfares. This is in the neighborhood on the south side of Bishop Street, east of Blanchard, west of the high school. Heading north on Bishop Street away from the centre of town, turn right on Hughes Street before you hit the high school. It’s a residential street, so you may have some trouble finding the church - it should be two blocks back from Bishop Street. Keep an eye out for the big water tower - the church is just north of that tower, which is visible throughout that neighborhood. This precinct is probably for those south of Bishop and east of Blanchard, but again - check your cards.

05. Bellefonte West
St. John’s United Church Of Christ, 135 W. Linn Street Bellefonte (Fellowship Hall - Use front entrance)

This is my precinct, which suggests that it encompasses the centre of town, as well as the west end of town, Half Moon Hill, and the neighborhood along Spring Street. St. John’s United Church of Christ is on the corner of Spring Street and Linn Street, which for that brief two-block section, is part of Route 144. Please note that the building we’re talking about for Bellefonte West is neither the Catholic St. John’s, nor the Episcopal St. John’s on the same block, over on Allegheny Street. I repeat, corner of Linn and Spring Streets. And check your voter’s registration card.

This made me laugh and laugh and laugh... thanks, Doktor Frank!

Argh! There are five precincts in Bellefonte, and two of them are in churches named St. John’s, neither of them the St. Johns (St. John Episcopal Church - Episcopal) I thought they were talking about. I’m currently signed up to do pollwatching in the wrong precinct - Bellefonte South, in the St. John’s (St. John the Evangelist Church - Catholic) over on Bishop Street, whereas I’m registered to vote in Bellefonte West, in a St. John’s (St John Church of Christ -well, dur) on Linn Street, which I think is that squarish Gothic church facing the north side of that Elementary School. What conspiracy of brilliancy and subtlety resulted in the establishment of three “St. Johns” within four blocks of each other?

No wonder G.T. was so confused when I offered that I thought I was in "Bellefonte North". I'm not in "Bellefonte South", that's for sure.

Although the election threatens to make political bores of us all, the world does continue to spin round while we, in amber, hang suspended, awaiting the moment of decision. Dave A, a noted nonreader, has suddenly started devouring George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I just loaned him the second and third volumes.

I mostly hung out at his place last weekend, helping him clean things out & helping him and his folks move some new couches in to replace the wrecked old set. I kind of miss the old Quest Labs days, when we had a balcony to fling unsatisfactory furniture off of, onto the grass below. They made quite amusing shattering noises, when the impact broke whatever remnants of a back said furniture might still have possessed. It was ever so much more easier than trying to get the couches out the tight corridors... You don’t get that visceral joy from furniture-disposal in a ground floor apartment. I mean, you can batter a couch pretty thoroughly by repeatedly flipping it end-for-end through the grass and over the asphalt, but it takes a lot of energy and wind to do that sort of damage, without the gravitational advantage of a good, solid couch-defenestration.

I’m reading a lot of Walter Jon Williams, in anticipation of the publishing-date of the last book in his Dread Empire’s Fall space opera, coming up at the beginning of next month. Martin and Williams are the two authors I go to the trouble of ordering British editions from Amazon.co.uk for; of course, they’re also the two authors I read mostly likely to get printed in Great Britain *before* getting printed here in North America, so there might be a bit of selection-bias going on here. I really like Williams, and he keeps getting better. I’m reading City on Fire right now, and it just feels so heavily predictive, prescient even, of the current troubles. It’s a damned shame that he never got the chance to finish the trilogy - City on Fire and Metropolitan cry out for a proper ending.

Armed Liberal of Winds of Change came off the fence yesterday, in a post that I agree with in almost every particular. For all the abuse I've subjected him to, all the nasty comments to the effect of "shit or get off the pot", all the irritable complaints, I heartly apologize. I think he made the right decision, but I recognize that many will not agree.

I just want to make sure that those that don't agree are kept far from the levers of foreign policy and national leadership.

I walk about these days with an orator-self fuming, constantly, sulfurously, against the Kerry-Edwards and the Moores of the world, ringing in the empty spaces between my ears. I try to avoid subjecting you, my few readers, to those ephemeral rantings. I have come to the conclusion that I am a terrible changer of minds. I am brusque, hostile, extreme and overbearing. I am impatient with detail, and overly-fond of intemperate hammer-blow rhetoric.

I found the Zell Miller speech in NYC to be absolutely delightful; those who saw or heard the speech and agree that it was truth-telling, will agree with me, but then, they were already likely to do so in the first place. Those who found Miller frightening, threatening, incomprehensible and dangerous, will probably react in a similar fashion to my attempts at persuasion. But, nevertheless, it is my duty as a citizen of this country, and my commonwealth, to try.

I do not believe in perfections, and so am not overly-distressed when the people who I choose as leaders fail to achieve in a manner satisfactory to those who judge by a standard of perfection. I believe that no plan survives contact with the enemy, that the other guy has a vote, that perfection is the enemy of good enough, and that a flawed decision now is worth ten thousand perfect decisions delivered too late to matter.

I believe that legislators do not make good executives, and that governors, mayors, and CEOs are preferable to senators, representatives, and trial lawyers.

I believe that in a time of war, foreign policy is paramount, that trade policy is secondary, that economic policy is tertiary, and that all else is grass.

I believe that excessive concern for civil liberties in time of war is a species of myopia, and that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I also believe that ground lost today on civil liberties can be recovered tomorrow, and that perspective in such matters is not only laudable, but intellectually mandatory.

I believe the current administration, while being by no means laudable, is the least worst option available to the voters in the current election.

I believe that we are least likely to see the use of nuclear weapons, in threat or practice, in the next four years, under a Republican administration.

I believe in preventative war. I believe that pacifism is intellectual suicide looking to share. I believe in a strong military, and wish for a stronger one, preferably by voluntary means.

I believe I'll vote for Bush on Nov. 2nd, and I ask that you join me in doing so.

Thank you.

In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

Excellent Neal Stephenson interview on Slashdot. Link via the inevitable Instapundit.

Law and Order will be on the air until our new Islamic overlords hack off the last head in Burbank, and even then, it'll probably just turn into Shari`ah and Tawhid.

Days of wrath, innit? Oh, well.

I'm going to be a pollwatcher here in Bellefonte, unless I get run over or otherwise discommoded between now and election day. Part of the 72 hour volunteer thing, don'tchaknow.

What’s a pollwatcher, you ask? It’s a relatively new innovation in the science of political busybodying. The traditional partisan line of attack on Election Day is to place people outside the no-electioneering limits of the precincts, to hand out literature, recommend candidates, and generally pester the public. Someone figured out, in this, our new millennium, that if a body has managed to drag him or herself to the polls, they’ve already made some sort of decision as to who they want at the top of the ticket, if not further down the list with the Attorney Generals, Treasurers, Recorders of Deeds, and Dogcatchers. So, from a presidential-election point of view, pestering folks on the way to the polls is *not* the way to maximize your vote turnout. You irritate your own supporters, who know their own damn minds, thank you very goddamn much, putz, and enrage your opponent’s voters, who probably hate your partisan ass anyways.

So, they decided to put the volunteers to some other task, which was more likely to get votes added. A pollwatcher is a state-certified observer of the precinct for a particular party or candidate. Each party and candidate gets so many certificates for each precinct. We’re going to be standing there, behind the judges of election, listening with pen poised while they read off who’s come to vote. We’ll have lists - hopefully accurate! - of Republicans in the precinct, which we’ll strike off as they come to vote. Every once in a while, some other activists will come by to pick up the list of those who haven’t made it in yet, and tote it off to central call centers. There, volunteers will be calling and bugging the missing Republicans, asking them if they’re planning to vote, offering rides to the precinct, when can we expect you, etc. Then they’ll send out the drivers to pick up those who need rides, and so on. Repeat every couple of hours until the polls close. For those people who plan to vote later in the day, fair warning - you’re going to get pestered by the local volunteer hordes until you show up and get your name struck from the pollwatchers’ tally.

The pollwatchers, of course, have another purpose - the one that used to be their primary function, and which will be of fairly high importance in those parts of the country where the registration schmucks have been kicking up mud and making a mess of things. If there’s any irregularities with a voter, we’re supposed to register an objection. Namely, we recognize that the voter isn’t who he says he is, or it’s the third time today that this woman’s been in to vote, or “I saw that name on a gravestone up in Union Cemetary”, or whatever. I’m not to expect that sort of thing in Bellefonte, but there’s an outside chance of something happening in State College, and they’re fairly certain that it’s going to be a lively November 2nd in Philadelphia, where there’s more registered voters than living adults in the census estimate.

At the close of polls, the pollwatcher hangs around to observe the judges of election open up the ballot-box, count the spoiled ballots, count the contents of the ballot-box, add the two sums together, and make sure that everything adds up. Then, we wait while they count. And count. And count. The lady from Centre Hall says that this usually takes until at least 11 PM, and probably will go later this year, given all the new voters and such. Finally, when they’re done with the count, we’re supposed to call in the totals to the people at the campaign offices, and watch them truck off the ballot-box to the county offices over on Willowbank. Yay.

They were talking about getting a watcher in every precinct in the county, until the guy-in-charge clarified that they weren't talking about precincts like Curtin West, which apparently consists of "thirteen voters, twelve of them hard-core Democrats". Could you imagine sitting in a pissed-off-partisan-someone's parlor for fourteen hours, clutching your pollwatching certificate, while you wait for said pissed-off-partisan-someone's dozen or so relatives to drift through to make their votes? If Curtin West consists of the "town" I'm thinking of, it's basically a half-block of ruinous student slum dumped at the bottom of a heavily wooded ravine way the hell up the Allegheny Plateau at the end of a logging road. It's as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get on this side of the Mississippi. Someone noted that they didn't think it would be "safe" to send a pollwatcher up there. I think they were half-joking.

Crawling out from under a pile of email and faxes to wave, weakly, at the half-dozen or so whom I've been shorting posts. Why, again, did they have to set election-day in the midst of the harvest season? Weren't we a nation of agrarians back then? I can't help but think it was a conspiracy of Alexander Hamilton and his cabal of industrializing banker-conspiratorialists. Disadvantaging the farmers by voting while the harvests were distracting everyone! Diabolical!

No wonder American Grange and farming-reformist factions have always, historically, been bugfuck nuts. The screaming craziness of politics while the crops need tending is bound to drive even the sanest and most stable to distraction.

While I'm waiting for some Louisiana data to process, I suppose I'll go on a bit about manga and anime I've been sampling recently...

Wallflower (aka Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge) is more odd than great. The female protagonist, Sunako, isn't exactly likeable, in that she's basically batshit. She talks to skulls and transparent-anatomy dolls, has all the fashion-sense and charm of Sadako from the Ring, and easily confuses people for angels. She was deranged by a harsh rejection by her "first love", and now she hangs out in the dark and obsessively watches slasher movies. Her aunt tries to reform her by luring four bishounen contemporaries into taking her on as a renovation-project by promising free rent if they can turn her into a proper young lady. Through the end of the first volume, all they've managed to accomplish is to move her from hebephrenic, morose shut-in to violently homicidal borderline-dominatrix. It's the sort of shoujo manga where you're supposed to be drooling over the sexpot bishie male leads. Since I'm not really prone to that sort of thing, I'm missing at least half of the attraction of the presentation. I will note that I had real trouble keeping the four bishies straight, or even remembering their names. They seem to be somewhat lacking in personality. But since Sunako has enough personality - and personalities - for three heroines, I suppose it all balances out.

Via Dave's magic anime-sampler, I've been working my way through the new Fall offerings.

Sunabouzou is, unexpectedly, a fun shoot-'em-up postapocalyptic comedy, featuring a diminutive "monk" in heavy desert-gear, so heavy that you never actually see any of his features. It looks sort of like Fist of the North Star with the role of Ken played by a smartass, faceless midget with a pump-action shotgun. Looks like it'll be this season's Bandit King Jing.

Gankutsuou, a loose SF adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo set on the moon, is this season's Gonzo eyecandy. It's got a very distinctive visual aesthetic, relying heavily on shifting texture-patterns to produce a sort of slow kaleidoscope swirl. The first episode didn't really get too deep into the plot, but it was all very atmospheric and harrowing. Gonzo has a studio-wide habit of promising more with first episodes than they ever deliver, mostly due to a very limited and shallow writers' bench. But, since this is an adaptation of a classic novel, it's possible that they might dodge the usual Gonzo curse. I have my hopes.

Grenadier is a transgendered Trigun, set in a Japanese-themed world instead of the pseudo-Western setting of Vash and the girls. I found myself rooting for the Darwinian extermination of idiot samurai trying to fight heavily-armed riflemen with swords, so I suspect I'm not exactly the ideal audience for this sort of we're-pacifists-but-we-want-the-fun-of-an-action-show-anyways hypocrisy. It doesn't help that the show's called "Grenadier", but the protagonist uses a pistol. I recognize that "Pistoleer" is a stupid name for a show, but really - there's a lot of thesauruses in the world, people. Put some work into it. Call it "Musketeer" and give her a slightly longer carbine-pistol, and not only would you have a more apropos title, you'd also have a protagonist who only performs unlikely feats with weaponry, rather than outright impossibilities such as rapid-fire sniping at a distance of a half-mile with a pistol.

Tsukuyomi Moon Phase is about a psychically blind occult-photographer who finds a cute, bubbly little gothic-lolita vampire in a ruined castle in the Black Forest. Much atmospheric, pretty scenery and saccharine predation ensues. No there there, but it's got it's moments. Real "shut your mind off and coast" material.

Just got back from a weekend in the People's Republic of Maryland, on an intensive planning meeting for the Convention. Jessica was there, despite her vows to divorce herself from the all-devouring, all-consuming beast. Nice to see you, Jessica. Lots of arguing, long, boring meetings in between. Nothing I can really talk about in detail.

Dave and I left early, hoping to get back here at a reasonable hour. Instead, we got stuck in a congealed traffic jam on Seven Mountains, clotted up behind a multi-car accident which sealed the Potter's Mills gap into Happy Valley. Worst place in the state for such an accident. We sat there for over an hour until finally giving up, getting into the valley via the McAvey's Fort entrance along Rt. 26. More than two hours just to get into the valley. I heard that it was an RV which wiped out, taking a bunch of cars with it in the narrows. We saw an emergency vehicle from the valley come all the way out to the open area on top of Seven Mountains, because it was the first place that vehicle could turn around. Tight quarters.

Why I'm glad I don't live in Japan. The idea that a publisher would yank a comic because it portrayed something true, simply because a large segment of the population prefers the deliberate lies offered in their school textbooks... well, that just sucks. See also this Anime News Network notice.

This is the one thing that makes me worry about democracies in practice - their capacity for self-delusion. With the Japanese, it's the Rape of Nanking and the evils of the militarist era. With the Turks, it's the Armenian genocide. I'm afraid that the Europeans are turning back again to an open embrace of anti-Semitism. This is the point at which my natural skepticism leaves me very, very cold. Because I don't have faith in an Almighty, belief in the people is essentially a gamble, that wisdom is inherent in the untrammelled long-term expression of the aggregate.

Is the American delusion isolation - the closing-inwards? Will later generations see a shrivelled, bitter America, locked behind heavily patrolled walls, sealed off from the outer world? Will they buy only from each other, sell only to each other, let no immigrants in or jobs out? Will our foreign policy be nothing more than "fuck off and die, foreigner"? Would they be paranoid about the corrupting influence of alien cultures? Would their textbooks be full of the wisdom of Lindbergh, Moore, and Buchanan, who knew that nothing was wrong with America, which couldn't be fixed by the excision of the external? Will they teach their children that the American Empire was a long nightmare of wickedness? That the only thing which ever mattered was the Republic, unchanging, eternal, a blood-line of land and culture, home and hearth? That any engagement of the greater world, any intrusion from without, was an abomination - a sign of the souring of Republic into Empire?

I think I would hate that America. I would never see it come to pass, if I had the saying.

I have an admission: I cheated. I didn't listen to most of the debate. I spent an entire dinner-hour eating at McDonalds and reading Othello, which is a somewhat gimmicky multiple-personality schoolgirl manga. I kind of listened to the last twenty minutes or so while playing Advance Wars 2 on my GBA, but really, I was just marking time until the Fox and CNN spinhounds called it. The Fox people were all "Bush routed him", but there weren't as many analysts on Fox this time - no Juan Williams, no Mara Liasson. What's up with that? The CNN folks were trying to call it for Kerry, but their hearts didn't sound in it.