Nader or not

I did listen to Meet the Press in the end: it seemed appropriately suited to the task at hand: tidying up a bathroom or two.

Listening to the pre-show, i.e. Schwarzenegger, was painful enough, especially when he got to his closing comment – about the possibility of a constitutional amendment permitting immigrants who have lived here for at least 20 years to run for the presidency. (Had I the foresight to predict this possibility, I would have lead an untarnished life, just in case duty called…) Does he see himself on this path? Would you believe it, he has yet to do a single remarkable thing for California (though repealing the auto tax hike at a time of such a severe state budget crisis was pretty remarkable), and yet he is unabashedly smackin’ his lips at the possibility of the White House.

Nader, though, was even more painful, in part because he would not acknowledge the likelihood that his candidacy will have a devastating effect on the Democratic run for the White House. He is known for claiming again and again that if Democrats do not win (in 2000 or 2004), they have themselves, and not him to blame.

Okay, Nader makes one good point here: his name on the ballot cannot be viewed as the sole reason for putting GWB where he is today. Nader listed others on the ticket that also drew votes away from Gore back in 2000. So true. Basically we vote without reason or thought. Perhaps we don’t understand arrows either, thinking that they designate the person who should be eliminated from the race. And why do some voters continue to vote for people who are not even running? In the Wisconsin primaries alone, many non-candidates got hundreds of very real votes. What kind of a voting public are we anyway? We’ll vote for Nader whether he proceeds with his candidacy or not. We’ll write in our neighbor’s name, just for the heck of it. Maybe some people draw decorative arrows that lead to nowhere. We are basically voting fools. Nader wont change that. But he could maybe not go out of his way to create another opportunity for us to display our idiocy.

A book to avoid

Is it so desirable to have your book reviewed in the NYT that it hardly matters what the reviewer writes? The flip side of this Q is – why review a book in the Times of a fairly unknown author if you can find absolutely no redeeming value in the work?

There are five novels reviewed in the Books in Brief section of the NYTBR. That’s not bad – each novel gets about half a column of text. One of the books is “Something Rising” by Haven Kimmel. I had read, no yawned my way through, her first book, a memoir called “A Girl Named Zippy.” I kind of like memoirs, and I wanted to see if this one, about a very ordinary life of a girl in the Midwest, could provide some nice zip to a lazy afternoon. It could not. It was an excruciatingly boring book. Possibly Kimmel thought that she could pull out an interesting text out of the dullness of her life (“my life is so ordinary! let me tell you all the ways in which nothing significant can happen on a daily basis!”), but really, she failed. I’m sure people bought the book because it had a very sweet picture of a little girl – the type that usually appears on the cover of a book about overcoming tragic circumstances. Perversely, you grow resentful that chapter after chapter nothing bad happens.

This would not be an author primed for a return appearance in the NYTBR. And yet there she is today, with her new book under scrutiny. You would think, then, that she wrote something exceptional, but no! The reviewer writes:

The father-daughter competition is effective and unusual, but is insufficient to redeem this meandering novel. Of no help are occasional clunky sentences, their meanings elusive, their locutions dubious. Fine books have come from close study of pool hall life. ‘Something Rising’ isn’t one of them.

Harsh words! Someone was not happy to be reviewing this book. If Kimmel didn’t have any rough bumps in the road during her childhood, she’s getting them now.

It’s all about the wife

Examples of “offbeat” and/or “odd” political spouse behavior (NYT front page article on Teresa Heinz Kerry):

“Ms. Heinz Kerry has a reputation of being offbeat if not a little odd… On the campaign trail, she speaks in jarringly frank terms about dealing with grief and loss” [nc: what could you even say about dealing with grief that would be “jarringly” frank?]

“He [Kerry] routinely stood by watching admiringly as she rambled on… her flowing hair hiding her eyes..’Isn’t she spectacular?’ Mr. Kerry would say. Oddly, Ms. Heinz Kerry seems not to return the favor: when he is speaking, his wife often wears a pained, or even bored [nc: the press loves that all-American grin] expression. She says [emphasis added] it is merely the look she gets when she is thinking deeply.”

“Her ideas about healing, though, range far afield of Western science. She talks to bewildered audiences about tai chi [nc: me, I would love to see her lead a bunch of staffers in a morning round of tai chi on the White House lawn], about “embracing the tiger”—a metaphor for…confronting and accepting (grief).”

Oh, and she likes scarves and shawls.

Move over, Judith, we got another weirdo to talk about.

Correcting trash

Except on days where you pick up the wrong newspaper (thinking it to be that day’s edition), mostly what you do with old papers is put them out in a grocery bag for the recycling guys to gather up and convert into something useful, like coffee filters. When I think of people who actually save newspapers, I think of batty hermits who are later found in their shacks in the mountains, with yellowed stacks of newsprint dating back to World War I.

But blogs – as far as I know, they can go on forever. Moreover, the “archives” bar gives the illusion of saved, catalogued, and archived master work, almost as if you were letting it reside in the great library of the British Museum (which purports to have everything ever printed). The storage bar more accurately should be called “trash.”

Because in truth, what current reader ever goes into Archives? Or even to yesterday’s posts? “Oh, let me run through her life just one more time. I may have missed a nuance to the story on the first three readings...”

Well, I did just that this morning – I revisited a couple of older posts on my own blog and on one or two other blogs. Why did I do it? For one, in a moment of great impatience and lacking self-restraint, I had read most of the Times headlines and all online inserts prior to this morning, so that most of the stories were already old news by the time the paper touched the driveway. And, I seemed incapable of figuring out when Meet the Press was on TV, having never watched anything on a Sunday morning in my life. I wanted to catch Nader’s big moment and, instead, I got some odd gent telling me to act now and fill out a ‘survey’ (?) against the ACLU – an organization devoted to teaching school children about gay unions and disarming our leaders of the ability to fight terrorism (almost verbatim from the show). So it was back to the computer for me.

Looking at old posts made me realize two things:
1. I had let some hideous grammatical constructions creep their way into many a post;
2. Occasional, once spotted by me (in an unusual moment of lucidity) grammatical bloopers in others’ posts had been corrected.

Naturally, I did the thing any blogger would do, I “managed” my old posts and cleaned up the two or three that I had read and that now were making me ill (“I used that awkward phrase for WHAT reason?”).

But the question is this: what presumptuous thought was making me correct? Who cares how awful it read – once posted, it’s a done deal. Except for a few stragglers and an occasional new reader, your readership will have moved on. They are now jumping around picking up the latest from blog X Y Z, you are HISTORY until your next post.

Sad but true.

To the loyal readers who continue to log on here even after reading that bit about reclining, both in the chair and in October – you are too kind. To the blogger who went back and clarified a sentence that was cutely suspended without a context – I appreciated your effort even if, most likely, no one else did.

But I do have a new definition of pathetically delusional: “as in: going back to your archives from many months back and correcting the grammar of your old blog posts.”

The day starts with Ollie (my dog), ends with Spot (GWB’s dog)

A touching story on NBC news about the death today of 15 year old Spot, GWB’s spotted canine. It may be the one moment where us dog people genuinely feel for the guy currently occupying the White House. Of course, the pooch had a privileged life, and one could write much about health care and affordability etc, but I’ll let that slide for the moment. The news report on dogs in the White House (and there have always been dogs in the White House) mentioned one tiny but important fact: dogs attach unconditionally, no matter how you perform your job. Must be a comfort to so many who have inhabited the White House.

Neighborhood update

Woah, what a beautiful afternoon, with the happy sound of melting snow and a dizzying array of puddles to jump over when walking the hills of this neighborhood. A pair of girls three houses up the block built a snow pig – a remarkable achievement, down to its curly tail. I almost felt the competitive urge to maybe sculpt a goat in our front yard, thinking if this caught on, we would have a block of farm animals and people would drive up just to admire our multivarious (isn’t this a word?) talents. I held back because I worried that neighbors would come out and ask if perhaps I had toppled my feather or otherwise fallen precipitously into some state of mental decline (not in so many words, of course). Besides, it all looks so WET out there in the snow. Still, it was a gorgeous late afternoon.

I am concerned, though, about the family across the street – the one with the flamingos (see post, February 8). Or rather, the now you see them, now you don’t flamingos. Because the birds are all gone. And this is not the type of clan that picks up their decorations when they are done with them – the adorable Christmas trees are still standing, tilted, but standing on the porch, and the lawn chair, last used I believe in October of 2003, sits where it did then, on that warmish fall day. Did we have a flamingo heist in the neighborhood? Bad enough that mailboxes get batted down every now and then, and swatches of toilet paper still cling to tree tops from brazen teen ‘decorating’ efforts of years back (such a quaint American custom, why ever hasn’t it caught on elsewhere?), but stealing plastic birds crosses the line. Next thing you know they’ll be toting away my rusty upside-down wheelbarrow which I forgot to put away in the garage for the winter, and from there it’s only a matter of days before they start digging up the climbing rose bushes. Young people have no manners.

Blogattack

Fortune magazine claims that there are 10,000 new blogs recorded on the Net each day. Are some of us multiple blogging? Keeping up different personalities maybe? Like, how do you know that the blog on the ‘SmileZone’ isn’t really mine as well? Okay, sure, I don’t have the technological acumen to put together something so visually appealing (one reader wrote just the other day suggesting that I might consider finally eliminating the ads at the top of my blog, though he admitted that commercials for Dean buttons aren’t necessarily a mismatch to the content of my blog, by which I am hoping he did not mean “losers all”). True, once you use your name in the blog, it is incumbent upon you to keep it honest. But if you don’t – oh the lives you could bloglive!

Of course, the statistic is a demographic fallacy for it says nothing about replacement levels. Maybe 20,000 other blogs self-destruct and 40,000 die a slow death, never to be heard from again (all this leading to negative replacement levels).

This point about blog disappearance is worth a worry. It could well be that at some moment you became blogaddicted to someone’s blog, reading it daily, enjoying the progression of events, the births, the marriages (maybe I should flip the order here), the social commentary, the humor. And then the writing stops. Now what? What a cruel hoax! The author manages to tantalize, entertain, amuse, engage, and then, without explanation, the blogging STOPS. What’s left for the reader? Maybe simply the four stages of blog withdrawal: denial (I’ll check again in an hour, maybe she’s just pausing to shower..), panic (how will I live without knowing if her dog learned to read?), anger (what a socially irresponsible act of hedonistic cowardice!), RELIEF (good bye blog, hello Fyodor Dostoevsky).

A very serious aside on war: skip it if you’re feeling light and airy

The writing of an important chapter of World War II history has yet to be completed. The NYT notes this in today’s story on how deeply preoccupied we’ve been with analyzing battles between German and the Allied forces on the Western Front, and how little attention has been given to the battles on the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht suffered as much as 80% of its total war casualties. It is in the course of battles with the Red Army that the Germans experienced their most stunning defeat.

Apart from the military issues, there are other harrowing aspects of war between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Any Pole will tell you that a key preoccupation for Poland has been why Stalin chose to let Warsaw fall to the final destructive onslaught of the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising. Given the inevitable and devastating outcome, many Poles believe that the Uprising wasn’t heroic, it was suicidal – an unnecessary loss of life. Speculation rather than fact fuels the debate as to the reasons behind Stalin’s passive role in the ultimate leveling of the city.

And there are the issues surrounding Red Army tactics: the retaliatory rape of 2 million German women, the pilferage and assault on Polish homes and families that lay in the path of the Russians – all this is shrouded in mystery, noted only in the limited stories told by survivors.

Why this empty slate? Because few historians have had access to Russian military documents from this period. Now, as the doors are opening for academic research, there still aren’t enough scholars, nor is there money to scrutinize the voluminous materials. The writer Eva Hoffman said recently that it is the obligation of the second generation to record and preserve, from its position of both distance and proximity to the events of war, the memory of those events. A burden? Maybe, but a critical one. Starting each day fresh, without the imprint of a history carefully drawn, seems to me at the very least heartless, and at worst, dangerously irresponsible.

What Diane Keaton meant to me…

The story in the Times (here) on DK’s idiosyncratic style of dress suggests that all those layers of buttoned blouses, blazers, turtle-necks, the wire-rimmed glasses, and always – the gloves, were emblematic of the confused (is that what “gracefully puzzled” means?), outgoing, emboldened modern woman. The suggestion is that women both imitated and were dazzled by DK’s style:

“Her throwaway verbal style and her thrown-together dress style became symbols of the free, friendly, gracefully puzzled young women who were busy creating identities out of the epic miscellany of materials swirling in the American cultural centrifuge," rhapsodized Jack Kroll, Newsweek's film critic at the time.
Her fashion influence in those days should not be underestimated, Mr. Talley [of Vogue magazine] said last week. "What Sarah Jessica Parker is to young women today, Diane Keaton was in that day," he said.

I wont waste time explaining why I think these statements are ludicrous, but let me just say that I wont ever admit to having had Keaton as a symbol of anything except a mildly crazed, sometimes quirky and amusing, most often not, character in movies that may have caused a ripple of chuckles, but only if you were in a room full of people who were under the influence of controlled substances.

The article does punch her out a bit for the glove thing (note suggestive comparison to creepy Michael Jackson):

Then there are the gloves, sheathing Ms. Keaton's slender hands wherever she goes (reminding fans with a more twisted turn of mind a bit of Michael Jackson). She wore gloves with her Woodyesque sport coat, and once again in Beverly Hills at the Oscar nominees' luncheon on Feb. 9. Leather gloves covered her wrists at the International Film Festival in Berlin a few days before that, a counterpoint to the black-and-white-checkered coat she wore. White leather gloves provided the creamy finish to the ivory-colored suit Ms. Keaton wore two weeks ago on "The Tonight Show." And white satin gloves accented her Richard Tyler coat at the Golden Globes Awards in January.
Her near fetishistic devotion to those gloves has inevitably prompted queries. Is she making a style statement, or is she simply hiding a pair of hands she deems too unsightly for a close-up?
Ms. Keaton, who declined to be interviewed for this article — because she is talked out, a publicist said — did nothing herself to clear up the mystery.

Well now, maybe we should leave her alone with her mittens. Whatever her reasons, they can’t be anything but sad. Warped, gnarled knuckles, scaly spotted skin, or a perennial nail biting problem – let’s not let our curiosity force some prankster to rip off her armor and zero in the camera. As I once wrote, the presence of some mystery is a good thing and, often as not, the fact of mystery is more interesting than the undisclosed reality.

Not amusing February musing

This morning my dog and I had a morning cup of coffee together, just him and me, as everyone else in the household is away in distant places, and I thought, how wonderful is the relationship between person and beast! – so perfect, sitting there, reading the paper, clipping Klinke’s coupons together, reading about the success of Olbrich Gardens (Horticulture included them on a list of ten gardens in the country that inspire us), not even noticing that I was actually thumbing through yesterday’s paper (local headlines are much the same from day to day), such a peaceful beginning to a Saturday.

Then I remembered that the exertion and strain of this morning activity for the dog (of sharing a breakfast Kodak moment with me) is going to require that he take the rest of the day to sleep it off: it is not unusual for him to take his morning nap from 8 am ‘til 5 pm. Luckily he has not yet learned to keep up with my blog (water spaniels are reading-challenged: he still can’t tell an A from a B and he’s almost 5), so he wont know how deeply disturbed, perhaps even resentful I am becoming over the inequities in our week-ends. Consider this. Dog’s Saturday: Kodak moments with owner, rest, eat, steal a few pieces of garbage, more rest. Owner’s Saturday: Kodak moment with dog, walk the beast, feed him, do a corrective read of today’s (as opposed to yesterday’s) paper, read 30 Admissions files and reject most of the applicants knowing that my flick of the pen will instill misery and gloom for the recipient of this largess, blog to bolster the spirit, pay bills due January 31st, think about which week to start gathering papers for taxes, think about going to the gym, rearrange contents of briefcase so that “urgent work” papers, crammed in some afternoon in 2002 finally get to see the light of day, feed dog again, yell at him for eating garbage, think about taking him for long walk, blog, by which time it will be evening.

The sad thing is, there is no writer’s hyperbole in that paragraph. It may be that a surprise will pop up – perhaps a call from my mother (much overdue as she is ‘processing’ my last weekend’s absence), or a note/call from a reader who will have read this and decided it’s best to check in, just to make sure we’re not all witnessing the disintegration and last desperate acts of a blogger, but otherwise, the course of this day is set.

The month of February is just too long. The framers of the calendar should have chopped off another 11 days and spread them among the remaining months. That thoughtful gesture would have put us on March 2nd today (leap year).

For everything else, there’s MasterCard

Drinking Steve’s wine with the dinner roast: $20+ (per bottle: see post below).
Spending the evening with your once-students-now-friends: priceless.
Shoveling heavy, wet snow from your sidewalk and from that of your neighbor at 1 o’clock at night: ridiculous.

[Tonight I heard that the city of Madison has officially closed its outdoor skating rinks and ski trails for the season. So why am I out there clearing snow and moving a car due to alternate street parking? Though I have to say, the night is so iridescent right now that you could read the newspaper without any trouble, just by the light of the winter sky.]

You and your blog

Comment from today: ”you’re funnier in your blog than you are in person.”

Response: “hey, I’m plenty funny in person. You don’t know how funny I can get. I used to make myself laugh out loud. Whereas the blog – sometimes it isn’t even slightly funny. Take the post (below) on book choices: what’s so funny about that?"

“It’s funny in some parts. I’d say in person you’re more contrary than funny”

Response: “Now that’s not funny. I’m not at all contrary. But I am funny. Really. Well, sometimes. Oftentimes. Ask others. No, don’t ask others…”

Poster update

Thanks to the reader who pointed me to a possible referent for the “No More Sour Juice” poster over University Avenue (see yesterday's post). I think I best not venture a description lest I should have the language police carry me away for a comfy night in the slammer. (Her email alone got a rating of three red peppers from Eudora’s morality patrol.) But I have to wonder still if the guy with the poster was offended by this musical venue (I’ll let you know that much: we’re dealing with a possible music group) and therefore felt compelled to protest, or whether he was envious of their apparent success.

I am anticipating a bizarre set of blog readers tonight. As always, sorry to disappoint, but you most certainly will not find anything here about…… never mind.

The art of buying wine

I was at Steve’s Liquor today, having the following (oft repeated) conversation:

me: “so, I’m serving a roasted tenderloin today, and I want something different, exciting to go with it.. But let’s keep it French and not too pricey; maybe a red Burgundy or a Gigondas?”

Randy: “yeah, sure, whatever you want.. here, let me show you this fantastic Chilean wine I just brought back from my trip there—it’ll knock your socks off!”

me: “I don’t want my socks knocked off…but seeing as I am such a loyal customer, perhaps, knocking off a few dollars off of a Burgundy would be nice?”

Randy, clearly hurt: “didn’t you like the California Vintage Renard Santa Rita I recommended last time? Wasn’t that special?”

me: “so special that I am saving it, along with the Jaffurs Syrah that you rang up for me that was twice as much as I had wanted to spend.”

Randy, feigning indifference: “I had a guy come in and buy a case of that for the week-end.. I mean, you can’t take your wallet with you to your grave, you know.”

me: “no, but I can take it to the grocery store and buy food that’ll last a whole week with left over cash for over-priced lattes. Okay, so what do you suggest? Should we look at a Cotes du Rhone? I can usually find a decent one for around $15 - $20..”

Randy: “I’ve got just the thing: a 1999 Morey St Denis Bourgogne for $29” [before tax, n.b.]

me: “You sold that to me three weeks ago when I was looking for a cheap bottle of French table wine. I’ll take the White Oak Cabernet that I had wanted the time I walked off instead, under your guidance, with the Chateauneuf du Pape from La Nerthe.”

Randy: wounded silence

So it’s not from France, and is the wrong price. At least it’s red. One out of three right.

Somewhat lengthy and not really funny reflections on book choices

Last night I had my other book group meeting (the “lawyer-loaded” one). The book, Lahiri’s “Namesake,” is wonderfully readable in a sad sort of way, as it chronicles the life of an Indian immigrant family. I am, of course, mesmerized by accounts of immigrant displacement. Doesn’t matter that I am not Bengali, I have never been to an American-Bengali party in my life, I don’t even seek out Poles living in America -- as has been repeatedly pointed out to me, in the spirit of: “if you’re so homesick for Poles, why don’t you go hang out at the Polish food store in Middleton?”

I am not really “homesick” and certainly not pathetic enough to hang with the kielbasy just so that I can hear my native tongue. It is more accurate to say that I am displaced. Having lived in the States as a girl (ages 7 – 13), I was more like the child of immigrants, having picked up Americanisms early on – only to throw them away again when we returned to Poland. So I can’t even wear the “first generation immigrant” label very well because I was crossing the ocean too many times, a habit that is still with me now. Hence the name of the blog. No one else gets it, but it has great significance to me.

One more note on book choices. In my other, “neighborhood” book group, the leaders were looking for interesting titles for future months, and of course, as usual, I foisted a title about World War II, this one describing a disintegrating social fabric in the city of Berlin. I’m sure there has to be some eye-rolling about my choices. The first time I went to a meeting of this group some four or five years ago, I suggested that we read the “Rape of Europa,” and then, soon after, the “Reader,” and so on. So long as it’s confession time, I should admit that certain persons from this household, when they were younger, commented that they were spoon fed books about Santa Claus and World War II survival in about equal doses. You’d be amazed how many titles I could find on the Holocaust or the Resistance Movement that I believed were appropriate for children.

It’s not that I myself feel compelled to read only from this period of European history. It’s worse than that: I feel compelled to recommend (meaning “force”?) books to others about these topics. “Here, you want to know what I think we all should read? This. And this. And this.”

When I left NY at 13 to make my home again in Poland, I remember vividly the classroom I left behind, with the usual display of maps, photos, student work, posters of famous people, who knows what else. An American classroom has more things posted, suspended, plastered on walls, windows, doors and ceilings than I would think possible for anyone to even look at in the course of the year. The first day back in a Polish classroom I was struck by its complete nakedness. There was one straw mat on the wall. On it, there was a black and white photo of the rubble that was Warsaw after the war. There was a banner across the bottom which read “Never Again.” I saw it every day, for all three years of my high school life there.

Help me with this one

As I was driving home this evening, I glanced up, as always, at the pedestrian bridge over Campus Drive. You don't need to pick up the paper in Madison to figure out what's playing in the theater or concert hall; all you need to do is look up at the bridge and you will see signs announcing anything from jazz artists, to musical hits, or the coming of any number of noteworthy performers.

But what I saw today was a guy holding up a huge sign that read: "NO MORE SOUR JUICE."

What am I missing here? It's one of those things that's lost in translation, right? Probably everyone else is driving home and thinking "yeah, no more of that stuff, right on!" Or, is it that the person with the sign was complaining that there is no more sour juice to be found anywhere, it's all sweet, damn it! Or what -- an irreverent rock band, aka Sour Juice, that should not be permitted entry into our concert halls or nightclubs? Truly, I'm in the dark.

If you know the significance of this, write me. My ignorance is killing me.

Need a spouse? Try the cemetery

According to GWB, your mate must be of the opposite sex. But we have an unresolved question here: must s/he be alive?
In France, the answer is no. For example, a certain Ms. Demichel married a dead man just last week (NYT, the paper of record, so reported)– perfectly legitimate according to French law. She carried flowers, there was a wedding cake, they say the only thing missing was the groom.

A honeymoon? Yes, of sorts –she’s going to visit her new mother-in-law. Her new dead husband died in an accident two years back. But she’ll keep his ashes in her bedroom. The mayor, who presided over the ceremony, did ask if she wanted to “exchange” rings in some manner, but the bride politely declined.

Scheming minds

CNN is speculating about the possibility of a new alliance between Edwards and Dean (and therefore also Gore). It makes sense. Edwards is short on money, and desperate to win in New York. Could it be that Gore will announce a shift in favor of Edwards this week-end? A CNN public preference poll, conducted before Tuesday, indicates that both Kerry and Edwards are currently favored over Bush.

As if all this wasn’t intriguing enough, I read today (NYT) that according to a survey (okay, I suppose that goes without saying), 9% of the primary vote in Wisconsin was cast by Republicans. One has to wonder – who did they vote for and why?

United

At a meeting of the neighborhood book group last night politics crept into the conversation (okay, were forced into the conversation by me). It was shocking, exhilarating, astonishing to hear how many (most?) had voted for Edwards. One had even given Kucinich a plug. You have to understand that many of these women are not on the same end of the political spectrum: Some have crossed over and connected the arrow pointing to a Republican in the past, others have been decidedly moderate Democrats, and still others have been known to waffle about which party to support (okay, ms exception, I know who you are and I know your record is unscathed by any GOP leanings, but admit that I am correct about the others). If a candidate would openly speak in favor of raising taxes, s/he’d lose at least half of them right then and there.

But last night, it became evident that these past voting patterns were nothing but youthful indiscretions, all forgotten, ignored now as visions of a future without GWB tantalizingly danced through their heads. A united front of Democrats? Never thought it could happen, but there it is.

Different worlds, different visions

Every once in a while I have days like this: an early morning seminar to conduct downtown at the Department of Justice and a late seminar to finish the day back at the Law School. Two Madisons, the Government/Courthouse on one side and the University on the other, staring, often glaring at each other, disconnected, both resenting decisions emanating from one sphere and affecting the other.

Which world voted for Kerry? Which for Edwards? I don’t think we have that one figured out yet. In fact, I read in one post-election survey (the Times maybe, but in all honesty I don’t remember) that fewer than a third of Wisconsinites voting for Edwards were “angry” at Bush, whereas fully 50% of those supporting Kerry were. What does that mean for the future months? What does that say about the Democratic constituents? I thought everyone was angry. Up here, in the “towers” of Bascom Hill, it seems that way. But we are so removed, sitting here on the other end of State Street, transfixed, glaring at the government, holding out hopes for change.