When Dad uttered the words, “come over here and sit down,” I thought I’d had it, the way a twelve year-old who’s been mouthing off to his mother used to in those years. Actually, I was amazed that he had not taken me immediately in hand, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t see that coming, too.

Sitting around the breakfast table that sunny morning in 1969 on the windward side of Oahu, I’d been bitching at Mom because she wasn’t dropping everything to drive me and my surfboard to the beach. I was trying to go at it as lightly as possible, within arm’s reach of Dad, but also as urgently as I thought I could get away with, because I’d been imagining the break at Kahana Bay all morning. It was just one of those days, and when a kid that age gets a picture like that in his head, he’ll take all kinds of reckless chances.

Looking back, I think Dad must have had his mind made up for some time. In fact, he recently related facts to me that make that even more clear. I still don’t know his mind as the events of that morning played. I can’t say that he sat there listening to me giving Mom hell and thinking, “He’s gonna get it,” in the way I finally got it. However, the mystery of why he didn’t just bounce me like a basketball has grown a bit less foggy.

You see, he knew I’d been going up the road a bit to play rock songs with my friend, Glen Companion. The father of my friend Bobby Miller — who played drums — had told my Dad. Of course, I didn’t know that… not that it would have mattered to me.

Now, I’ve never forgotten any of this. I think Dad thinks I have, but it’s one of the clearest pictures in my memories, and always has been from the moment it happened. I remember exactly where the chair was positioned in front of the window; I remember exactly how the burning island sunlight was streaming through the window over my shoulder as I sat in the straight armless chair, and I recall the odd note of authority in his voice as he said it: “Come over here and sit down.”

I had a big question mark in my mind. “Am I in serious trouble, or what?”

I should have been, which is why, of course, I was asking myself the question, but there was also something missing in his tone: I wasn’t hearing any of the menace that I figured I should have.

And it only started to dawn on me when he cracked the case of the 1952 Gibson L-47 acoustic guitar that he’d owned since he bought it with the money he’d saved as a teen-ager delivering newspapers and setting bowling pins, and set it on my lap.

I wasn’t in trouble. I was into something else altogether.

It wouldn’t be honest of me to sit here and say that I knew, that day, that my little life had reached a turning point. It wasn’t like that at the time, because there was too much going on. The first hour or so of my guitar life was filled with lecture on axe-anatomy, maintenance, how to tune it, history of this particular instrument, and all kinds of stuff that I can only see now as the initial approach of adulthood. I didn’t really see it then. I knew it was important, because Dad never went at anything less than very seriously the way he was going at this. I knew this from the way he managed his Little League baseball teams, on which I played for several years. It was serious… which accounted for the tone of his voice that had mystified me when I expected to end up in my bedroom for hassling my poor Mother the way I had.

The thing is, looking back at it ever-after, it’s no trick at all to understand how and exactly when my Father took my life in his hands and directly changed it forever. The moment stands like a physical object: a hinge around which I turned in one definite direction, on a line reaching from then to the end of my days.

The seriousness of it was beginning to set in several hours later, when my left hand hurt like hell from holding an open-C chord almost the whole time. He also showed me an open-G, as well as (and this is the really important part) explaining to me how they related to each other theoretically. That — the theory — was all the difference between actually learning what I was doing and simply aping sounds the way I had been with Glen and Bobby. Yeah: we could hack our way through Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour," but we didn’t have a clue to why those sounds came together in the way they did. Before that first day with Dad was over, I could faintly discern that I was going to be a real guitar player, because I would know why. My Old Man would see to it.


For a couple of years already, my younger brother Michael had been playing the mandolin. I recall sitting on the floor outside the closed door of our bedroom and listening to Dad give Mike his very first instructions, and here’s the damned truth: I couldn’t understand why, as the oldest, I shouldn’t have been first. It was another mystery to me: Michael and Dad were doing something exclusively together, without me, and I simply couldn’t fathom that.

Dad’s wisdom might have been mysterious to me, and maybe even to him, too, but all was borne out in events: my brother became a fabulous mandolin player where, by the time it had come to my turn, I just didn’t have it for the mandolin. I don’t know why, but I just never understood that thing. These days, I don’t even consider the fact that he tried to teach me, beginning a couple of months after Michael. It might as well have never happened.

I’ve often joked that Dad taught me to play the guitar only because he was sick & tired of playing by himself and needed a rhythm sideman. I still don’t know whether he knew that I was going to excel in that particular discipline. By the late autumn of 1969, though, he had me going on some of his best swing arrangements for two guitars.

That entire summer, and the afternoons after school that fall, were filled with guitar practice. The law was down: an hour every day. At least: one hour’s practice, every day. There was a sort of symbiotic discipline to it that I suspect is largely missing in matters of this sort involving most children, today. Dad said, “one hour, every day,” and there was simply no question in the world that I would defy that. I think he might deny that he was that autocratic or tyrannical about it. If he would deny that, then I believe he also doesn’t understand the tremendous moral authority he wielded in his family. You see, he could dictate terms like that because he was right. And by the time I was twelve years old, and to the extent that I understood serious matters, I could also understand a thing like one’s Dad being right. It’s true that I wanted badly to play the guitar, but here’s the thing: I was already doing that with Glen and the boys. What did I need Dad for? Here’s the other thing: they didn’t know what they were doing, but my Dad did.

And that’s how he got to dictate terms to me.

So, every day, while all the other kids were outside playing in the island paradise (which is what it was to kids that age), I was sitting in that chair wearing out my fingers with chord changes.

He’d said an hour every day. Of course, it didn’t go exactly like that. Very often, it was two, three, or four hours. Sometimes, it was just me, alone. Very often, though, Dad would get home from work and immediately pick up his 1963 Gibson ES-355 electric, plug it up, and sit down with me to see where I’d been or to push back the frontiers a little more. The lines between work and play began to blur to the point where the former completely suffused the latter and vice-versa, and I cannot say exactly when rehearsals were born, but it was already some time in that first year.

What a sweet moment it was for me when he could sit there and play his arrangement of Glen Miller’s “In The Mood” and rely so confidently on me for competent rhythms that his lead guitar work began to grow on its own. My Dad was pushing his own frontiers and I was helping him do it. And, even better, if you could believe it: Mike would sit in with his mandolin on something like “Waitin’ On The Robert E. Lee”… and Mom would sing something like “Motorboat” in her angelic tones wringing perfect magic with Dad’s voice in the duet, and I could look around and see a band. Right there in our house.

I was still running up the road to jam with Glen, and it was a funny thing: I was getting bigger than they were. Fatter and deeper. There can be no denying it, and I wouldn’t want to: when we heard Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” it was like a bomb going off, and I looked years down the road to a day when I might cop John Lennon’s parts in “Back In The USSR." But I also had something they didn’t. I could go home and rock a rhythm to Dad’s cover of Chet Atkins’ “Levee Walkin’” and get the same feeling, which can really only be best described with one word:

"Swing."

It’s really true. If it can’t swing, then it can’t rock or jump or wail or anything else, and my Dad had it in spades. He brought it to the whole family, and we made the most of it.


We have my grandfather on tape. Grandma and Grandpop came to Hawaii to visit us in 1971. Dad was proud as he could be to show off his little band to a man who was playing professionally by the early twenties. Fifty years later, Grandpop could look down two generations at something happening with the same devotion to craft and hard work, and he was just delighted. He would sit there with us playing “The Swallow” on the mandolin, in its precisely dainty three-quarter waltz time, and ride the band synergy as fully as he ever had. I could tell: he was working at it, too. He’d never forgotten how.

Michael and I could look back two generations and understand that “swing” was a universal concept. It was clearly discernable in the eyes of a 71-year-old man burning with a strain of youth available to anyone who knew how to get there, which was through hard attention to the second-to-second real-time work of landing on the right note at the right time as everyone else, in order that something of ethereal perfection might appear in the air between several minds for just a moment before it went past into history, but everyone had known its existence. We knew, most of all, because of how we knew what it took to make that happen. And it was something that elevated kids to peerage with a man of seven decades’ experience, and brought him back to the searing brilliance of childhood: there was nothing in the world like it when he would just wink at us at the end of one of those performances. It was more than anything, or everything.

Over more than thirty years now, nobody knows how many people who might have played, but never did, have sat around gathering the perfection Dad has inspired… and demanded. Everywhere we have ever lived has been filled with friends and family who were graced to sort of take it for granted while Dad’s band has filled the air with fleeting moments disappearing into the past. It’s always been somewhat poignant to me how they could hear this thing he’s wrought through untold and unsung hours when nobody was present to know the intense effort at catching one fleeting chord change over and over again until it went by with just the right flow… as well as linking a whole train of them into a song ready for performance… and then a whole train of songs to make up an evening. It’s a close secret: the thing that happens between us, while people in the room applaud and cheer after something like my Mother, my sister Agnes, and Dad singing the three-part round of Danny Kaye’s “Three Pennies." They don’t know how good it is. They get to hear it, but that’s nothing in life like actually doing that, and it’s kind of sad to me that they have no idea what it’s really about. Bless their hearts, it’s always good to me that they enjoy it the way they do, but I’ve always wished that they could know the infinite depth of satisfaction of being able to look around our band with that wink, from the inside.


It was in the mid-80’s that Dad had cooked up his arrangement of “The Christmas Song” (Mel Torm� & Robert Wells). Grousing, as usual, over the fact that we somehow never got around to rehearsing Christmas music until December, he nonetheless introduced it to Michael, Mom, and me. By then, Mom was playing bass, and the band was more serious than ever. My best friend Alan Macomber was playing drums with us, and Alan was a serious player. He had a demanding touch for arrangements that surpassed even Dad’s. (Drummers are like that.) And the band was playing weekly around central New York, centering on the town of Cortland. We had gigs in various local bars where the whole country/swing root of things had a market, and it was great fun.

Some of the rock crowd I was hanging out and working with couldn’t figure it out, but the better of them understood that there was something serious going on here. My pal Danny Stillwell was a regular bitch guitar player. He was making a living playing, and there wasn’t anything loud and screaming happening anywhere in the world that he couldn’t handle with amazing style. But he’d seen Dad and me do a local cable-TV session and realized that here was something going on that he couldn’t fathom. There was just no denying that when we had “The Bells Of Saint Mary’s” up on its particular half-time roll, it was as powerful a groove as something like the Eagles’ “Life In The Fast Lane,” it its own mysterious way.

“What the hell are you doing with those rhythms?” he’d asked me after he’d seen it.

“What my Dad taught me,” I told him, and I realized even more that I’d been given something really rare. Nobody I knew had ever learned how to play those old swing-based soc rhythms.

About a week before one of our Christmas shows that year, Dad popped the “Christmas Song” arrangement on us and said he’d like to perform it for an audience. What happened next was an intensity bordering on panic.

I remember a session in which Michael, Dad, and I sat around for hours tossing chords at that thing in order to flavor it just exactly right. None of us ever went looking for sheet music: we would just hack at it until it sounded the way we wanted it to, and the result has always been that the original sounds of Dad’s world-view — rooted at least as far back as the 1940’s — survive down to the turn of the century.

What an effort that was, that night: sitting by the fire in Dad’s living-room and figuring out what we wanted to hear.

Set the key: “Okay, it’s in ‘C’." Right: Dad knows his part — he’s been beating on it for weeks already — and Michael is going to lace the melody with his own harmonic bits on the mandolin (blessed as he is with amazing — not to mention sickening to someone like me — improvisational skills: he can just make up stuff out of thin-air where I have to fight tooth & nail for every note), but I’m the one who has to chord the damned thing.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” I’m sounding out loud: “C, E-minor, A-minor, G7…and we’re into the C7 subordinate bits to the F-major…which isn’t really a modulation because it keeps going through E-minor to end up at the F-minor tonic to the C… okay… that C7 is going to be a 9th, actually… Right. Let’s take it that far.”

Off it goes. “From the edge” (the beginning).

“Jack Frost nipping at your nose…” (halt)

“That’s ascending. C-major. Up through D, somehow, but the major ain’t right.”

Dad and Mike are throwing blind stabs at it, but The Theory Kid is on a roll. “No, listen: it’s minors all the way up. D-minor. E-minor. B-minor. And then… that’s a B-flat 7th. That’s right. Listen to me…”

“Folks dressed up like Eskimos…”

“Hear it? Yes. That’s right. Around again for the second time from the C. Okay, let’s go.”

It sounds a lot more simple here than it was that night, and we beat on it endlessly that week. In fact, we were still beating on it, just to make sure, minutes before we loaded the gear on Friday night to take it out in public. Dad wasn’t completely sure of it, and Michael was still picking at it. (Hey, Mike: I want to say right here and now that I shouldn’t have told you that night that you were “full of shit." You’re not, obviously. However, I’m also going to say that your suggested B-flat-7th glissando has never worked where you suggested it, because it can’t be done the same way as the preceding C9. I’m telling you.)

It was just a little VFW hall in a small town, full of people who’d driven from their surrounding farms through the snow to have a good time on a Friday night. It was a Christmas party, though. The place was decorated in the old homespun way of such places out where the lights shine against surrounding darkness, and most people can hold in one hand the number of moments — throughout a lifetime — that feel the way that night did to me.

The time came to lay something new on them, which they’d never heard us play before, and we all took a deep breath as we stepped up to the edge. The place went quiet from the opening chords, and the world closed to the confines of that room, perfectly floating on one passing moment so long and luxurious that nothing else mattered. Our singer Walt’s voice drew everyone away to a place so easy to be, and nobody out there knew how long it had been in the making.

Of course, it was nothing like a "miracle." But it seemed like one, when it happened.


Thirty-one years into the miracle, now, I’m so happy to tag my father with responsibility for all of it… rather the way he tagged his L-47 with my name for Christmas in 1970.

Thanks, Dad. I love you dearly.

Dec. 6 — I’m sitting here right now watching the Florida House of Representatives Minority Leader, Lois Frankel (D), making an astonishing fool of herself on network television. Her grief over the announcement of a special session of the Florida Legislature in order to appoint a slate of presidential electors has driven her to distraction. For one thing, she says the thing is illegal, and even hinted at litigation to enjoin it.

Given the state of the courts these days, she could probably get someone to actually hear the case.

During her painful moan, Rep. Frankel asserted it as “naive” that anyone should think the Florida Legislature’s leadership was “calling the shots.”

"The only thing missing from the proclamation today was the postmark from Austin," she said.

She went on about the ubiquitous “WillofthePeople” and how outrageous it would be for the “partisan” majority to supplant themselves for the wishes of six million Floridians.

If there is one thing I cannot stand, it’s a whiney loser. (”Legal and constitutional scholars far smarter than me have been saying that there is no legal grounds for this!” she let on.) Oh, there’s room for it in the case of, say, a ninety-seven-pound weakling getting trounced by a two-hundred-pound bully pounding him just because he’s little. I could see that sort of thing being worth howling about, because the injustice of it is starkly obvious: anyone like that who would destroy someone smaller just because he’s smaller, is also a good candidate for a tire-iron on the kneecap just to get his attention before making things right again.

In the matter of big-time politics, however, nothing like this is the case. For one obvious thing: ignorance of the rules is no excuse. Rep. Frankel could do herself a favor just by reading the US Constitution. Personally, I’m not a real big fan of that document, but it’s not terribly long or otherwise difficult to understand. Also: I’m not the one who’s gone into business under its provisions, which is not the case with Rep. Frankel, even though she’s just a whiney Florida state representative. In the instant case everything she was talking about is subject to the authority of the US Constitution.

“Each State shall appoint, in such a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” (Article II, Section 1, paragraph 2)

The period isn’t strictly quotation, because the sentence continues beyond that punctuation, but it’ll stand for the purpose of a great big “HELLO!” to Rep. Frankel.

So, what exactly is it that drives a person like her to her appearance this afternoon? Well, she knows an implacable thing when she sees it. The Republican majority in Florida is getting ready to have their way with the elector slate, and if they really want to do that, there is nothing in the world that anyone can do about it. They have all the numbers breaking their way, and poor Rep. Frankel, who wants Al Gore to be president, is going to lose in that case.

One wonders if she didn’t understand politics when she chose a career. Did she never look forward to a day when her own party would be in the majority and have its way? If she ever did, then whence all this hollering about "partisanship?" What the hell else could she ever expect? If she has some idea that her own appearance on the heels of the announcement was “non-partisan” or something like it, she should bring it on, because I can always use a good laugh.

Whether the Florida Republican leadership of the legislature are "partisans," one thing remains indisputably true: that assembly is mandated by the US Constitution to appoint a slate of presidential electors. They’re calling the special session a “safety net” in case the Certificate of Ascertainment — already stashed in Washington — turns out to be not so certifiable as a result of any number of legal actions now in progress. They might never stand up and cop to “partisanship” in the deal, right out loud, any more than Rep. Frankel would admit that for motive of her own distress, but they feel like they need to cover the action. Who could blame them?

It’s variously said that “the electors were chosen on election day." This is the “photo-finish” argument; that the only thing remaining is to examine the photos of the finish. That would be the full-blast manual recounts. The most notable example at the moment is the Leon County circuit court case which was appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. The Gore team is still playing for a hand recount of 14,000 “under-vote” ballots in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

The “undervote” ballots are the sort that require human peering through to a light source, nonsense aptly called “ballot phrenology” by Lynette Warren right here in The Union Square Journal. It was great for illustrating the actual cognitive value of various ardent work carried on by the various bleary-eyed canvassing boards, which is nil.

Now, we could rehearse all the hue & cry over “divining voter intent” and all the rest of it, but I’m not interested. I’ll just sensibly assert, here, that anyone who thinks they know who an “undervote” voter voted for, is also just making it up. The simple fact is that there is no evidence, in the same way that there is no evidence for leprechauns.

That’s that. It’s just the way it is.

The far more pressing question involves who, exactly, is making up what, exactly, and why they would do it.


This is the point where integrity requires Full Disclosure. I want to get out of the way, right away, that I am a dedicated Clinton Hater.� Sooner or later in these columns I will make clear to all the fullest depths of my contempt for The Lying Bastard and his Ozark Long March. The point is briefly necessary here, however, for this reason: I am not unreasonable about it.

Throughout The Long National Nightmare — during which I have been far more fully awake than to fall for all the “prosperity” jazz — I grew to my status (”If only the guy kept an “Enemies List” like some presidents we’ve known!”) with close observation of this administration’s record, which was always appraised in terms of principles. All of that leads to fairly heavy material, all its own. My principles (mainly freedom) are anathema to many, but I’m not here to argue them. (Yet.) What I’m getting at is the fact that hating Maximum Bill, as well as his whole rotten cast, is an eminently reasonable conclusion at which to arrive by a process of reason.

One more disclosure in order to set a context: Bush is going to be a spectacularly rotten president. Not especially evil, I think, but spectacularly rotten. Tack that up on your refrigerator: I said that. Period.


Way, way back in that unholy night between the 7th and 8th of November, Christopher Ruddy writing at Newsmax filed a 4:21am report which stated that “key Democratic precincts held back turning in their final tallies until the bitter end.” Ahead of a few of its unfortunate or improvident competitors, The New York Times had stopped its presses sometime near 3:30am in order to avoid another Truman/Dewey style headline goof. Before the morning sun had raced from sea to shining sea, the Florida vote was legally mandated for recount by the hair-thin margin, and forecasts of court challenges were already hours old.

The Florida vote looked like a train wreck that had finally found its grid-coordinate. The Place To Be.

Very shortly after the train wrecked, air was densely fogged with shouts of confusion in numbers that eventually far outstripped the alleged mistaken Buchanan votes. Even before the train wrecked, Gore fund-rouser Terry McAuliffe told reporters, “We got to make sure this election is right.” Looking back at that November 7th statement, one wonders whether he knew the wreck was coming, although it would be fair to note that we’re talking about a state in which vote fraud is so pervasive that the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating the subject, so I guess it’s possible that my eight year-old niece could have expressed the same worry had she been interested.

By 4:30am during the overnight on NBC, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter threw down what can only now be regarded as A Plan, looking back on actual events. Nearly frenzied over the nationwide popular vote margin for Gore, Alter suggested shotgun litigation in every court with an open door, essentially aimed at keeping the Bush elector slate from being certified for as long as possible. Two beneficial ricochets might possibly accrue from this angle: 1) Bush might yield to various unspecified pressures to concede the election under the weight of the national popular vote; and 2) it could later be plausibly argued that there could never be an accurate (i.e. - “true”) accounting of the Florida vote.


It shouldn’t require a quantum physicist to understand which way the particles are blowing when a James Carville says that the day will come when we will all understand that Al Gore won the election in Florida. It’s likely the furthest distance from accident when US Sen. Harry Reid, (D-Nev) come along to remind everyone: “Remember, there’s something of a pale over all this: he lost the popular vote by over a quarter-million votes.”

Now, for the purposes of my own judgment in these matters, a resort to history is quite often good enough for me, and here’s one thing I know: the name “Daley” anywhere near them is something like acid on fine leather… which isn’t to point up a comparison of fine leather to elections, but actually the particular ferocity of the corrosive effect. And that’s just for starters, as in: a generation before Carville, if you can imagine the devolutionary implications.

So, now, we’re treated to some dynamic portrait of yet another working class hero laboring in The Ballot Fields for the future of the past, and here’s a noteworthy fact: it’s the… Gore people… who pitch that rubbish. Nobody else.

I could sit here and nod my head and smile at the suggestion that there is no Uncertainty Principle at work in this business, but I’m afraid I won’t be very good at it, because there simply can be no other way of things than that the data will change as long as they care to look at it, because they’re looking at it. I am not a fool: I know “phrenology” when I see it, even if only as far as I can see the damned lawyers tramping around and the whining losers baring fangs. Just look at these people, and tell me if the truth is in them. Go ahead.


Pat Caddell is nearly coming unglued lately, and that looks like a signal matter, to me. “We are headed to hell,” he said tonight in looking ahead at partisan divides. The poor guy is making as much righteous noise as he can over the election stealings of Florida, but he’s also got a pretty good grip on which way the particles are blowing into the future. I’ve not heard him remark greatly on the legal plays. But he might see that sort of thing as swell for people who dig it, but anyone who thinks that’s where the action is, is also the type of person to be excited by a field-goal kicked in the last six seconds of a 21-7 football game.

Yeah: there’s a lot of noise in the stands, and even side-bets on miracles (e.g., Martin County), but Al’s dead. Nobody has to believe that, of course, but they get to hang around and watch to see who’s right about it. And then, as Carville tells us where his bet lays, “We’re gonna have the wrong guy in the presidency because these votes are going to be counted under the Florida sunshine law.” It was Nancy “Amazing” Grace who hipped us, “Those votes will be counted, come hell or high water.”

Wonder which it’ll be. Don’t you? Which would be what to the Bush administration, and would it be "partisan?" Jeez, it would almost call for some kind of price to be paid for winning the election, what Thomas Bray at OpinionJournal.com characterized as “go[ing] all wobbly with gauzy visions of a bipartisan future.” How much hell or high water would that take? The question occurs because of the ways these people raise them… but this isn’t the place to start raising other questions about burnt drowned bodies.

And, see, the thing is that Maximum Bill can go ahead and ride off to Hollywierd or Oxford if he can get away with either one of them… if he can get far enough away to dodge the splinters if one of his old pillars explodes under him, which is to say: out of reach of “the law." He probably will, and I said so years ago. (From 1776 on, nobody ever died so that something like Bill Clinton could be what he has been and then just flit off to party like a retired Soviet apparatchik as if the blood of the Lubyanka cellars had never splashed his trousers.)

But the Clintonism is seeped now, and I ain’t counting on Dubya to ward it off.

"Well… the goddamned thing is over now; it ended on Thursday afternoon with all the grace and meaning of a Coke bottle thrown off a third-floor fire escape on the Bowery — exploding on the sidewalk and scaring the shit out of everybody in range, from the ones who got righteously ripped full of glass splinters to the swarm of ‘innocent bystanders’ who still don’t know what happened…

…And probably never will; there is a weird, unsettled, painfully incomplete quality about the whole thing. All over Washington tonight is the stench of a massive psychic battle that *nobody* really won.”

(Hunter S. Thompson on the end of Nixon, “Fear And Loathing In Limbo: The Scum Also Rises," Rolling Stone #171, October 10, 1974)


I suspect that the whole reason why Thompson has been so quiet as he has throughout the last decade is that he claimed Maximum Bill as his very own in 1992. “He may be a swine, but he’s our swine.” Conjecture, of course, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. However, one of the fine things about history is the way it rolls around in echoes among those who try to ignore it. I’ve always maintained that the 90’s could have used Thompson’s firebomb invective of the 70’s, but stepped up to guided-munitions precision amid the vast carpet-bombing target prospects. The guy went limp, though, and that’s all there is to that. But it’s not all there is to the fact that, after eight years of unprecedented scandal of every variety in the federal government, the biggest and worst scandal of all is the government itself.

Working on the general premise, acceptable to sensible people, that the United States is the largest manifestation of politics in world history, it necessarily then follows that it is also the greatest, most dense, repository of mendacity and hypocrisy ever known. Historians might disagree with resort to various examples of the past. They would do so in vain defiance of known facts. The most prominent fact of the moment is the hue & cry for “bi-partisan healing” mere hours after five weeks of frenzied hellish combat ostensibly on behalf of "TheAmericanPeople," but really for the prize of power. Nothing more was involved. There were no other principles attached to the matter.

The Democratic Party will do its utmost to demonstrate this fact in 2002, and it is on this point that the junior Bush administration will go down in history as the most craven to date.

I’m the first one to say that the forecast is premised on certain political values that get only the least cursory attendance from any of these rotten people. What is commonly called an “assumption” is actually the real thing, here: a true premise. It is not “assumed” in the manner generally taken as an opening for various skeptics’ attacks on its validity. The political values of which I write — while all these rotters merely make sounds and type syllables — include, first, foremost, and principally, individual human liberty.

During the savage fight, we were often told of the great civics lessons being taught, and how wonderful it all was that such things could happen here without tanks in the streets. I think it’s a good thing that there were no tanks in the streets, but that’s not at all the same thing as saying that things have worked out as they should. Beyond all that, however, I have no confidence whatever that the whole thing was dragged out as it was so that it could all be turned around with a few words from Bush and Gore that would suddenly inspire kissy-faced comity as we now hear oozing from the various pores of apparat.

The main thing I’m here to point out is the facility of lies these people wield like tear gas. The sheer outrageous patrimony they throw down on us is something no grown human would ever tolerate from anyone who could not muster air strikes to back it up. Of course, the various presstitutes can’t avail that sort of thing, but those lot know they’re safe in parroting all the presumptive rubbish of people who know good and well that nearly a hundred million eligible adults did not go to the polls in the election. That’s how a Chris Mathews, for instance, can wax starry-eyed effusive over a bare total of twenty-three hundred words between the two candidates that were just appalling in their threadbare platitudes. Even Don Imus was swooning (over Gore) — “It was one of the great speeches of all time.”

Yo, Don: it was crap. What the hell is wrong with you?

For anyone who doesn’t know, I can point out what’s wrong with someone like Imus: he doesn’t value freedom anymore than anyone else on the dismal scene, and he’s got liars in his ears.

Does anyone wonder whose bright idea it was over at USA Today to publish that county-breakdown map of the election? I suppose it’s arguable that it’s wishful thinking, but I don’t think so: I really am convinced that the thing is the single most important news event of the season, and I can hardly believe that it made it into the light of day. I don’t think it’s open to question that it has captured the attention of what are dismissed as “fringe elements." However, the “massive psychic battle” of which Thompson wrote a quarter-century ago is nothing compared to what’s happening in what’s now proudly called “Red Country” by some of its most conscious inhabitants.


“The message from TheAmericanPeople is not a policy message, but a message that we should get our own house in order and start working together for the good of this country.” (Sen. John Breaux, Larry King, 12/13/00)

Now, while the liars are schmoozing their “bi-partisan” feel-goodies at each other, Red Country people understand that nothing they stand for matters where it counts. Sen. Orrin Hatch can sit there and earnestly nod at the presumptuous nonsense of someone like Breaux, but he should never believe that there are not millions of people casting him one fishy eye with the other fixed on the federal monstrosity laying across their America like a steel net. There are, and their convictions cannot be addressed so simply as these lot presume.

The best that they can hope for is that the heat of the election fight has now been reduced to a low rolling boil as the Bush administration gets off the ground. However, it is an enormous stupidity for anyone to point to the narrow margin of this election and attempt to rationalize it as a mandate to “govern from the center." This fact might escape the attention of the mandarin class in the short run, and that’s mainly because the short run is what they’re built for. Such disdain for principle as they manifest naturally means that the range of the moment is as far as they can see and act.

All the nonsense about "bi-partisanship," however, means in practice that one side or the other, or both, must necessarily compromise on principles, and here is a truth: only the Democrats have principles to compromise, and they’re going to do less of that than the Republicans. That’s because they know that they don’t have to compromise: the Republicans don’t have a leg to stand on.

The impeachment notwithstanding, the Republicans spent the last eight years sitting on their asses just making noises that meant nothing. The lesson was not lost on the Democrats, or the Red Country.

What a car! It was completely astonishing, the way it sat there in the mall parking lot. Arresting. By the time I made my way to it, there were almost a dozen people standing around nearly in shock. The whole scene was almost religious in the way that small crowd behaved: trying to be very quiet each in their proximity to strangers, each drawn close by what could fairly be termed “reverence” for this sensational object, which was also a lot more than approximately fifteen hundred pounds of history on the rubber hoof.

It was a 1957 Ford Thunderbird convertible. Pale yellow, with a white interior, black rubber floor mats with the T-bird icon in gleaming white. Not one hair out of place, not a single smudge anywhere on it, not a single ripple in the paint, nothin’ wrong with it, anywhere. And the top was down.

It looked like it should have had armed guards.

The group of admirers was torn between obviously novel excitement and self-impressed restraint. People clasped their hands behind their backs in ostentatious displays of taken care as they leaned as far as possible over the doors to the interior without touching anything, advertising to each other — as well as the prospect of the owner catching them — that they knew how to conduct themselves around such a treasure. They walked all the way around it, some several times, observing and chatting details in church-like tones.

After a moment I’d spent near it, someone observed what I’d seen right off the bat: headlights glowing. I’d come upon the car from the left-front quarter, and the main question to me was whether it was the T-bird’s lights. It was parked nose-to-nose with some late-model homotype or other: one of those dark things with tinted windows, ground-effects package, and just about completely indistinguishable manufacture. I wondered whether it had the self-extinguishing headlights, which hadn’t extinguished and were merely bouncing off the T-bird’s eyes.

The person who I heard observing the glow asked nobody in particular, “Did they leave the lights on?” He wasn’t talking about the homotype driver.

“I don’t know,” I said to anyone or everyone. Right then in the medium-gloom on the cusp of evening, I could not determine which car’s lights were on. I closely examined the headlights of the T-bird, and couldn’t really tell. I hadn’t yet made my way to the interior to examine the lights switch.

As I walked around to look inside, a kid caught my eye. He was about eight years old, and staring at the car as if he were confronted with incontrovertible evidence of space aliens landing on earth. “Never seen anything like it, and there it is, right there in real life,” was written all over his little face. His mom and dad, who had not been born when that car was built, stood together, but unmistakably isolated from each other in their own internal fantasies over such a fantastic machine. Maybe he was chasing Suzanne Somers in “American Graffiti." Maybe she was being chased. I don’t know, but they were far away.

I came to the driver’s side door and looked. “Yeah, it’s the T-bird.”

Oh, man. Glances flew around. What to do?

Now, I don’t think anyone felt a real risk that the car would actually sit there crippled by the time the owner returned to find it with the battery completely run-down beyond starting without a jump. (It was an automatic shift: it wouldn’t start on compression.) That would take hours, and surely it wouldn’t be left alone that long. But everybody there was obviously pained at picturing that circumstance. They all wanted to turn the lights off, out of simple respect for the way the car should be taken care of. The ethical tension hung palpable in the air.

Finally, one old guy simply reached over the door and, with the precise tip of one forefinger, pushed the lights switch all the way into the dashboard, and all was right.

I might have expected a cheer to go up. What happened, though, was that the small crowd began milling about again in quiet admiration, and slowly heading off to their own cars and affairs. The old guy got a nod or two from around the car for his trouble: circumspect acknowledgment that he’d done the right thing, and everyone had seen it.

I eventually walked off toward my ‘72 Chevelle. The mom & dad with the alien-abducted kid were headed in my direction. It turned out that their mini-van was parked right next to me.

As we were about to get in our respective “cars” (if you could call ‘em that in the shadow of the spectacle), dad said, “It would have been too bad to leave the lights on, but you know: you never know, these days.”

I looked him in the eye for a second, having clearly heard him refer obliquely to the implications of the ethical dilemma. In my own mind, I remarked, “It’s not our grandfathers’ America, anymore. There is no telling what anyone is ever going to do next.”

I also wondered what he would have to say if he knew that, at that very moment, he was in the presence of a dangerous criminal: someone with horrible disregard for the rules of society. That would be: me.

I said aloud, “Oh, well, I know what you mean.” We just kind of rolled our eyes at each other, and waved. I winked at the kid, and gave mom a courteous nod, and we parted.

“You never know, these days.” That’s what he’d said. And, of course, he was absolutely right. That was the main reason why I was a dangerous criminal right then and there, as I usually am.

I wonder what that guy might have had to say — in his safe, secure, suburban mini-van way — if he’d known about my Beretta 9mm pistol tucked in the waist of my jeans at the small of my back, right then and there. Completely ignorant, of course, he’d given me a friendly, “Good night," just before he drove away.

And I could be wrong, but I’m convinced that he’s the very same guy who would howl about “gun nuts”… even in the context of our encounter. He would have discarded everything peaceful and friendly about me — a guy with a gun and no concealed carry permit — and retreated into the full depths of terror to which most of his generation has been cultured.

I wouldn’t know how to help him over his ignorant infirmity, and you know what?

I don’t really care.