When I was a kid growing up in Queens, I did not know that the Unisphere is twelve stories high, nor that it weighs 700,000 pounds, nor that it is the largest structure on Earth made of stainless steel. All I knew was that it was huge and it was in the park where my parents would take us to ride bikes. I was always afraid it would fall over and crush me. I would ride around underneath it, thrilled by the perceived danger of this enormous globe falling, and thrilled by its sheer size. I could imagine the groaning, heaving sound all that falling steel would make as it toppled in slow motion.

When my friend and fellow Queens native Greg told me that he had his parents' car for the day and that we should go for a drive, I couldn't imagine where we would go on a rainy Thanksgiving Eve. But once we started driving, he said he knew just where to take us.

It was cozy in the car, with the rain falling outside and the music playing inside. I realized that one oddity of New York City life is that you don't get much, if any, car time with your friends, since you don't have cars. You miss out on that womblike togetherness inside a tiny box, the intimacy of retrieving something from the glove compartment.

Somewhere on the Grand Central Parkway I got the feeling that our destination was Flushing Meadows Coronoa Park. I just knew it. Between the tricks of mist and light, the BQE and LIE and Grand Central were totally otherworldly. It looked like UFOs had landed everywhere, and I wasn't even stoned. Well, not very, anyway.

We exited the highway and drove along some kind of service road that paralells the park. I hadn't been there in years, probably not since I was a kid. Even fifteen years ago, the park was a ruin. As we drove into the park from the service road, we realized why the park had always been a little scary. There is something Soviet-era about its landscaping and architecture. It doesn't, as its name suggests, have meadows or any kind of discernable landscaping; it lacks the winding paths or approximations of nature that make Central Park or Prospect Park magical and friendly. Flushing Meadows is geometric and foreboding. Like much of the rest of Queens, it feels as if it was hurriedly constructed during a time of marked by a collective fear of annihilation.

I directed Greg over a bridge I recognized as the bridge on which I flipped over my bike handlebars when I was ten and landed on my head and was, as my mother predicted, glad to be wearing a helmet. Driving on the dark, empty paths, not a park ranger nor a police car in sight, I felt like we were going deeper and deeper into the strange wilderness that only exists in the middle of cities.

The end of the Wilco album we were listening to was fading out into several minutes of eerie, instrumental music that would have perfectly soundtracked the landing of a flying saucer. At this exact moment we made a turn and the Unisphere loomed, floodlit and silvery. We were a good quarter mile away and its size was already terrifying.

We drove up a long path to the globe and circled around it in the car. The lights were refracting inside the structure in such a way that it appeared to be sending huge bolts of light out into the gray-purple night sky.

We parked the car and got out to take a walk around. Amazingly, I saw an elderly man jog by, as if it were daylight in a crowded park and not a rainy night in a deserted, crumbling fairground. We looked around the weird concrete flying saucer towers I remembered my dad telling me used to be an observation deck and restaurant, and I told Greg how the pavillion with all the criscrossing cables on top had a map of New York State on the ground and you could walk on it. It was always so hard to imagine this scrubby collection of inexplicable, non-functional concrete monstrosities as a bustling theme park devoted to progress and technology. My dad, an avid Popular Science reader, digs the future, and dug it especially as a teenager at the World's Fair. But by the time I played in it as a kid, the park's version of the future had already become a hulking relic of a distant past.

We parked the car right near the Unisphere and I noticed that it was set up right in line with a series of empty reflecting pools leading up to sculpture of a contorted, classical male figure. The pools were full of wet yellow leaves.

The optical trick of the Unisphere is that it's so enormous from far away, you can't imagine how it could possibly get bigger, and yet it seems to multiply in size exponentially with every step you take toward it. We jumped right into the emtpy fountain that surrounds it, which I remembered doing in the winter as a kid, and suddenly we were standing right underneath it, looking up at its hollow interior. Its cables were warbling creepily in the wind.

I was scared, almost dream-scared. It wasn't the fog or the floodlights or the emptiness of the park so much as the size. To be near something so big throws your sense of scale so far off that you quickly take leave of reality.

We circumnavigated the globe, pointing out places as if we were passing them on a train. Someone had tagged some of the lower beams that support the globe, and someone else had looped a few pairs of shoes around the lowest of the three rings that orbits it. These gestures seemed futile instead of bold. So much of the Unisphere was so sadly, terribly unreachable. When we stepped out of the brightly lit fountain and back into the shadows, it felt like we had landed from someplace very far away.

On our way out of the park we drove around a large duck pond. I never thought about how the ducks are always there at the park, even when it's winter and nighttime and there's no one else there. We stopped and observed two larger, white birds that stood out against the night. Swans! Two swans were paddling along, oblivous to the ominous Unisphere disappearing into the mist behind them.

"That is so fucking David Lynch," we agreed, and headed back to Williamsburg to drink green tea.

Today is that peculiar holiday on which on which we pretend that acts of colonization and genocide were instead just a dinner party, and that the dysfunction of our families was instead just normal.

Did you know that in South America, to kill turkeys, people get the turkey drunk until it dies of alcohol poisoning? But if the turkey's really, really ornery, not only will it not die, but it will still be trying to get it on with the girl turkey once it is drunk.

I am thankful that I am not a turkey, male or female, drunk or sober.

This post-election red-state/blue-state conventional wisdom is full of perversities. More people get divorced in the red states than the blue states. The amoral gay-marriage condoning pagans in Massachusetts have the lowest divorce rate in the country. The richest states in America--Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York--are all blue. The "moral values" people in the poorest, reddest states have divorce rates 50% above the national average.

Despite these many inconsistencies, indicating that things are far more complicated than they seem, the blue-state liberal stereotype remains so ingrained that "sushi-eating, latte-drinking, New York Times-reading, yoga-doing, Volvo-driving, multiply-pierced, sexually lax" liberal is still an epithet, though it has long been a cliche. One reason for the tenacity of this stereotype is that the right wing has relocated what should be an economic debate (some people are rich and other people are poor) to a social debate (some people like guns and other people like yoga). Hating people who do yoga and eat sushi is a way for poor people to hate rich people. What is ingenious about the Republican party is that they have helped relocate poor people's hatred of rich people specifically to rich urban liberals. In truth, all rich people enjoy some form of raw seafood.

While I do not consider myself a "rich urban liberal," while I am in fact, in ideology and bank account, a nearly-broke urban radical, I doubt Red America would see me that way. They don't care if I try to follow Martin Luther King, Jr.'s example and reserve my deepest ire for the liberals who are the greatest enemies of revolution. They don't care if I don't own property or even one of their despised Volvos. They don't care that I, in fact, do not love John Kerry very much, and in fact only despise him marginally less than I despise the Moron Puppet. They don't care that what they might see as a "liberal lifestyle" to me is a kind of hedonism I would like to one day experience completely outside the bounds of "normal" society, so I do not have to buy my organic produce at the inflated prices set by coporate entities like Whole Foods, Inc. I have enough markers of East Coast urban liberal elitism to be identified as such, especially if the debate has been relocated away from political disempowerment, away from economic disparity, away even from the amorphous and ungraspable entity of God, to the more palpable terrain of lifestyle.

It is with this in mind that I publish here the anecdotal evidence that notwithstanding my revolutionary goals, rejection of my upper-middle-class-assimilationist-Jewish privileges, critical consciousness and deep-seated loathing of guilty liberals, I am, in fact, the embodiment of Red America's worst nightmare.

My Liberal Weekend
by Emily SuperLefty

Friday afternoon I dropped in on a yoga class taught by an old friend. After I breathed in unison, removed stored tension from my Soas muscle and prayed for peace for all beings with twenty other New Yorkers, my old friend and I went to eat some soup and drink some green tea. We reminisced about when we used to go to Jewish socialist art camp together as teenagers in the mid-90s. At socialist art camp, God was never mentioned, except derisively, and we were encouraged to express ourselves creatively and freely. We were encouraged to explore close feelings for our same-sex bunkmates and listen to lesbian feminist folk music. At socialist art camp, the Fourth of July was not observed, and instead Bastille Day was observed, on which the campers were encouraged to dress in drag.

My friend told me what it is like to teach yoga to pregnant women, how the pregnant women can feel what is happening inside their bodies. I made plans to attend her upcoming dance performance, during which she says she gives birth and is inseminated by a fruit.

In need of a quick snack, I grabbed a salmon-and-avocado sushi at the health food store.

I spent several hours walking around the West Village sampling gourmet cheese and buying chocolate and organic shade-grown fair trade coffee from Mexico.

Settling in for a quiet evening at home, I smoked some marijuana. I watched Waking Life, a movie in which people philosophize about the meaning of existence. Then I made myself a salad. This was what was in my salad: baby spinach, roasted pecans, grapefruit, alfalfa sprouts and goat cheese. I made a maple-syrup-dijon-mustard vinagrette for my salad. I enjoyed my salad with a glass of red wine and finished up this week's New Yorker. I made some espresso and sat down to work around midnight.

I spent the next 6.5 hours writing left-wing screeds on my Apple iBook computer while using the internet to read other people's left-wing screeds. Shortly after dawn, I brushed my teeth with non-fluoride toothpaste and got into bed to read Joan Didion essays until I fell asleep.

On Saturday, after I spent the afternoon encouraging two sixteen-year-olds to question the way power functions in the media and politics. While discussing an article that had been censored on the school paper, I introduced them to the concept of self-censorship as it relates to the mainstream news media. Then I went home to make a fresh mozzarella appetizer for the dinner party I had been invited to that evening.

The dinner party was on the Upper West Side. A delightful group of people sat around drinking fancy cocktails in fluted martini glasses. We also drank chardonnay and laughed heartily at each other's many witticisms. We ate a delicious pesto lasagna and a cheesecake. I got kind of drunk at this dinner party, but I remember that many topics were discussed, including the current political situation, sexual and political messages we received at summer camp, the implications of fan violence at American sporting events and British sporting events, drug use, figure skating, public health, logarithms, marriage, stemware that can be procured through marriage, dog training and waterbeds.

On Sunday, I woke up and made espresso. My roommate and I bought the New York Times and read it until it was time for yoga class. After yoga class, we had Thai food and went home to watch a movie in which the main character is named Fuckhead.

The End

I think we can safely say that there is not one aspect of my weekend that red state "real Americans" could not be easily incited to vilify and despise.

The questions to be dealt with in short order, therefore, are "How, why and what does it mean for America?"

But first, I am off to yoga class, followed by an experimental music performance on the Lower East Side.

Me: How are you, Mom?
Mom: Oh, Emily. I have so much to do. I don't think I'm going to make it.
Me: Well, actually, Mom, none of us are going to make it. Or rather, all of us are going to make it--to the end. So don't worry so much about whether you are or you aren't. You are and you aren't. You're gonna die someday, so you're gonna make it to death, but on the other hand, you're not gonna make it through life.
[pause]
Mom: I guess hadn't really thought of it that way before.

Dad: How are you?
Me: Unfortunately, I'm still in the middle of the slow process of trying to remove my head from my ass.
Dad (pleasantly): Well, just don't strain your neck when you finally get it out.

Voicemail from Noah (brother, age 21): Hey Em, it's me. I'm having a real hard time here. My girlfriend's in Argentina, I hate school, I just had a mohawk and shaved it off, and I'm not sure if I've ever really experienced anything in my life so far. It'd be real great to talk to my sister. Love you. Bye.

Scientists estimate that 106,456,367,669 people have ever lived on Earth. Assuming (conservative estimate) that 10% of those people are gay and 50% of the remaining 90% are women, that leaves 47,905,365,400 people. Assuming the scenario I'm about to describe has happened to every straight woman at least once, we'll just call this Example #47,905,365,400, give or take a few.

*(This did not happen to me. This did, in fact, happen to A Friend. I mean, it did happen to me, just not recently. But it's happening all the time, oh yes, oh yes, it's happening all the time.)

The scenario: Boy meets Girl. Boy and Girl have amazing, magical night together sharing quirks of cyncism and whimsy. Perhaps Boy and Girl even hook up. Hookup, like conversation is fun, satisfying and alive with a frisson of connection too often absent from conversations and hooking up. Not like one of those hookups that happens "too soon" and ends trajectory of attraction but the kind of hookup that begets further hooking up. Boy and Girl exchange phone numbers. Boy regales Girl throughout night and subsequent morning with various insinuations of things they can do together, like take a road trip to New Orleans or "get dinner next week," insinuating that he will call girl at some future point so they can do these things. Though he could say, "That was really nice, take care" (meaning there is a 0% chance Boy and Girl will see each other again), Boy says, "I'll call you," perhaps even prefaced by "I'd really like to see you again," meaning there is a greater-than-0% chance Boy and Girl will see each other again.

Boy never calls Girl again. Girl realizes this just fucking figures, doesn't it, as Boy Who Has Not Called is the first guy in eons Girl can remember actually wanting to call her. Girl considers using phone number acquired in phone number exchange to call Boy, but ultimately decides that if Boy really wanted to see Girl, Boy would have called Girl, since in a patriarchal misogynist heteronormative society the imperative to action still rests, for better or for worse, through tacit society-wide agreement, and through explicit agreement expressed by statement "I'll call you," with Boy as subject and Girl as object (and doesn't the grammar just literally illustrate the problem right there?), on Boy.

Girl realizes that Boy is not going to call her, berates self for thinking this Boy was in fact interested in her, berates Boy for being a dumbass, realizes that Boy was not truly interested in her, was probably drunk and wanted to get laid, or bored and wanted to see if he could get Girl's number, not to call but to carry around and eventually throw away, Boy does not care about or did not experience sparkling conversational connection, Boy does not want to take a road trip to New Orleans or get dinner next week or, in fact, ever. Girl acknowledges that insinuating future contact either as geniune intention or boldfaced lie and then not following through on intention for future contact is a right reserved by both men and women in all romantic and sexual situations, but can't help but feel rather slighted by Boy's apparently abrupt change of heart, or gradual loss of interest in situation to point where Boy is not motivated to call Girl until such time as both parties delete one another from cell phones, which is usually followed shortly by awkward meeting on subway platform, which is usually followed by relief on one or both parties that future contact was not made, as obviously everyone involved was drunk at the time, and why did Girl even care whether or not Boy called her, Boy is not so great at ALL and actually kind of lame and why did Girl get so pissed off that Boy did not call her, or until such time as Girl meets Other Boy and he does or does not call her and life goes on ad nauseum through Examples #47,905,365,401, #47,905,365,402, #47,905,365,403 and so on until the end of time or the end of human sexual and romantic contact because planet has been taken over by machines like in The Matrix and the human race awaits liberation by Keanu Reeves.

But before this all plays out, while Girl is still waiting and hoping Girlishly for Boy to call so they can go on road trip to New Orleans or "get dinner next week," when Boy has not called and it is becoming increasingly evident that Boy is never going to call, for one deluded moment, however, the One Who Is Not Called entertains the notion that something terrible has happened to the One Who Has Not Called. The Girl, in this particular situation, Who Has Not Been Called thinks, with great alarm, that something has happened to the Boy Who Has Not Called (and Never Will). "What if something happened to [Boy Who Has Not Called (and Never Will)]?" wonders Girl. "What if some terrible fate like amnesia or death has befallen him?"

But--and this is the crux of the theory I wish to impart today--in all of human history, this has never once been the case. If someone is expecting or hoping for your phone call and you have not called them, you can't be dead. Not calling people who you said you would call can protect you from harm and even death.

If you have absorbed the recent rhetoric that the reason a Boy (or Girl) has not called you is because S/"He's Just Not That Into You!", information apparently so revelatory that it is a #1 bestseller, consider the alternative, equally likely possibility: Maybe S/He Just Doesn't Want to Die and Calling You is Karmically Linked to His Eventual, Impending Death in the Grander Scheme of the Universe!"

If you want to live forever, go out with or hook up with someone, take their number, tell them you'll call them, and then never call them. Two impossibilities will be forever linked in the universe--you calling and you dying. The fragile romantic faith of another human being is but a small price to pay for immortality.

Laura Brannigan died this past August, at the early age of 47, of a brain aneurysm in her bed in Quogue. I was saddened to hear this. Laura Brannigan gave us the song "Gloria." Not "Gloria" the Van Morrison song, "Gloria" the Laura Brannigan song. It went platinum in 1982 and was notably featured in the movie Flashdance.

Flashdance (tagline: "What a feeling.") is a movie about the making and breaking of people with big dreams. "Gloria" plays in the scene in which Jeanie, the ice-skating friend of Alex, the Jennifer Beals character, gets her big break but blows it by wiping out in that spectacular way only ice skaters can (gasp-inducing sound of skate edge catching ice to launch jump followed by moment of slightly off-kilter spinning in air followed by extremely painful-looking skid of bare thigh and ass along ice). Though her friends are murmuring "get up, Jeanie, come on, Jeanie, get up," from the stands, Jeanie sits broken, on the ice, as the song "Gloria" reverberates in the frigid rink.

If we begin to unpack Flashdance (and I would like to suggest here that Flashdance has not been unpacked enough by film critics and semioticians to date) we see the ice-skater subplot as a kind of might-have-been, a cautionary tale to be redeemed by the main plot of the film. The ice-skating friend falls down and doesn't get up. This moment is both a foreshadowing of and counterpoint to the moment when Alex falls down and does get up, in the climactic ballet school audition scene.

Though she performs her avant-garde dances to an unappreciative crowd in a strip joint and supports herself as a welder by day, Alex gets an audition at a fancy ballet school, through the connections of her boyfriend, a presumably influential boss-of-people-who-weld. Perhaps he is a merchant of welded things? What is the correct title of the rich people in the welding cities of the world? Is it "robber baron?" Alex's boyfriend is a modern-day (well, mid-1980s) robber baron, one who prefers the company of much younger women who wear the bow tie and upper third of a tuxedo shirt and nothing else to a dinner date.

In a memorably lit room, before the requisitely stony faces of the foreboding ballet school admissions board, Alex begins her unorthodox and electrifying dance routine but falls down after the first few bars. "Can I start again?" she asks, registering the painful mix of hope and devastation any eighteen-year-old welder with a heart of gold and a furnace of raw, untrained dance potential would feel if she had just fallen down in a heap during her once-in-a-lifetime shot at the training that could catapult her from the unsavory stage of the strip joint, where her femininty is sold as a commodity, to the stage of the opera house, where it will be respectfully exalted. She starts again and dances the piece to completion, culminating in an unorthodox and electrifying tumbling sequence I was urged by my parents not to try to recreate in our living room without a stunt double.

The audition scene has since been immortalized shot-for-shot in a J.Lo video, used to teach the welders how to strip in The Full Monty and referenced with typical HBO Original Series genius in a dream sequence in the second season of Six Feet Under, in which Claire, who is applying to art school, places herself in the audition scene and then dreams that her limbs are grotesquely snapping off while she tries to perform. The Six Feet Under reference in particular demonstrates that the Flashdance audition scene occupies a niche in our cultural memory. The scene serves as a receptacle for and articulation of anxiety about performance, judgment, failure, and paralysis. It also provides us with the narrative possibility of overcoming these fears in a way that culminates in an electrifying tumbling sequence.

We can read Alex's "getting up" at her audition not only as the literal resurrection of Alex, the dancer, but a symbolic re-creation of Alex, the woman. The physical act of her falling indicates that she is a "fallen" or "incomplete" woman, a notion confirmed by Alex's unladylike occupation, marginal place of residence (a loft), suggestive outfits and sexually liberated behavior, and ownership of a menacing, masculine dog, . She seeks entrance to the ballet academy, but she also seeks entrance to the more legitimate self-expression--within more legitimate paradigms of femininity--that the ballet academy offers.

When Alex gets up in the audition scene, she is reborn like a phoenix from her old life along the margins, to her new life inside more conventional forms of dance and womanhood. In the final scene, the Robber Baron brings Alex flowers and ties a feminizing celebratory bow around the menacing dog's neck, representing the neutralization of Alex's shadow masculinity. To further enforce the parallel stories, Jeanie--the permanently fallen woman--is left by her comedian boyfriend after she falls down on the ice. She receives neither the big break nor the romantic love that will rescue her from obscurity, poverty and lonliness.

The soundtrack to the audition scene and the final scene that immediately follows is, of course, "What A Feeling." "What A Feeling" is an exuberant ode to the familiar theme of triumph over difficult odds. "Gloria," in contrast, is a much darker work. Tying "Gloria" to the character of Jeanie while "What A Feeling" belongs to Alex further emphasizes their opposite fates. While "What A Feeling" is about a woman's re-creation, "Gloria" describes a woman's undoing.

For those of us looking for a heroine, Flashdance provides one, ready to dance off into the Pittsburgh sunset in her pink satin slippers. But for those of us who would rather sing with--and about--the losers, the underdogs, the broken and the lonely, as well as the paranoid and the unhinged, Laura Brannigan, with "Gloria," gave us an anthem.

Gloria
by Laura Brannigan
lyrics reprinted without any permission whatsoever

Gloria
You're always on the run now
Running after somebody
You gotta get him somehow

I think you got to slow down
Before you start to blow it
I think you're headed for a breakdown
So be careful not to show it

You really don't remember
Was it something that he said
All the voices in your head
Calling GLO-RI-A

Gloria
Don't you think you're fallin'?
If everybody wants you
Why isn't anybody calling?

You don't have to answer
Leave 'em hangin' on the line
Oh-oh-oh Calling GLO-RI-A

Gloria (GLO-RI-A)
I think they got your number (GLO-RI-A)
I think they got the alias (GLO-RI-A)
That you been living under (GLO-RI-A)

But you really don't remember
Was it something that they said
All the voices in your head
Calling GLO-RI-A

Gloria
How's it gonna go down
Will you meet him on the main line
Or will you catch him on the rebound
Will you marry for the money
Take your lover in the afternoon
Feel your innocence slippin' away
Don't believe it's coming back soon

And you really don't remember
Was it something that they said
All the voices in your head
Calling GLO-RI-A

Arlen Specter is the new hope for keeping the U.S. out of my ovaries.

Why should being under investigation for gerrymandering keep Tom Delay from upholding our moral values as House Majority Leader?

Why, indeed.

The internet is jumping with frighteningly clever arguments for why the Vietnam-era phrase "we had to destroy the city in order to save it" applies to Fallujah. Does anyone believe that violence can stop something like this from happening? Does anyone believe that violence that causes this to happen is ever going to make anyone in the world safer?

Some people are nitpicking over the number of civilian casualties. They're dubious that it can really be 100,000, while others say that since the invasion of Fallujah, the number could be as high as 300,000. They're busy defending their methodology in counting up the number of people our government and its allies have killed so that they can make money buying and selling oil. Let's just all agree that it passed the number "too many" a long time ago.

Howard Dean, having joined the ranks of Al Gore and now John Kerry, is doing what all failed presidential candidates do once they are consigned to the dustbin of history. He is saying things that actually make sense. In a recent speech to students at Northwestern Univeristy, Dean said that Bush appealed "to homophobia and fear and gay-baiting in order to win a presidential election." He said that the Democrats can try to stop Bush from stacking the Supreme Court, but they "have to thave some chutzpah, as they say in Yiddish, or cajones, as they say in Spanish."

Call me a Monday-morning quarterback (and as long as it's still daylight on Monday it's Monday morning to me), but this is the kind of loveable "straight-talking" that could have won the Democrats a presidential election. I mean, presuming the voting machines used in such an election are the kind that count votes, as opposed to the other kind, the kind that do not count votes, which we here in America prefer to use.

These few Dean remarks made me nostalgic for the good old days, when we were wondering what caused the implosion of the Dean campaign, instead of what caused the implosion of the Kerry campaign, our hopes for deliverance from the apocalypse, and democracy itself? When we thought everything fell apart because of a scream, instead of, oh, the fact that when we vote, it has little bearing whatsoever on the outcome of the election? When we thought that a left-wing governor from Vermont with truly liberal values who outright opposed the war was "just too much" for America, as opposed to now, when we think that anyone who doesn't use the word "Jesus" or "God" every other sentence, doesn't think gay people should burn in hell and doesn't believe that large-scale violence solves everything is "just too much" for America? Those were the good old days. When we thought that a real liberal was too much and a moderate could do the job. Now a real moderate is too much and this guy--an anti-choice Mormon--is the new power elite of the Democratic party. The "If you can't beat them, become them" strategy is off to a good start.

You know, I'm sick of losing. Let's think like the New York Yankees and buy us a winner. Why stop at an anti-choice Mormon? Jeb Bush for President in 2008--as a Democrat.

And now, another word from my mother.

There used to be a television program "Queen for the Day" or was it "Queen for a Day."  My recollection is they paraded out an overweight housewive on daytime TV and put a fucking crown on her head, like Miss America, gave her flowers and prizes which consisted of washing machines and regriferators, or was is mixers and blenders? The woman cried.  She was so grateful someone appreciated the fact that her life was an endless service nightmare and in return, she got one fantastic day in the fantasy world of daytime TV to acknowledge the fact that she was trapped in a role in which she could never explore her creativity except as it related to cake decorating and curtain making. "The best day of her life," except of course perhaps her wedding day. Not the day of the birth of her children, since she had been robbed, via anesthesia of experiencing herself in perhaps, the most creative, powerful and simultaneously humbling moment of her life.  Oy, the fifties. Oy the 00's.

A brief word about my mother. She is currently a doctoral student in a program called "Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology" at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute in California. This branch of psychology concentrates on how our earliest life experiences, including those in the womb and during birth, affect our lives. Pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and women's health, particularly as they relate to the empowerment and disempowerment of women, have always been important to my mom. Now more than ever, she sees a lot of oppression in the world through the lens of our original engagement with power and control--the way it is exerted on us at the moment of our birth. Also, lately she seems to have a lot of insight into the bizzarre messages of 1950s television. Unfortunately, she is too busy with her full-time job and full-time graduate study to consume or criticize any 00's television. That's our job.

One of the kids I tutor goes to yeshiva. She studies all the regular subjects, plus a full curriculum in Jewish history, law and scripture. Her dad is Israeli and she applies the pleasant iron will I associate with Israelis to her learning of SAT math. When I tell her f(x)=y, she says, "Why? Who says that? What makes that true?" I find myself having to prove the fundamental assumptions of algebra to her, rarely to her satisfaction. It's gotten us into some interesting discussions about math being just another language. This seems to placate her, since she is bilingual in English and Hebrew. Every time she argues with me that f(x) doesn't have to equal y, I ask her to translate an English word into Hebrew for me and then pester her, asking "Why? Why does that mean 'book'?" Why? Who says?" until she admits that in a language, a certain symbol and sound gets associated with a certain object or idea, and that's just the way it is. In trying to explain to this kid why f(x)=y, I finally understood Saussure, this French linguistic theorist who made me cry in college. Sometimes it just needs to percolate for a while.

Working with a kid who actually speaks, reads and writes Hebrew, as opposed to reads it phonetically in order to get through her Torah portion, pass Mazel Tov and collect $15,000 in bar mitzvah gifts has provided me with an interesting anaology for how math is taught versus how it should be taught. Math is currently taught to most kids the same way Hebrew is currently taught to most Jewish kids--as a language to learn by rote and use to participate in a kind of rehearsed call-and-response. Only the very religious actually learn to understand the Hebrew they are reading and only the very nerdy actually learn to understand the math they are doing. It doesn't have to be this way. Learning Hebrew or math by rote in order to jump through hoops, be they educational or religious, is a waste of time. Why are we teaching kids languages, ancient languages of sacred truth at that, without teaching them the meanings of any of the words and symbols?

Tonight, I saw a case in point of what can happen when a kid does understand the languages she's speaking. We were working out the notoriously hard last question of the math section together. I was trying not to give away the secret of the problem, which was that if 180-x=a and 180-x=b+c, then a=b+c. I was quite excited about this secret and was waiting with some suspense to see whether the kid would see this or not. I guess this is how I am able to maintain my interest in my job. When I start to lose interest in my job, I will start gambling on whether the kid will see the secret to the last problem in the math section. That's why they call it, "making it interesting."

The kid was frowning and muttering in that advanced stage of math-problem determination and I was rooting for her. "Don't tell me," she kept saying, so I kept my mouth shut.

Eventually she figured it out and triumphantly circled "(E)."

"Very good," I said. "You got that if two different quantities are equal to the same thing, they are equal to each other." She even knew that it's called the transitive property, which most kids don't know.

"Well," she shrugged, "We're studying the Gemara in school. It's like, part of the Talmud. And it has all these laws, and they are the same as other laws, so you have to see that if one thing is the same as another thing, and another thing is the same, then they are all the same. So I raised my hand and said, 'Isn't that the transitive property from math?' I guess that's kind of dumb."

"Are you kidding?" I nearly shrieked. "That's not dumb. That's using math to understand religious law. That makes perfect sense--law is logic and logic is math."

I thought of my friend Josh, who was always messing with his computer in his basement and went to MIT and keeps getting degrees in things like computer science and engineering and artificial intelligence. We used to have big arguments about whether poetry had any value in the world. He always said math was the only thing that was real. After he went to MIT he had some nice things to say about math, like "Math is a way of saying what is true." I told the kid this and we agreed that religious texts tell us what is true according to the laws of one particular system, and math tells is what is true according to the laws of another system, and these truths are both articulated according to a language and system of meaning that helps us to convey the truth.

You see what happens when kids understand what they are reading and doing? They learn how to articulate the truth. I understand better than ever why schools spend thirteen or even seventeen years teaching kids to regurgitate lies instead of discover and speak the truth. Regurgitation is a lot safer than revelation.

Last Wednesday I was on the phone with Holly, plotting our imminent expatriation to Peru in the wake of the election results. We were trading insightful and horrifying things we'd read on the internet in the last twelve hours.

"You know," I said, "Someone somewhere pointed out that when Nixon was re-elected in 1972, the left was dismayed, but he never got to finish his term. Maybe in two years there will be a massive scandal that will throw Bush out of office." (As if everything that's happened since the moment he wasn't elected the first time isn't enough grounds for impeachment.)

"Yeah," said Holly. "But Bush is even worse than Nixon."

If you could go back in time to 1972 and find our respective parents, in their respective dismay over the Nixon victory, and tell them that by the time the decade was out they'd be the parents of daughters who would grow up to be friends, and that by the time these daughters had voted in their second presidential election, just after the turn of the millenium, they'd be talking to each other on tiny, portable telephones about the election that had just taken place, in which a warmongering, lying Republican had just been re-elected, and that they would be saying to each other on these tiny, portable telephones that this warmongering, lying Republican was worse than Nixon, would they believe it?

If you told me right now that in thirty-two years my future kid will be communicating through a chip in her molar to her friend about the recent election (if there are even still elections in the United States by then, if the Earth isn't a charred cinder by then, if all the new terrorists the Bush administration is creating right now with its holy wars haven't come and blown us up yet, if by then I'm even allowed to have my own children, because the state hasn't taken over my uterus to make sure it's a moral enough environment in which to grow a fetus), if you told me that after the 2036 election my kid would be saying to her friend on the phone, trying to be consoling, "Hey, when Bush won in '04 the left was really dismayed," and her friend said, "Yeah, but this person is worse than Bush," I think I might have to kill myself and hope I don't get reincarnated in this demented version of human civilization.

My Grandpa Sam is 85 years old. He and my Grandma Ruth were married 59 years last Friday. I was already late to meet them for dinner tonight when I found out the J train would be terminating at Essex Street, instead of taking me to Canal where I could catch the 4/5 to the Upper East Side, where Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Sam now live in a high-rise condominium they bought in the eighties with the spoils of their thirty-odd years of paying low rents in co-op housing in Astoria, Queens. The condominium has an amazing view of New York, and on clear nights, New Jersey, though this view is gradually intruded upon by other condominiums that have since been built. Tonight, there were swarms of helicopters buzzing around the Hudson River.

Stuck downtown, I decided my quickest route uptown was a sprint through the Lower East Side. As I ran up Essex street, over on Rivington, up Orchard, and over on Stanton, losing count of the boutiques and pseudo-old-New York restaurants and the pseudo-old-Paris restaurants, the cafe/art galleries and the bar/art galleries and noticing that there is now a store called "Fuck Yoga" where they sell yoga mats that say "Fuck Yoga," I realized that this was the very neighborhood both of my grandparents had lived in when they were very young. My grandmother was born at 442 East Houston Street and my grandfather lived on the Lower East Side when he first came to this country. I was about to traverse their entire net migration in America in a dozen stops on the 6 train.

When I arrived at the condominium, I found Grandma and Grandpa, as usual, knee-deep in a week's worth of The New York Times, which they read religiously and voraciously. Luckily they were not unconscious with hunger, as they had had a "late lunch." My grandfather, as usual, was wearing several layers of sweaters and my grandmother was dressed for an evening of al fresco dining at Club Med. The vast difference in their experience of temperature is just one of the many mysteries of their 59-year marriage.

"Emily," said my grandfather gravely, "I have something to tell you."

"Sammy!" my grandmother interrupted, "Emily's here. She's hungry. She wants to eat. You can tell her at the restaurant. Unless she wants to eat in. Do you want to eat out or do you want to eat in?"

"Hold on a minute, Grandma," I said. "Grandpa just started to tell me something."

"I never get to finish a sentence in this house," he said. "I haven't finished a sentence in fifty-nine years."

"I'm listening, Grandpa," I said.

"When I was nine years old, Emily, Al Smith was running against Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election. The papers were so full of Al Smith. Al Smith was a man of the people. I read so much about Al Smith everywhere, I thought, 'Al Smith is going to win.' But he lost. I was shocked. I was so sad. How could Al Smith lose? To Herbert Hoover? It was terrible. So that was the first time I was on the side of the losers in an election, and I've been on the wrong side of most elections ever since."

I told my grandfather how I had a similar experience of the 1984 election. I was five and had been very taken with the 1984 Olympics, specifically Mary Lou Retton's gymnastics triumph. I was into the idea that things could be won and won by the right people. The Olympics of '84 segued nicely into the election of '84, in which I learned that Mondale was the good guy and Reagan, as I feel I always knew, perhaps even in utero, when he was only governor of California, was an ASSHOLE. When Mondale lost, I was heartbroken. I didn't know that the right guy could lose.

We agreed that these defeats (Al Smith '28, Walter Mondale '84) were difficult, but despite the perspective they gave us on the pendulum of American politics, this one seemed to be the worst yet. We all went out for paella.

I walked my grandparents back to their apartment. I like to walk with one grandparent on each arm. The restaurant we went to was only a block away from the condominium. My grandmother has powerful, multiply-jointed hands with which she usually grasps a person, any person, even small children, a few inches above the elbow in a suprisingly immbolizing grip. But tonight she was holding my hand, and I remembered how soft her hands are. My grandfather, who can do all kinds of old-fashioned things like dance and wear hats, links arms in that old-fashioned way that you feel came naturally in the 1930s.

"Sammy!" said my grandmother. "Come stand on my other side."

"Oh, Christ," said my grandfather. "You're not going to faint, are you, Ru?"

My grandmother has low blood pressure and has been prone to fainting all her life. Also, I'd been told she should not drink alcohol and had forgotten this when she split a Dos Equis with my grandfather over the paella. Not that she would have listened to me if I had said someting. She was paused and looking a little woozy on 89th Street between 2nd and 3rd.

"So what if I do faint. You'll just carry me upstairs is what you'll do."

"Try and faint on a rug," he said. "So I can just slide you into the elevator."

We all laughed at his joke. I watched my grandparents laughing and thought, as I often think, that if you live with one person for fifty-nine years and don't want to kill them, it's a blessing, and if they still make you laugh, it's a miracle. My grandmother took a deep breath and kept walking up the block. We arrived at the condominium and said goodbye. My grandmother expressed her usual concern about the kind of "characters" that might be on the downtown 6 train at 9 p.m. I told her that there were very scary characters on the downtown 6 train, many of them the yuppies of the Upper East Side. "The subway is very safe now," my grandfather assured her. "It's not like it was."

All the way home, I wondered about politics, about love, about the subway, about New York, is it not like it was, or is it just like it was?

The only lucid comment on this election that's pierced the fog of my depression about its outcome came from someone who is not a U.S. citizen and therefore did not vote. Perhaps it was this distance from the process that allowed him to see through to its core truth. This is the story of how I came to know the sad truth and who told me about it.

One of my tutoring jobs is working on English with a man in his late thirities who emigrated here from Senegal eight years ago. He's fluent in English by now (as well as French and seven African languages), and just needs help refining his writing skills. Every week we pick a series of questions for him to answer in writing, and we look over what he wrote last week and fine-tune the verb conjugations, pronoun agreement and idioms. Our work often leads us into interesting conversations about all kinds of things, which in turn leads to good questions to ponder and write about for next week.

One of the delights of working with Demba is realizing just how much you can have in common with someone who grew up in an African village with no electricity and no running water, farming and spying the occassional lion, who then travelled all around Africa before coming to America from Dakkar with no money and no command of English, and then married a woman from Trinidad with whom he shares the parenting of five, soon to be six, children and is a practicing Muslim, when you grew up an atheist Jew in Queens and Long Island, attended an overpriced university in New England, experienced your vastest cultural gap as being kind of a hippie hanging around a scene that was a certain strain of punk, and your farthest emigrations up and down the Northeast Corridor of I-95.

It turns out that Demba and I have a lot in common. We have simliar dispositions and simliar fashion sense. When our writing together revolves around social issues, like how to handle your friends and family, I find that we have a similar intolerance for bullshit and respect for honesty. When our writing revolves around the NBA, I find that we have a similar dislike for Kobe Bryant. When it revolves around matters of colonialism, development, religious fundamentalism and violence, I find that we have similar opinions on these things, though our the way these things have impacted our lives and formed our opinions is vastly different.

Demba is not yet a citizen, though soon we are going to start preparing for the citizenship exam. (The content of the citizenship exam and the apoplexy it causes me is fodder for a whole other essay.) Despite not being eligible to vote in this election, Demba was often more aware than I was of developments in the campaign. So when I asked him today why he thought Bush won and Kerry lost, he said, "I told you already that Bush would win. He was always going to win because in political buisness you need to tell people what they want to hear. Bush never said he made a mistake. He made a mistake, everybody knew he made a mistake, but he says no matter what that what he does is right. He is a man because he stands up to say he's right no matter what."

"So you're saying even if he was wrong and everyone knows he was wrong, that he lied and fought the wrong war and it was a mistake, everyone would rather hear him say he's right when they know he's wrong?" I asked.

"Yes," said Demba.

The more I thought about it, the more I agreed. Anyone who thinks the American people don't all know that this war is bullshit is missing the point. A lot of people know this war is bullshit, maybe not everyone in America, but enough for the Democrats, and certainly even me, to assume that if everyone who thought this war was bullshit voted for Kerry, then Kerry would win. But Demba points out something perverse about the American political process. He says that Bush looks like a man. And if there's one unspoken absolute truth about the Bush presidency and the Bush re-election campaign, it's that THIS PRESIDENT IS A MAN. This election wasn't about the war, it wasn't about terror or even those abstract "moral values" we'll now all be forced to waste valuable time pondering that would have been better spent taking drugs and jerking off. This election was about answering the question of "Who's the Bigger Man?" It was about electing the right Man for the job. It was about choosing the Man to be the Man who is going to get you down, and making sure he's the manliest man there is.

Now I am going to sound like one of my least favorite characters: the humorless feminist/barely-hiding-my-single-lonliness-with-lame-gender-based-humor-urban-fiction-female, but I cannot resist. A person who never admits they're wrong even when it is abundantly obvious and could save a lot of heartache? A person who invents their own bizzarre, impenetrable reality and sticks to it even in the face of extensive proof to the contrary? A person who would rather fuck everything up and blow the world to kingdom come than admit that he was wrong? A person who lies compulsively and tries to take all the power for himself?

Sounds like a man to me!

So congratulations, America. Your president has a penis. You proved it.

I believe the American people are rewarding George W. Bush for making a series of terrible decisions and telling a series of terrible lies and then having the balls, the absolute unmitigated enormous balls, to stand up and say with absolute conviction that these were the right things to do. The genius of the Kerry campaign--and it seemed obvious at the time--was to point out all the WRONG things the Bush administration did, a foolproof formula for beating a total fuck-up. Except the genius of the Bush campaign was to do as they've always done and spin that idiocy and failure into something positive. Since they are magicians of meaning who can turn dissent into terrorism and military occupation into freedom and war into peace and other such feats, certainly they can spin being WRONG and unwilling to admit it into manhood. And once you can claim your candidate is the bigger man, you're home free, especially if you happen to be running him for the leadership position in a global empire.

It seems that the American people, or 51% of them, give or take a few million discarded--and possibly deciding--votes, would rather have a president who never, ever equivocates, even if he is unequivocating about issues on which everyone knows he's wrong. Bush says the war is right because it is simply impossible for him to be wrong. Nothing he does is wrong, therefore the war is not wrong, therefore to say that the war (or anything else Bush does or did) is a mistake and is also to be wrong, not only wrong but dangerous to America. The commander in chief is by definition always right, and a person who is always right is by definition the only person who can be commander in chief. There is no rule but this rule, no truth but this truth. Bush is right when he's right and right when he's wrong. This is commonly called "circular logic" or "fascism," but in America we call it, "being the Man for the job."

Kerry said he was wrong when he thought the war was right, and now he is right to think that the war is wrong. This is called "changing your mind" or "seeing the light," and yet somehow on this planet, it became an Achilles heel, and opening for the Karl Rove to apply the label flip-flopper, and the rest is already scary history, turning rapidly into an even scarier future.

Over the next few days I will bring you: Reasons Why We Lost This Election, Reasons Why It Was Fucked to Begin With, Reasons Why the Democrats Don't Exist, Reasons Why the Republicans Don't Exist, Reasons Why America as a Nation or Concept Has Never Been So Great and In Fact Has Been Primed for This Very Sort of Theocratic Takeover Since the Puritans Came Here to Found Their Own Original Theocracy and Killed the Native Americans in the Holiday We WIll Soon Celebrate, Reasons Why There Is No Fixed Meaning in the Political Landscape and It Is All An Enormous and Terrible Game in Which We Are Not Even Mere Pawns, Reasons Why The Only Answer is Immediate Global Anti-Capitalist Anti-Fundamentalist Revolution, Reasons Why George W. Bush is a Fascist and This Is Not A Missapplication of This Term, Reasons Why I am Expatriating and You Should, Too, Reasons Why I Think People Do Dumbfuck Things Like Vote for the Moron Puppet, Reasons Why We Should All Spend the Next Four Years Stoned Out of Our Minds (If We Weren't Going to Anyway), Reasons Why We Should Go Lie Down in Traffic and Reasons Why We Should Go Drink Cappucino (a choice that SuperLefty top advisor Chloe Godwin often poses to herself in times of national crisis) Reasons Why I Will Not Be Heeding My Yoga Teachers and Dedicating My Practices To The Moron Puppet or Dick Cheney, No Matter How Bereft of Good Energy, Peace and Truth They May Be, and Reasons Why None of This Matters Because We Are All Our Own Self-Contained Nations of One Where We are Sovereign Kings and Queens Who Reign Supreme, Reasons Why We Are All Going to Die, and until then, Reasons Why We Are All Going to Live.

Curt Schilling, you are no longer our friend and confidant. You have done us wrong. We must now say to you what we say to all who believe the Moron Puppet is anything but a fascist willing to sacrifice all our lives at the altar of oil and no-bid defense contracts.

FUCK YOU.

You will not be coming to my house for a beer any time soon. (I had another misconception of you--that you didn't drink. You do. You drink alcohol and also, you drink from the well of deluded, colonizing, murdering idiocy.) You shall not advise me on important matters and you have nothing to teach me about mental toughness. When you buzz on my buzzer, dropping in on my friends and I as we watch the election returns much as we watched your World Series triumph last week, I will not say, "Hey guys, it's Curt Schilling!" Instead, we will crowd around the buzzer and shout in unison, "FUCK YOU!"

You are nobody's hero and no kind of champion, Curt Schilling. You are dead to me now.