Where does this mean world cast its cold eye?
Who's left to suffer long about you?
Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag,
Past empty lots and early graves,
Of those like you who lost their way,
Murdered on the interstate,
While the red bells rang like thunder?
Oh deep red bells
Deep as I have been done
"Deep Red Bells", Neko Case
It was sometime around ten o'clock in the evening, Eastern time, on Election Day, 2000. I'd just come in from collecting vote totals at a local polling place. Thirty or forty co-workers and volunteers had plans to get together at the local to drink a bunch of beers and watch the election returns. I was thirty-two years old, had just started living, the good years stretched out, long and endless and as far as the naked eye could see, like a bright shiny ribbon of new untried road, in front of me.
I hustled upstairs to our flat way up on the second floor, and a lot of stairs in that walk; forty or fifty ran up from the sidewalk to the front door, and then another twenty or so up to our place. I lived there very happily with my young wife and very young son, but they were far away that night, thousands of miles away, in England, my wife's homeland.
We'd brought a son into the world at the tail end of 1998. Close to a couple of years later, out of nowhere, my wife caught fire with a desire to bring the boy back to her homeland with her. She wanted her grandfather to see him. Her grandfather wasn't sick, as far as we knew, but she had this feeling. And Lord help you if you got in her way when she had one of those feelings.
She had a feeling he wasn't long for this world, and who was I to doubt her? She'd never steered me wrong, and we followed her gut all along and in so doing we always wound up taking the right exit. She wanted her granddad to see her only grandson before he died. She was the only reason anyone in her family had a relationship with him in the first place; he'd left her grandma for someone else years before she came along, and they all swore him off for good, but somewhere in there, in the year or so right before she met me, while home from her studies her in the U.S., while home on a winter break, she decided to go and see him, and her doing so caused a lot of familial turmoil, but in the end it caused a lot of reckoning and a lot of forgiveness, and a lot of people wound up reestablishing relationships, and a lot of water ran over a lot of dams.
So she took our son and they got on a plane, on November 1st, 2000, and she took our boy home to see her granddad. She never even told him she was coming, she flew home and a day or two later she walked down to his house and rang the doorbell and he opened the door and saw her, and his grandson, our boy, and he smiled and he wept at the sight of them.
&&&&
I practically lost my breath running up all those stairs on that Election Night, 2000. While waiting for the old biddies to open the voting booths for the counts I talked with fellow volunteers and rumors started making the rounds; Gore won Michigan, Gore won Ohio, Gore might have won Florida, it might all be over in another hour. I needed someone to declare the results official. I needed to hear someone in a position of authority call it, for good.
I clicked the remote and turned the teevee on. Turned on one of the networks. The house was dark and lonely without the life of my wife and my son in it, but even in the ungodly quiet of their absence, I had hope. I knew in my heart that even one term of George W. Bush as President would prove to be a serious disaster for this land I love. I clicked on the teevee hoping someone, anyone, would give me the news I wanted, the news that Gore had fended him off and hung on, that he had won it despite running with the immense handicap of being the smartest guy in the class, that he had won it despite trying to distance himself from the seemingly immensely popular President he had served under for eight years of relative peace and prosperity.
Some channel, I don't remember which one, called Florida for Gore. I picked up the phone and dialed my old home phone number, the number my parents still used. I knew my dad, the man who, more than anyone else in the world, had made me a hardcore lefty, I knew he'd still be up, watching it all.
The phone rang a few times, and then he picked up.
"Dad?"
"Yeah." He recognized his son's voice instantly. No other words were needed.
"Just got back from getting some results."
"Yeah."
"They just called Florida for Gore!" I screamed.
"Yeah."
"It's over, right? It's over. We got Florida, no way we can lose, right?"
My dad was a history professor, with a specialty in American history. If you ever want to engage someone in an hours-long debate on the finer points of the Buchanan Administration, well, my dad is your man.
"It's over. Man, we narrowly averted disaster tonight, eh? Did you see some of the assholes he's got on his transition team? Man..."
I waited for his blessing. All I needed was for my Dad to tell me it was OK; I had left him behind in the way that boys do when they grow up and find their own way in the world, and I had found my own way but good, I had a great life with a wonderful wife and a beautiful bouncing baby boy, but still, on that election night, I wanted my Dad's blessing, I wanted my Dad to tell me that the good guys had won and that I could safely go and drink a bunch of beers and laugh with friends about how close our nation had come to electing an incompetent quasi-fascist reject as our President.
"It's too early to call this thing. I'm nervous. It's barely ten and they're giving up on Florida? With his brother running the show? I dunno. Smells too good to be true. Go party with your friends but don't get too cocky yet. This thing ain't over. We could be in for a long night."
"Uh...OK, Dad. I think it's over, though. I don't wanna jinx it, but I think it's over. We got Florida and Michigan, how can we lose?"
"We'll see. You heard from Lauren yet?"
"Yeah. She took Bailey down to see her granddad the other day. They all been hanging out. He's real happy about her coming over, she said."
"Well...glad to hear it. When is she coming back?"
"A week tomorrow. Another eight days. Gotta admit the first coupla days home alone were sort of fun but after that...I think I've had more than enough now, ya know?"
"Yeah...Well...don't get too drunk tonight. You don't want her coming home to too much trouble...and don't call here looking for bail money," he said with a laugh.
I hung up and headed out to the bar.
Gore had it. I knew it. We'd made it.
&&&&
Life went on. They stole it from us, and it pissed me off and I had a hard time letting go if it, as many of us did; we sat and watched and howled in horror and protest as they flat-out stole a Presidential election from under our noses.
But life went on.
They let 9-11 happen while they snoozed the late summer days away, while they vacationed and played golf, and then they gleefully used the horror of that day as an excuse to drop bombs, like Christmas toys, on the targets of their ignorance. They unshackled the forces of greed and let them run wild, they let the forces of greed run wild like greed-crazed boars on crystal meth, and they cheered wildly as those same pigs inhaled all the money they could get their filthy snouts on.
&&&&
And still, for at least one happy couple, life went on.
We sat and watched in disgust over what they ran, but still, we went on living.
We sold that house we owned in November of 2000 and we bought a better one, on the cheap. We worked on that new house, and we borrowed against it mercilessly as our middle-class wages sank and sank and sank again. We bought low, we sold high, and we paid off the debt and pocketed a nice chunk of change to boot, yeah, it shames me to admit it but we played that bubble to the hilt, and we lived and we loved, we lived the very best years of our lives, we threw parties and we lived like hitmen and we brought two more children into this world, thinking that in spite of the shit afflicting the unfortunates of the world, we were on a winning streak that would never end.
&&&&
But the streak ended, and our luck ran out.
Her dad died and then her mom got cancer and then she herself got a brain tumor, benign they said, but then, there is no such thing as a benign brain tumor. They said if she didn't have it out she'd have a lot of problems to look forward to, I'll never forger this, one of those doctors looked us straight in the eyes and said, well, dong nothing is the worst thing you could do, you got a lot of life in front of you. She had a little over two months to live when he said that, though she didn't know it then, and so she put her life in the hands of those surgeons, and despite their assurances and best intentions, they blew it, and while it might not have been murder, she wound up dead, and her young children will wander the earth motherless for the rest of their lives.
The best years, and the worst years, of our lives, all after they stole the election of 2000.
&&&&
The other night me and my mother stood in the kitchen, fixing dinner for ourselves and for my dad and for my three motherless children. We got to talking about the election. My mother detests McCain with all her being, and she truly believes that our grim situation can only be alleviated by electing Obama. Yet she refuses to let herself believe that he will win.
"McCain's gonna win, all these people just won't admit to the polling people that they won't vote for the black guy..."
"Ma, don't worry about it. It's over. It's in the bag. Things are so fucked up, there's too many people out there know we need a change..."
"They won't let him win. You just watch. And there's a lot of stupid people out there that don't even know how bad it is. Look at what happened in 2000, we elected Bush and..."
I had to interrupt her there.
"We didn't elect Bush in 2000, Ma. Gore won that election. Gore won. He won. They stole it. It was outright theft, a fucking coup, Ma. A fucking coup. A fucking velvet coup..."
"Stop dropping the f bombs, will ya? Yeah, I guess you're right, Bush didn't win. But stop with the langauage, I know the kids are little and they're in the other room but if you're not careful they're gonna pick on it...and I KNOW someone who would NOT be happy to hear her babies saying the f word..."
"Alright, alright, I'll stop. But ya know I'm right. And besides, Lauren's not coming back from the dead no matter who wins, so I guess it doesn't matter that much, eh?"
&&&&
I do not really mean that it does not matter who wins next month: it does.
Yes, much of life is random, and we all live with the very fickle hand of chance hanging over our heads. No matter who wins next month, some of us out there will stick our thumbs out as we stand on the side of life's road, and some of us will cast our lot with strangers, and fate will smile on some of us, and we will wind up close to where we wanted to go. And for others of us, no matter who wins next month, we will end up in the middle of dark nightmares and dark hells the likes of which we never could have imagined.
When I woke up on the morning of November 21st, 2007, I can assure you that for a million bucks I couldn't have safely identified George W. Bush as the President of the United States of America, but I know could have told you without a doubt that the deep red bells had tolled for us, I could have told you for sure that the love of my life had died the night before.
&&&&
But still, like I said, it does matter. It matters.
I think of the pain I suffered, watching my wife die. I think of her, and of how she will never get to watch her children grow up. I think of myself, and my children, and of the many, many people who love us, I think of the pain all of us have walked through, I think of the pain and I try to avoid hyperbole, but I don't think I exaggerate when I say that, should we make the wrong choice next month, more fathers, more children, will walk beside me, beside us, on the road of the grieving, more innocents will be bombed out of their existences, for the jollies of a few yahoos.
I think of how deep we have been done these past few years, and I think of how deep others will be done, should we allow the man who makes sing-song jokey funny-funny-ha-ha out of bombing other human beings, to sit in the Oval Office. I think of how life can be brutal and cruel and of how it can also be beautiful and joyous, and there's no denying it, what happens next month, it matters, so let's do the right thing and spare a few people the agony of having to wake up one morning saying to themselves, what now, the love of my life died last night.