Taking De Bait

Aarghh!!!!!  Not only am I going to have to watch the debate tonight (I have always skipped them, as they’re almost always phony and stultifying vehicles for the same old talking points and speechifying), I’m going to have to watch it amidst a den of Bush supporters.


When I’m working here in Milwaukee, my client takes me to the Milwaukee Athletic Club once or twice during the week so I can get in a workout at the gym.  I normally welcome the opportunity, because dinner usually comes with it, but tonight he’s arranged a meetup with several of his friends to watch the debate in the club’s cafe.  I’m stuck going, because I enthusastically agreed to go before I knew we’d be staying for the debate.


I’ve met these folks before and actually like them a lot, one of the paradoxes in this country that seems so bitterly divided: I have spent pleasant evenings with them, perhaps joking a bit then glancing off of politics, but I’m not looking forward to tonight, when the entire focus will be on those things that divide us.  I weary just thinking about how to counter the myriad talking points that the Republicans have unleashed on the landscape.


Maybe I’ll take a candle, as Dr. Omed suggests, and work some funky voodoo.  Prepare to do an intervention, in case I verge into the Stockholm syndrome.