Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom

A friend wrote to me this morning asking if were building an ark. Given the news about the weather in the northwest these past few days, his inquiry was not without merit. It has rained. But the suffering caused by a convergence of Pacific storms has not afflicted us much here in Portland. We are a hundred miles from the Pacific, and there is a coastal range between us and most of the furor. One town, Vernonia, just thirty-five miles away to the northwest was isolated by mudslides and residents had to be evacuated by the National Guard. Some people have died. So the fact that we were mostly spared in Portland is not the story.

It is odd to be so close to so much mayhem and know little to nothing about it. We gave up television when we moved west from New York City, a grand experiment. We rely on the newspapers, including the New York Times on Sunday, and the internet. What we do not see is the televised hysteria that accompanies every twist of natural or national fate. We are aware that there has been a drumbeat for war against Iran, but we have not watched Wolf Blitzer posting minute-by-minute bulletins, nor had to listen to our Commander in Chief bloviate about the threat to "Amurica by the tarrists." We were somewhat relieved to read this morning that the Iranian threat may have been overstated--but the lack of a threat did not stop the US going into Iraq and probably will not stop our government leaders from launching another war against someone. At least tonight, we do not have to listen to the administration explain how no Iranian threat is actually an increased Iranian threat. (Or how peace is about to break out in the Middle East once again because an American president decided to make it so.)

We do not have to watch television to know that reality shows trump reality or that the candidates for president are almost uniformly dreary, talking endlessly about the nonessentials. The Republicans are busily showing how tough they can be on illegal aliens; the Democrats are trying to show they can be believably tough about anything at all. We are at least spared having to listen to their voices.

In this election everyone believes in god and wants to be sure that we all know it. It is mostly meaningless, this constant reiteration of our national creed. In politics, we believe in power and money--and that's about it. We do not need a television to tell us that has not changed.

A couple of months ago we took a quiz about the political campaign in which we indicated our positions on certain "hot-button" issues. The quiz results told us which candidate most nearly represents what we think. Both Connie and I found ourselves squarely in the Kucinich camp--the only candidate to publicly ask why we are not impeaching George Bush. (The silliness about UFOs is a perfect example of why one can safely avoid television.) Not only that, the candidates most likely to be nominated--Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--were quite far down our list (and of course way ahead of Guiliani, Romney, and Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom, although for awhile we liked his lapel pin). What's a citizen to do?

That's exactly the question, isn't it? How many of us will come close to voting for someone we actually trust, admire, and agree with? We said to ourselves: We can't support Kucinich. He won't win. Duh.

At a dinner party a few nights ago, someone said that the government is building camps for dissidents--those who will oppose the coup that is coming in the next year (so that Buscheny will not have to leave office). Someone else said the atmosphere feels like Germany in 1933, the end of a party and the beginning of terror--not the terror caused by imagined jihadists, but the terror caused by our own government, our own society, by Blackwater mercenaries. I have not seen any evidence that the government is building camps for me and my liberal friends.

But I also have seen nothing of the devastation over the mountains to the west, where storms have been raging and people have been swept away by forces over which they have no control. It happens.

We watch these events on television and are told how to feel about them--when to be afraid, angry, distraught. When to pray fervently for the return of the last missing white girlchild. When to pray for the safety of the soldiers we have needlessly put into harm's way. I think Americans will probably watch the coup on television and not realize that something has happened. It will seem all too ordinary by then.

Connie and I will miss the coup if we continue to try to live without cable. I hope some one out there will let us know when things get hot, so that we can call Comcast and get hooked up before the excitement's over. Or take a train to Canada.

Did I mention that the sun is shining today in Portland and that the temperature is around 50 degrees? Perhaps there were no mudslides, no torrential downpours, no deaths, no dramatic rescues on the Pacific coast. Who really knows anything?