If I wasn't already married...

I would totally want to marry Sarah Vowell.

I am listening to her book of essays on democracy as I "clean the house." And her essay on Al Gore, it's breaking my heart, because he's so amazingly learned. Did I vote for him? I did not. Living in a throwaway state, I staged an (ill informed?) protest vote for Nader. I did not, however, put the Nader bumper sticker on my car.

I'm mortified by all the years I didn't vote.* I remember being fourteen or fifteen, babysitting, during the first Iraq war, the newscaster in the gas mask. And what I tried to feel was: civic pride. That's what I thought I was being sold.

I remember seeing Vowell on The Daily Show when this book came out. I'm listening to it (true to form) on my Ipod, and she herself reads it, in her strange, quirky little voice, backed up by her friends Stephen Colbert and weird, verging-on-annoying music between essays by They Might be Giants (of The Sun is a Ball of Incandescent Gas, A Gigantic Nuclear Furnace fame, a song which takes me back to my freshman year of college, when Kurt Cobain died and I occasionally lifted weights in the student center, unable to shed the jock-ish vestiges of having been on the swim team for eight years).

Anyway. It's good. It's funny. She says "like" a lot. And she's pointing out to me just How Very Smart Al Gore is, how informed, and how totally the kind of person I would want to be president, if he is a little geeky which didn't play well. Her essay on Gore draws all its titles from the third Revenge of the Nerds, I think.

The brilliant thing about this book, when they have the quotes from Al Gore, they're read in that Saturday Night Live caricature voice. Pointing out all the obvious things, the "sidekick qualities" (sidekicks are SUPPOSED to be nerdier than the star, she says, invoking Jordan Catalano and that Brian guy from My So Called Life)... and in spite of this, in fact BECAUSE OF, the regret is even more intense.

Before I broke up totally and completely and for the last time ever with my flashy grad school friend, we watched one of the Bush/Kerry debates at her house. A particular moment during which there was that flash of erudition (and even the irritation against The Monkey Man was RESTRAINED), and we just KNEW Kerry had totally creamed Bush. We couldn't believe the next day, that the WHOLE PRESS didn't see it that way.

I don't like to talk about the election, I feel so liberal bandwagonny. You know all my opinions, from the word go, just when I say yes, I'm a Big D Democrat, I feel like all the rest of you in the liberal academic blogosphere. There was this totally ridiculous thing we did in Social Studies in eigth grade, where we were supposed to divide ourselves up into Democrat or Republican. This must have been, what, 1988? I did not know a thing about partisanship. I did not know a thing about the "debate" over abortion. When we were presented, I swear to god, with the task of deciding how we felt about abortion (in eighth grade I was TWELVE), I CONSIDERED THE EVIDENCE, the arguements for both sides. Choosing a political party, I READ THE PLATFORMS. I knew that my grandfather was involved with the Democratic party, and that in our county that was a totally rare thing, like having Lyme Disease or being a foreign exchange student. (N.B. In our high school, the exchange students, mostly all from Sweden, were Cool.) But this wasn't why I picked it. I can't tell you now what exactly it was, but I vaguely remember that the Republicans were Against Government and For Tax Breaks For The Rich but even then I was like, taxes are okay, they provide the money that helps the poor people and the artists.

In the end, it was Democrats: me plus the four most sarcastic hilarous boys in classes, Republicans: everyone else. Including cheerleaders and fellow members of the swim team. Which is pretty much how it went in the country, right? I mean, I think it was the time of Dukakis. I don't remember too well. It was the phase when every day I came home and listened to Abbey Road, the first side only, over and over and over. On record.

So anyway, this book. It's cool. If you like essays, or if you want to see sarcastic blog-type person does Patriotism, check it out.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program of Fretting About the Reception.



*Also known as, all the years up to 2000. My reason is the state I live in, though this has not even at the time ever actually sounded like a good reason.