Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I’ve Got the Post-Kill Blues

By Bob Wire, 11-07-08

	"Hey! I'm out of toilet paper in here!"

A hunter once told me that all the fun ends the moment your bullet hits its target. From then on it’s all hard work and drudgery, and maybe crawling into the carcass to keep warm. That sudden shift from giddy anticipation to grim determination is where I find myself in these heady days just after the most historic, emotional election we’ve ever seen.

My hangover is only figurative (for once), as I had only two or three beers while watching the election returns with about sixty other people at a friend’s house. An identical scene was played out in millions of homes all across the country—we drifted from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room, drink in hand, eating gobs of appetizers, exchanging political small talk with acquaintances you normally see only at grade school Christmas programs or maybe the local grocery store. Our kids all gathered in the basement to play Guitar Hero (even though most of them didn’t seem to be musically suited for anything more challenging than Tambourine Hero).

I followed the campaigns pretty closely, like most people, but at this party I found myself quickly out of my depth with a few serious politics junkies, people who won’t give you the time of day unless you read The Nation every week. When they’d say something like how Reagan’s supply-side economics failed despite his anticipated effect of the Laffer Curve, I’d sip my beer, smile, and give them my best, “well, now, there you go again,” in Reagan’s pseudo-Clint Eastwood delivery. Then I’d quickly excuse myself to go catch the update on the Rhode Island state auditor’s race.

As the booming bass from Guitar Hero threatened to drown out all conversation and clear any intestinal blockage, we gathered around the multiple TV’s and commented on some of the more curious events unfolding on that crazy, breakneck night. One thing that seemed to be universally reviled was the hokey “hologram” on CNN. You could almost see Wolf Blitzer squirming in his Armani suit while he was forced to stand ten yards away from the hologram of his interviewee. Apparently you can’t stand too close to a hologram, or the tractor beam will suck you into the Laffer Curve.

The first person to be zapped into the studio was Jessica Yellin, CNN reporter. She began to explain the technology of holograms, then went rogue: “You must report Senator Obama’s landslide victory tonight. This is our most desperate hour, and you are my only hope. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobe, I mean, Wolf Blitzer…”

I loved all the touch-screen, whiz-bang technology displayed by CNN’s phalanx of talking heads, but in this age of information overload, they of course took it too far. One touch screen featured dozens of horizontal bars, representing various sliced ‘n diced demographics of the voting population. The reporter would touch and certain bar, and a big pie chart would emerge, genie-like, onto the screen. We learned that among unmarried, left-handed, Latina college women between the ages of 34 and 38, who drive a Japanese car and masturbate three times a week, Obama was huge. I felt a pang of melancholy and nostalgia for the late Tim Russert and his modest white board. He made me understand stuff.

When CNN called the election mere seconds after the polls closed on the West Coast, a great cheer erupted among my like-minded compatriots. We hung around to watch McCain give his concession speech, looking like an Alzheimer’s facility fugitive who’d been caught in the little girls dressing room at Nordstrom, while Sarah Palin stood at attention stage left, while her guy Todd whispered, “Don’t get tears on the jacket, babe, it’s gotta go back to Neiman-Marcus.”

We rounded up our kids from the basement frenzy, and took them home so we could watch our new president’s acceptance speech together, and share this watershed moment as a family. As the TV cameras showed the dazed faces of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Hon. Oprah Winfrey, tears streaming down their cheeks, how could you not be moved to tears yourself? To see the civil rights movement finally come full circle to the point where a black man will be in the White House, well, it’s a heavy thing. It’s going to take a while for this to sink in, and I’m glad I was able to share that night with my family and so many friends.

Now that we’ve field-dressed this election, we all need a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. But there’s no time to rest on this victory; the country and the world are enveloped in problems too deep and too pressing to wait until Bush gets the bum’s rush in January. We’ve got to start work right away on the one issue at the top of the list.

Obama’s re-election.

[Bookmark NewWest.net/BobWire today. This coupon expires 12-31-08.]

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