I’ve been spending the last few days in Florida, which is currently battened down under Hurricane Crucial Swing State. It’s hard to convey quite what it is like here. Campaign ads appear more often than Proctor & Gamble ads on the radio. Everyone’s house has a fistful of spoo-oo-ooky negative campaign leaflets that come through every door, every day. Friends start phone call with pitch-perfect imitations of the automated phone solitations: “Hello, Danny, I’m calling you about your voting intentions this Tuesday”. My friend’s answerphone is filled at the end of the day with messages from Al Gore, George Bush, Theresa Heinz, Barbara Bush…
That’s the local colour I was expecting; it’s what all the news reports will start their slice-of-life “portraits of a state under sieges” pieces with. What I wasn’t expecting was the oddity of being in a real 50/50 state.
I played around with Fundrace.org before I came out here, and was a bit surprised by how incredibly Democratic my neighbourhood back home in Californai was. As in, Kucinich/Dean democrat. I suppose that just checking the election results would have told me what a hotbed of communist sympathisers downtown is. Nonetheless, you do rather assume some diversity in your neighbours; that your idiot neighbour three blocks down must be of an opposing political opinion to you, even if he’s too cowardly to say so with a garden sign. With a bloody car like that, he’s got to be on the other side, right? Nope. Maybe he’s a Liebermann fan or something.
Here, you see Bush and Gore bumper stickers sit uncomfortably close to each other in carlots; neighbourhoods front yards flicker between the two. Churches are quietly split; political conversations sway nervously from left foot to right foot, as everyone tries to keep balance.
I haven’t learnt anything about what will happen here. Standing in the interzone doesn’t mean you know the shape of the edges of the territory. There’s a part of me that, electoral college or not, thinks it’s good to have some kind of hothouse, some kind of ground zero, somewhere in the process. It feels viscerally close here.
Not that anyone in this country needs to move to Florida to feel that. I’ve felt sick with a dread of this election since the beginnings of the Iraq war. The whole country has been pulling at its collar and chomping down antacid for weeks.
And for good or for bad, I’m going to float up and away from it all. I’m catching the flight at 3PM Florida time (-0500) tomorrow, and landing in California by nine Pacific Time (-0800). If it’s going to be decided tomorrow at all, I’m thinking it be decided between those two times. I’ll be in radio silence. No drinking games, no state by state plays, no screaming at CNN, no cellphone trees.
I shall watch 1776, read “Alternate Presidents”, and look out the window on the breadth of America, right coast to left coast, until we all land, hopefully in one piece.
Have a good trip.