First, the good news: I got my first article in Salon Magazine. Click here to go straight to the story; in order to read the full piece, click on the "one day free pass" ad it's very short. Or just subscribe to Salon Premium, which allows you access to a fantastic daily webzine that is – together with Slate - some of the best writing on the internet. And that was true even before your humble servant got his digs in.
Either way, it's a great clip to have under my belt, even though I had severe misgivings about selling out my Mormon heritage in order to write it. The idea came from a French Toast... excuse me, Freedom Toast dinner we had at the Park Slope Caf two nights ago, when I went to the bathroom and suddenly saw the images of John Walker Lindh and Elizabeth Smart before me. They came from vastly different circumstances, but both ended up part of a "cult" in the eyes of most Americans. I distilled the idea down to its barest essentials, pitched it at noon today, and by 10:30pm, it was on the front page of Salon. The internet is crazy like a banana.
And now, the bad news: we all woke up this morning and George Bush was still our president. It was not, as I'd hoped, an opiate-infused dream caused by the lingering molecules of Jaegermeister shots tucked away in my love handles.
My mom called me tonight while I was playing hoops on Lincoln Street, and told me that Bush had given Saddam 48 hours to blow his popsicle stand, that terrorist retributions were probably to follow, and that we're back in Orange Alert status. My first thought was how nice it has been to boost my dose of Celexa to 40mg a day.
Then I told the guys on the hoops court, and they all reacted with disgust. These guys are not prissy Volvo drivers, nor are they lining up for tickets for Ani DiFranco. They are Brooklyn-bred first-time-dads from blue-collar families, their accents indecipherable, and they are uniformly against this shit. "You might as well draw a big freakin' bools-eye on New Yawk," one of them said, "This guy Bush is a freakin' mo-ron."
Like the guys that work the elevator on 26th Street, like all the cabbies, like the guy that sells nuts on Prince Street, they all think this war is a dangerous load of shit. On CNN tonight, they reported that 66% of this country backs a fuck-the-rest-of-the-world strike on Iraq. I will be willing to bet than very few of them live here in the big freakin' bools-eye.
Posted by at March 17, 2003 08:41 PM