New Slam Piece: Noon in the Garden of Mostly Evil

It’s 11:15 in the morning, and my stomach and head are at war. It’s Day One of Phase One of the South Beach Diet revisited, which means I’m on a strict, imbibe-no-crap regimen. It’s also the day we take my co-worker to lunch for her birthday. The Birthday Lunch is a ritual that began when people lived in caves. You can see it on the walls at Lascaux – the piercing eyes of stick figure cavemen imploring, asking the birthday caveman how his mastodon tastes. He responds with a tentative grunt, self-conscious, polite. They make small talk and navigate uncomfortable pauses by taking keen interest in their food. Later, there’s cake.

Apparently, we have not progressed. The co-worker assigned to round up the troops lets us know the Birthday Lady has decided on Olive Garden.

Olive Garden.

Olive Garden, where I can eat exactly one thing on the menu, the Chicken Caesar Salad, and watch the rest of my table feed on sumptuous-smelling breadsticks. Olive Garden, where they serve you salad family style before bringing your meal, which means I will eat redundantly, salad followed by salad. Olive Garden, where the A/C is cranked to nipple-hardening, lip-numbing temperatures, where they bring you full glasses of iced tea rather than just fill your half-filled glass, leading you to feel a contractual obligation to drink more tea, where you are indeed a pawn in some waiter’s kill-the-lunchtime-boredom game of Customer Iced Tea Drinking Races, where the waiter will mention I look tired at lunch when, really, I look ripped-off and petulant, the result of being dragged, not exactly against my will but not exactly out of instinctual, let’s-eat-there impulse, to Olive Garden.

They seat seven of us at a ten-top and won’t seat us at the eight-top the next table over because that’s the “training section.” This means we are assuredly in the hands of professionals. Our professional waiter saunters over, suggestive-sells us drinks (we decline), suggestive-sells us appetizers (we decline), and hands us menus, thinking us cheap and unfestive, which is not altogether inaccurate.

I look at the menu, scan the items, confirming the worst. Carboload. Carbomax. Carblicious. Carbohydrate Surprise. Carb To My Lou. Carbeteria. Chicken Caesar Salad. Defeatedly, I place my order, and settle into a randomly-firing conversation about negligent boyfriends, mundane vacation spots, and death.

No matter how witty your co-workers, no matter how much lemon butter is drizzled over the main course chicken, no matter how quick and efficient your waiter, Birthday Lunch is the Hindenburg of lunch dates. If you live in an office with politics, they will edge the bare spots in conversation and poke through like weeds to sidewalks. If you cannot speak frankly and openly under the flourescent lights of your office, you are doomed to fail under the non-descript light of a chain restaurant.

Tempers will flare. Envy will lick its lips and look for a hand mirror. Ennui will take a silent roll through the gates in a giant wooden horse. Birthday Lunch will make you pine for other discomforting engagements, like College Reunion Karaoke Night, or Acquaintance Strip Club Bachelor Party, or Obscure Relative Closed-Casket Funeral.

And then, later, there’s cake.

If you are dieting, cake means watching other people eat cake. It means singing-in-public punishment and then declining cake reward. It means wearing a forced smile and drinking from a comically-oversized glass of water in a valiant effort to feel full, compliments on your willpower, tsk-tsk chiding from those who can’t resist pointing out, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” when, in fact, you do. It means 15 minutes of conversation with the entire office as difficult to predict as roulette. Could be boredom, could be agitation, could be earnestly funny and the highlight of the work day, could be harrowing cryptic precursor to layoffs and reassignments and general work-related doom.

At the point in the proceedings you wish your parents were there, so you could ask to be excused from the table, you may beg off and return your cubicle and let your email and your homepage of choice and your personalized screensaver soothe you back into the space that is no longer shared, to the refreshing consolation that though no man is an island, sometimes, you get to be relatively close to an island – perhaps, an isthmus.

And, if you are like me, you know that sometime in the next 364 days, the discomfort of the Birthday Lunch will be on your behalf. And if you are like me, you can’t predict the level of angst or boredom or restless fuss that will tether itself to your day. But you will know, at least, that you will have your pick of restaurants, and one guess as to where you won’t be dragging the rest of the office.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before

(cross posted to The Symposium:)

I remember it all too well. Several days before the tension-filled Election Day 2000, in which conservatives feared the Gore hydra head would sprout from the Clinton neck, and liberals feared the return-to-fascism movement sure to result from electing Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, one of my friends sent me a blog link that laid out just how the election could end in a tie.

Preposterous, I thought, until I actually squinted at the numbers and saw just how such a break was within the realm of possibilities. The states in play could have, with just the right nudges here and there, dispensed the 538 electoral votes evenly, 269 for each side.

Of course, we ended up with something far worse: the limbo in Florida, which effectively put the election into the hands of the nine Supreme Court justices. In other words, when Bush the Elder was effectively able to imbue the Clarence Thomas hearings with an innocent-until-proven-guilty climate more suitable for a courtroom (which it felt like) rather than a job interview (which it actually was), he was setting the table for the deciding vote that would, about a decade later, allow his son to take over the ultimate family business.

The country, for better or for worse, healed from the mess of the elections, and Bush was inaugurated with no more glee from the winning side or bitterness from the losing side as in past elections – the losing side invoked more robbery motifs this time around, but do you really think the left hated GWB any less than the Bush with four initials or Reagan or Nixon? The continuum of jealousy and hate for the losing side just transfers from elected candidate to elected candidate. The fact that GWB couldn’t even muster a popular majority made it a little worse, but in the end, he was our president, and it wasn’t like any buildings had collapsed or anything.

Actually, that came eight months after the inauguration, and in the crumbling ruins of the World Trade Center and the damaged wall of the Pentagon came the purpose of the Bush presidency. He went from ineffectual gee-whiz boy king to aggressive ideologue with conviction in several epoch-defining hours. Somehow, along the way, Bush has invaded and invoked a successful regime change in Afghanistan without finding the one person we wanted to find in the invasion, and has attempted and is currently floundering with regime change in larger, more advanced, and infinitely more complex Iraq.

That, in conjunction with a foundering economy that is only now, arguably, beginning to find its way again after two years of recession and three years of negative job growth, makes the 2004 election a referendum on Bush. As a staunch liberal, I’d like to think that this truly is a choice between Bush and Kerry, except Kerry has become something of a non-entity so far – merely a “not Bush” box to x or not x.

Kerry, to make a crass analogy, became the most convenient Democrat for the party faithful to bed, after we realized that Dean was too “hot,” as the pundits have labeled him, or as we like to call him post-scream post-Iowa, “totally crazy.” If this campaign was a night out on the town, Kerry was the one we started dancing with about 1 a.m. (Iowa), went home with for the night at closing time (Super Tuesday), and have now woken up next to at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning (mid-May polls, showing Bush and Kerry in a statistical dead heat), not quite sure if we should go out to breakfast with him or let him sleep, stuff our panties in our purse, and take the walk of shame back to our apartment. But we haven’t just had a one-night stand with him; we’ve pinned our hopes on him to somehow become the 44th President of the United States. We recognize his shortcomings, and yet, we’re stuck with him.

And now, we're just plain stuck -- the AP-Ipsos poll released last week show that there's a deadlock in electoral votes at this juncture, six months before the election. 205 votes seem to have been locked up by the incumbent, and 205 seem to have been locked up by the challenger. What we have left is 128 electoral votes, dispersed among 12 states, to be divvied up between the two people left, in a nation of 250 million, who have a realistic shot of seeing us through the next four years.

And no, Nader’s not a viable option. To the left, Nader is a galling presence, an egomaniac who is going to suck votes from the disenchanted left – votes that would otherwise have nowhere else to turn but to Kerry as the anti-Bush.

This is perhaps not a shocking revelation, but once again, the election might boil down to what happens in Florida. Other states are up for grabs, of course, and some of them, including the Pacific Northwest states and the Rust Belt states, seem like they might swing Kerry’s way. Arkansas, despite the Clinton residue, seems like it’s ultimately Bush territory, and even though Missouri and Iowa proved key states in Kerry’s walk to the nomination, they’re still so surrounded by Red America states that the peer pressure might swing at least one of them Bush’s way.

What we might see, ironically, for the second time in four years, is the winner of the popular vote losing the electoral vote. Unless something dramatic happens in the next six months (the capture of Osama Bin Laden, a drastic change of fortunes in Iraq, a dramatic spike in jobs gained or economic numbers), I’m seeing the American public remain polarized, and I’m seeing Nader’s possible jump to the Reform Party (which gives him access to the ballot in Florida, Michigan, and five other states) having a decisive effect on the total electoral ballots.

As we look to see polling numbers for New Mexico and Nevada in the coming months, as we bite our nails over the numbers coming out of Ohio and Florida, and as we’re ignoring three-fourths of the states under the assumption they are foregone conclusions, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to wring our hands about the electoral college system – particularly one set up for a 269-269 tie. On one hand, it’s brilliant, in that it forces candidates to go state-by-state, addressing myriad issues in a variety of American landscapes. But for voters like me, in perhaps the reddest of Red America states, in a city where we just voted down giving our mayor and city council members a livable wage by a 2-1 margin, in a Congressional district recently reconfigured at the behest of Tom DeLay, it feels as futile to cast my ballot for John Kerry in 2004 as it did for Al Gore in 2000.

In Florida and New Mexico, in the 2000 election, a college auditorium’s worth of itinerant drifters voting as a block could have shifted the presidency to Gore or shored up Bush’s numbers. I’m not saying voter turnout should include buses and cheap apartments for adventurous post-college wayfarers willing to live in Ohio long enough to punch a ballot a particular way, but if you live in Texas, California, the South, or New England, don’t expect many Bush/Cheney commercials to get in the way of your summer reruns.

If you live in the handful of states that will actually matter, though, steady yourself for the barrage. Kerry made a point throughout the primaries to talk about how much he loved Iowa. As one of the battleground states for ’04, he’s going to love it so much you’ll think he wants to marry it. And in the non-battleground states, we’ll get to hear every rhapsodic word from Bush and Kerry, and be jealous.

And as long as we don’t cheat on either of them with a Nader vote, they won’t care.