Electing a new heaven on earth - uh, someday

"Now God defend! What will become of me! I have neither consulted with the stars nor their urinals, the almanacks. A fine fellow, to neglect the prophets who are read in England every day! They shall pardon me for this oversight. There is a mystery in their profession they have no to much as herar of – “the Christian starry Heaven” – a new Heaven fancied on the whole earth.”

Thomas Vaughan, the alchemist, whose merit as one of the greatest writers of English prose is obscured because he wrote about, well, alchemy, wrote the above words in the 1650s, I think. Vaughan was quite a guy. He died of getting an overdose of mercury vapor up his nose, after a standard stormy life trying to balance natural magick, a clerical position, and reactionary politics. He was “ousted” from the clergy in Wales for “drunkenness, swearing, incontinency, and carrying arms for the king.” Well, how is LI to resist a compagnon de route like this? Before he died, Vaughan dreamed he was pursued by a stone horse – which is the same dream his wife had before she died. O for a life of portents and poetry.

Anyway, LI’s purpose in citing Vaughan is to disclaim any foresight into the results of tomorrow’s election, and to mildly decry the newspaperly madness of following the polls. For a political blog, we haven’t really spent a lot of time on the election, it seems. The reason is that our regular readers are no doubt going to vote, as we did last Friday, for liberal or lefty types, with here and there an exception, and those readers who aren’t going to vote that way are probably not going to be persuaded by us, and … we just don’t practice an election-centric politics.

In our own case, we are more concerned that the library here in Austin finally gets a shot of money (although the odds are probably against this) and that the highways don’t (although the odds are probably for this). We live in a district that the Stalinist Reps gerrymandered into a perpetual Republican fief, so our vote counts for nothing against the dickhead who represents us. And, finally, the one vote we were looking forward to – voting for Kinky Friedman for Governor – we didn’t cast, as K.F. turned sour in this election and displayed a peculiar tone deafness about racism. So it was back to voting for Bell, the Dem candidate, who actually did something that made us happy: he came out foursquare against the testing mania in the public schools. In fact, the only person who likes the test industry’s grip on the poor 1st through 7th graders is our utterly ridiculous Governor, Perry. May he suffer someday for all the miseries he has put these thousands of children through.

The races we were interested in were mostly elsewhere. We are especially happy that Eliot Spitzer looks like a walk in NY. In fact, New York voters have the luxury of voting strategically. We talked to a friend up there who is voting Green, and that seemed fine to LI – Spitzer’s win being pretty much locked in, the question is, how can you take your microscopic vote and use it to encourage a leftward tilt?

On the other hand, the race that would be difficult for us is also in New York. That’s the one between Pirro and Cuomo. On the one hand, Cuomo is undoubtedly the better candidate, even though we are fed up with inheritors of political capital running for office. On the other hand, Pirro seems to be one of those unique people who is happy about turning her life into a public sit com. We’ve totally enjoyed her pursuit of her wayward creep of a husband, Al – the detectives, the weeping to gossip columnists, the tapes and videocameras. As attorney general, Pirro would make her philandering hubby’s life a living hell. She’d be able to get favors from state troopers. Her so called best friend, that fucking bottle blonde, shamelessly flirting with Pirro’s hubby under her very eyes! Well, time to look at your tax returns, baby. On the other hand, the argument could be made that being the attorney general of New York entails other duties than exacting personal revenge on your spouse and the bitches that throw themselves in his way. Hmm. On the one hand, civic duty, on the other hand, the howl of the redneck in my blood, that fan of mudwrestling and the NY Post. I have no idea how I’d vote.

I do know that the urinal of the popular will, the polls, should not obsess any properly constituted mind.