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I've been consumed with much in the world--tangible, terrifying, pressing--and my brain has been sluggish, slow, suspended. I listen like a furtive junkie to NPR, rifling through the virtual pages of the New York Times, devouring The Forever War, balancing one foot on the urgency to act and the other on preemptive defeat.  

In my tiny town on a river in New Hampshire I drive along the water, looking at the loveliest homes, reassured by the blue Obama Biden signs cropping up like some kind of lush fall bounty. It settles me, it insulates me, it quells the panic that lives easy inside me. 

When I drive to the barn though, out of town and along the lake towns, out onto the interstate and back into distant, unconnected areas, the urgent gnaw returns and the number of McCain Palin signs snake the roadways like thick vines. I keep my mouth quiet when the plumber comes by and brings up offshore drillin' and at least we'll have someone in the White House who's real people, even if she is a woman--no offense, I mean. And I cannot understand how so many of the people immediately around me, the people who will need federal assistance this winter to heat their homes, the people who cannot afford to fill their gas tanks, the people who cannot pay their medical bills, who cannot afford health insurance, people whose homes are being foreclosed --because of an administration of undersighted, myopic, unilateral greed-- the people who are most disenfranchised by the current and unbalanced powers of our country today are its staunchest supporters. 

I see how Obama misses the mark in places like this. His eloquence, his manner, his intelligence, the way he says his words work against his most desperate and deserted constituency. I see how people in places like this think to themselves, well shit, Sarah Palin's husband is a hunter and I'm a hunter, and that's really good enough for me. I don't need no high-fluenting, fancy-talkin' President. I need someone who's gonna understand me. And that means, to many, shooting deer, going to church and not giving a fuck about Russia. Because, in their dire disconnect they miss Joe Biden unequivocally defending the money in their pockets, saying--under no unclear terms--that people who have more need to start paying more, not less, than those who don't. Bottom line, end of story. What they do hear is Sarah Palin--screaming, shrill, lacking all composure--proclaiming that's not patriotism. Raising taxes is about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse.

But I have to agree with Dooce. If I have more money than you and you need to heat your home or pay your medical bills or put gas in your car to drive to work because you make something barely over minimum wage then take my fucking money and goddamn you Sarah Palin for saying that's not patriotic.

I am no great political commentary. This is not a political blog, nor will it ever be. I will be the first to admit that I have checked the fuck out internally over the last eight years because paying too much attention to the country I lived in caused a kind of desperation and rage in me that was often untenable. I am, if anything, more of an anthropologist than critical analyst. Listening to our President whisper the words freedom made me want to claw my way through an eighteenth storey window and jump. Standing by, powerless and bewildered, to watch something akin to the economic Patriot Act about to be passed to the tune of seven hundred billion dollars (the weight of which will be allocated equally between the rich and the poor, thank you Sarah Palin) creating the inalienable, non-transparent right of the Fed to manage it, to save some of the world's wealthiest individuals without the time for insight, foresight or careful consideration is astounding to me. It is beyond my grasp and when the guy comes by to fill dirt into the holes in my backyard, driving his truck up with his McCain stickers and then works for something like 16 hours of hard manual labor and tells me he ruptured a disc last year but couldn't afford to go to the doctor, I want to rip out both of our eyeballs. Because I cannot pay him enough to fill holes with dirt to go to the doctor, but I am certain that if he has his way in this election, neither will his political candidates.