Short Stories, Long Odds

On March 28, I went to the Capitol Extension in Austin to cover the Texas College Republicans state convention. After waiting outside the hall for several hours, the press secretary brings me into the room, from which almost everyone has departed. He asks me to wait in an interior conference room while they prepare for the press conference and closes the door as he leaves.

After a few minutes, during which I’ve started going over my questions, a state trooper throws open the door, hand on the butt of his gun, and asks me in a too-loud voice to explain what I’m doing here.

“I’m the working press,” I say, “and I’m covering this convention.”

He says, “I’ve gotten several calls about you, about how you’ve been out there for hours harassing people and threatening people, disrupting their meeting.”

He asks for some ID, and I give it to him. He starts calling in my license number. I tell him that in four hours I spoke to no one, save for one guy from whom I bummed a cigarette.  He asks me what publication I write for.

“I’m here for the Texas Observer.”

He looks at me for a second and then says, “I’m gonna go find out who’s in charge.”

He soon comes back with the CR press secretary, who looks terrified. He doesn’t know who made the complaint and it shows. He gives a few breathless answers to rapid-fire questions before saying, “This guy is supposed to be here.”

The trooper hands back my license with some choice words about the prank before leaving. The kid gathers himself and turns to me. “We’re ready to start now,” he says. “We’re ready for you.”

And so my first official interaction with the Texas College Republicans was almost being arrested by a state trooper, who on false reports was chasing the specter of a marauding intruder.

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(The last in a series I did for Quorum Report in January.)

On Wednesday we turned south and headed for Georgia. When we were planning our trip we figured that if we were driving all the way to Washington, we should not come straight back if we did not have to. I wanted a different experience on the way home than I had on the way up.
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After a long time on the road we finally reached Ashburn, Virginia on Monday afternoon. We had made lunch plans with our friends who flew in from Texas and would be staying with us during the inauguration, but that was before being waylaid by weather in Wytheville, Virginia. What happened instead was that they made it to our lunch reservation and my wife and I dragged ourselves to the Metro stop in a late-day attempt to actually get into Washington, DC.

In the weeks running up to Obama’s inauguration, every front page carried at least one or two stories a day about how many people would Be There on January 20. I had assumed that these stories might actually serve to drive that number down a bit as people thought of standing in the freezing cold for eleven hours with strangers and no food and decided, instead, to witness history from the august environs of the couch. I was wrong.

At 3:00PM the day before the inauguration, the line to buy a ticket at the Vienna Orange Line Metro station in Virginia was about three hours long. After having had to engage in Mad Max-style road combat to get a parking spot, the only immediately apparent choice was to wait in a line that extended out of the station and almost to the highway. Read more…

(As long promised, so now delivered: The first of a three-parter I did for Quorum Report in late January.)

The night Barack Obama was elected, my wife and I decided to go to his inauguration.  I had a romantic notion that taking a road trip across the heartland from Texas to Washington, D.C. would be the best way to go. The idea of this trip became fixed in my mind as a necessary pilgrimage to my nation’s capital. I had never seen it.

As I write this, America exists in a fluid present at the crossroads of history and on the precipice of total disaster. Economically, domestically, and internationally we have plates brimming with misery.  As a counterbalance the American people elected the first African-American president.  Everyone that has not already decided to hate Barack Obama has placed all of the world’s troubles at his feet for him to bear on strength of what thus far is little more than potential.

I voted for Barack Obama – it would be dishonest for me to conceal that – but I don’t know that he can save my country, let alone the world.

I love my country but I also readily admit to pessimism concerning its condition. I wonder if my countrymen feel the same way.  That is the most accurate explanation I can produce, and I hope it sufficiently illustrates the origin of my need to drive across the United States in a bitter winter, and to ask people how they feel about America, and to be one of millions on the National Mall on an Inauguration Day during what will be, for good or ill, a turning point in history.
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The World Moves On;

With the Bush years now just a memory, Kos’s blog has lost its mission, and its increasingly rudderless posts read like talking points from the Democratic National Committee.

The World Moves On.