They had reached a sort of impasse in the conversation when a guy on the other side of the room who'd been looking at my earring suddenly took note, staring straight at me, that there were a number of "new people" in the room, and perhaps they'd like to introduce themselves to the regulars.
It turned out that about half the people in the room were new, so I waited my turn to announce my name. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't an immediate recoil of disgust when I said it. But it's been eight years since my notoriously leftist column was in the Hampshire Review, and we still have a lot of new people moving into the county. And let's face it, in a hyper-information age, even in small town America, memories are shorter than they used to be.
After all the new people had introduced themselves, now that everybody knew who I was, I raised my hand to ask a question--one of my favorite ways to "break the ice" with people (now were those Dave Barry quote marks, or what?).
"Now I'm a proud leftist," I began, a tactic that proved quite successful in drawing the entire room's immediate, quite focused attention. "But I hate the government as much as you guys do. But I don't think there's a "dime's worth of difference' (thanks, Dave!) between the two major political parties. I don't see that there's really that much difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. I think they're all a bunch of puppets, working for their corporate masters."
When I observed that I seemed to have the support of a majority of people in the room, I decided to have a little fun before I continued.
"I mean, I agree with Robert F. Kennedy's kid (you can tell what generation I come from) that the only difference between the parties is that the Democrats are only 75 percent corrupt. But the whole system is so "rotten to the core' (bows toward Florida), I don't see where it makes any difference. I think you guys should save yourselves the gas money of having big centralized meetings like this, and you should be getting together in your neighborhoods, in neighborhood groups, because that's what it's going to come down to when civilization finally collapses completely in the very near future--what happens on the local, even neighborhood level."
(I was taking not too much of a chance that this was an apocalyptic crowd, given the influence of fundamentalist preachers in this county. And nobody really knows for sure who's going to be left behind, watching their neighbors float like so many helium-filled naked plastic bodies up to the Jesus-filled clouds, while they've got nothing to face but cold, hard tribulation. Always a good idea to plan ahead.)
The odd destination my little trance-like talk had arrived at, had discomfited several participants in the meeting, not least of which podium guy, who took advantage of one of my cursed inhalations to interject himself into the spell I was weaving like a spider's web. He was the one who had organized these meetings in the first place, and he wasn't going to watch some gosh-darned communist break it up into small-group consensus decision-making. Somebody has to be in charge, after all.
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