One thing I like about rental car companies these days is that they will come and pick you up when you rent one of their vehicles, subsequently dropping you off at your home when you return it to one of their business sites. When I travel by air, I like to rent a car just for the drive to the airport, turning it in and renting another when I return for the drive back to my home in Great Falls, Virginia. It’s a great way to avoid leaving my imported sports coupe sitting in a long term parking lot at some airport for days at a time, it allows me to avoid dealing with that SUV full of bozos the airport limousine service inevitably sends for me to ride in, and, these days, even if you pay the extra ten bucks for full insurance coverage, as I always do, it still ends up being cheaper than taking a taxi. There are other advantages, too, such as being able to stop on the way to or from the airport for business meetings or other tasks, and, as I found out while returning from Dulles International today, when somebody rear-ends you at forty-five miles an hour on the Capital Beltway, if you are in a rental car and paid the ten bucks, well, it’s one hell of a lot less stressful than going through that in your own car.
So, instead of being ready to sue, if not actually punch out the chowder-headed moron who rear-ended me, I was cheery and sanguine as I exited the driver’s side and walked down the freeway shoulder to confront him. This was good, as it turned out – because, in a moment, I saw that the chowder-headed moron in question was my friend Blebs, the Democratic Super Delegate.
“Oh, [expletive],” he shouted when he saw whose automobile he had so rudely rammed, “Tom! I can’t [expletive] believe it! Of all the people in the Washington area I could have done this to, you deserve it the least!”
“No problem, it’s a rental,” I told him with a jaunty smile as I whipped out my Blackberry and instructed it to call Verizon Roadside Assistance and send a tow truck to my GPS coordinates. “What’s more, I paid the [expletive] extra ten dollars for full coverage, so I’m cool.”
Blebs listened intently as I spoke with the dispatcher. “Ah, could you ask for two trucks?” Blebs sheepishly inquired.
“Sure,” I replied, “be glad to,” and promptly did so.
When I slipped my Blackberry back into my jacket pocket, Blebs looked up from gazing morosely at his front end damage. “That’s gonna cost a fortune,” he lamented.
“Ah, well, these things happen,” I observed philosophically. “At least neither of us was injured.”
“Look, Tom, I just want you to know,” Blebs continued, “that it was entirely my fault.”
“No need to go into that,” I assured him, “since both of us are aware, I’m sure, that in 99.99 percent of rear end collisions, it’s considered to be the fault of the rear-ender, not the rear-endee.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Blebs admitted, “what I meant was, I’m a total nervous wreck, and that’s what did it. Thinking about the Democratic primary race had me so discombobulated, I wasn’t even looking where the [expletive] I was going!”
“Not unlike the current state of the Democratic Party itself,” I opined. “It seems to me that your situation in the moment penultimate to impact – forging ahead at full steam, obsessed in a solipsistic, misbegotten and benighted trance, totally unaware of where you are going or the dangers involved – is a perfect metaphor.”
“If you’re trying to say you think I’m not the only Democrat who’s totally bull [expletive] at the moment,” Blebs said as he stared out at the passing traffic, “then your only fault is extreme understatement.”
“Are you Democrats all fretting about the same things?”
“Nah,” Blebs shook his head, slowly. “Different things.”
“And you were…”
“Thinking about switching to Obama,” Blebs proclaimed, turning to confront me. “I started out pledged to Clinton and expected to stay that way. It was simple – the first rule of politics – Be On The Winning Side; and back when this all started, that particular question seemed like a real no-brainer. I figured Hillary was up for a God-damned coronation or something. I had nightmares where she was carried onto the Democratic Convention floor, riding a gold couch palanquin, like Liz Taylor in that Cleopatra movie – ya know, the one with Richard Burton? Except that, while all the men carrying her chair and such are wearing ancient Egyptian clothes, Hillary’s not dressed like that at all – she’s wearing a baggy lime-green pant-suit, stuffed with so many shoulder pads up top she looks like a junior welterweight and cut so dowdy down below, the rear end could fit a garbage truck; and she’s smoking a cigar – a huge one, thick as a kielbasa and about nine inches long. And there I am – one of the slaves walking behind her, holding this big ostrich-feather fan on pole.”
“Sounds horrifying,” I commiserated. “I hope it hasn’t been a persistently recurring experience.”
“Pretty much, unfortunately,” Blebs confided. “Sometimes, it was more vivid and frightening than others. I mean, there were times when I didn’t feel the least bit scared, in fact, I didn’t feel anything, like it was happening to somebody else. Then, there were those nights when I had to eat that rubber chicken they serve at political fund raisers, and it would be indescribably terrifying. It was like that on Monday night, when I dreamed that, as Hillary’s entourage approached the dais, I could see Gloria Steinem up there with an enormous hatchet, chopping away at one guy after another like some feminist version of an Aztec priest – there was a line of men leading all the way down from the podium to the floor, and here I am, walking behind Hillary on her golden couch palanquin, fanning her with this faggoty feather fan, climbing up a huge staircase. And when we reach the top, where the podium is, there’s like half a dozen little midget Betty Friedans running around. And all Hillary’s slaves are wearing this… this thing… that’s like a dress, kind of, I guess, you know, like ancient Egyptian men used to wear, and the little Friedan midgets are looking up inside them. So one runs up and peeks up my sarong or loin cloth or whatever the [expletive] it is and yells at Steinem ‘This one still has his testicular fortitude!’ Then I woke up, completely covered in sweat.”
“Sounds like you might have had a touch of salmonella from the chicken,” I ventured.
“Possibly,” Blebs allowed, “or maybe it was the fact that it was a Hillary Clinton fund raiser I attended on Monday night and it didn’t raise squat.”
“That must have gotten you thinking,” I speculated.
“Damn right it did,” Blebs spat out ruefully. “She’s already loaning millions of her own money to her presidential campaign.”
“Has this recurring nightmare gotten worse since Monday?”
“Worse? Look, Monday night – or I guess really early on Tuesday morning, actually – I woke up covered with sweat, just as the little Betty Friedan midget finked on me.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Blebs wailed, softly, but still loud enough to be heard over rush hour traffic, “Tuesday night, I stayed up until one o’clock in the [expletive] morning on Wednesday waiting for [expletive] [expletive] Lake County, [expletive] Indiana, for Christ’s sake, to report its [expletive] Democratic primary results, because I couldn’t possibly go to sleep knowing that Obama had beaten Clinton by a [expletive] landslide in North Carolina, could I? And what did I see? I saw Obama almost beat Hillary again, that’s what! So, I was hyperventilating and needed to take a hot bath and drink a double B-52 before I could fall asleep and this time, when I had that dream, I got all the way to the sacrificial altar – and you know what, Tom? It’s a stack of books! Yeah, yeah, The Feminine Mystique, of course, but not just that! There’s The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, Backlash by Susan Faludi, The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris, The Radical Future of Radical Feminism by Zillah Eisenstein, Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin, The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation by Janice Delaney, Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves by Sarah B. Pomeroy, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny by Carolyn Heilbrun, Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart, I Shot Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas…”
“Hey, wait minute,” I interjected, “’I Shot Andy Warhol’ is a motion picture about Valerie Solanas. She never wrote…”
“This is a dream I had that I’m telling you about,” Blebs reminded me, a bit miffed. “Don’t you want to hear how it ends?”
“Right. Okay, sure.”
“So I see that the altar is a stack of feminist books, and that crowd of little midget Betty Friedans ties me down to it like I’m in Gulliver’s Travels or something …”
“I can relate,” I interjected, “my life’s often similar to the works of Swift.”
“Yeah,” Blebs nodded, confidently, “and they rip off my loincloth and Steinem takes one look at me and yells, ‘Hey, Hillary! Check this out! His are even smaller than Bill’s!’”
“Then what happened?”
Blebs ventured a quick, nervous glance at his watch, exhaling very slowly. “Then I woke up screaming,” he confided.
“Blebs, old boy,” I said, slapping him in a solid, manly way on the back, “look at it this way – it could be worse.”
“Worse?” Blebs squinted at me, astonished. “How could it be worse?”
“Well,” I began, “for example, you could be a fat, loudmouthed feminist writer with bad breath, a mono-brow, a moustache, acne scars pockmarking your thighs and persistent, incurable stinking yeast infections…”
“Ugh, ugh, huck, huck, argh, huwhalph… ” Blebs doubled over, seemingly poleaxed by a wave of cold, uncontrollable nausea. “Don’t say stuff like that! Please!”
“Sorry,” I apologized as Blebs dry heaved next to the acoustically sculpted noise suppression wall on the other side of the road shoulder tarmac. “Or, you could have been born an impoverished peasant boy in a remote rural Brazilian Amazon mining region and died from breast cancer at the age of ten while suffering from chronic dementia, agonizingly painful, dispersed neuropathies and incessant, tormenting, suppurating gluteal rashes, all caused by your constant inhalation of mercury vapor pollution, a family history of habitual dry cleaning fluid abuse and community drinking water contaminated with bacteria, viruses, tropical parasites, herbicides, pesticides, arsenic, lead, PCB’s and dioxin.”
Blebs stopped retching, considered what I said, and then drew himself up, standing with a modicum of dignity as he wiped his mouth on a handkerchief. “Yes, Tom,” Blebs conceded, “you’re absolutely correct. There are worse things than being a Democratic Super Delegate in a year when Hillary Clinton is running for President.”
As Blebs finished his reply, a Virginia State Police cruiser pulled up behind his car on the shoulder. The state cop got out and walked over to where Blebs and I were standing. He asked if there were any injuries. We said no. Then he asked for our paperwork – Blebs was missing proof of current insurance. Then he asked if we would object to taking alcohol breath tests, and we said we would not. So, after assuring himself that neither of us were over the limit, he asked me to describe what happened.
“Just driving along, officer,” I related, “about fifty or so, in thick traffic, when I braked to avoid hitting a vehicle in front of me.”
“And you?” The officer looked Blebs over carefully.
“Officer, it was all my fault,” Blebs bravely confessed. “I should have kept more stopping distance between me and the car in front; and I was distracted, too.”
The cop’s eyebrows twitched upward a bit. “By what?”
“Worry. Anxiety. Tension, fear and loathing,” Blebs replied.
“Caused by what?” The cop took out his ticket book.
“Officer… I don’t know quite how to say this… but… I’m… I’m a Democratic Super Delegate.” Blebs broke out sobbing. The cop shook his head sadly and put his ticket book away.
“Okay,” the cop told Blebs, “in that case, it’s understandable. Promise me you’ll take taxi cabs from now on until the convention is over and we’ll forget about the moving violation, a five hundred dollar fine and two points on your license, and another two hundred and fifty dollar fine for not having proof of current insurance.”
“Yes, yes, certainly, officer,” Blebs sobbed, looking down at the ground in abject shame. “I promise! Thank you, thank you so much.”
The cop shook his head sadly, looking at me. “Poor guy,” he said, “I hope your lawyer won’t go too hard.”
“Oh, no, officer,” I assured him, “not only do I understand this gentleman’s terrible circumstances, he’s also a friend of mine.”
“Really?” The cop smiled, slightly bemused. “Small world, isn’t it?” With that, he sidled back to his cruiser, started up his lights and pulled away, vanishing into the traffic.
“See there,” I pointed out, “how forgiving people can be when they learn the truth about your awful situation?”
“Yeah,” Blebs whispered, wiping tears from his eyes, “it kind of restores your faith in humanity.” Suddenly, Blebs raised his face skyward, throwing his arms out in a gesture of total despair. “Tom! What the hell am I going to do?”
“I take it,” I presumed, “that you’re afraid to defect from Hillary’s camp, then?”
“Who wouldn’t be?” Belbs turned to confront me, slightly defiant in his self-justification. “If I endorse Obama, and Clinton wins, my political career is finished! It’s over, I tell you – Hillary takes no prisoners! Besides, how electable can Obama be? After all, Hillary’s proved that well… you know…”
“Uneducated white Democrats won’t vote for Obama?”
“Ah, yeah…”
“That doesn’t say much for the Democratic Party, now, does it?”
“It says what it says,” Blebs intoned like a Zen master, his utterance at complete odds with his reddened eyes and inflamed nostrils.
“But, on the other hand, if you stick with Hillary and Obama wins…”
“Then,” Blebs moaned, “I’m doomed to eight years wandering in the political wilderness. Effective exile. You see, don’t you, Tom, that picking the winner is the only way I can survive?”
“Sure. But if you wait until it’s obvious that Obama is the inevitable choice before you switch…”
“Then I’ll be perceived as nothing more than an opportunistic camp follower,” Blebs complained.
“And you’re not?”
“Of course I am!” Blebs shot me a cold glance. “We all are – all of us Super Delegates – and all any of us care about is endorsing the winner so we can look good and reap the proper rewards after the convention. All that is just fine – what’s sure death, what we all have to avoid – is looking like we’re opportunistic camp followers.”
“Okay,” I reasoned, “so it’s just a question of determining the optimum time to decide, then, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is,” Blebs conceded. “What would you recommend?”
“I’d say, wait until after the West Virginia and Oregon primaries.”
“Why?” Blebs asked me as he peered down the shoulder at a tow truck that was pulling out of traffic just up ahead, with what appeared to be a perfectly intact sedan hitched to it. “It’s gotten [expletive] ridiculous! People going crazy over places like Guam and Indiana! Why does anybody give a [expletive] about the Oregon and West Virginia primaries?”
“Because,” I said as the tow truck stopped and began to lower my replacement vehicle to the ground, “after those are over, you may not have to switch allegiance to be on the winning side – of the Democratic nomination race, anyway.”
A look of perfect shock and horror crept across Blebs’ face as we watched the tow truck driver expertly back my replacement car down the shoulder and stop a few feet in front of my wrecked rental. “You mean… “
“That’s right – wait until you see if Obama accepts a compromise naming Hillary as his vice-presidential running mate.”
“Jesus [expletive] Christ!” The veins on Bleb’s forehead stood out like a road map as I watched his blood pressure go through the roof. “Only the most insane people in the Clinton camp believe Obama would agree to that!”
“Insane people,” I observed dryly, “tend to dominate situations when they get fixated on a particular goal – like making sure Hillary obtains some kind of political power, even if it’s not the Presidency.”
“But if Obama does that,” Blebs protested, “the general election is as good as lost!”
“True,” I conceded as the tow truck driver handed me the paperwork and a set of keys to my new ride, “but at least you won’t have to contend with other Democrats who have a friend in the White House when you don’t.”