“Walking among our people there is someone straight and strong, to lead us from desolation and a broken world gone wrong.”
— Neil Young
Let it be known, file it away for all of history’s babies to gum over,
that the first skirmish in the real fight for the 2008 presidential
election occurred well past midnight, in a Denny’s restaurant, over a
piece of pie.
Marina, Calif. is an overlooked, polluted, bombed-out former military
town on the north end of the Monterey Bay. Wind lashed and consistently
chilly, the town, once a thriving base known as Fort Ord, now sits like
a giant corroded magnet, hoping like hell to attract big box stores,
universities, housing developments, airports, produce packing plants —
anything to bring in some new tax revenue to a town that was literally
abandoned just a decade prior. There are few amenities here, unless you
count Chuquie’s Used Cars, a few cheap hotels and a Denny’s restaurant,
which happens to sit precisely in the middle of two wildly different
events on this refrigerated July night.
The California Rodeo is underway this week. The respective bulls all
retired at midnight and, like the man says, you don’t have to go home,
but you can’t stay here. So of course, we all ended up on top of each
other at Denny’s, the only open mess hall from Big Sur to Santa Cruz.
Weekends are generally chaotic for the haggard employees of the Marina
Denny’s. Fights are common, and in this area, fights are serious
business that often escalate to armed warfare between sets, sects and
gangs. 911 is programmed into all nine slots of the company handset
speed dial function, and the manager, a goiter-necked geeky fellow with
porcupine hair and poor fashion sensibilities, keeps a sawed-off deep
fry stirrer under the register in case he needs the leverage.
I was trying to settle my inflamed guts (to assuage my lack of protein
at supper, which was only a quick bottle of liquefied Mini-Thins and
several Tecates with lime) with a pile of French fries and a club
sandwich while doing some research into the Tomato Panic when the
troubles began.
“Look here, Slick. I ordered that pie, and it’s mine. Step aside!” came
the call from over near the entrance alongside the pie case. Standing
in a fluorescent silhouette, two men, one dressed in Wranglers, boots,
denim vest and a sweat stained Stetson wide brim, and the other
sporting blue racing leathers, a black Barack Obama themed T-shirt that
said “Bros Before Ho’s,” and an overly gelled faux-hawk squared off.
Between them, on top of the display case, sat a single slab of what
looked to be hot apple pie.
“Well CHET,” said the behawked biker, observantly using the name
provided on the big white lugs chest patch, “you took that pie out of
that waitress’s hands as she was on the way to deliver it to me. I
ordered it first, cabron!” I thought this insult to be odd, given that
the man speaking was obviously of Asian descent, possibly Korean.
Anything is possible this deep in the night. Maybe he was raised in
Mexico. Perhaps cabron is also a swear word in Korean.
I was pondering this, and watching the booths for nervous action,
looking around for a sign of a bum rush from either side. The cowboys
watched intently, smiling and eating slowly. The crotch rocketeers sat
up straight, sizing up the challenge.
The bikers are not the same bunch of hooligans that your father was
terrified of and your mother (well, not your mother, but most other
mothers, except for mine) secretly lusted for; this new generation
rides impossibly fast sport bikes and don elaborate protective gear.
From my stool I performed a scientific straw poll, asking several of
the riders who they planned to vote for. All of them said Obama. They
are Hopesters and Changeheads, on the ever-dangerous night road and
away from their natural homes along the Silicone Valley where they
program and engineer and make money to make money.
Likewise, my canvassing of the rodeo types alongside me at the counter
revealed a unified band of McCain’s Army, red-blooded patriots who
believe that liberalism is a shootable offense.
“Your ‘bro’ is a connivin’ bastard whose gonna sink this country fast
as he can get his Hopey hands on it! He’s an empty suit, a paper
promise”
“Give it a rest, Tex. You assholes have had eight years to destroy
everything good that this country stands for. Look at you! You are a
perfect example. All dressed up like John Friggen Wayne. Hey Tex, you
catch any rustlers making off with yer cows today?”
I waited silently, chewing a soggy fry, fascinated, expecting the next
comment to be an obvious strike and the start of a real melee — a
“Brokeback” comment.
It occurred to me then that this is what The Fight will be like. The
Fight will be fought and won not over the airwaves, not from the
well-lit floor of any convention hall or stadium, or even by the
candidates themselves. Both of them are products and slaves to modern
politics — toothless lions weened on milk, lacking a real taste for
blood. They tiptoe around each other in measured respect, one eye on
the polls, the other on the donor streams, afraid to rock the boat, let
alone the vote.
No, this fight, just as critical to the sustainability of our nation as
any war that our country has fought, is the chance to determine once
and for all if the Bush years were just a bad hallucination, a hostile
takeover of an obese democracy soothed with tax rebates and false
securities, or if we are in for more of the same — a descension into
corporatized everwar, World War III and the bloody beyond.
Our fight will be fought one bar stool at a time, brother against
brother, wife against husband, pastor against priest. We are going to
have to violently wrestle one another for the right to choose our
national identity, to prove to ourselves, and the rest of the world,
that we belong at the top, that we care to nurture a future for all
people.
There are only 108 days left until the general election. Unless things
go skittering off horribly sideways (like, say, opening up a Third
Front in Iran, or the FDIC melting itself down for traveling gold, or
the Yankees overtaking the Rays), and assuming both candidates are able
to greet November’s chill with good health and intact morality, our
nation is going to be given a golden opportunity to renew itself, to
begin to stitch our sucking chest wound back together. But first, we
are going to have to fight it out amongst ourselves and decide which
party we will entrust our leadership too.
And to do that, someone is going to have to step up and snatch the pie.
Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a
remote hot spring tub in the asbestos flats of the Hollister Hills,
where Polish own the day and the jackrabbits rule the night.