Politics; unexpected fascination... At seventy-one, I'm able to remember quite a few U.S. presidential elections, and I remember being extremely interested in a number of them. Even when I was incredibly busy, with a batch of kids still at home to be looked after, and a batch of jobs to be worked at, and a batch of books and grants proposals and linguistics papers to be written, I was genuinely interested in those elections and I tried hard to keep up with the news about them.
But this is the first time in my entire life that I have ever been interested -- fascinated, enthralled, entranced -- with a U.S. presidential
primary, before the candidates have even been chosen. I would not have believed that I could be so on-the-edge-of-my-chair about a primary that I can hardly wait to check the news every morning to see what bizarre thing has happened
now -- but that is exactly my present state of mind. [Using the word "mind" loosely.]
I would especially not have believed that I, a lifelong Democrat, could be as fascinated by the
Republican primary as by the Democratic one -- but I am. I never cared a fig about a Republican presidential primary before. But this time is different. It seems to me that the current primary campaigns as a collective entity are, more than anything else, like a great hulking five-volume fantasy epic; the plots and subplots are so intricate and so utterly improbable that I expect some big redwood tree to set out on the campaign trail any minute now. Elves and orcs and fairies and banshees could turn up at the rallies and town hall meetings and ask questions, and I wouldn't bat an eye. Because the things that
are happening, right before my eyes and ears and skin, strike me as equally improbable. Every other sentence out of my mouth, lately, seems to be "I can't believe he/she SAID that!" or "I can't believe he/she/they DID that!," and I am meaning those sentences wholeheartedly as I say them.
Boggleboggleboggleboggle....
Am I alone in this? Am I sliding into a state of second childhood where any trivial passing phenomenon can hold my interest? Or is the whole multimillion-dollar-costing thing actually as wild and crazy and exotic as I perceive it to be?
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Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at
http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm ; "Why Are Old Women Older Than Old Men And How Can We Fix That?" at
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesElginOld.html ;
Religious Language Newsletter archive at
http://www.forlovingkindness.org .
Fiction online: "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" at
http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Story-Panglish.html ; "What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" at
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/epa.htm ; "Weather Bulletin" at
http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Weather.html ; "A Quorum Of Grandmothers" at
http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/QuorumOfGrandmothers.html ;
The Communipaths at
http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html . More stuff at
http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SiteMap.html ; LiveJournal
blog index at
http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque .