The night of the Iowa caucus, I wanted to quit my job and pack a bag for Chicago or New Hampshire or wherever the action was. I didn't go to either of those places, and I put off my political wanderlust for an embarrassingly long nine and a half months, but I did end up where the action was. Though I now live in Connecticut, I grew up—and my parents still live—on what unexpectedly turned into a fault-line for the 2008 campaign: the Indiana-Ohio border.

One day in Czechoslovakia, not long after I was born, during the gray decade that was the '70s, my 6-year-old brother came home from school and shared what he'd learned: "Lenin was a kind person. He liked children." Those words have acquired the force of a proverb in our family: we assure each other that Lenin liked children whenever one of us lets fly with a statement that seems dangerously optimistic. The following may fall into that category: Czechoslovakia before 1989, when the Communist regime fell, was not a bad place to be a child. For my parents, who spent a large part of their adulthoods in the country, it wasn't all free health care and underground rock 'n' roll. As everyone knows by now, most people had to keep their opinions to themselves, do without traveling abroad, wait in line for bananas, accept overt and subtle limitations in their lives. As soon as kids started going to school, they too slipped under the arm of the state—witness my brother's first-grade indoctrination. In general, though, a political system that thwarted the better instincts and ambitions of adults seems, perversely, to have been mostly congenial and comfortable for children. Read More

Subj: politics 1
Date: 10/17/2004 6:21:22 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: rothcomar@gmail.com
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Dear eds,

To parody an ad for John Kerry, there are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of America, and one of them is that election day is coming and the Republicans still have a chance to win. In a sane world, this race would not even be close. What is it like to live in the days before a disaster? History provides examples, but none are just right. What was it like to be a Roman citizen hanging out at the garum shop when Caligula purged the Senate? Was that you strolling with careful elegance in Unter den Linden mocking the Bavarian brownshirts? Or you, writing poems when the one-eyed General crossed from Morocco? Or waiting for your husband to come home from the Santiago factories in 1972? People are even starting to come up with names for what we're living through, names like Sheldon Wolin's "inverted totalitarianism," but these still rely on European models. The coming disaster will be all-American, red, white, and blue, and be ours alone. History gives us our unique lives and our unique chance to screw up. Read More