This is Part III in a series. Read Parts I and II here and here.

Part III, In Which Our Hero Triumphs Over the Familiar of a Dark Arts Practitioner

Our next misadventure picks up some time later, in the fall of 2010. Comedian Jon Stewart had announced his intention to hold a “Rally to Restore Sanity,” his answer to the polarized extremism of the contemporary political climate, and his sometime partner Steven Colbert, in his pseudo-right wing persona, announced a simultaneous “Rally to Keep Fear Alive.” This joint event would be held in Washington, DC on Saturday, October 31^st, Halloween.

I thought the idea was funny, especially as it was at least partially intended to mock excessively well compensated professional jagoff Glenn Beck. But it did not occur to me that I would attend myself, until my dad proposed that we do so. I think he really wanted to show up Beck. He knew I was a huge Stewart/Colbert fan and is a great fan of road trips, the non-disastrous kind. At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to go because Halloween in Chicago is usually pretty awesome, especially the previous year which I’d spent hanging out with this blog’s hostess (Hello Lisa), but this did seem like one of those great once in a lifetime opportunities that I’d be a fool to miss. I posted my ruminations about this on Facebook, which was the fashion back in those days, all of my friends strongly encouraged me to go, and of course, I’d do anything for the old man. Consultation with friends and their plans indicated this might not be quite as fun a Halloween as last year anyway.

I had certain deeper misgivings as well. I am a huge fan of Stewart and Colbert, watch them most every night when I have the chance. And Stewart’s passionately felt but moderate and independent minded liberal politics have always pretty much seemed a mirror image to my own. But I had to admit he may have been going too far down the moderate road with this endeavor. The general thrust of the statement he was trying to make was that the American political landscape had been hijacked by extremes and the voices of reasonable people who lie in the middle are getting drowned out. Honestly, who disagrees with that? It’s like saying you like puppies. And I definitely have problems with people on what I consider the far left, a group which includes many close and beloved friends of mine (Hello again Lisa). I think their tone is often too strident and I think they often think more idealistically than realistically. I don’t care for old school sixties organizations like Code Pink, which confuse disrupting free expression with exercising it. But ultimately my differences with them are more about strategy, tactics and style than they are about substance, whereas my differences with folks on the far right are more my contention that they should be beaten with sticks, an issue of substance on which their position is probably the reverse. And seriously, when was the last time you heard about Code Pink?

As tempting as this pox on both their houses business is, it’s just not true that “both sides” are equivalent in America today. The left is not bringing guns to town hall meetings. They’re not setting off bombs and they’re not murdering doctors, and while some on the left made deplorable jokes about assassinating George Bush, a whole lot fewer people actually tried it than have with Obama. You don’t hear about it much but it happens a lot.

And anyway, however moderate and reasonable Stewart’s audience might be, they are overwhelmingly seen as liberal. Hell, that’s what liberal used to mean. And considering the fact that Republicans were about to retake the United States Congress with an agenda pretty far removed from the restoration of sanity, maybe it would have been a better idea for thousands and thousands of liberals to spend some time volunteering for Democratic candidates instead of going to a big party in DC with their favorite comedians.

All of these nagging misgivings were eventually overtaken in my brain by “Jon Stewart! Colbert! Woo!”

By this late stage of the year, I had exhausted all my vacation time because I can be an imprudent sort in some respects.  This meant we couldn’t depart until late Friday afternoon and had to be back ideally Sunday sometime. We had toyed with the idea of flying. But it would have been a thousand bucks for both of us by the point we looked into it. The sticker shock put me off immediately, spending that much (of my father’s) money on this adventure was surely a terrible idea. No, we would just have to press on through the night for the entire epic thirteen hour drive from Friday to Saturday morning. I had booked one of the last available motel rooms in the DC area, where I hoped we would be able to grab maybe three hours’ sleep before assembling with the other multitudes.

Though the rally was theoretically a nonpartisan affair, my dad had brought some of my vintage Obama for Senate signs to demonstrate where we stood, firmly, in an election that had taken place six years earlier. If we’d had some Obama for President signs, or better yet, “Democratic Congress: Please Give Them Another Shot” signs, we would have brought them but you’ve got to work with the resources that you have.

I inherited my political junkie orientation from my dad and we spoke grimly about the prospect of impending Republican rule. I suggested that this Rally to Restore Sanity event might be even more necessary a year or two from now. What if a whole movement sprouted out from this day, a counterpoint to the Tea Parties? “What do we want?”
“The opportunity to sit down and discuss our problems like mature adults without being mean to each other!” “When do we want it?” “Whenever it is convenient for you!” Probably not, but if it did, we would be there for the start of it.

Of all my road trips recounted here, this was the one most dominated by, well, the road. It competed with a college trip to Philadelphia as the longest one I’d ever been on. Somewhere in, once again, Ohio, I encountered a rest stop phenomenon that may be commonplace but that I found slightly surreal. There would be a set of businesses, a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, a Starbucks and a BP Station, say, and across the street, there would be the exact same Burger King, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and BP Station. My dad is not one to pay particular attention to this sort of thing so I ask you dear reader: That’s kind of weird isn’t it? It was like parallel worlds facing each other. Maybe my brain wouldn’t have fixated on this so much if it didn’t want to go to sleep as badly as it did. But I had miles to go… Like way more miles than Robert Frost had to go on that horse.

As the night wore on, my father and I, switching off the driving duties, had adhered to an unspoken pact to travel cheerfully at excessively high speeds. We had a motel to get to, and oh, 90 miles an hour seemed appropriate when there was nothing else on the road for what felt like 90 miles. My dad had a little GPS gadget that predicted the time when we would arrive at the destination. The time would get earlier as the car went faster. I made it a personal game while driving to make the time display go backwards.

At about four in the morning on Saturday, October 30^th, Halloween for all practical purposes, my dad was driving, we were passing through Bedford County, Pennsylvania about two hours from our destination. Again so tantalizingly close when misfortune struck, this time with the kind of vicious, overwhelming force designed to crush what plucky optimism you’d managed to hold fast to through previous misfortunes because this misfortune doesn’t like the cocky look on your face.

Completely without warning, a deer ran in front of our path. There was less than a second to process this realization before impact. I can’t even recall exactly how I became conscious of it. My father may have shouted something along the lines of “DEER!” I was sad that we had killed a deer. And shocked of course. But I did not, in the first few seconds, grasp the full implications for ourselves. I thought, “Terrible tragedy that, how carelessly and ploddingly we tread on God’s green earth… But I’m sure we will quickly recover from the no doubt minor damage to our vehicle and be on our way.”

Exiting the car, however, we saw the picture of a very damaged automobile. The whole front appeared to be completely wrecked. I was prepared to speculate that among many other things, the deer had almost certainly taken out the alternator.

I started mentally sputtering. What…who…why…Burger King… “nonpartisan rally”? What the FUCK? Why the hell was this happening to me AGAIN?

The all but mindless hunk of venison for which I had moments earlier felt sorrow became the target of my rage. The deer and my father’s car had destroyed each other in a symbiotic symphony of doom. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that jumping in front of speeding cars was fucking STUPID, Bambi?

Or perhaps you were a familiar, the servant of some evil wizard? An evil wizard opposed to the elevation of American discourse? Or was there some other unknown cause you gave your life for? Thanks a lot, deer. Hope you’re enjoying your fucking Deer Valhalla where all the deer martyrs go or something. You blow.

At this point, I knew the drill. There I was once again. Broken down on another rural highway, running my ass off just to determine where the hell I was. This was definitely getting old. Then the sheriff’s deputies arrived, an older man and a younger one. We explained what happened. Their tone was generally polite until they asked my dad for his license and registration, for some reason, the latter was in the trunk rather than the glove compartment. That’s when the deputies saw the big Obama sign, and the tone changed a bit. Bedford County, Pennsylvania is not Obama country. The young deputy became heated.

“Exactly how fast were you going to do that much damage?” the younger deputy started asking. My dad initially ignored this and kept talking to the older deputy, whose tone remained relatively respectful. When the younger deputy persisted with the question, my dad, himself a Chicago Police veteran albeit for a brief time, favored the boy with a withering glance and answered in a tone dripping with disdain that my words cannot capture, “I have no idea how fast I was going,” the clear implication being “And you don’t either.”

My dad is awesome.

The younger deputy said he would have to look for the deer and shoot it if it was still alive, which it wasn’t. I thought I detected a bit of sadness in his voice for the poor beast, which made me like him just a bit more.

Once we were, again, dropped off at a motel, my dad engaged in some charming banter with the female desk clerk, which, apart from being contemptuous of authority, is one of the things he’s very good at. It was now past 5am and when we adjourned to the motel room, my dad and I decided that we would have to forgo the Rally, which was both a relief and a disappointment. It frustrated me to have traveled so far for nothing but neither of us was in any condition for standing in a big crowd having gotten no sleep whatsoever. At least I’d kept true to the “Keep Fear Alive” portion of the event. My dad was now pessimistically saying it may be days before we can return home as the nearest rental car agencies are closed all weekend.

I absolutely refused to countenance this talk. I couldn’t wait until fucking Monday to go home, as I had no days off left, and if I did, I was sure as hell not going to waste it on the road. I’m going to get home and I’m going to get home now. I furiously combed the Internet for some means of escape. The nearest city I’d heard of was Altoona. If I’d heard of the place, I reasoned that they must have cars available for rental on Saturday. They did, from 9am to noon. It was close to 6 now. And Altoona was fifty miles away. No public transportation of course. And no taxi companies in the sense I was familiar with, but after my dad and I conversed with the clerk we discovered there were people in the area who would give you a ride as a sort of side business. She gave me a phone number and I called to arrange a pickup at 9am. I managed to get an hour of precious, precious sleep before having to be on the road again.

Our driver was a diminutive, elderly man in U.S. Air Force fatigue pants. He and his wife were friendly I’m happy to say, they asked us where we were from, and we told them Chicago.

“Chicago…” the man said. “I think I might have met another fella from Chicago once.”

As if Chicago were some obscure, remote region he’d only heard of on occasion. We are a rather world famous metropolis you know. Or perhaps, they were just too polite to repeat what they had heard. They asked us if we had Chicago accents and we said we supposed we did.

We managed to rent a car and head home. It looked like I’d be home for Halloween after all. I texted a few friends to ask them what they were doing. I told my friend Molly that it looked like I would be coming home a bit earlier than anticipated. With no more prompting than that, she texted back “Oh no! Did you destroy another car out of state in a political endeavor?” I responded “If I told you the answer was yes…I’m not even going to bother coming up with something witty here, the answer is yes.”

If I have a regret about these misadventures in this strange “other” America, it’s that I never really tried to reach across these perceived (largely by myself) cultural and ideological divides. I always adopted meek and unthreatening postures and never once tried to engage anyone I met in a forthright, honest conversation about things. Perhaps this silence is one of the reasons these sort of divides exist. Or perhaps it really does maintain a sort of tense peace.

Oh and a bit of a footnote to the previous entry, I found out that the TV series Glee is set in Lima, Ohio. I kind of love that, because I don’t think the Klan would have liked Glee.

My dad and I found out, not long after our return home, that his 1.5 year old car was not in fact salvageable, making my (blameless!) automobile death count three. Marc told me that I would have to undergo some sort of powerful exorcism from a seriously hardcore priest or shaman before he would ever allow me into any car of his again, though he has already yielded on that threat.

And hey, much as we can joke about my streak of bad luck, that’s all it was, bad luck, it’s not that I’m really cursed because we’re all grownups here and we know curses aren’t real. As I write this, I’m preparing to drive back to Ohio for a friend’s wedding. I am firm in the conviction that absolutely nothing will go wrong…