Back when I was in college, one of the schools that I went to was embroiled in controversy. Some drunken knucklehead had thrown a security guard through a window. It was, they proposed, preferable to have to shoot a knucklehead from time to time than to have a security guard go through a window, and so the administration wanted to give the security guards guns. The soft and ample left wing contingent at the school was livid. They staged a huge march and walkout. My friends and I were just as upset about this as anyone, so we put our marching shoes on, too. "No guns for ULED!" was our cry, ULED standing for "University Law Enforcement Division" and rhyming with "moped", the gasoline powered bicycle, and not the past tense of "mope". O! The passion! Hundreds of us marched around the lecture hall building, which was shaped like a big donut, poetically, and someone would fling open each lecture hall door as we came upon it, and dozens of students would storm in chanting, "No guns for ULED! No guns for ULED!", and the students inside, swayed by our earnestness or simply by their own disinclination to endure another 45 minutes of Economics 101 when REVOLUTION was in the air, they would join our ranks and move on to the next lecture hall. We got to the big one, Lecture Hall One, a mammoth, sloping amphitheater with two aisles and literally thousands of seats. Someone right ahead of me threw open the giant wooden doors to Lecture Hall One, and as I marched in with my sign in my hand and our chant on my lips, the full weight of the masses was pushing at my back and a thousand bright faces turned up from their studies to marvel at our strength. Which had diminished somewhat. The door had closed behind us by this time, and the vast, vast majority of the masses had moved on, I guess, to the next lecture hall. But an objectionist in motion tends to stay in motion, and so down the aisle, wearing the bravest of faces, we went. It was just me and my good friend Emma (a ferociously civil person) and maybe one or two other suckers. It's interesting that I can't remember who else was there. Minnie, maybe? Anyway, our chanting and stomping was swallowed up by the vast, contemplative room. it took quite some time to pad our way down the carpeted aisle aaaaaalll the way down to the front, where we were met by the amused smile of the tweeded, be-elbowpatched sociology professor who, rather than dignify our struggle with any interaction at all, just let us go by while enjoying another sip of coffee and re-arranging his notes. By the time we made it back up and around to the other door, the class had basically picked back up, as if uninterrupted. The main thrust of the march had already moved on out to the quad for speeches, and hacky-sack and doobies. I just wanted to go the vending machine in the basement to get one of those cups of coffee that has a poker hand on it, and maybe a packet of orange cheese-on-wheat crackers. I had a clearer point with this than I can recall. Bottom line, I'd really like to encourage the vast readership of dirtdirt.com to register and vote. For Obama. Tell your friends to register and vote, too, particularly those who live in swing states. It's important. Important enough to march around a room full of bemused, preoccupied freshman. This country is in a hell of a pinch. John McCain and Sarah Palin are pretty much the lousiest combination of people we could put in control right now. McCain has let his better nature be consumed by pandering to the right wing of his party, and his temper and ego have grabbed on to power by dropping his core beliefs, and a blind, unstructured taste for power is a flammable marshmallow we don't need at this campfire. And Palin, goodness gracious. Palin is literally the worst candidate for any major party in my lifetime. She is also, perhaps coincidentally, an unrepentant liar, and when she isn't lying she is very nearly crazy. Still and all, she is fairly charming, so long as you don't evaluate her on anything but her charm, which we as an electorate are susceptible to. It's crazy to think that if this was rabidly anti-choice, filthy with erupting scandals, 18 months as governor of a tiny state that is unable to balance its budget yet is awash in oil money, book-banning, rape-victim charging, thanks-but-no-thanks-but-really-just-thanks, no question answering, unwed teenage daughter having, complete national unknown, STEVE Palin we'd be talking about Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee right now. Or, how about if Sarah Palin was frumpy? Her whole appeal as a candidate is tied up in appealing to the nutsiest of the right wing (illegal abortion even in cases of rape and incest, global warming, whatever, let's shoot wolves from helicopters and sue the government for calling polar bears 'endangered') and the shallowest of the center (she's spunky! She's sassy! She's sexy! Lipstick! She said "First dude"! She's like Tina Fey without the annoying intellect! Got my vote!). There is no there there, except for poison. And it's not like vice president is nothing. Vice president is potentially president. I surely wish all the best for John McCain, but he is an old man, with recurring face cancer, who had some seriously awful physical things happen to him. He's not particularly well. Palin could be president, soon. That terrifies me, because we really, really need someone sensible in the drivers seat right now. If Obama is elected, and I fervently hope he is, he's got a terrible, terrible mess to clean up, and he will probably, through no fault of his own, fail. But he'll try. At this point it seems to me like the Republicans aren't even willing to try, and that they are actively trying to bring on the end days. I always thought McCain was smarter than this, but here we are.