My Heady Experience In The Empire Of Cows

As a kid I found broccoli pretty boring. Not repellent, just... dull. Something I would avoid if possible. But as I've gotten older I've begun to appreciate broccoli, in particular lightly steamed broccoli with just a little garlic sauce. In fact, I now appreciate broccoli so powerfully that "appreciate" is too mild a word for it. I am doing more than appreciating as I cradle broccoli in my arms and croon to it softly. Please do not interrupt us during this period; this is private time, for my broccoli and me.

I've undergone the same progression with democracy. I didn't see what the fuss was about when I was younger. But now I just can't get enough, particularly democracy that comes with the garlic sauce of life and death implications.

For me, the most deeply enjoyable part of democracy-in-action is it's one of the few times in America when you get to meet everyone as straight up equals. Usually the people we meet want our money, or we want theirs, or they want us to promote them, or we want them to promote us, and so on. Somebody always has more power than somebody else, and both somebodies are deformed by it.

But here in Wisconsin, in the get out the vote work I've been doing, everyone I meet is just as important as everyone else. Everyone has just the one vote. And the strict roles we're used to playing, based on our skin color, or money, or status, or unwholesome fixation with broccoli, begin to melt slightly. You can catch a glimpse of who people (including you) might be in a different, better world.

I could go on in this vein for hours, but my broccoli calls, and I must fly hence. But here's another piece of writing by Ian Frazier from his book Great Plains, which expresses more eloquently what I've been trying to say.

(P.S. Based on what I've seen, Kerry's going to win.)

In Chapter 9 of Great Plains, Frazier visits Nicodemus, a small town in Kansas founded after the civil war by freed slaves. It's in the midst of its Founders Day Celebration weekend, and Frazier goes to the township hall:

...Next came a fashion show of ladies' hats designed by Billie Singleton of Topeka. The hats were big, in dramatic shapes, burgundy and gray and black and white. Mrs. Avalon Roberson modelled them. She put on each hat and strolled around the room so everybody could it. She got applause all the way around. Then Mrs. Juanita Robinson, of Nicodemus, introduced her daughters Kathleen, Karen, Kaye, Kolleen, Krystal, and Karmen...

Then the song "When Doves Cry," by Prince, began to play on the loudspeaker, and they began to dance. I looked past the people sitting on chairs against the wall, the women with their pocketbooks on their knees, past the portrait of Blanche White, who was like a mother to the kids in the town, through the tall open window, past the roadside grove of elms which Blanche White's 4-H Club planted in the 1950s, past the wheat-field horizon, and into the blank, bright sky. Sudden I felt a joy so strong it almost knocked me down. It came up my spine and settled on my head like a warm cap and filled my eyes with tears, while I stood there packed in with everybody, watching Mrs. Robinson's lovely daughters dance.

And I thought, It could have worked! This democracy, this land of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness -- it could have worked! There was something to it, after all! It didn't have to turn into a greedy free-for-all! We didn't have to make a mess of it and the continent and ourselves! It could have worked! It wasn't just a joke, just a blind for the machinations of money! The Robinson sisters danced; Prince sang about doves crying; beauty and courage and gentleness seemed not be rare aberrations in the world. Nicodemus, a town with reasons enough to hold a grudge, a town with plenty of reasons not to exist at all, celebrated its Founders' Day with a show of hats and a dance revue... For a moment I could imagine the past rewritten, wars unfought, the buffalo and the Indians undestroyed, the prairie unplundered. Maybe history did not absolutely have to turn out the way it did. Maybe the history of the West, for example, could have involved more admiration of hats, more unarmed get togethers, more dancing, more tasting of spareribs...

I was no longer a consumer, a rate payer, a tenant, a card holder, a motorist. I was home. The world looked as I wanted it to. My every breath was justified. I felt not the mild warmth of irony, not the comfort of camp, not the cheer of success and a full bank account; just plain, complete joy.