okay. let me preface this post by saying: i find it utterly distastful when people indoctrinate their children with their political views before the shorties are old enough to understand them. i get pissed when i see a little kid sitting on a parent’s shoulders, wearing a besloganed t-shirt, shaking a little fist, face scrunched up while screaming “life begins at conception!” or “affirmitive action is reverse discrimination!” my kids have no idea that i have a negative opinion of one of the most terrifyingly stupid people on the planet, our current president (though EvilGremlin, now in third grade, has realized on his own that the guy is less than articulate. if he happens to hear W speak for more than 30 seconds, he usually peppers me with questions like “did he say that right?”) call me old-fashioned, but i think they should believe in respect for the office of the presidency for at least as long as they believe in santa claus. they know there’s a presedential election coming up, and they know i prefer obama over mccain. (i’ve explained that they both want to do a good job, but i think obama’s ideas for how to fix some things will work better than mccain’s, but nobody really knows for sure, so sometimes people wind up arguing about it.)
now, fast forward a bit. the boys have been asking for hawkeye paraphernalia for a while. and that shit’s expensive! a single, 3-inch hawkeye sticker costs $2.99 at the grocery store. i scored a short stack of bumper stickers (for the swim and dive teams) at the student gym on my way out of tuesday night’s fencing class, which they plastered on their t-shirts to wear to school yesterday. that’s a little too ghetto even for me, so i took them downtown to the cheap-ass “buy one school shirt get two free” store downtown. i think it must be part of a chain, since the “hawkeye den” here bears an uncanny resemblance to the “discount den” in champaign, IL, right down to the selection of shitty candy in mexican retail wrappers.
we actually never made it to the den, because after stopping at the library to drop off a stack of books about tarantulas, books on cd, and 8 bajillion japanese pop music cds (seriously? endlessly fascinating, to the point that PositiveRoleModel needed to buy a copy of Puffy Ami Yumi’s cartoon network cd, featuring the theme song to Teen Titans. like his children screeching along to kurt cobain, he can entertain himself for hours by putting that song on repeat and screaming in his best little-japanese-girl voice, “teen titaaaaaans!”) we passed by the fountains on the ped mall. it was the warmest day in two weeks – high temperature of 70-something instead of 50-something – so the kids dived right in.
while they were running around screaming, i noticed a threesome of old people standing nearby, scanning the crowd and talking. one had a microphone, one had a television camera, and one had a stack of glossy 8-1/2×11 glamour shots of sarah palin. i couldn’t quite hear what they were talking about (mostly because i had to keep chasing down MonkeyBeef to prevent his soggy little ass from hug-tackling any dog that walked by) but it seemed that they were looking for man-on-the-street interviewees for some sort of republican propaganda.
so when we left half an hour later, i spotted the crew again, now sitting at a sidewalk cafe. a man-on-the-street was leaning into the microphone, delivering a rambling monologue with furrowed brow and expansive, shakespearian-soliloquy hand gestures. important stuff, yo!
SM: HEY, I WANNA TALK AT THE CAMERA.
me: keep walking.
DQ: did he say obama?
EG: yep, they’re talking about barack obama!
me: keep. walking.
SM: OBAMA’S GONNA BE A AAAAAAAAAAAWESOME PRESIDENT!
remember that SpazMonkey speaks in an earsplitting shriek even when he’s calm, and he was EXCITED that he knew what these people were talking about in front of the big-ass tv camera. so let’s just say he completely drowned out whatever the man-on-the-street was saying. then, as if by prior arrangement, the three older boys suddenly went into pep rally mode while MonkeyBeef sucked his thumb and added the occasional screech. so, somewhere, maybe on fox news, or maybe on a republican national committee promotional video, some poor backroom sound technician had to try to edit out the next 90 seconds or so of three soggy little boys jumping up and down as i ushered them past the interviewee, chanting “O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! woooooooooo!” they couldn’t have done better had i actually put them up to it. i knew that watching the daily show with them all summer would pay off!
