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With Election Day nearing, it was time to find my favorite inside source: Ananias Ziegler, a retired lieutenant colonel who handles media relations for the Committee That Really Runs America.
He was in his office, although he said he had just returned from an exhausting three-day trip through several swing states, attempting to gauge the mood of the electorate so he could advise Karl Rove on an effective last-minute strategy.
By the way, Quillen,
he continued, you're in
the middle of Colorado. How do things look there?
This was flattering, since he usually refers to my home
as one of those big square states out there in flyover
country,
but I told him I couldn't be much help. Just a
few years ago, Salida was competitive, but the town seems
much more Democratic now -- for every Bush-Cheney yard sign
or bumper sticker, I must see two or three Kerry-Edwards
signs and stickers. Either Salida's demographics have
changed, I told Ziegler, or else the Republicans are in a
world of hurt here in the Great American Heartland.
Let me clarify that for you,
he said. If your
town votes Republican, it is indeed part of the Great
American Heartland. But if your town holds a lot of
latte-sippers who want to invite another terrorist attack
by voting for the wrong party, then it's an elitist enclave
which is out of touch with the common-sense mainstream
American values which have protected all of us during these
threatening times.
Most of my friends and neighbors, I told him, seemed to be more worried about Iraq and the economy than about values.
That's terrible,
Ziegler said. I have a hard
time believing that people could be so selfish.
I asked him to explain.
To care about whether you've got a job? That's just
crass materialism, and it means you're thinking about
yourself, rather than the emerging global economy and
America's role in the world,
Ziegler said. That's
just so greedy, to be whining about out-sourcing.
I hadn't thought of it that way before, and asked if there were other examples.
Just about anywhere you look,
he said. Look at
those parents who want their children to go to good public
schools and develop solid skills in math and language --
don't they realize that there are higher and nobler goals
than mere competence or even excellence? How can we inspire
them to look beyond such mundane matters, and toward the
eternal verities of abstinence?
Some of my friends have lost their health insurance, I said, and most of us can't afford it anyway. It worries us a lot.
Again, you're just thinking of yourselves,
Ziegler sighed. It's so narcissistic. There you are,
just worried about fixing your own bodies and saving your
own homes, when the sacred institution of holy matrimony is
threatened as never before by same-sex unions. Can't you
learn to lift your eyes from your petty little picayune
concerns?
Perhaps not, I conceded. Just the other day somebody was complaining about the flu-vaccine shortage.
That is so insular,
Ziegler said. How could
anyone be concerned over a minor personal matter, when the
world is so much safer now that Saddam Hussein is no longer
in power?
Ziegler might have had a point, but I wanted to get something straight with him. Was he really telling us that elections should not be about our interests -- jobs, health care, education -- but about values?
Absolutely,
he said. Our wealth makes America
great, but you people can barely pay your taxes. So we have
improved matters. Everybody pays lower taxes. We may get
richer in the process, but you get better values. That's
truly a value-added policy, right?
He had another call, so I bid him good day, and returned to my mundane, selfish world of trying to make a living, even though I knew I was supposed to be thinking about values.
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