distressing visions

David Warren is perhaps my favorite columnist, with only Mark Steyn giving him close competition. In the past two years I've learned much from him, about Canadian society, about Islam before the Islamists (he spent much of his formative years in Lahore), about the conservative tradition, about the messy and often hypocritical business of diplomacy.

And along the way, about how to turn a memorable phrase:

America is polarized, not only between two parties, but between two cultures, and two worldviews, basically Christian and basically post-Christian, for which the Republicans and Democrats have become mere proxies. As personalities, Bush and Kerry make appropriate leaders. The sort of person who likes Bush — who has some respect for what the man is, whether or not he agrees with all his policies — will almost certainly despise a man like Kerry, and consider him a fraud and poseur. And vice versa: the sort of person who finds Mr. Kerry smart and “nuanced”, will tend to find Mr. Bush a bloodthirsty ape. […]

So while American society may be splitting at the seams, the two ruling parties are struggling, tweedledum-tweedledee, to embrace the disappearing middle — to find that ideal point, where the seam is, between the two rending buttocks of public opinion.

Shudder.

But perhaps he's just been seized by the same sort of nightmares that are plaguing me. The night after Kerry's am-I-a-hero-or-what? grandstanding in Boston, I dreamed that after the votes were counted in forty-nine states, the tally for Kerry and for Bush was dead even—which meant, for reasons best left unexamined, that those votes cancelled each other out. It was then left to the final state alone to select the president.

And so the choice was made: Al Sharpton. The weird part? The state with the controlling legal authority, so to speak, was Arizona.

I am not making this up.

Weird dream, I am very hopeful you are wrong. I moved to AZ very hopeful that a conservative climate would prevail, unlike WA. We shall see.