An Odd Experience

I'm a bit lazy. I haven't yet taken the John Kerry '04 bumper sticker off of my mid-sized foreign sedan yet. Well, somebody noticed that yesterday while I was on my way home from work (and, as you might guess, he was in a ridiculously big SUV, maybe a Yukon or a Suburban). He was behind me for a while, and then he made a big show of passing me. Except he didn't pass. He pulled up even with me on the left until I looked over at him.

When I did, he held up a Bush/Cheney '04 pin with one hand, pointed at it with the other (I guess the steering wheel was taking care of itself, and looking at me was more important than looking at the road at 70 miles per hour), and started screaming. I couldn't tell what he was screaming, because both of our windows were closed, but it didn't seem to me to be a sentiment where the specifics were too important.

This wasn't an impetuous youth. This wasn't a crazy hippie. This was a guy who looked to be in his early 50s, with gray hair, probably with grown kids of his own, around my age. He was probably coming home from work, where he does some respectable job in some respectable manner. But seeing that bumper sticker set him off, I guess, and boy did he ever show me!

This is the kind of thing, once again, that's so wrong with our public discourse. It's usually not this literal, but usually it consists of pointing to your candidate and screaming, whether or not anybody's listening.

Fargus...