DEMOCRACY
posted 7:01 PM
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen .
Sunday, November 02, 2008
THE GRAND ELEPHANT OF LES MACHINES DE L'ILE (AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN)
posted 1:15 AM
My daughter and I are in Nantes, preparing to return to Paris after attending Utopiales, Nantes' extremely pleasant international festival of science fiction, now in its ninth year.
Yesterday we visted Les Machines de l’Ile (Island Machines), which surely must be the single most exquisitely steampunk site on the plenet, and rode the Grand Elephant .
This morning, as my daughter called me for breakfast, I woke from a dream in which someone was enthusiastically comparing the (in my dream) triumphant Obama campaign to the Grand Elephant and its forty-some tonnes of moving parts (party-mascot irony evidently being lost on the logic of dream).
Are you planning to vote for Obama? Let me advise you to do what it takes, Tuesday, to do that. Don't be a part of that part of the electorate that, for whatever reason, intends to vote, but doesn't. Whichever way this election goes, you will not want to journey into your personal future, the future of the United States, or the future of the world, without having cast your vote in this election. If I know anything about the future, I know that. Either way, you will not want to have not been a cog, however microscopic, however essential, in this magnificent and beautifully-intentioned mechanism. If you've already taken advantage of early voting (of which I am a huge fan) and have the time to do so, please help as many others as you can to vote. Whatever the outcome, you will always count yourself a better person for having done so.
And as Kos says, leave everything on the road.
