At a time when Harry Reid actually believes “when the dust settles the Republicans will no longer want to stop everything and we’ll work together” I don’t feel even slightly sheepish about indulging another crazy dreamer.
So it’s over. Either your candidate lost and you’re angry, or your candidate won and you’re still angry. (Except for the TV people, who remain glassy-eyed from the epic feast of attack-ad revenue.) Am I the only one who still flinches when the phone or doorbell rings? Indeed, the mood is so wrung-out and exhausted that it feels like we’re living in a Bob Dylan song.
This is where campaign hysteria comes — at long, weary last — to die. It’s been raging across the valley for months, in attack ads, fliers and weaponized sound bites, but come Election Day, it’ll rattle to a halt, and it will do so here.
Looks like a good crowd today. Upward of 100 people are lined up outside in the unseasonably warm October afternoon, but inside Wayne Carrington is the one working up a sweat. It’s a Thursday afternoon, when the food pantry run by Living Faith Assembly hands out the groceries, and it takes an incredible effort to pull it all together.
From the remorseless cash-extraction ethos of the Strip to the every-man-for-himself mentality that simmers below the surface of our civic life, Las Vegas offers plenty of reasons to be ambivalent about the city and its problems. Many of us don’t fight it. London Porter does.
I’m having trouble finding an illegal Canadian. Not for a lack of trying, though. Peering into the trucks carrying work crews and gardeners down the freeways at dawn, I’ve looked. Swinging past the day-laborer gathering points, I’ve looked. Not a single conspicuous Canadian, just the usual Hispanics, or, as Sharron Angle knows them, Asians.
“They’re building that already?” asks a guy I bump into on Friday, after that morning’s topping-off ceremony for the new Las Vegas City Hall. “I thought they were still arguing about it.” For Mayor Oscar Goodman the project carries a heavy symbolic load.
Open letter to Dearborn, Mich.: I confess, Dearbornians, that as a longtime Las Vegan, it didn’t occur to me at first that anyone there would take Sharron Angle’s comments about the rise of Muslim Sharia law in your city seriously.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, it’s estimated that a human language dies every 14 days. Most are aboriginal and village-specific tongues, sure, but we shouldn’t get complacent.
Human memory can be a notoriously unstable and tricky mechanism for making decisions, imposing judgments or, more to the point in the Erik Scott inquest, getting at the truth.
Anger is so in now. It may be one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but wrath is all the rage. Blame the Tea Party and its deep sense of entitled grievance if you must — and I, for one, must — but hasn’t it gotten bigger than that?
