Tell The Truth...

Do you know the saying “Tell the truth and shame the devil”? It’s from Shakespeare--who probably stole it from Rabelais--who probably stole it from the common people, no? More recently, it’s been adopted by Pravda, the Russian newspaper, and transformed into the slogan: “Speak the truth and shame the devil.” I ran across that little fact as I was online looking for information about Russia.

So remember how I told you that I had signed up to work the polls on election day? Well, yeah, I did. Overcome--or perhaps more accurately, striken--by some semblance of patriotism, I went ahead and signed up to be an election official. It’s a sweet gig: Three hours of training and a fourteen hour day on November 4 that will net me a grand 160 clams. (Which I’m donating to charity because I happen to think that doing things like being an election official or, say, a blood donor, are things that people should do because they’re the right things to do and not because they’re getting paid to do it.)

Yesterday, I went to the three hour training session. And let me tell you: The republicans are really not going to have to steal this election because the people who are earnestly running it? Are pretty incompetent. (Yes, that includes me.) The training is minimal. Minimal. Your zen democracy at work.

I was was going to write out some of the training details, some of the few things I learned, some of the most inane questions posed by those in attendance, but--Ah!--I’m so tired of being cynical about the whole election process. I mean, I wouldn’t feel right if I weren’t doing something that is relatively bipartisan, but I definitely have some kind of election fatigue going on. I'm all electioned out, so much so that I’m not even posting my usual Palin rants, here or elsewhere on the internet. I’m not even compulsively checking the news.

I’ll tell you what I have been doing, though:

I’ve been thinking about moving to Russia to teach English. Recently, Judi and I got together for coffee and I told her again that if this election goes the wrong way, I’m definitely moving to Russia, a place where people are free and democracy works. (Because Canada just won’t seem far away enough if President Palin becomes a more imminent possibility, you know?)

So I’ve been online, looking here and there at websites about Russian culture and politics, and I came across a slew of youtube videos of the former president/current prime minister Vladimir Putin. I’ve since spent many, many hours reading interviews and articles and watching him speak, and I have to tell you, Sarah Palin may make George W. Bush look like a mental midget, but Putin makes both of them look like ign’rant mouth-breathing hillbillies. That guy is pretty goddamned slick.

I went online to look for some slick quotes from Putin and ended up, like I said, listening to several hours worth of interviews with him. Probably several hours of Putin interviews all at once is not a very good idea. I did see a chunk of a nearly five-hour long interview he gave to a room full of both Russian and foreign journalists as his second term as president was coming to an end. The interview was remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Putin spent nearly five hours answering journalists’ questions. Can you imagine George W. Bush holding his own in a five-hour long interview with journalists--even Fox News "journalists"--asking questions about the economy or foreign policy or whatever came to mind?

That’s just crazy talk right there.

Of course I realize that one of the main differences between Bush and Putin is that Putin is smart enough to keep all his lies straight, whereas Bush can’t hardly keep the names of his daughters straight in his head, much less all the lies he’s had to stand up and speak. But there it is.

If this election goes the wrong way, I’m moving to Russia. At least their election-stealing despotic leaders are smarter than tree stumps.