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gallerist. Organize a show entitled “Off-Hand: Right-Handed Artists Painting with Their Left Hands and Vice Versa.” Or call up a lot of nonrepresentational artists and get them to paint pictures of the House of Representatives. But as soon as I say something like that, I know I probably won't get around to doing it. Not up here where I live, anyway. It would just give people another chance to think, “Ah, yes. El Necko.”

The Right Shade of Blue?
    A s a pre-baby boom liberal Southern Democrat residing in semirural Massachusetts, what am I? A quidnunc, a curio, representative of no time or place and possibly concocted by a hoaxing taxidermist? Or can I have been preserved, cryogenically, for some purpose? Will I thaw out, any moment now, and step forward as the one who finally figured out how to halt the spread of immoderate Republicanism before it devoured all other forms of life?
    No, I can't take all that much credit. The antireality-based folks were hoisted by their own petards. I will say, however, that the 2006 elections were a ringing endorsement of a column I wrote in 2005, when most of the country still thought Dick Cheney knew what he was doing.
    The blue-staters I know seem to feel that they can swing the political pendulum back by means of logical analysis. Big “family-values” states turn out to be big watchers of
Desperate Housewives?
Aha! A “disconnect”! Now watch the whole red house of cards collapse!
    I don't see it that way. For one thing, Republican strategists make duct tape out of disconnects. For another thing, the one time I watched
Desperate Housewives,
I thought maybe Karl Rove was behind it. Why
wouldn't
red-staters want to watch residents of California act trashy and be miserable?
    Another tack I run into a lot up here is people priding themselves on their utter inability to
fathom
how
anyone
can
possibly
support those barbarians. This from people who stress the importance of being open to other cultures. Me, I'm from Georgia. I'm not too fine to wrap my mind around the Bushy Juggernaut. But can I wrestle it down?
    Maybe the best way would be to egg it on. Anything can be run into the ground, even extremism. Republican legal minds have covered up the semitopless Spirit of Justice lady at the Department of Justice and have fought to preserve courthouse monuments to the Ten Commandments. I bet there are representations of underdressed women—or, anyway, blindfolded ones—all through the justice system, nationwide. Maybe I could start a campaign to replace those floozies with tasteful graven religious images in every court in the land. Far be it from anybody, in this climate, to speak out against that on the merits. But it's going to be expensive. Might even require some rendering unto Caesar.
    But no. Republicans would say, hey, this statue swap doesn't have to cost tax money, why not let churches take over the legal system—or, hey, why not privatize it? Worshippers and corporations might find it advantageous to underwrite the courts.
    Anyway, how could I, a non-Republican, float such a proposal? Well, if Republican officials can create fraudulent journalists—actors introducing quasi-TV-news segments and oddballs asking kissing-up questions at White House press conferences—why can't journalists create fraudulent Republican officials? Actors playing undersecretaries of whatever could pop up here and there around the country floating proposals that push the envelope just a wee bit too far.
    Of course, Republicans paved the way for creating fraudulent journal-ists by playing up the notion that “fraudulent journalist” is redundant.Creating fraudulent Republicans would be trickier. Since modern-day Republican governments are opposed to government, trying to create a fake official of such a government might leave a straightforward person such as myself more confused than surreptitious.
    Maybe I could connive more honestly as a member of what we might call the postmature community.