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My absentee ballot came today. Scary stuff. In 2002 it got lost in the mail and when I called the office of elections they told me it was too late to get a replacement. So this is my first election.

I don’t get HBO, or any cable channels for that matter, but I always try to download a cap of Bill Maher’s show every week. This week George Carlin was on and he said:

all of this back and forth debate implies that there are really choices in this country. freedom of choice—it’s an illusion of choice. americans are meant to feel free by the exercise of meaningless choices. you know what the choices are? paper or plastic. aisle or window. smoking or non.

and I think that’s brilliant.

I already bubbled in all the bubbles on my ballot, and being a Florida voter I have to vote for Kerry—but it still seems like I could have picked any of the candidates in any race and it wouldn’t really matter. It’s just feeling good about myself for being able to fill in some bubbles and stick them in an envelope—I guess soon the Iraqis will have bubbles, and they can feel good about themselves too.

I also watched a PBS documentary on RFK’s political life this week. KCET is running it because they’re about to turn the Ambassador Hotel into a school or somesuch, and a few people (the Kennedy family excluded) are angry that they’re going to tear down the ballroom and pantry. After watching that, it seems to me like one of the most important things to happen in American politics in the last 40 years was RFK’s assassination. He was set to become the democratic nominee and I think he would have destroyed Nixon at the polls; he had an idealism about fixing Vietnam and repairing US foreign policy that probably would have drastically changed the way we justify war. And with a Democrat in charge during the Vietnam end-game, I think the Republican party would have turned out to be a much different thing than it is today. #