Daniel Menaker is executive editor in chief of the Random House Publishing Group and the author of two short-story collections and a novel.

My uncle Frederick Engels Menaker (whom I mentioned yesterday by way of trying to establish, however feebly, my progressive background, watered down though the gene pool may be by now, having released me into the un-urgent delta of liberalism, which has gently washed me up here in Columbus, Ohio, where I am trying to work for John Kerry's election) once wrote a check to a hospital and then thumb-tacked it on his bulletin board in the country, in the house in New Marlborough, Mass. This was when he was about 90. The check was made out to Fairview Hospital, in Great Barrington, and it was for the difference between his Medicare coverage and the hospital's charges for a medical procedure. He pointed it out to visitors as a kind of amusing Exhibit A of the mental depredations of age, because he signed it not "Frederick Menaker" but "Frederick Hospital." I thought it was funny at the time: about 20 years ago. But now that I am old enough not to have to go to the polls in Ohio—at 62 you can use an absentee ballot out here, as elsewhere, no doubt, by virtue (or curse) of your age alone, and I am not 62—and narcissistically prone to mentioning my age too often and trying hard to laugh at such behaviors as trying to find my glasses as I look through them, I don't find it so funny anymore.

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

This is all by way of apologizing for not being able to post good digital photographs of my Ohio volunteerism along with this "Diary" entry—an inability due at least partly to the age-eroded ability to assimilate new technology. Slate gave me a nifty Olympus Camedia Digital D-540 Zoom 3.2 Megapixel Camera, as I think this publication does for all its correspondents, and damned if I didn't take some great pictures today of a rally in downtown Columbus staged by the AFSCME—a union that belongs to the AFL-CIO, which has put the still-considerable muscle of its organization behind the candidacy of Sen. John Kerry. And damned if I have been able to figure out how to get them from my computer desktop, where they sit laughing silently at me, into this fucking e-mail. OK, OK—half the pictures are of the gray asphalt of the street I was walking on ahead of the marchers. And one of them is of my New Balance sneakers. But there are also some good pix of the rally—I can see them when I click on them on my desktop, where they come up soundlessly guffawing at me and defying my efforts to cut, paste, copy, send, or post them. Well, screw them.

They are of a march, "huge" by local TV news standards (about 2,000, I'd say), of people protesting the schemes of J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican secretary of state of Ohio, to do what very much seems like suppressing the vote here in Franklin County. He evidently wanted to disqualify voter registration forms that were not on the correct paper stock. The Katharine Harris of the Midwest. The marchers were beefy men and unglamorous women, most of them union members, wearing Kerry and AFL-CIO buttons, filled with zeal, increasing by the minute, as unguarded munitions disappear in Iraq, and the scent of a possible Kerry victory grows stronger here and in many other places in the country. They were chanting, "Count All the Votes" as they marched north on State Street and then east on Broad Street, past the Statehouse, and to the front of the Borden Building, where Blackwell has his offices. There they were addressed by, among others, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, the first African-American woman elected to the House from Ohio. She said, "I'm sure Mr. Blackwell will step up to the plate and do his job, because if he doesn't, he is not going to have it for very long. Ohio will not be the next Florida. Uh-uh!"

Spirits were high. The weather was beautiful, prompting one union guy with a chopper or two missing to say to me, "Bush thinks God's on his side, but look at the weather God gave us today! And anyway, a reliable source told me that Bush is actually the son of Satan." Who was that reliable source? His "father." But as noted yesterday, the election is everywhere here. In one of the many malls that serve as escalatored Muzak neighborhoods downtown, a woman at the information kiosk who was giving me CVS directions asked where I was from. Then she asked me why I was in Columbus and when I told her, she said, "Good! I was going to vote for Bush but then my sister convinced me that he really does want to kill Social Security, so I'm going to vote for Kerry!"

As for volunteering, well, there have been some wrinkles, which with any luck will be ironed out tomorrow. I switched horses from the 527 organization America Coming Together to the Kerry campaign itself before I even got to the stream, because when I called ACT they sounded pretty laid back, but when I called Kerry headquarters they sounded rabid. The main HQ—frantic with activity, including indoctrination sessions for canvassers, phone bankers, debates about registration criteria—is on Groveport Street, south of downtown in the United Steelworkers of America building, across from the Columbus Steel Castings works. Over that squat and monstrously powerful-looking facility's entrance—you really feel as though you are looking at the blast-furnace heart of America—is a legend that reads something like "Though these door walk the finest foundry men in the world." I'm not sure of the exact wording because I inadvertently erased the digital picture I took of it.

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

SPONSORED CONTENT