We Used To Be Friends (A Long Time Ago)

Tarn alerted me to the possibility that there might, out there in the universe, be a dashboard widget that would allow me to post to The Odds Are One from OSX Dashboard. And indeed, such a widget exists. Here I am, using it. And lo, the world is made new. Surely this is the technological advance that will foment my creative breakthrough, allowing me the freedom to blog every day, to dash off some brilliant paragraph or two just before I head off to bed. Surely the only thing that was standing in the way betwixt me and Great Art was better UI.

What with the Forces of Evil having been (temporarily) defeated yesternight, The Gadflies have, this night, gone out for a celebratory evening involving sushi and lots of alcohol with our compatriot Mita. Somewhere last evening, after the votes were cast but while the Webb/Allen election was still in doubt (it's been called for Webb as of this writing. For the leftist radicals that live in the Gadfly household, Webb is absolutely nothing to write home about, but being that he's Number 51, for tonight he's one of us. In summation: hurrah!), I conceived of an OaO post about cause, wherein I would talk about how pundits would, in the future, attribute some manner of cause to Webb's or Allen's defeat. In the event of the latter, of course, they'd talk about his "Macaca Moment," and how this brought into stark relief the fact that George Allen is a fucking lunatic. If he had won (which he didn't. I'm quoting myself here: "Hurrah!"), somehow, that factor would no longer achieve the golden label of "Cause." This in spite of the fact that it would have influenced the exact same number of votes (in review, all votes have already been cast in this post-hoc estimation of voter intent)--in that case they'd be talking about how Webb's overt sexism and failure to articulate a position other than one of anti-party-in-power weren't enough for him to take the crown. The thing is, we exist in a state of superposition of Webb/Allen election. It happens that Webb has 7200 more votes out of 4 million or so, and so he takes office, but as with the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, somebody has to take office despite the fact that nobody won. So suddenly, and for the rest of time, "Macaca" becomes a political cliche for that moment of political implosion, in spite of the fact that Allen ended the race in a virtual tie with the bass-ackwards anti-feminist ex-Republican running against him. Narrative is funny that way.

There are so many problems here that I can't even being to describe them. One, the Blogger Dashboard widget doesn't have a scrollbar, so instead of taking the hint that I had to write shorter posts, I posted this and am editing it in a browser. Second, I just blogged about the thing I meta-didn't-blog-about. But the real problem here, in true Chambersian form (I'd have a better href for you there, but I'm too drunk right now), is that I have already blogged this post 10,000 times in 10,000 different ways, and you read it and understood it the first time, and indeed recognized the phenomenon of Odds-Are-Oneness in whatever discipline you came from already, and were already going to subconsciously apply the principle every time you read about politics and "Macaca Moments" for the rest of your life. Yet I just wrote this post anyway. So what the hell am I doing?