The Dropout in your In-Box

THE CLOUDROCK ANGER REDIRECT

Before I changed American politics forever, I was a dropout. I lived in a town of five thousand in the middle of the desert. I worked summers as a backcountry guide, and in the winters I traveled and wrote. I held a masters degree and had finished a book, but sales were small, and getting published hadn’t brought fame or acclaim. But no matter: Living was cheap. I paid three hundred dollars to rent a trailer on an acre of tumbleweeds, and I had learned that by eating only beans, tortillas, tea, and honey, I could subsist on five dollars per week. Between the light workload, good weather, and swimming in the river, I was almost content.

And besides, I was taking a moral stand. Casting aside riches and ambition to dwell in the desert, I was protesting the excesses of the Clinton years. People had too much stuff. They were spoiled and pampered, the sort of weak-willed citizens who might one day let our sacred democracy drift into dictatorship. I was looking forward to a stock-market crash that would sweep the moneylenders from the temple.

Then came the 2000 election. It had been easy to ignore politics in the ’90s, especially since I didn’t have television or read a newspaper. (I considered my ignorance preferable to the propaganda peddled by networks and publishers who were, after all, puppets for bad corporations.) As far as I was concerned, both parties were corrupted by some nebulous source of evil that I called Big Money, and because Utah’s five electoral votes were guaranteed to go Republican, I cast my protest vote for Ralph Nader. It never occurred to me that George W. Bush might actually become president.

On Election Night I watched the returns with my best friend in Moab, Mathew Gross, also a published author, also a dropout. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and a masters degree in environmental studies, but worked as a waiter. Since neither of us had internet service, we gathered at a friend’s house and clicked refresh on a news site. When Drudge announced that Gore had won Florida, we got in the truck and drove downtown to celebrate at the bar.

Somewhere in that five-minute drive across the autumn streets of Moab, Bush took the election. Matt and I drank glumly at the bar until it closed. We had been robbed by Big Money. We wanted a fight.

But whom could we fight? The next election was four years away. And besides, we were slackers in a windblown tourist trap. We had no political power, no connection to power, and we knew of no mechanism in the national process by...