October 29, 2004, 8:25 a.m.
Dessert Storm

“How's dis, Bubby?" Molly says in a cold-fogged voice. She holds up a length of white cardboard that reads, "Vote Early...And Often!"

"Very nice," I murmur, putting the finishing touches on my sign, a kind of explosive starburst at the center of which I've written in red and blue, "Outsource Dessert Tonight!"

"This one is good," my husband remarks, pausing by the dining-room table where Molly and I have strewn markers, scissors, and construction paper. "Chewy Defeats Truman." What else have you got?"

"That's for brownies." Rummaging around I pull out the list of prospective slogans that either originate in our household or with the world's cleverest readers who are, naturally, NROniks and Cornernites.

"The Right Bake Sale in the Right Place at the Right Time!" I read aloud in a voice like a circus barker's.

"Liberally Packed with Goodies, Conservatively Priced!"
"These Cakes Pass the Global Test"
"A Vast Icing Conspiracy!"

My husband laughs and Molly grins from the depths of her congestion. I keep reading.

"Don't Be a Girlie-Man: Buy a Dozen!"
"Kerry Home a Mud Pie!"
"Weapons of Mass Digestion!"
"Dubya Pleasure: Buy Two!"

"Kerry Home?" my husband asks, wrinkling his nose.

"Ugh, I know, lame. The thing is, I have to balance out the Dubya line. We need to be bipartisan." That, after all, is the chief characteristic of what Molly and I are running: A Bipartisan Bake Sale to help celebrate the opening of a local park on the eve of possibly the closest election, ever, on which subject every one of our neighbors is passionately, and variously, opinionated.

The nice thing for me, what with buying all the red-white-and-blue bunting, and laying in vast supplies of butter, sugar, dried cherries, chocolate chunks, pumpkin puree, allspice, and walnuts sufficient to pave the National Mall, to make many dozens of Laura Bush's Oatmeal Chocolate-Chunk Cookies and Teresa Heinz Kerry's Pumpkin Spice Cookies, and drawing these posters, is that it redirects my anxieties away the desperate contest that has caused all of Washington — and, I expect, much of the country — to walk around these last few days with one hand cupped protectively over its collective chest, as though we are all in the midst of a long-running, badly-intensifying heart attack, which, unfortunately, we are.

I've been surprised by how much adrenaline shoots through me when I see a "Redefeat Bush" or "Bush/Satan" bumper sticker. It's like getting jabbed in the chest by some angry stranger's forefinger; it's being on the receiving end of the sort of public excitability that used to be the lonely realm of frothing end-timers. Now grandmothers walk around wearing insulting buttons and bird-flipping tee shirts. The other morning I was forced into proximity with an aged dame who was wearing a shirt with a picture of an elephant crossed out and the slogan, "Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican." Whatever happened to United We Stand?

With the aged dame still in mind, I wax retributive, " I wish I could use, "These Cookies Have Never Been to Cambodia, Either."

"No," my husband agrees, "Though witty."

"How about "White Cake and Chocolate Cake... but No Yellowcake?" I continue fondly, " Or "Tax-Free Municipal Buns?" Or, "Cookies with a 3% Margarine of Error — "

"Enough," my husband demurs, warding off the attack of baked goods. He disappears upstairs, from whence ever-louder thumping suggests the imminent threat of the arrival of the other children. Preemptively, I hide the scissors and tape in the next room. Meanwhile, the radio is on, and it's the top of the hour.

Violet reaches the bottom of the stairs first. "The man said "John Kerry," she observes, by way of greeting.

Molly gives a worldly sigh. "Unfortunately."

"We want George" — Violet struggles with the middle initial — "Buddya Bush."

"Yes," I confirm, with an ardent glance upward. "We do."

Phoebe stomps noisily into the room and makes a loud announcement: "This is my tail." She turns aside to give us a clear view of the pink terrycloth bathrobe belt she has tucked into the seat of her navy tights. She is otherwise unclothed, and the moment she stops speaking she slips two familiar fingers into her mouth.

"If Kerry wids," Molly puts in stertoriously, "We should go live in Lundud for four years."

"No, no, no," I say in one voice, then, in another, "That's a nice tail. Are you a lion?" and then back again. "The President is the President even if we don't like him. We don't threaten to leave the country if our candidate doesn't win," I say, thinking, Team-America-style, "unrike Arec Bawdrin."

"Not a lion," Phoebe says, annoyed, "It's my fairy tail."

Violet, meanwhile, has climbed on to a chair and is pulling off the top of an orange marker. As she begins drawing a pumpkin, she remarks, "John Kerry wants to make medicine out of babies."

For a moment I am mute and nonplussed, openly goggling at the steel-trappitude of the juvenile mind. A week ago Molly asked me about embryonic-stem-cell research. Violet, evidently, overheard us, and from a meandering half-hour conversation was able, remarkably, given that she is only four-and-a-half, to extract what newspapermen call the "nut graph."

"Lots of people do," I say carefully, resolving to check around corners before embarking on mature subjects next time.

"Bleah," puts in the equable Paris, as he dribbles a soccer ball through the dining room, under the piano, and into the sitting room. "Hey," I chide automatically, "That is not an indoor toy."

On the radio, meanwhile, Senator Kerry is droning on about "putting Iraq on the right track," and pretty soon, lettering away on my signs, I lose myself in a long interior riff about how feeble and ill-fitting a metaphor a "track" is for national destiny; how curious it is that pollsters ask Americans if the country is on the "right track" or the "wrong track," as if someone has laid two discrete routes that disappear over the horizon and terminate either in Boom or Bust, when, of course, there is no "track." There is the open future, unfurling before all of us simultaneously, virgin and trackless, and we Americans have more ability than anyone to lay the bold tread of our heavy national machinery in it, but what we can't do is expect to be able to follow some defeatist, pre-ordained —

I am musing cheerfully in this outraged fashion, when Paris rushes back into the dining room.

"Uh, oh, look what a Naughty Girl di-id!" he cries, waving a large hand-lettered now-besmeared red-white-and-blue poster that reads, "A Nation Bitterly Divided Still Loves Sweet Treats!"

"Phoebe!" I squawk, correctly, capping my marker and seizing the sacred signage. "Oh, argh. Sweetheart, why did you scribble on Mummy's poster?"

"I didn't scribble," she says with dignity, swishing her tail with one hand. "It's a princess picture. For you."

***
Thanks to all the Corner readers who sent me so many excellent suggestions. These generous individuals include, but are not limited to: Steve Biddle, Andrew Coyne, Michael Ubaldi, E. King, Eden Simmons, Claudia Husemann, Dennis Rardin, Roger Buck, Hoy Grimm, Scott Lucado, Glenn Smith, Stephen Feher, David Cleland, Carolyn Purvis, Frank Bennett, David Hentosh, Steve Schippert, Troy Hinrichs, Jessica DeBruin, Stephen Becker, Tomasina Granata, and "No Names, Please," in the midwest, who knows who he is. Thanks so much!

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