I am seeking Truth from a presidential election. I know, I might as well seek blood from a turnip, Guinness from a sushi bar, or an official release of Chinese Democracy from Guns n’ Roses (not rushin’ ya, Axl). While I have always sought an inner truth, I’m currently struggling to find an external truth that works in our 21st century society, and hopefully one that works when it comes to choosing a chief executive for our country.

I’ve spoken at length with close friends and loved ones who indignantly repeat some “fact” about one of the candidates that should not only disqualify that candidate from running for office, but also from mingling with decent folk. In every situation, I’ve tried to be the voice of reason: “Very interesting. I don’t remember seeing anything about that candidate’s intolerable flatulence in the Washington Post or the New York Times. How do you know that’s true?” There’s always a pause, and then quietly, “it was in this email I received.” In more than one case I like to think I’ve inspired my fellow citizen to dig a little deeper, to be a seeker of truth in all things, even if it means learning something unsavory about one’s favored candidate.

Yet here we are in the last forty-odd days of the election, and the candidates are only interested in truth if it favors them. Fortunately for them, the public is willing to believe anything, fact or fiction, as long as it’s passionately said by someone they admire. Who will our next president be — the one who told the fewest lies, or the one who lied the best? Perhaps most maddening is that speaking half-truths or total fabrications doesn’t do harm to the candidates and in some cases even seems to help their causes. Still, there’s hope for truth seekers. Some quality time spent at PolitiFact.com can help the curious to know which campaign attacks are based in truth. A glance there (as of this writing) shows that most of the “Pants on Fire” (i.e. completely untrue) attacks have been aimed at Senator Obama, though there’s arguably enough blame for everyone to share. Yes, you’re very astute: how can I believe what’s written at PolitiFact.com, or any publication, printed or digital? The answer is “I can’t.” You shouldn’t believe it either. It is your job to read responsibly: read as much as you can about a given topic from a significant variety of sources. Even in this age of blogging and digital media, the most highly educated people I know still read several printed newspapers every single day in an attempt to obtain the most balanced view of the news.

With the responsibility for ferreting out the truth unfortunately now firmly in the reader’s lap, my quest to inspire others to be truth seekers often ends in a reluctant admission that it’s too much trouble to do such research. I’ll agree it’s a burden. But what’s the alternative? Believe everything? Believe nothing? Maybe in politics Truth is not one side of a coin but a point on a scale, and we’re forced to literally choose the lesser of evils. So it seems. With that in mind, my vote will go to the candidate whose pants have caught fire the fewest times, and I’ll look elsewhere in my quest to find Truth.

I’m gonna find a phonebooth and switch back from political pundit to comic-critic mode for a moment here… or at least halfway. The press release below is the first example I’ve seen of emissaries from our world making a good effort to get people involved in the electorate, so I thought I’d pass it on, and encourage everyone to do likewise. We geeks, as Harlan Ellison once pointed out much less politely, put a lot of imagination into dreaming more perfect worlds, but don’t always join the effort to get there, so this is one good mixing of the two.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CAPTAIN ACTION AND MOONSTONE PROMOTE VOTER REGISTRATION

“TAKE ACTION — GET ACTION” FREE Comic with Voter Registration

New York, NY, September 13, 2008 — Captain Action Enterprises, LLC and Moonstone Publishing are encouraging fans to register to vote with their “Take Action — Get Action” Free Comic Giveaway.

The Captain Action Team is pushing for all Americans to register to vote, and will give new voters, with proof of registration, a free digital copy of Captain Action #0.

“Captain Action is all about taking action and we’d like to do our part to encourage folks to vote. In fact, as our new Moonstone comic is all about a new generation taking over — it’s very appropriate,” said Captain Action Enterprises’ Ed Catto.

Voters are recommended to visit sites such as RocktheVote.org and register as soon as possible (deadlines vary by state). Then all they need to do is forward a copy of their confirmation to TakeActionGetAction@live.com. Moonstone will then send them a free digital download of the sold-out Captain Action #0.

“Captain Action is a great story and we want to make sure as many people as possible can read it. This is especially urgent with our ongoing series, which begins with issue #1 — on sale in just a few weeks”, said Moonstone Publisher Joe Gentile.

“We feel passionately that when you have “Action” in your comic title — you’ve got to shake things up a bit and really promote action!” said Captain Action’s Joe Ahearn.

The first issue of Captain Action features a lead story by Fabian Nicieza and art by Mark Sparacio, and back up stories featuring Mandrake the Magician and Fantomas. Covers are by Mark Sparacio, sculptor Ruben Procopio and a modern/homage cover by Marat Mychaels. This “event comic” also features a special forward by Jim Shooter, the original 1960’s writer. Other surprises, such as vintage ads, are also included.

For more details on this program, and the latest on Captain Action, visit www.CaptainActionNow.com and www.MoonstoneBooks.com

* * *

Captain Action Enterprises, LLC is dedicated to creating new Captain Action experiences for both the collectible/nostalgia market and passionate fans of adventure toys and fiction through licensing, recreations and creative innovations.

Opinionland is buzzing with the poll answers and commentary of voters switching from Hillary to McCain, or even from Obama to McCain, on the strength of Sarah Palin’s presence on the ticket. I’ve seen comments from liberals who perceived a certain freshness and possibility in Obama’s candidacy, but who are now leaning toward Palin because they sense an even greater alternative to the status quo. Since these voters are white, and often female, the switch to Palin seems a bit less fresh since it is, by definition, a move to the more familiar. It’s a commonplace of politics that voters will pick whichever candidate they identify with most — even if this identification is often a projection of certain hopes by the voters and certain mannerisms by the candidates, who are typically from an economic strata and professional dynasty far removed from the voters’ frame of reference.

Much has been said about the white women who identify with Palin (and I’ve met no shortage of white men who do too). But what about the white people who identify with Obama? There is a heavy subtext in much public discussion that for a white person to support Obama some impulse of charity, of liberal guilt and wishful social fantasy, is involved; this reflects the divisions in our society and assumes the improbability of whites looking up to blacks. But I grew up in a family with Jewish forebears who all remembered huddling around the radio when Joe Louis fought the Nazi champion Max Schmeling in the 1930s, cheering Louis on just like many black families remember doing; my mom fondly recalled her upbringing in integrated Chicago projects in the days when, as comicbook auteur Art Spiegelman would say, blacks and Jews were still on speaking terms; every advance for black Americans was viewed in our house as a victory for people like us. On the personal (as opposed to polemical) level, the black/Jewish affinity has never really gone away, and I got that old feeling that my standard was being carried when I watched Obama’s historic acceptance speech. It’s a feeling I’m sure I shared with many working-class or downwardly-mobile Americans of all ancestries who sense that this mixed-race son of a single mom knows something about what hurdles they’ve had to face.

The feeling was tempered by the compromises that anyone who gets that far in this system will display (and which make Obama much less a liberal than conservative alarmists insist). And of course I can’t claim the obstacles my mom faced as a Jew in the 1930s, or that Obama faces as an African-American to this day. Indeed, one important measure of a president is the extent to which you don’t, needn’t, and shouldn’t identify with him or her. As Jon Stewart has said, notwithstanding the guy-you’d-like-to-have-a-beer-with factor, I *want* a president to be smarter, much smarter than me, and Obama seems to be that guy. He’s lived around a world I’ve barely been to; he’s a long-time public servant and a leading legal mind; he’s three years older than me and yet he’s almost president while I’m, well, never mind.

I sometimes wonder if all the people who have become excited about Palin really do “identify” with her. She’s powerful, has a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude, and shows an endearing troublemaker’s zeal to dismantle the government she’s running to be part of. She makes her own rules in ways we average schmucks can’t. And yet from time to time we’d all like to stick it to the system and its rules too. She is, in short, not a mirror of what we’re like, but a movie of what we might do in her place.

But Obama may deliver us a reality we can actually get ahead in. The white voters switching sides from Obama to Palin-McCain are moving backward from broad empathy to private identification. But why not a leader who promises the collective advancement of us as a nation rather than the retaking of power for some specific segment? Ask not what you could do to your country, ask what your country should be doing.

The divisions of class — that fault line we’re not supposed to talk about, since Americans of any race or gender can be born into automatic advantage or disadvantage because of it, short-circuiting our ideals of equal opportunity and common purpose — must be deeper than ever to have made a seismic shift in the 2008 campaign seem natural to so many people. It’s been remarked that suddenly the whiny language of the left, a major rallying point for right-wing talk-radio crusaders for years, is okay for Republicans to use when it comes to defending Sarah Palin with charges of elitism against her opponents. In some parts and populations of America, the resentment at what is perceived as condescension from more affluent and ideologically aloof metropolitan liberals is so strong that it feels to many Americans like the real injustice that has been going unacknowledged. That’s a more plausible explanation than sheer hypocrisy — campaign spokespeople can be calculating, but the popular support for Palin is heartfelt. Still, it’s an inconsistency that exposes how divided a country we are; the extent to which we don’t feel that the problems of some Americans are the problems — or at least the concern — of others.

But what about the condescension of conservative pundits and power-brokers — most of whom are in the same white-collar, intellectual world as their left and center counterparts — typically delighting in the elevation of the candidates who put issues in the most simplistic terms and display the most combative and disdainful temperament? Is there no one out there more sober and capable than George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, and is this the pundits’ idea of what everyone making under forty-thousand is like? Time after time thoughtful and competent conservatives are overlooked for spotlight-hounds who represent a caricature of the working class (and a counterfeit, too, since President Bush is of course a millionaire, and millionaires are clearly where laissez-faire politicians like Palin’s sympathies lie). Arguably, the thoughtful and competent John McCain has been eclipsed by his own running mate through this very formula.

It’s everyone’s American dream to go as high in life as your talents and effort will take you, but to be honest we all dream of the top more than the climb. Still, we can all see the damage when politicians trust more in a top-down outlook on our problems than one which connects to the grass roots. Palin’s promotion over all our heads will not change this.

Sure, American history is full of humble, common people who were able to accomplish a lot for the country by reaching high office — including the small-town Harry Truman and the aristocratic though plain-spoken and populist Teddy Roosevelt, each placed in the presidency through their boss’s death. But it’s all about attitude and ability. The needs of the growing lower class in this country need to be addressed, and addressed now, but it has to be by candidates who represent our interests, not just get in office because of what they represent as symbols.

If the election is a contest of qualifications and not symbols (good luck), then it’s okay to note the contestants’ relative fitness. Palin’s brief resume has been picked apart by every fact that reporters have turned up (keeping most of the money for the “bridge to nowhere,” etc.); her interviews and appearances are tightly managed by the campaign and she seems vastly uninformed when she does appear; her personal history is full of contradictions of her public policies, though she expects you to live by them. America can use a scrappy, clear-eyed populist. It needs more politicians from parts of America that haven’t been let in the game before. It’s wrong to rule out any candidate who fits this description. It’s fair to reject an individual who’s unprepared, hypocritical, and lies.

Barack Obama himself put in time as a grassroots, not top-down, advocate for ordinary people. Palin’s dismissal of this is not a good sign for the powerless majority of us. Obama wants to model national programs on those that have had miraculous success in keeping kids in school and out of jail at a neighborhood level. Palin/McCain will clearly govern by edict, and the average person will see no improvement, to say the least. Obama represents — and speaks for — the kind of novel solutions and common sense that rise up in America largely unnoticed. Palin represents the kind of stale ideas and empty ambition that slips up the ladder while no one is looking.

I’m the only one I know who hasn’t said from the start of this campaign season that Barack Obama could be shot. He represents one culmination of a dream whose earlier advocates, like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, were picked off one by one, and is a successor to a still-recent possible presidential contender, Colin Powell, who explicitly listed fear of assassination among his reasons for not running. Still, I sensed that a certain corner had been turned in this country, and that this extreme was now beyond us. I questioned my own apparent optimism, but I realize now that’s not what it was. It’s not inevitable that the first person of color close to winning our highest office will get killed, but it is inevitable that the most vicious and unfair half-truths and non-arguments will be thrown at him. It was never gonna be easy for Obama, and Americans don’t like to think about things being less easy for one of us than for anyone else (especially if we’re among those it’s easier for). There’s actually a strange comfort (to everyone but the target) in picturing assassination rather than rhetorical racism or irrational barriers, since hardly anyone kills public figures, while all of us can have bigoted thoughts and most of us are on one side or another of some unequal opportunity.

As Obama sees his former lead in the polls cut into by the addition of Sarah Palin to the McCain ticket, pundits talk about the supposedly previously invisible class her appeal taps into: discontent rural whites who feel the economy has abandoned them and the culture disdains them. That it took the first major-party presidential campaign by a black man to get the media and much of the citizenry focused on the plight of disaffected white people is either post-racial or the most racist episode we’ve seen in many years.

Actually, it’s neither. For years this country has been realigned by have and have-not as much as by race. The gap between the richest few and the poorest many has widened, and it’s axiomatic that our middle class is disappearing. It’s also taken for granted that officeholders survive not on how many people will vote for them but on who will fund their campaigns, which cuts out anyone, from urban ghettos to rural ghost towns, who can’t pay and play. Being ignored breeds resentment and being deprived isn’t conducive to reaching out to other communities when you have trouble keeping your own family afloat.

So we’re not divided by black and white — at this point we’re fragmented into many enclaves. That’s no better for national progress, and it’s unfinished business of our democracy that’s been long neglected and, of course, unpopular among powers-that-be to bring up. The bravery of the Obama campaign has always been that, by its very existence, it serves as a reminder to America of this fact. Unfortunately, we’re so fragmented that we tend to frame our condition in terms of opposition rather than mutual challenge. Thus the Obama campaign was framed by some in the media and the electorate as black/male vs. white/female during the contest with Hillary, and is now being framed as black/urban/educated vs. white/rural/disadvantaged in the fight with McCain-Palin’s faux-populism.

And to say “faux-populism” is fightin’ words, but here’s what I mean: Obama is the black son of a single mom from Kansas. He started out with some of the worst strikes against him you can have in this country. The policies that McCain-Palin want to continue are the ones that have dispossessed great swaths of rural (and also formerly industrial) America. Many people in those parts of the country have been accused by liberals (and libertarians) of “voting against their own interest” for Bush. Advocates counter that these voters feel more culturally comfortable with the values (rather than, necessarily, the policies) of the Republicans. It’s true that the Democrats have become typically tin-eared about the problems facing non-metropolitan Americans. But I do mean problems — if voters in the forgotten former centers of American prosperity were not seeing farms and jobs disappear to misguided “free” trade policies and other misordered priorities in Washington, their dissatisfaction wouldn’t center on what they have left, which is their cultural distinctions from coastal America — and many Democrats’ clumsy rush to insincerely co-opt pro-military and faith-based rhetoric doesn’t work because it shows their own enthusiasm to avoid the real underlying food-on-the-table issues that they as much as anyone have brought into crisis (NAFTA fizzled under Bush 1 and sailed to victory under Bill Clinton).

No one likes to think that the American Dream is just that, but a skilled statesman or woman can show that it’s a dream worth having whether or not it has all come true yet. Barack Obama personifies the ability to rise through the ranks that that dream promises. Unfortunately we Americans tend not to cheer those who make it but to envy those who make it first. In a strange way, Obama, who started with little, is to be more resented by this formula than George W. Bush, who started wealthy and whom most of us don’t have to bother thinking we could ever be. These are realities both Obama and those whose votes he needs must be sensitive to. Left-behind Americans are gonna get a better deal with Obama-Biden than with McCain-Palin. But Obama needs to speak clearly to the root causes (rather than the surface style-differences) of what concerns them. And all voters need to think seriously about which candidate represents the same old competition, and which one will move us on to common cause.

Every now and then a politician who’s smart (if not wise) like Rudy Giuliani will hammer Obama on concrete mistakes like his flip-flops on public campaign funding and telecom immunity. Ironically, issues of substance aren’t what Giuliani’s party faithful want to hear, even if it damages their opponent. Washington lifers are so used to attack politics that they’d rather stick with the vague personal insults. Which is where all the disparagement of Obama’s eloquent speaking ability and emotional insight comes in.

Republican rhetoric has been full of dismissals of Obama as just someone (indeed, “anyone”) who “can make a stirring speech.” They’re conceding his skill and statesmanhood in this area, and it’s strange to see the party of merit-not-handouts using excellence as a main accusation against their opponent.

A more ominous theme among McCain supporters is their recurring praise of him for “going against public opinion” in continuing to support the widely unpopular Iraq War (specifically, yes, the partially successful surge, but implicitly, his indefinite commitment to the fiasco in general). Even stranger than the “Stop Obama, He’s Good at What He Does” theme is this one of “Vote McCain, He’ll Ignore Your Input.”

The 2000s have been a battleground over whether the wishes of the masses in a democracy really matter; millions of people, many of whom had never walked a picket line in their lives, took to the streets against the Iraq War in all its “coalition” countries for months before it started, and those countries’ leaders went to war anyway; all those leaders, in Spain, Australia and elsewhere — everywhere but here — were cashiered by their own population at the next electoral opportunity.

Anyone who wants to be president is sure gonna need public opinion on their side to get elected, so shouldn’t they be ready to listen to the public while they’re in office? Weighing options without making a decision is disastrous (President Jimmy Carter). Making a decision without weighing options is dictatorial (this President Bush). The disciplined Obama campaign seems deliberative yet decisive. The McCain campaign has as good as announced that he doesn’t represent the majority. On November 4 the majority should return the gesture.

It’s conventional wisdom that whoever becomes the next president will have to do it by winning over the undecided and some chunk of the opposite party’s voters. This is not surprising given the razor’s-edge elections we’ve had since 2000. Surely many old distinctions of right and left have been eroding at a rate perhaps more perceivable to the average American than to the attack dogs in Washington. I live in a state (and it’s not the only one) where registered independents like me outnumber Republicans and Democrats combined; in such a climate no candidate can write off my view or count on my vote, and this year’s two presidential candidates seem to be thinking this way too.

Sometimes in the recent past this has resulted in a clumsy rush by the parties to switch places with each other — the military pageantry of the Dems’ 2004 convention and the sudden defensiveness of the GOP this time over the common phenomenon of unwed teen motherhood they used to demonize. Sometimes it just results in the two sides being indistinguishable — we’ve had 16 straight years of presidents, both Clinton and Bush, for whom responsibility is always someone else’s and reality is negotiable; if that doesn’t describe the triumph of spoiled-brat baby-boom values across the political spectrum I don’t know what does (regardless of the archaic hippie-versus-hardhat role-play that every election from Nixon/Humphrey through Bush/Kerry was stuffed into by pundits and political operatives).

This time the candidates are uncommonly distinguishable yet the polls, so far, are getting as close as ever. Maybe it’s because each candidate hasn’t entirely abandoned their party playbook for the yardstick we everyday powerless people use, which is consideration of what works.

Liberals don’t like to admit what Bush did that worked — and, dispiritingly, neither do Bush loyalists. John McCain scoffs at Barack Obama’s willingness to sit down and talk to our enemies, but the greatest foreign-policy successes of the Bush years — and there are some big ones — came from diplomacy. Libya is off the board as a threat, and North Korea is getting there, while Iraq is a morass and Iran is a time-bomb (though not, from any objective and neutral accounts, a nuclear one). Of course, the Libya deal is largely thanks to Colin Powell, who was forced out of office for his less than total zeal for the Iraq invasion, and diplomacy in North Korea was only agreed to as a last resort, so the Bush camp doesn’t recognize its own strengths. McCain signals that he doesn’t either — strangely emphasizing his leadership in normalizing relations with Vietnam, the country that tortured him, as an apparent olive-branch to Democratic doves while ignoring the savvy, stabilizing success of that move by supporting almost every other ill-considered military action we’ve undertaken since.

In the same way, Americans sense that the future is in alternative energy technologies that can not just relieve a dangerous dependence but provide America an industry it can lead in again; still, Obama sprinkles his green rhetoric with concessions about doing some of the new offshore oil drilling that won’t make a dent for decades, and affirms the prospect of “safe” nuclear power in the context of chiding pundits for their pessimism; a sure example of the way that, in the Bush years, “idealism” has been redefined from expanding the possible to insisting on the unreal. (Okay, the absence of a major accident in the last 20 years suggests that nuclear plants can be *run* safely, but there’s no such thing as safe nuclear waste, and they just keep making more of it, which puts this power-source with fossil fuels in the column of habits we have to kick.) These diversions from what makes sense to what plays to a steadily-shrinking “base” can’t be helping either Obama or McCain achieve the majority one of them should have.

This doesn’t mean that voters aren’t free to read the fine print. Some values that both parties insist on cut both ways, and lead to somewhat different conclusions than each side intends when looked at objectively. Conservatives applaud, and liberals complain, that Bush’s administration has had “the most CEOs” of any in history. But in my secret identity much of my work is done for major corporations, which are typically headed by masters of their field who have climbed the professional ladder (unlike Bush’s typical cabinet assortment of unpopular lame-duck governors, defeated one-term senators and guys who lose elections to dead people). The corporations I work for by and large also operate at a profit rather than a deficit, have decent family-leave policies and give partner benefits to gay couples — the business of America is minding your own business, and minding the store, by which measures no one in the Bush Administration, including its two top men, would last long in any corporation I’ve been involved with. Business can be a positive force and government a negative one, though not in the conventional ways claimed by both parties’ true believers.

The parties also have a bit of trouble separating the tough and the smart. Sorry, Democrats, but the Iraq surge worked; and sorry, Republicans, but you can only get so much credit for cleaning up part of a mess you caused to begin with. The good guys don’t start wars, and a sense of national purpose is not served by serially changing the reasons you went in after the fact. Committing to a mistake now doesn’t ennoble a cynical misjudgment then, and it’s clear that most Americans want out, and see no dishonor in extracting ourselves from a blunder. The often-shifting rationale for the Iraq War makes it pretty hard to define what we’re there to “win,” and the known fact that Saddam had nothing to do with terrorism on our soil casts a chilling suspiciousness on the claim that “we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” It’s true that jihadists have been pouring into Iraq to battle the so-called Great Satan since we invaded, and you couldn’t find a better way to keep them busy if you were *trying* to sacrifice our soldiers by diverting the enemy to a foreign land — though I don’t think that’s what the Bush White House was trying; they can’t be both so reckless as to complete an invasion before they start planning the occupation, and so calculating as to deliberately send our youth into an unwinnable indefinite conflict. Still, some five years of underequipping soldiers in the field and medically neglecting vets afterward have proven that the current government is all about “supporting the troops” unless they make the bad mistake of actually getting home.

That has to do with fully considering the meaning of what slogans you use, which also applies to the GOP’s sudden attack on points-of-light volunteerism in the disparagement of “community organizers,” as if there’s any imbalance in value between those who try to make a difference in a struggling rural town or a troubled city neighborhood. What’s sad is the way that Sarah Palin’s elevation actually represents the Republican Party turning its back on small-town grassroots values. The party’s best hope of attaining a majority nationwide is to build structures at the ground level across a wider constituency; newcomers like Palin in Alaska and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana could be vanguards of bigger-tent Republicanism, but not if the stakes keep getting yanked up for tokenistic gain by the old white guys who are still trying to hold onto the definition of the party.

Obviously, I’m making a case that there is in fact a difference between the parties competing to steer the next stage of American history. Barack Obama is the least compromised candidate his party has run in a generation, and John McCain has both clearly defined his right-wing bona fides with his voting record and vice-presidential choice, and made some strong statements to distance himself from the incumbent. But that very dance should be suspect, and involves a triangulation that’s refreshingly absent in the Democratic nominee this time.

Negative campaigning has turned off the electorate in past years, but I think they do yearn for clear distinctions. Though I agreed with little of their agenda, the Republicans under Newt Gingrich understood their role as an opposition party; and yeah, they picked the wrong fights and rode their revolution to short-term political suicide, but it was nothing if not an example of putting principle before self-preservation. The McCain I might well have voted for if he’d gotten the nomination against Al Gore, the McCain who snubbed the religious extremists he later courted (and then backed away from again) and who would go on to resist irresponsible wartime tax-cuts (before he endorsed them), is not the McCain who’s running this time, so his risk-taking in the name of causes worth losing for is not the sure thing it was then — and ironically makes him less deserving of the win.

There are other things at stake, and they involve the people you never get to vote on (or whom many have decisively voted against) — that is, the caliber and character of McCain’s appointees. Personally I’m more worried about Justice than justices; Supreme Court appointees are traditionally (if not recently) independent and unpredictable no matter what kind of president picks them, but, say, an Attorney General Giuliani would be ready to start attacking your rights on day one. (Rudy needlessly governed in permanent-emergency mode but is exemplary in an actual crisis, which is why he’d make an ideal FEMA head, but it’s not gonna happen ’cuz that’s not what he wants.) Despite many lefties’ surprisingly open ageism, Palin herself is probably not much cause for conservative celebration or liberal concern, since McCain shows every sign of following his hardy mom into the 100s. But we’ve just seen eight long years of the immediate damage that a cabinet handpicked to placate hardline constituencies can do.

If the current poll numbers hold, we’re headed for another razor-thin election. This means either that those already faithful to one or another party are dug in, since both sides see this as a new chapter and no one need feel associated with the unpopular incumbent; or that everyone is in a toss-up state of mind due to the absence of that incumbent from the contest. I hope the undecided climate will result in people considering closely, rather than dropping out or opting for old, outdated certainties. As the party of small government and low spending sees its recent leaders concentrate unheard-of power in the executive and make us more of a debtor nation, it’s still been surprising to note the number of lifetime Republicans among my friends, family and colleagues — from my mother-in-law to the guy who co-created Captain America (!) — who’ve spoken of their intent to cast their first-ever Democratic vote in the last two national elections. Though casting any vote, and keeping an eye on its consequences, is the key. The turnouts during this primary season were an encouraging sign of Americans being ready to truly participate in a way that’s become uncommon. I’m convinced that far fewer of our country’s problems come from those who don’t agree than from those who don’t bother. I’m eager to meet everyone in the space across the proverbial aisle. And to shake hands either way. Though I do think that this year, Obama is the guy likely to give more of us room there.

This story is for real, even though it sounds just like an episode of Stargate SG-1. The plot: a super-advanced piece of research equipment is about to be turned on, equipment that will help scientists understand the universe better. Other scientists are opposing the device saying simply starting the machine up would be disastrous. The reason? A possible result of starting the device will be the creation of (are you ready?) black holes. In the lab. Black holes.

CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, boasts itself to be the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator that lives 100 meters underground at CERN and thanks to its massive diameter (26 kilometers) resides both in Switzerland and in France. The LHC is scheduled to start at 10am local time, which for us in the continental United States means 4am.

If you’re reading this in the US on Wednesday morning, congratulations. It looks like the world didn’t end. Since you’re still alive and now possibly mildly curious about particle physics, consider surfing over to the CERN website and reading about the LHC. As for it generating a world-ending black hole, well, there’s always tomorrow.