Monday, 07 April 2003 | Dashboard

The people who have no sense of irony and buy Hummers because it makes them feel patriotic, the people who insist on calling them "freedom fries," and the people who bulldoze Dixie Chicks CDs: these people scare me more than the ones in power do, because they are the ones I'm supposed to be counting on to bring about change.

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Right, it's snowing again, or maybe it's sleeting right now, but I don't want to look. I'm pretending that the red-and-yellow-checkered blanket wrapped around me is heat from the sun.

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I saw Michael Palin speak last week, in a bookstore at Union Square. I didn't get there early enough to get a seat, so I stood with the others at the back, having to rearrange my line of sight in cracks of space between humans every time someone shifted his or her weight from one foot to the other. He was funny (of course he was funny) and natural and likable, and he told stories from the last 15 years that he's been wandering around the earth. He admitted that he hasn't perfected a second language but would really like to do so, and then he sang a lumberjack song in German. Which reminded me that I want to know German at least as well as I once did, instead of watching it slowly fade as if I left it on the car dashboard.