Halfway through the evening, I thought to myself, "If they bomb this auditorium right now, American literature would be set back 20 years."
While Cheney and Edwards duked it out in Cleveland Tuesday night, UCLA's Royce Hall filled with what passes in L.A. for progressive activists: a mixture of liberal-leaning undergrads, subdued Hollywood power-brokers and aging hippies who laugh a little too loudly at every swipe voiced against the Right. This gathering of left, like birds on a wire come to roost, was Downtown for Democracy's "Take Back Your Democracy" reading. Modeled after the sucessful New York event last May at Cooper Union, D4D's Wrong Coast literary fete, lacked the energy and crackle of a New York audience, but who cares when you get the chance to see and hear Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Susan Lori-Parks, Anne Lamott, Alice Sebold and Dave Eggers all in one night? To add specialness to excitement, "Everything is Illuminated" author Jonathan Safran Foer hosts.
Foer began the evening, dressed in a polite and courteous suit by expressing his gratitude to be in an audience of people who shared his views, shared his core belief and shared his conviction that the Republican Party was the best goddamn party on Earth. His remarks to the audience outlined his core beliefs as a Republican and discounted the views of that other group who try to protect "this-so-called-environment" and so the joke continued. Sobering up his message at the end, he asked the audience to envision four more years of Bush. "We will be able to achieve so much more, unhampered by the yoke of reelection, think of the Supreme Court judges we can appoint, think about gun control and abortion, think about the economy, think about our relationship with the world, think about Iran and North Korea and Syria." The list lasted minutes and silenced the audience.
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