Polling Place

Now that election madness has passed, and we've all returned to a world in which BOTH parties agree that we should block climate change prevention measures, continue funding state terror, and use drones to kill civilians around the Muslim world, I figured it was high time I blogged about my experience working at the club on election day last month.

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This one chatty ass stripper started talking to me about the election. She had cast her vote earlier that morning.

"Do you want Obama to win?" she asked.

"I don't want Romney to win. If that means Obama wins, I suppose I'll be relieved."

"Yeah, well I think Obama is better. I mean, I'm a minority and from a poor neighborhood and I definitely think Obama is better for like minorities and older people and women."

"Yeah, to a certain extent that's true."

"But I voted for Romney."

"Oh...wait, what?"

"Well like I said, I think Obama's better. But like, with Romney, I mean, Romney's new. And American should always be about doing something new. Like, having a new person in the White House. That's going to send a message to the rest of the world that America's not afraid to try something new."

Seriously, we're going to disenfranchise convicted felons and let this weirdo vote? Democracy, you so crazy!

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There's this right-wing white Zionist guy who sits at the bar and talks mad shit about Obama all the time. "He's a socialist Muslim," he once told me. "Any Jew that votes for Obama is full of self-hate." On another occasion, he told me he was really excited that the club hired an East Asian woman because "there's nothing hotter than a little Oriental girl."

The day of the election, he was at the club drinking. When I stopped by for my tip, he told me he was nervous because he'd trusted the club's valet with his car. But then, he added "We'll trust a black crackhead to run this country, so I guess I can trust one with my car, what do you say?"

Post-racial America, you say?

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I have a regular customer, Steve (two years now and counting!) who's a die-hard Obama supporter. And while he is anti-war and generally further left on the spectrum than 'Bam (which is true of just about everyone except Ann Coulter and the Koch bro's!), he always defends Barry O with gusto. I'll always press him with my critiques, to which Steve predictably responds that the only reason Obama played to the right wing so much was because he was trying to get reelected. A week or so before election, we made a little wager: He said Obama would, in his second term, stick up for Palestinian statehood and stop backing Zionist apartheid in Israel. I disagreed.

Sadly, just a few weeks following re-election, Obama fully proclaimed his support for Israel to 'defend' itself against Hamas attacks from Gaza. (Might I, here, offer a pithy quote from my boy Chomsky: "When Israel, in the occupied territories now, claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population that they’re crushing.")

For me, this meant I got a $200 shopping spree at Sephora, and I didn't lose the bet (which would have meant me treating him to a steak dinner). A tiny silver lining of our country's upsetting foreign policy for this Gaza stripper!