Dropped into Fenelli's last night, an old-fashioned pub in SoHo on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, to meet an architectural collegue from Charlotte, SC. He introduced me to his friend and former college room-mate, now based in Sarasota, FL.
Predictably, the conversation turned to the voting fiasco in Florida in the annus horribilis of 2000, with my question as to whether the whole sorry mess might repeat itself in 2004, with (1) the new hackable, error-prone and unaccountable touch-screen computers installed to replace the punch card machines with their infamous hanging chads, and (2) the President's filial regime still in place.
This was an intelligent man who professed deep shame in his state in his country on this and other issues. The conversation turned from voting machines to the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida at the last election, then widened to embrace the transformation of the world's empathy and support for the USA after 9.11 into the world's distrust and scorn after the invasion of Iraq.
At one point, the Sarasotan stopped me dead in my tracks with an unspecified hint of big trouble if a rerun of the vote in 2000 occurs. When pressed as to what he meant, he replied with the two words: "civil war".
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