Sunday, January 8, 2012

Report From Exeter: Romney and Christie and Occupants Oh My

As mentioned, My Handycam has a dead battery and I do not have a charger. I went to the storage unit and found my Handycam accessories. All the accessories except for the AC charger. Hopes dashed.

I spent about seven hours this weekend trying to hook up a printer. Long story but I'll try to summarize. When I moved two years ago I gave away one printer and put the other printer in storage. I don't have much space these days.

Anyway, my friend returned my printer to me at one point and I threw it in the closet. I tried to add the computer without the disk (I know I will find the disk soon now that I have the other printer running) but for whatever reason I was unable to install the printer, even with help from Hewlett Packard. So today, I dug the other printer out of storage.

The second printer was already installed on the computer. In two years time the installed cartridges froze and thawed and froze and thawed. After much futile tinkering I bit the bullet and bought a color cartridge and a black and white cartridge. Seven cumulative hours and $42 later I was able to run off a Bingo card template for my friend.

I decided to drive across town to see Mitt and Christie at the high school gym. I know. Mitt is not my first choice and he is not a great orator. But I have missed the circus this year and I figured there would be a lot of sideshows. I was not disappointed.

I have spent my life in the cheap seats away from the limelight, so this is the highest concentration of media fixtures I have seen in one space. Counting tech people there were literally hundreds of them. There were rows and rows of typists on laptops. There were so many news people that hundreds of civilians, including me, were routed away from the auditorium to a nearby gym.

In the gym, we listened to a speech that was piped in. Dumb ass me thought that the audio track was a previous Mitt and Chris rally and that they would be starting this evening's rally later. After talking to a fellow reject I learned that we had been excluded but that Mitt was going to be dropping by to say hi.

In this era of camera proliferation, it is hard to tell who is in the business and who is a mere civilian. But it seems that even some of the privileged members of the fourth estate were excluded from the grown up room. A mob armed with expensive looking cameras huddled around Mitt. I was able to see the governor's tan forehead and not much else. I guess he got that perfect tan on the campaign trail in Soth Carolina.

I saw David Gergen and Carl Cameron and a bunch of bug-eyed foreign correspondents. There were probably more civilians than media people but it's hard to tell. There were a few dozen Occupiers, a half dozen or so Ron Paul supporters and some guy with a loud voice who yelled something about Romney being a draft dodger. There were even some pro-Israeli Zionists holding signs at the parking lot exit.Some of the Occupiers infiltrated the crowd and started chanting. This happened a couple of times. I was standing by a Gang of Four who started some silly ass chant. I might make C-Span just yet.

I did my own political theater. Whenever an Occupant handed me a flier I would ask if it was printed on recycled paper. After a heartfelt "I don't know sir," I would either act despairing or hostile. I think I frightened one timid soul. But I did learn that "polite occupier" is not an oxymoron. A rarity perhaps, but not an oxymoron.

I wish I had my camera running. I wish I would have purchased a fancy phone with video capacity (mine costs $15.) Instead of video I have pleasant memories that will fade over time. Read: Tuesday. But I will treasure a vague composite memory of the evening that was uniquely New Hampshire. How sweet it is.

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