Shrink Rap

Where the hell are we? Looks a little like a doctor’s office, but only a little. Dr. Wise’s (Sorry, it’s his real name) wife has gone to great pains to make it look like an un-office. There’s a fountain in the corner, the doctor’s desk is blonde wood – dawn redwood – with curves, rough edges, and a remnant of bark.

Dr. Wise himself is a dapper forty-five-year-old, refined but not offensively so. Clipped brown hair, pencil-drawn moustache, trim, slim body.

He’s standing behind the desk, in front of a window, and across from him we see the back of the head of a slouched man with dark hair, mildly disheveled, who is saying: 

“Being with my friends is like being in an insane-asylum. They think they’re right the way Napoleons in a nut house think they’re Napoleon. There’s nothing to say about it that makes any sense to them. They know you’re wrong.”

Dr. Wise sighs and takes a seat at the desk. And now we see that the man sitting across from him is someone we know very well. It’s Wayne!

The good doctor looks, with mild friendly eyes, directly into Wayne’s wretched ones. “My friend,” he says, “welcome to the asylum.” He reaches across the crazily-grained desk to shake hands. “You are in it; I am in it; we’re all in it. You’re talking about politics. Of course I know; Doreen told me.”

Doreen? What is this, and what’s Wayne doing here, anyway? Let’s backtrack. He was watching television with Doreen. He shouldn’t have done it since he can’t stop shouting at the screen.

It was a man-in-the-street interview, with a woman.

Man: “What do you think of Obamacare?”

Woman, frowning: “I think it’s terrible.”

Man: “What do you think of the Affordable Health Care Act?”

Woman, bursting into a smile: “I think it’s wonderful. I can’t wait to get on it.”

Man: “Don’t you know that Obamacare and the Affordable Health Care Act are the same thing?”

Woman, shocked: “Oh, no! Oh, no! I hope this isn’t on television.”

They must have changed her mind somehow. It was. And Wayne watched it, and stood up, and yelled – at the screen, of course, but the only person who heard it was Doreen, “You moron! You’re what’s wrong with this country! Idiot! You shouldn’t be allowed to vote! And you’re what they’re making more of every day!”

He got no answer from the screen, which was now on to a car commercial. He turned to his lovely lady, and continuing, yelled, “She has no right to be so ignorant. She knows nothing. NOTHING! And she’s deciding how I’m going to live. Maybe whether I live or die. Maybe there aren’t death panels, but there sure as hell is death! Death because they think you’re too old, or your disease is too rare, or you die in your virtual waiting room because they’re six months behind, or…”

This is where he grabbed her. You shouldn’t have done that, Wayne. Not like that. And yelled, “Or they run out of money because they’re giving the store away! Everybody can’t have everything! It’s against the laws of nature!”

We didn’t see you shake her there, just a little, did we, Wayne? She says you did, and that’s what you’re doing in her shrink’s office. Her shrink. Now if she were your wife, that would be, to say the least, frowned upon. But in this country, your mistress is not recognized, legally or socially, and so anything goes. A perk of being not above, but alongside of, the law.

Doreen said that unless he came… well, you know… So he’s here, and the good doctor is saying, “Basically, the two sides don’t agree on the shape of the planet. To talk about politics, you need to have a common language, a framework you agree on. The Republicans and the Democrats have different world-views, and piled on top of that is a lot of disinformation, propaganda and downright tribalism. The Blue team versus the Red team.”

Wayne is attentive. His head is coming up, and his shoulders are finding the back of the chair. We are watching the urbane Dr. Wise do what he does best: explain, in a suave, soft, civilized voice, not at all like Wayne’s, that, “of course, there aren’t only two sides to most issues. But two makes more sense to us, it’s easier to wrap our heads around, and much easier to make ourselves feel we are right once we’ve picked one.”

Wayne likes this. It’s making him feel better. He’s wondering why he had such a bad opinion of shrinks. This one is saying, “No issue is too complex for our politicians, the news media, and the popular culture to turn into an either-or. Either we bomb Syria, or we are Assad’s collaborators. Either we have unrestricted burning of coal or we hate coal miners. Either we provide health insurance for the poor, or we want them to die faster. Either we reduce the tax burden of huge corporations and the mega-rich, or we’re anti-growth and anti-jobs.”

The doctor makes sense, and yes, explains so much. Here’s the clincher:

He comes around the desk, and sits precariously on one of the rounded burls on the edge, but he’s so ethereal, it bears his weight. He puts a light hand on Wayne’s shoulder. “The opposition is awful, isn’t it? They emphasize the wrong things, misunderstand everything, and draw implications that make absolutely no sense. So much so that we’re left with the impression not only that they are cynical, but that if they’re not insane, they’re criminally dangerous.”

Wayne has been relieved of a block in his head that he couldn’t get past, to understanding. This was it; this was the feeling he’d had, but didn’t have the confidence to interpret correctly. Everything was worse than he thought, but on the other hand, he wasn’t crazy.

The weather has turned cool, and everyone is snuggled up in bed with their little darlings. Well, yes, but not in this story. Nobody has any darlings yet – not quite. Least of all, Wayne.

Steve got in trouble this week. With Monroe – the doctor, not the doctrine. It was inevitable. Monroe and Mom must read the same books, or watch the same news. He didn’t have to go to college to hear, in the informal “current events” beginning of the class, Monroe repeat Obama’s claim that his health care product is good, that the price is good, and that nobody is madder than him about what he has previously likened to an iPhone glitch. He’d heard Obama say it. Of course, Obama would say it. But then he heard his mother say it. He raised his hand and channeled his father.

“The website’s bad for the same reason Obamacare is bad. Politics. Look who Obama picked to make it: A Canadian company – how American is that?” (Jesus, Steve, you don’t have to quote your Dad verbatim.) “A Canadian company that failed to produce a working gun registry in their own country, but Obama figures once they finish the health care project, they can start on that here. Maybe even before they finish, by collecting the right information.”

To which he received, “Nonsense. Obama’s just trying to provide health care for the poor. He’s in too much of a hurry to do good, that’s all. He was so busy negotiating the debt, he was blind-sided by the difficulties of putting up such a big site.”

You can’t keep a good man down. One sally was never enough for the dinner table, so why should it be enough in college. Steve countered with, “But how busy could he be negotiating the debt when he refused to negotiate?”

What he got back was, “The idea is to get the cheapest health care for the poorest people. Not to throw business to over-priced domestic corporations.”

Steve wasn’t through. “No, of course not. We have better places for our money. Like giving Mitch McConnell a 2 billion dollar earmark for selling out the Republicans and putting Obamacare back in business. For a dam in Kentucky, probably built by some of his buddies.”

Silence, then a quick look around the room by Monroe. 

“Thank you for your contribution.”

Steve sat down feeling unfulfilled, until he caught the eye of Brittany Brown, grader, and was flashed a smile and a nod.

Conflict Resolution

Hey, did you hear about the fight over at the winery? Oh yeah. Sunday night. You know, three-day-weekend, big doings, open to the public for wine-tasting and ungenerous portions of local cuisine to go with it – in this case, fall salads and home-made bread one slice to a customer. The big room is all set up with glasses galore; guests come and go around the big table

So there were a lot of folks up from the city to sample the rural wares, and some of them were Italian. One was an angry Italian who was baiting everybody about his countryman, Columbus. Columbus is being maligned, we’re all ungrateful bigots, if we think he mistreated the Indians then why don’t we all go back where we came from, or at least leave all our worldly possessions to a tribe. That kind of stuff.

When he gets no takers, he steps it up. The Indians never amounted to anything. They didn’t have what it takes to build a civilization. They’d still be wearing feathers and loin clothes if the white man hadn’t come around to show them a thing or two. Not that they ever learned.

Everybody ignores him, even though he’s getting louder and louder and drunker and drunker on his “tastings”. Finally, he starts talking about syphilis and how the Indians gave it to the white man. From the other end of the room comes, of all things, a gen-u-ine Native American. He’s not wearing feathers; he’s in a suit. The man’s a lawyer, and he’s had about enough of this. It’s late, and he’s also had enough wine.

He’s a big, muscular guy and the Italian is his size, but a bit flabby from good living. The Indian swaggers up with a toothy grin pasted on his face. “You claiming that filthy buggerer as your own?” he asks.

The Italian stands up, as well as he can and says “Proudly!”

“Then you bear responsibility for what you just said?”

The Italian’s now taking the measure of his opponent. He pulls himself together and uses the word he’s just discovered. “Proudly.”

The Indian steps back, looks around the room at the people looking at him, and suddenly reaches out both arms and pushes the Italian hard, till he’s sitting on the floor, looking up at him through his own drunken haze.

“Why you!” He gets to his feet fast, and runs his head right into the Indian’s stomach. A couple of men rouse from their inebriation in an attempt to separate them, but instead, are pulled into the fight. It’s the wine talking. In vino veritas. Everybody’s mad at one thing or another, and at each other.

Some of these folks have been trying to get Obamacare, and are failing to get into the club because of the bad software. Others did get on and are angry at how much their premiums are going to go up. Some of the men have been fighting with their wives, who refuse to see what’s happening to the country. Others have been fighting with their colleagues, who do, and who are trying to get them to see. Nobody’s got any friends anymore. There’s something wrong with everybody. No two people think alike.

The police come. They break it up. They take away quite a few unopened bottles of wine for not hauling anybody in. Then they wait down the road with their breathalyzers to bust people on the way out of the winery. You know the spot.

Billy wasn’t at his post on Saturday, disappointing his undercover team who read his pamphlets and couldn’t agree more. He and Doreen are visiting relatives who live year-round in Martha’s Vineyard. His Aunt saw Obama with her own eyes this summer, and spent the weekend making Doreen jealous.

Wayne and Melissa were together, alone, and kept running into the news about the government shut-down over Obamacare. But it’s okay, because they have a mutual enemy: the Republicans.

She: They’ll do anything to embarrass Obama. They can’t stand to see a black man in power. They don’t give a damn about ordinary people – only the rich. They don’t want change because they want to keep what they’ve got.

He: Fucking Republicans. They refuse to represent the people who elected them. All they care about is making nice to the people in power so they’ll get invited to the cocktail parties. We’ve got to get rid of them!

Steve wasn’t around, so they even got cozy in bed. I said cozy, not sexy. Wayne was too miserable to be sexy. He sees the last vestige of his country’s freedom going down the drain. There are rumors that the Republicans are going to cave, that they can’t stand being blamed for the shut-down, and besides… and this is what’s making him sick, they don’t really want a small government that minds its own business, because government business is their business.

“We’ve got rulers,” he said. “They aren’t listening to us anymore. They’re not even pretending. We live in a police state. Closing the people’s parks and monuments, but keeping open their planning and plotting and scheming to bring down the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind.” She’s curled up against him, trying to calm him down, but instead, he turns maudlin. “The normal state of mankind is ‘animal,’ hiding in a cave, eating whatever he can bop over the head. But people in this country live like kings used to live. Even the poor.”

Melissa can afford to be magnanimous. She, too, has heard the Republicans are about to cave and let Obama get on with saving the country from the ghost of George W. Bush.

She lets him go on, as she strokes his once-long hair. “We fix our problems. We fought a war to get rid of slavery. How come we don’t get credit for that? We’ve freed half the world from despots. Why do they act like we’re the bad guy?”

She holds him close and lets him rave. She knows you can never do enough. You can never blot out crimes committed. You must repent and repent and repent. You must make it up to the descendents. Though sometimes she wonders why they aren’t glad their ancestors were captured and brought to America so they could be born here, instead of Africa, which sounds pretty awful to her.

Steve’s not here because Steve is at a party at the college. He’s not exactly with Brittany, but she still thinks he’s cute and keeps coming back to him. She can’t seem to get anywhere with him. He argues with everything she says. Little does she know it’s because she sounds so much like his father. Not that it would make any difference. If she sounded like his mother he’d argue too. But his heart never seems to be in it. It’s not. He argues on automatic pilot.

She’s had a few beers, and is in a teasing mood. She decides to be brutally aggressive. With words, that is. “Funny, isn’t it, how the liberals, who think they’re so good, are the ones who want to use force all the time? They don’t want to steal money from people themselves, but they want to sic the government on people to do it for them. And they want all these rules about how everyone should live. It’s the liberals who turn out to be the tyrants. You might even call them oppressor pigs. Funny how backwards everything is,” she muses. “Whatever happened to ‘Question authority ’? That used to be the liberal mantra.

But Steve, too, has had a few beers, and his normal instincts have taken over. Instead of playing Mom, he plays Dad, picks up a mat of her stringy hair, pulls it toward him, and kisses her. End of discussion.

That was days ago. Now the Republicans have caved. The Dems are rejoicing. They’ve saved Obamacare, though nobody can get it, and the ones who can aren’t happy. The government is going to re-open. They are unaware that there was plenty of money to run everything, and the closures were all for show. The Republicans and Democrats are in this together against the Tea Party, which threatens their lifestyles. But don’t worry, they’re on the warpath, if I may use that phrase, against these radical renegades who want to go back to the old days.

T.G.I.F.

It’s Wayne and Doreen, at it again. At the good stuff, that is. These two can’t keep away from each other, and for good reason. Each one has what the other lacks. He’s hard; she’s soft, and neither is ever much of the other. She tries to soften him up, there on the loveseat, doing without, because Billy has hidden her stash.

Billy doesn’t think his mother should smoke. Especially not with Uncle Wayne (he’s taken to pronouncing the “uncle” in Italics, thereby obeying the letter of his mother’s law. The man is morose. How can anybody want to be with him, let alone get high with him? That’s impossible anyway. The guy’s whole purpose in life is to bring everybody down. He always says something that makes you feel lousy.

Which is about to happen now. Doreen is making a confession. She’s giving Wayne the upper hand. Cradled in his lap, her long, lush body curled up on the loveseat, she nuzzles her face in his neck, and to give him a surrender of sorts, she says “There’s something about the government that does scare me.”

“And what’s that, Reenie?” his pet name for her, out of use lately, but he’s petting her un-bunned hair, and it sounds right.

“The government spying,” she tickles into his neck. Wayne gets a mental hard-on. His hand goes from the tips of her long hair, sideways toward a voluptuous breast, when she adds, “which might be even worse under a Republican president.”

I wish I could say he stiffened, but the opposite is true. He wilts, and jumps up, spilling her halfway to the floor.

“Can’t you let up for a minute?” he shouts. “The Republicans! The Republicans! The Republicans, of which I am NOT one, aren’t doing a god damn thing except trying to stop the government take-over of America!” Doreen slips the rest of the way to the floor, and lets the barrage go over her.

“Wake up! It’s one man who’s bringing us down, and demonizing Republicans is just one more of his tactics. He has super-human powers, awarded him by guilty Liberals, and he’s taking the country to hell! Don’t you see it? Collecting records of everything so he can have something on everybody? How about the IRS starving out his opposition by not granting them the same status, which amounts to money to buy ads, as his friends. How about that he wants to bring in millions of Mexicans who will vote Democrat, so finally we will have one-party rule? Just like Russia!”

At the word, she rallies, and from the floor accuses. “George Bush started it; He wanted something else to scare us with. Terrorism and Homeland Security have replaced Russia and A-bombs, and it’s just going on and on. Obama can’t stop it, or he would.”

“Oh my God!”

She begins to blubber. “You’re always defending the Republicans. They shut down the government…”

“The Republicans did NOT shut down the government. The representatives of the people, who do not want Obamacare, because it sucks on every level, funded the entire government except Obamacare, and Harry Reid’s Senate, on behalf of the President said No thank you. It’s all or nothing. Take Obamacare or take nothing at all. It’s the Democrats who don’t care about people. It’s Democrats who don’t want equality. It’s the Democrats who cheat and lie! And it’s the fucking Republicans who are too stupid, or untalented, or downright moral, to do it back and beat them!”

On “beat them,” she flinched, and he threw up his hands in disgust. He’s got a wild look in his eye from not being able to get her to understand.

Let’s get out of here. Billy’s got the right idea. He’s riding his bicycle over to the winery, looking for Natalie. Let’s hope she’s not home, because driving slowly up the winding road to the winery, always at least a curve or two behind him, is a nondescript dirty white car, and in it are two undercover police officers assigned the task of following that kid who’s been seen on Saturdays handing out pamphlets in support of marijuana.

We’re going to jaunt over to the college, and see what the academics are doing this late fall Friday afternoon, when decent people are out raking their lawns.

Drinking coffee, of course, and being intellectual. Brittany Brown has the student lounge floor. The crowd is sparse; it’s the beginning of a holiday weekend. She started out talking to another graduate student, a pretty girl in very tight jeans and a low-cut shirt. A small group, mostly male, has collected around them, and Brittany is becoming expansive before it. She’s waving a piece of paper. Her voice is way up there.

“Pelosi says there is nothing to cut. Not one single thing! Well listen to this. When the ruling class retires, you know what they get?” She consults the paper.

 
“A congressman or a Senator gets one hundred and seventy four thousand dollars. Every year. For life! After congressmen serve in the US Senate or House of Representatives, every year, for as long as they live, they get one hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars! The Speaker of the House gets even more. I think we can find you some cuts, Nancy!”

Surprisingly, she’s applauded, so she steps it up. “I say congressmen should collect a salary when they’re in office, and that’s it. Their terms should be limited, and when they’re over, they should go back to the jobs they came from, and WORK, like the rest of us. No retirement pay at all. We’re supposed to have citizen legislators, not career legislators. Career legislators are rulers. We don’t have rulers here.”

But up at the winery, Donny Harris is not so sure. He’s thinking: I don't get it. If I know my taxes are due, do I wait until two weeks before the due date to figure out how I’m going to pay them? NO. I come up with a plan in advance. I know winter is coming. Do I wait until December to start splitting firewood? NO.

They knew the debt ceiling was about to come down on their heads. What do they do? They wait until the 23^rd hour to try to force it through over fear of a shut down. We have a seventeen trillion dollar debt. When are we going to at least stop adding to it? Why does Obama insist on spending more and more?

And he doesn’t understand why there was no money to let the Veterans into their memorial, but right next to it, undocumented residents were welcomed by Nancy Pelosi to protest for amnesty. Not that he has anything against Mexicans, but the attack on the veterans seems mean.

He’d like to talk to Anne about it; they talk about everything, but on Day 5, she went on-line and tried to find out how much Obamacare would cost them. She signed up to get her login and password to the exchange. An error message came up, and then every day and hour after that, website maintenance. “All I wanted to do is find out how much IT is going to cost me and what IT is. Amazon should have been in charge of setting up and running the systems. Imagine how many people use that site daily, hourly, and it still works every minute of every day.”

Anne is a big fan of Obama, and of Obamacare, and she’s miserable about the bad showing. If he piles on his own doubts, the gloom in the big room will only deepen. As it is, they’re drinking from dinky little glasses some not-so-good wine they have to get rid of, eating cold left-overs.

Meanwhile, Steve has forsaken his new friends for old, and coffee for weed. He’s out on the compound grounds in Natalie Winegrove’s room. (She hasn’t legally changed her name, but she plans to when she‘s old enough.) He and Nat and Billy the Kid are talking their own brand of politics.

Billy is telling them what’s in his Saturday pamphlet. “I’ve got a list of names you wouldn’t believe, of people who used pot. Wanna hear?” He’s anxious to tell them, and they’re in the mood to listen.

“William Shakespeare,” he says.

“Nooo,” says Natalie, slowly exhaling the breath she’s been holding.

“Steve Jobs.” He’s proud of that one. “Dope on a regular basis.”

“You’re kidding,” says Steve.

“Stephen King.”

“Obviously,” says Nat.

“Thirteen presidents, including our current one.”

“Holy shit!” says Steve.

“Exactly,” says Natalie.

Outside in the unmarked car, the two police officers have all the windows open and are themselves partaking of the evil weed, their self-awarded ransom for letting go the guy they nabbed harvesting it.

Cruz Control

Wayne is sick of the way his life is going. He serves two women, and neither service him. He can’t get a good feel, let alone get laid. All he gets is sharp tongue.

He’s decided that sex is more important than politics. That he won’t fight; he won’t argue. He’ll be nothing but agreeable. After failing with Wife Number One, as he thinks of her now, he has taken Melissa up on her “Go visit Doreen,” and is happily ensconced in the love-seat, in the little alcove where he and his lover, the mother of Billy the Kid, smoke pot.

Oh yes, Wayne’s a bad boy. Practically everyone in his generation is. Wayne is 43, born in 1970. In 1968, everyone in the enlightened town where he grew up, tried it, and a surprising number stuck with it for a while. Most of them, like Jackie Paper, put away Puff the magic drag-on, when they grew up, but a few still indulged, even though now they had children who were encouraged in school to rat out their parents if there was a funny burning smell coming from the master bedroom.

But he shouldn’t have tried it tonight, if he expected to keep his mouth shut. He shouldn’t have relaxed. He shouldn’t have asked the lovely Doreen if she knew that the phone number to buy Obamacare was 1-800-FUCK YOU. (Well, not exactly, it’s 1-800-F1UCKYO.) And when she told him where to go, he shouldn’t have said he didn’t want to go there because it was full of Liberals.

So now, instead of some nice, casual cuddling in their little nook, he’s telling her that not one person in Louisiana could buy insurance because they couldn’t get the website up. That the navigators who are supposed to help people, have a 207 page manual, and are told things like, “Don’t leave people’s personal information in the Fax machine, and make sure there’s someone on the other end to receive it.” And furthermore, that the navigators are getting millions to get people onto Obamacare, and they’re all his buddies. Planned Parenthood, ACORN, the NAACP, the AFL. It’s just a voter outreach program. Obama doesn’t give a good god damn about anybody’s health care. He wants control. He wants everyone dependent on government, so they won’t fight against it.

Doreen tries to reason with him. “But why should they fight it when it’s trying to take care of the poor?”

“Because you don’t take care of the poor as if they were barnyard animals, given just enough to keep them lazy and content. He’s designing a country for the ignorant, for people who don’t know and don’t care what’s going on. This is how tyrants rule. America is supposed to have educated voters - and I don’t mean voters with degrees. I mean voters who can figure out when they’re being had, when they’ve got a ruling class that wants to stay in power. These people aren’t supposed to be our leaders. They’re supposed to be our representatives, public servants. You ever hear of public servants? Obama and Holder… do they act like public servants? Does Congress?”

Uh-oh. The lady has risen from the loveseat and is standing with her hands on her luscious hips, and fire in her green eyes. “All you want to do is fight! Fight with Government! Fight with me! Fight, fight, fight! Obama is trying to fix a horrible situation where some people can afford insurance and other people can’t!”

“But that’s not what’s happening! People are having their hours cut or losing their jobs because their employers can’t afford to pay for their insurance! They have to buy it themselves, but they can’t afford it either, so they have to pay a fine, because it is now illegal not to have health insurance. Poor people paying fines because they can’t afford so-called Affordable Care. Does that make sense to you?” His voice has gone up a few decibels.

She slaps him and yells, “Don’t you yell at me like that!”

He’s alone in the loveseat, with a big, blue bong sitting on the floor next to him. So much for mellowing out with Mary Jane.

Let’s check on a different couple and a different drug. Donny and Ann Harris, at home, in the great big room under the carved beams, at one end of the long table, discussing the news of the day, which they have gleaned from CNN, from Fox to be fair, and a few choice websites that are safe to go to. They both hate reading the comments of crazy people who see evil wherever they look.

“Damn Tea Party,” Donny is saying, as he twirls a glass of last year’s Mountain Red “Holding the entire economy hostage. This Ted Cruz. An opportunist. Just wants to get his name out there. But there’s one good thing. The Republicans hate him as much as the Democrats do, and they’re going to help to get rid of him and the tea-baggers. Bunch of radicals who don’t want any change.”

Caftaned Ann nods. “It’s awful, this shutting down of government. People are suffering, all because the Republicans only care about making money, and don’t care about people.”

But something has been bothering Donny. “Nobody cares about the people,” he says. “Actually, it’s the Democrats who shut down the government. The Republicans want to fund the government, except for Obamacare, and the Democrats are saying, ‘All or nothing. If we can’t have Obamacare, we won’t have anything else, either.’ In fact, every time there’s a complaint, like those kids with cancer who can’t get treatment, the Republican House offers up a bill to fund it, and the Democratic Senate refuses to consider it. Harry Reid wouldn’t let them accept funding for the cancer kids. He says it’s a trick.” Donny pauses, thinking, then, “And they won’t let Arizona pay the ticket to keep the Grand Canyon open.”

Donny is having problems. He’s beginning to not like the Democrats any more than he likes the Republicans. It looks to him like the Democrats want the shutdown to be as bad as it can be, for the ordinary person. Closing the parks reminds him of not letting classes tour the White House during the sequester. Unnecessary but painful. And petty.

“Donny, you know who you sound like? You sound like Wayne. I don’t think I like it.”

Let’s leave these two to further unravel, and move on to our final scene. School. College, to be more precise. And a change of drug. This time it’s caffeine in the student lounge where Steve is basking in the attentions of Brittany Brown, who is ranting about the lawless government.

“This isn’t even the bill that was passed. They keep changing it. There weren’t supposed to be waivers for anybody. Why should we be subject to a law that half the country is being exempted from? All the big O’s cronies in big business are getting excused. The congress is getting excused. If everybody gets excused, who’s going to be pay for it? All the poor schmucks (Brittany’s a WASP and doesn’t know what that word means) who aren’t rich enough to get excused? How does that work? Do you know that 700 times, the bill says, ‘at the discretion of the secretary?’ That’s like writing a blank check. Who says you can write a bill and after it’s passed, say who has to obey it and who doesn’t? I’m sorry, but that is not the way we do things in America.”

“Not in your America. But Obama’s trying to do something for people who look like him, not people who look like you.”

Whoa! Stevie-boy. This is the grader in your class. You really think it’s smart to antagonize her? But he can’t help himself. If she sounds like his father, he’s got to give his mother equal time.

“Typical Liberal,” she says. “I have a legitimate complaint, and you call me a racist.”

And with that, three out of three of our couples have uncoupled.