Overheard

We were in the mood for hamburgers tonight, so we went to a little joint where they have half a dozen booths ranged around a long bar. It’s built-in entertainment: you, the sit-down diner, get to listen to the conversations of the beer-and-wings diners.

Our bar guys tonight were most excellent entertainment, being loud, ignorant, and drunk. (The trifecta!) They were overweight, unshaven, trucker-cap-wearing white guys holding forth on politics: the Iraq war, affirmative action, the presidential candidates. Their logic was torturous, their conclusions baffling, their remarks punctuated with fists pounded on the bar. We spent the better part of our dinner either chuckling into our plates or making “OH NO HE DIDN’T” faces at one another.

We were almost done by the time they worked their way around to Obama, who is “willing to do anything to the black man if it lets him keep his power.” Having assured each other of this, they decided that Obama is thus a white man and uttered this triumphant declaration as we scurried out the door: “Obama and [Jesse] Jackson are slave traders!”

Ladies and gentlemen, America’s voting public.