Underexposed: An Election Day Fantasia
Are you sitting down? Preferably in a recently-deloused reclining red theater seat with dual cupholders? 'Cause get this: The Cleveland International Film Festival this year includes a documentary short about the 2004 selec... I mean, election. Ahem.
Says the [ironically named in Bush's AmeriKKKa] Free Times:
On November 2, 2004 — election day — Director [Laura] Paglin loitered inside a Ward 7 voting precinct with a digital camcorder. The result is No Umbrella.
The film opens outside a polling location in downtown Cleveland, then moves inside, where a long line of people waits to cast votes for president. Some have been there for nearly two hours. Many are angry. One woman yells loudly at the two election workers seated behind a table. Then, she begins to cry.
"We acting like niggers," shouts a tall man to the increasingly agitated crowd. "We need to be black people trying to vote."
But they can’t vote. Not if they can’t wait. Not if they have a job to get back to… There simply are not enough machines.
[Councilwoman] Fannie Lewis does her best to save the day, but bureaucracy (and possible Republican maneuvering) win out. For her efforts, though, she deserves to be canonized.
The Cleveland Scene painted a similar picture on its pages at the time. Sadly, I don't have footage of my own trip to the polls that fateful day, but let's just consider this my treatment for the certainly upcoming movie version:
Ah, Election Day 2004. My capitalist masters, tipped off by the issue of National Review on my desk, have given me the day off to vote, but I wake early out of habit and head to the polls. It's raining, but I open the oversize golf umbrella Karl Rove FedExed me and head down the street, past the library where, incidentally, having moved recently, I had to file a provisional ballot last year. "You don't really need to fill that out," said the kind Ann Coulter lookalike behind the desk. "I trust you," she said in a deep voice, winking once and pulling back her long blonde locks to reveal a diamond earring in the shape of an elephant.
This year, however, the library is under construction, so the polling place has moved down the street to a church. A white people church. Hooray! I go to church every day anyway, so twice on a Tuesday is, pardon the pun, a slice of Heaven!
I'm pointed to the end of a long hallway and down a flight of stairs to the line. Yes, it's about an hour wait from where I'm standing, but any chance to commune with my fellow man is welcome; maybe I'll meet the person who so envied my Bush 2004 yard signs so much that he just had to borrow them one night. Besides, some poor Democrat is working overtime at the office to make up for my paid absence. Ha! Maybe I'll even learn something: a lot of your typical hardcore conservative public school teachers are here during school hours, some schools having been closed because of the, um, security threat of having polling places in school buildings.
This year I tip off the election workers with my silk tie, which features little red, white, and blue elephants trampling Negro caricatures and carrying Confederate flags in their trunks. I'm led personally into a side room with a prototype voting machine-slash-massage table. What a thrill to find Michelle Malkin there giving complementary back massages. As a white male Republican, I used to think there was nothing better than a massage from a hot Asian woman, but casting multiple pre-punched ballots while sipping a protein smoothie at the same time surpassed any fantasy I ever had.
Bidding on film rights begins now. Keep in mind you'll need a decent special effects crew for the spontaneous parting of rainclouds as I leave the polling place, but a PG-13 should cover the steamy voting scenes.
Says the [ironically named in Bush's AmeriKKKa] Free Times:
On November 2, 2004 — election day — Director [Laura] Paglin loitered inside a Ward 7 voting precinct with a digital camcorder. The result is No Umbrella.
The film opens outside a polling location in downtown Cleveland, then moves inside, where a long line of people waits to cast votes for president. Some have been there for nearly two hours. Many are angry. One woman yells loudly at the two election workers seated behind a table. Then, she begins to cry.
"We acting like niggers," shouts a tall man to the increasingly agitated crowd. "We need to be black people trying to vote."
But they can’t vote. Not if they can’t wait. Not if they have a job to get back to… There simply are not enough machines.
[Councilwoman] Fannie Lewis does her best to save the day, but bureaucracy (and possible Republican maneuvering) win out. For her efforts, though, she deserves to be canonized.
The Cleveland Scene painted a similar picture on its pages at the time. Sadly, I don't have footage of my own trip to the polls that fateful day, but let's just consider this my treatment for the certainly upcoming movie version:
Ah, Election Day 2004. My capitalist masters, tipped off by the issue of National Review on my desk, have given me the day off to vote, but I wake early out of habit and head to the polls. It's raining, but I open the oversize golf umbrella Karl Rove FedExed me and head down the street, past the library where, incidentally, having moved recently, I had to file a provisional ballot last year. "You don't really need to fill that out," said the kind Ann Coulter lookalike behind the desk. "I trust you," she said in a deep voice, winking once and pulling back her long blonde locks to reveal a diamond earring in the shape of an elephant.
This year, however, the library is under construction, so the polling place has moved down the street to a church. A white people church. Hooray! I go to church every day anyway, so twice on a Tuesday is, pardon the pun, a slice of Heaven!
I'm pointed to the end of a long hallway and down a flight of stairs to the line. Yes, it's about an hour wait from where I'm standing, but any chance to commune with my fellow man is welcome; maybe I'll meet the person who so envied my Bush 2004 yard signs so much that he just had to borrow them one night. Besides, some poor Democrat is working overtime at the office to make up for my paid absence. Ha! Maybe I'll even learn something: a lot of your typical hardcore conservative public school teachers are here during school hours, some schools having been closed because of the, um, security threat of having polling places in school buildings.
This year I tip off the election workers with my silk tie, which features little red, white, and blue elephants trampling Negro caricatures and carrying Confederate flags in their trunks. I'm led personally into a side room with a prototype voting machine-slash-massage table. What a thrill to find Michelle Malkin there giving complementary back massages. As a white male Republican, I used to think there was nothing better than a massage from a hot Asian woman, but casting multiple pre-punched ballots while sipping a protein smoothie at the same time surpassed any fantasy I ever had.
Bidding on film rights begins now. Keep in mind you'll need a decent special effects crew for the spontaneous parting of rainclouds as I leave the polling place, but a PG-13 should cover the steamy voting scenes.
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