This reminded me of the 1996 U.S. presidential election, which is one of five U.S. pres. elections for which I have been over 18 and registered to vote, and is the only one for which I stayed home. On the one hand I had a veritable slew of logistical rationales for this (all of which were, admittedly now and would have been so then if pressed, weak-sauce): I had just moved to Virginia the month before; I had no idea where the polling place was and had never even voted in a polling place before because four years prior my first-ever vote had been cast via absentee ballot; I was temping, getting paid by the hour, and therefore uncomfortable either showing up late to work or leaving early just to exercise a civic duty. But the real kicker came when I got home from work that Tuesday, when the polls were still going to be open for a couple more hours and there was still an extant possibility that I might vote.
Just to set the stage a little further, here’s a couple more reasons I had not to vote, but these are not logistical, nor are they particularly valid; in fact I hate when people use these excuses nowadays, and I’m pretty sure that at age 22 I knew they didn’t carry much weight. One was that Clinton seemed poised to win re-election by a landslide. Another was that, at the time, Virginia was a ridiculously reliable red state (or whatever verbal equivalent we used to use for red states and blue states in the 90’s), whereas I was a predictably blue voter. Both of those reasons more or less equate to “my vote doesn’t matter.” Clinton was not going to get any electoral college votes from Virginia, whether or not I voted, and yet Clinton would still get his four more years anyway. If 22-year-old me were to pierce the veil of the future and ask 35-year-old me whether or not he should vote under those circumstances, he would get a big fat Yes, ALWAYS in response. But he/I didn’t. (To be fair, he/I really couldn’t avail him/myself of that option in any case.)
One person I could ask if I should vote, and in fact did ask, was my roommate. (I had two roommates at the time but was only close with one of them. Many, many stories could illuminate the strange tripartite living arrangements there but will have to wait for another time.) My roommate was a good buddy with many interests common to my own – comics, X-Files, heavy drinking – but he was what I term a Lazy Republican: his parents voted R as predictably as I voted D, and my roommate uncritically followed their lead, generally agreeing with his outspoken father’s convictions about the evils of affirmative action and high taxes and welfare &c. without thinking them through on his own or thinking about how policies might affect anybody but his family and himself. (Please note this does not mean that I believe if every single Republican thought through their beliefs they would find them wanting and magically agree with my liberal leanings; I’m talking about a specific individual who had a very shrugging indifference toward politics in general and, when pressed, would mostly parrot what he had grown up around. I suspect this happens quite a lot. But I don’t think it exemplifies the entire Republican party. For what it’s worth, my former roommate is still my buddy and his politics have become decidedly more well-informed and more liberal as time has gone by, which again is just one specific anecdote which proves nothing.)
My roommate very quickly cut to the heart of the matter. He told me he hadn’t voted, and wasn’t planning to, but if he had gone down to the polls he would have pulled the lever for Dole et al. (of course) He hazarded a (correct) guess that if I were to vote, it would be for Slick Willie. So on top of all the excuses, rationalizations and fuzzy electoral math logic already filling my exhausted head, he laid the back-breaking straw: if he and I had both voted, we would have cancelled each other out. And we could achieve the same zero-sum effect by not voting at all. At which point I gratefully slumped onto the couch beside him and we probably watched Simpsons reruns.
I’m certainly not proud of this behavior, although I could probably make a few valid analogies between my enthusiasm for the 1992 elections and my utter lack thereof for the 1996 version and what the hell happened to my generation in the 90’s politically, but mainly the reason why I bring up the tale of my civic duty-shirking is because of what it has revealed to me about the unreliability of my own memory. Because I do think about that exchange and roommate pact every so often, especially around elections, however fleetingly. And I always remember the conversation happening in a very specific setting, the recessed living room with the big green sectional sofa and the non-functioning fireplace. I also remember watching the returns of the election results in that same room, on that same sofa.
But it’s the wrong sofa, in the wrong room, in the wrong house. As I was thinking about the Non-Vote-Swapping of 1996 at length, it slowly dawned on me that my roommate and I moved into a townhouse in Ashburn in October of 1996 and relocated to a townhouse in Sterling in September of 1997. Obviously we were living in the first house on the Election Day in question. But for years I have associated all those incidents with the second house, subconsciously painting it in as the background scenery … and I really have no idea why. It totally falls apart when I think about it at length and attach real dates to the recollections. Plus the two houses were laid out differently, the decor colors were different, the furniture was arranged differently (it was Third Roommate's mind-bogglingly impractical white couch in the first house) - it's not like I'm confusing two different institutional dorm rooms which are for all intents and purposes identical boxes. It's a very strange thing to conflate, but I seem to have done it for over a decade.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I am an unreliable narrator at best, but I am a guileless one, to boot. So if you don’t know me and have stumbled across this blog in some arcane link-hopping fashion, be advised that I may sometimes get things flat-out wrong. And if you do know me, be advised that you may find yourself saying “whoa, he is totally misrepresenting what actually happened that time five/ten/twenty years ago.” But in either case, it’s not because I’m shady and trying to promote some subversive revisionist agenda. I just have a crappy inconsistent memory and an inherent ability to mentally construct patchwork memories that are so convincing that they become indistinguishable from the real thing. Which means I’m a great person to make bar bets with because I often am convinced I know something when, in fact, I don’t.
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