Gwen Cooper's Open Salon Blog

On Superstitions, Animal Cruelty, and a General Rant

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:03:23 -0400

Two things happened today that infuriated me. Granted, I'm on edge these days--between Vashti, the book proposal I'm working on that alternately thrills and terrifies me (good news--it's another cat book! but a novel this time!), and life in general in these scary times...let's just say that I've been saner.

I saw this story today: http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/superstitious-villagers-are-killing-off-harmless-primate-called-aye-aye/19416515?icid=main|main|dl1|link6|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolnews.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fsuperstitious-villagers-are-killing-off-harmless-primate-called-aye-aye%2F19416515.

Read it after you've read this--although I warn you, it will probably upset you.

All you need to know right now is that a group of superstitious people somewhere in the world are killing a bunch of harmless animals for superstitious reasons.

Now, I've always been appalled by stories of superstition-based animal cruelty because of the way I feel about animals. I tend to take them more personally these days--ever since I became aware of how hard life is for black cats in this country. I literally had no idea that upwards of 95% of black cats go unadopted from shelters because they're black until I started doing research for the proposal for Homer's Odyssey. That was when I learned that even if he hadn't been blind, Homer almost certainly wouldn't have been adopted from a shelter because he's black. I have a black cat who I couldn't love more if he were bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. So I take the problems people have with black cats very personally.

I mentioned the above news story to someone tonight, and got one of those "why do you care so much about cruelty to animals when so many terrible things are happening to humans blah blah blah" speeches. I am SO VERY SICK of hearing that. I try not to rant in social situations, so please indulge me while I do so here.

First of all, I worked in non-profit for a lot of years. I worked with organizations that served animals, but that also served abused children, terminally ill children, the elderly, the homeless, the disabled, and so on. I ran a program that trained women on welfare for jobs back in the '90s during Clinton's welfare-to-work initiative (and when people questioned why I was wasting my time on lazy "welfare queens," my short answer--and I could have given a MUCH longer one--was that, if nothing else, as a society we should be concerned with the plight of their children).

I'm not trying to make myself out to be a saint. My point is that the people who volunteered with children never questioned the people who volunteered with the elderly. And the people who volunteered with the elderly never questioned the people who volunteered with disabled veterans. And so on. And none of those people--the people who actually did things other than judge what other people did--ever questioned the animal volunteers. If I'd been able to collect a buck for every person who questioned the animal volunteers but didn't volunteer themselves in any capacity...let's just say that Laurence and I could retire today.

Which leads me to my second point. When you help animals, you help people. I'm not talking about extremist fringe groups that hurt humans to help animals--frankly, I don't feel that I have to answer for the extremists any more than Christians have to answer for the KKK. There are messed-up people in all walks of life, and their particular cause isn't what messes them up--they're messed up already, and then they find a cause that legitimizes it.

But I'll say it again--when you help animals, you help people. Maybe that's not why you do it, but the fact remains. Shelters give people who've lost a pet a place to start in their search. They provide a safe haven for animals that might otherwise roam the streets and, out of sheer desperation and hunger and fear, become a threat to neighborhoods. They match people with pets who make their lives tangibly better (statistics on the improved health/reduced stress of pet owners, anyone?). In my case, the ASPCA volunteers who helped me get back to my cats after 9/11 may have done it for their love of animals, but they helped me, and I was a human disaster survivor.

That would be enough, but I'm not done by a long shot. Going back to my earlier point--how the people who genuinely want to work to make the world better never question the others who do so, even if they do it in a different way. That's because we all understand that cruelty is cruelty, and injustice is injustice, and if everybody did some small thing to help others out of kindness--or even a sense of ethical responsibility--the world would be infinitely better for us all.

What's wrong with the world isn't too many people helping animals. What's wrong with the world is too many people doing nothing to help anybody at all.

The people who want to help, however they want to help, aren't the ones who create injustice, violence, or oppression. I've met a lot of people who would help animals before they would help humans--but not a single one of them would ever knowingly hurt or take advantage of a human. People who volunteer at shelters might not teach an illiterate adult to read, but I guarantee you they'd be the first to rally to help a neighbor in a crisis that others would ignore. Often they don't volunteer with humans because they feel "safer" with animals--but, to a man (or woman) they are kind-hearted people. Kindness, in any form, is the only hope our species has got.

Which brings me to my final point--societies that routinely mistreat their animals will also mistreat their humans. Before the founding of the RSPCA, Victorian England was notorious for animal cruelty. They also hanged 10-year-old children for pickpocketing in Victorian England. Maybe I can't draw a scientific cause/effect relationship here, but I don't think I'm off base.

I could provide countless other examples, but I'll offer only one. When I was a young child, maybe third grade or so, I started learning about the Holocaust. (To grow up Jewish, at least in my neighborhood, was to begin learning about the Holocaust at a young age.) Something like the Holocaust is a hard thing for a child to grasp as anything other than an abstract Very Bad Thing that happened a long time ago. It's as hard to personally conceptualize as the concept of infinity. The first thing that made it personal and real to me was learning that, before there were concentration camps and actual murders, there were laws passed to restrict the daily life of Jews. Jews couldn't use public parks. Jews couldn't teach in schools. And Jews were not allowed to have pets--Jews who did have pets were forced to give them up.

As a child with dogs, that horrified me to my core. And it wasn't just that I could personally and viscerally understand how it would feel to have police officers come into my home and take my beloved Penny and Tippi away. It was because I could understand, although I couldn't have articulated it, that a society that could be that cruel to innocent and helpless animals (because, even if you thought Jews were bad, their dogs and cats loved them and wouldn't understand why they were being taken away from their families and homes) was capable of any cruel thing. It was a society devoid of a soul, of compassion. It was a society that could ruthlessly inflict any horror one could imagine. And while obviously ripping pets out of homes was far from the worst thing the Nazis did, I think I was correct in understanding on a purely visceral level that people who could be that cruel and unfeeling were the kind of people who were responsible for all the horrible things in the world.

The people who killed black cats because they were "witches' familiars" were also the people who burned humans at the stake. Societies that engaged in animal sacrifice also engaged in human slavery and trafficking. I don't even think it's a cause/effect relationship--I think that cruelty is simply one of those things that gets easier as you go along. We practice it on animals and then perfect it on people.

Bad people aren't bad people because they're cruel to animals. They're cruel to animals because they're bad people. And nothing I've seen since third grade has convinced me that I'm wrong about that.

So I don't care about animals more than or instead of humans. It's my general feeling that somebody has to care for the most helpless among us--that somebody has to recognize when we've started down the slippery slope to general inhumanity--that motivates me and makes me angry when I see animals abused or killed for gratuitous reasons. And even the people who would say they care more about animals than humans are still the ones who do more to help humans--if by doing nothing else than tipping the social scales back toward human kindness--than those who judge them for it. I'm not talking about every pet owner out there--I'm talking about that rare breed (the ones who people tend to call "crazy") who love having an animal in their homes, but who ultimately take in pets out of a genuine desire to give the pet a better life, not so they have something cute and fuzzy in the house. It's a fine distinction, but an important one. People who love animals purely for the animals' sake--not as tools or entertainment--aren't the ones throwing dollar bills at Parkinson's sufferers like the "humanitarian" in that video that went around last week. Goodness is always appalled in the face of cruelty, whatever form it takes.

And the people who are in it to help others, not for the sake of making themselves feel more special or righteous but out of a genuine desire to do good, never judge the way others choose to do good. They recognize that good is good, however it occurs--and that, like people themselves, it never looks exactly the same twice.

And, frankly, just like I'm capable of loving my cats and my husband and my family, I'm capable of caring about animals and humans. People who know what it is to love in the truest sense of the word know that love is an infinite resource. The people who assume that caring for animals and caring for humans is an either/or proposition are the ones who have no idea what it means to care from your very soul about anything. They're like children who think mommy won't love them anymore because she's having another baby. If they didn't spend so much time impeding my progress, I'd feel sorry for them.

People who fight to save animals are fighting to save us all. And I say: Godspeed.

A Canticle for Vashowitz

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:01:10 -0500

Yesterday morning, I left Vashti at the veterinary hospital where she will spend the next several days receiving intensive treatment for her kidneys, which are failing. There’s a range of scenarios for her eventual prognosis, some very positive and others, obviously, far less so. We should know more in a couple of days.

I brought her in yesterday at around 10:00am, and spent the rest of the day—until I eventually passed out at around midnight—well…I spent it drunk. I am not proud of this. The only other time I can remember having used alcohol as a coping mechanism was the night of September 11^th. Ah, well…there are always good reasons to do what you know you shouldn’t.

Vashti has been declining for several weeks. I’ve avoided writing about her, or about any of the cats, not wanting to talk about her illness until we knew more, but also feeling that it would be dishonest, somehow, to write about the cats as if everybody were fine. But, since I left Vashti at the hospital, I haven’t been able to think about much else. “Out of the full heart, the mouth will speak,” the saying goes. And so, at last, I speak.

I think one of the hardest things about the illness or loss of a pet is the way in which it isolates us. There are no rituals, no protocols, no acknowledged bedside vigil when you’re waiting for news about your cat. If (god forbid god forbid) it was Laurence in the hospital fighting for his life, I could stay at the hospital around the clock, waiting for updates from the doctors. Friends and family members, both of ours, would be there to wait with me. Calling them and telling them what hospital and what was going on would be, in itself, a mercy of temporary productivity. They would hold my hand, bring me food or things I needed from home, or take turns relieving my vigil while I ran my own errands or caught a couple of hours of sleep. I wouldn’t even have to think about doing any of these things—they are simply What One Does when someone we love falls ill.

But Laurence and I are waiting here alone. We’ve told a few friends, of course, who’ve been wonderfully sympathetic and supportive. Still, the illness of a pet isn’t acknowledged by society as the kind of thing that uproots your life, that hollows you out with fear and grief, that leaves you incapable of doing anything else or that others should rally to your side to help you bear. And so we have only each other as we wait and worry, worry and wait. I don’t mean to minimize this—having Laurence with me, and knowing that Laurence loves Vashti as much as I do, is the only thing holding me together.

I’ve received thousands of letters from readers since Homer’s Odyssey was published. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky, in that—out of those thousands—I can literally count on one hand the number of negative letters I’ve gotten. One of them was from a teenaged girl in Roanoke, who claimed that she would have liked the book except it was so obvious that I had replaced Scarlett and Vashti with Homer, and then eventually replaced Homer with Laurence.

I wrote back to the girl (I answer every reader letter I get), and explained that, when you’re a writer telling a story, you have to be selective of what you tell and where you put the emphasis, for the sake of creating a narrative. For example, I told her, because this was a book about Homer, I never wrote about things that had nothing to do with him, like the boyfriend I was madly in love with who was unfaithful and broke my heart; or the boss who made me so miserable that, for a year, I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning; or the time the drycleaner lost my favorite shirt; or the day when, out of the blue, I found the birthday card my grandmother had given me on my second birthday (signed, “Love, Bamma and Bampa”), and how, even though I was in my thirties by then, I slept with it under my pillow for a month because it made me feel closer to her than I had since her death.

None of those things had anything to do with Homer, or his story, or the story of our lives together.

And because the story was Homer’s, Scarlett and Vashti ended up being cast in the roles of “supporting characters.” This was necessary for story-telling purposes, I explained, but in no way reflected the strength of my feelings for them, or their individual importance in my “real” life.

What would I have said about Vashti, had the story been hers and not Homer’s? I probably would have talked more about adopting her, how she was in worse shape than any kitten I had ever seen when my mother first brought me to the tool shed at her school where they were holding Vashti to keep her from running away. She was dirty and smelly and itchy, and painfully skinny, and so tiny! I brought her back to my office, where she climbed onto my shoulder and slept in my hair all day (while I desperately prayed I wouldn’t catch her fleas or mites), until I brought her to the vet. When she was in her carrier on the way to the vet’s office, she kept stretching her little paws pleadingly out to me through the grates, wanting nothing except to crawl back into my hair for warmth. Already, she was “my” cat.

I might have told how I broke the news to my then-boyfriend, Jorge, that we were about to have a second cat—a second cat he emphatically did not want. I called him at work and cheerfully announced, “There’s going to be twice as much love in our house!” He was not amused. But he agreed to let me bring Vashti home just long enough for us to find a “permanent” home for her with another family. We all know how that story ended. Jorge’s father—a quiet and non-demonstrative sort—was the first man ever to fall in love with Vashti. “The Arctic Fox,” he called her, because of her long plume of white tail, and his eyes glowed whenever he looked at her. But this was later, after Vashti had become an acknowledged beauty.

I named her Vashti not knowing she was going to be beautiful. In fact, I thought she was going to be an ugly little thing—what else could I have thought, given how mangy and filth-encrusted she was back then? It was a full month before I realized her nose was pink and not black. So I thought naming her after a beautiful Persian queen was ironic, and also my own commitment to always see the beauty in her, even if it wasn’t there on the surface. But, of course, Vashti showed me. I always think that her growing into such a stunningly beautiful cat was the greatest “ugly duckling” story I ever saw in real life, and Vashti’s best revenge against all of us who doubted her.

Vashti was so still and quiet that first day when I found her, and I thought she was going to be an unusually still and serious kitten. Now I know she was just weak and ill, and starved practically to death. The first night she came home, after she’d seen the vet, I kept her in the bathroom overnight. I thought she’d feel safer with her own room, and we also had to monitor a first introduction to Scarlett. When I opened the bathroom door the following morning, a teeny Vashti came bursting through it as if a late-night talk show host had just announced her name. She was bright yellow from the sulfur dip that had treated her skin mites, and she whirled around in circles—her nose low to the ground, her rump and tiny tail high in the air—whirled and whirled around Scarlett and me and everything in the room. She was a tiny ball of yellow, smelly joy. It was the first day in her life when she’d felt well-fed and healthy, and her joy was more than she could contain.

I love all three of my cats, but my relationship with each of them is different. Vashti is the only one of my cats who didn’t come to me first through a vet—and I’ve always thought that Vashti viewed me, personally, as her savior. She looks at me with so much love in her eyes! I’ve never seen so much love in the eyes of a cat—or in any eyes, really. I always secretly felt that if some catastrophe made it necessary for the cats to find other homes, Vashti would be the least able to cope. Homer is so ready to love anybody who loves him! And Scarlett is so ready to hate everybody on principle, other than me. Her misanthropy would keep her going out of pure spite.

But Vashti has always been a sort of domestic goddess—sweet and accommodating and happy to welcome anybody into her home, but gently insistent that, no matter how many friends she may have, she has only one true home and that’s with me. Nothing was ever more important to Vashti than being in her home with her family. The one time I tried to leave her someplace else—when she stayed at Jorge’s for a few days and peed on everything he owned—I learned that lesson.

This is not to say that Vashti was anti-social, or unwilling to make friends with others. Vashti always loved it when people came over to visit, although she never put herself forward as insistently as Homer did. Vashti was never one to fight anybody else for her share of attention, even though she loved the attention dearly. The night my apartment was broken into, when there were four police officers in our home taking my statement, investigating the break-in, et cetera, Vashti stood in the middle of the coffee table on her hind legs, her front paws reaching desperately out to the “visitors.” I could almost hear her thinking indignantly, “There are four men here and not one of them is going to pay attention to me?!”

Above all else, Vashti is a gentle soul. She’s so gentle that, except when I put her in her carrier, she never issues a full-throated meow, never raises her voice to demand anything or to warn off another cat. Her meows always come out as coos or tiny squeaks. For this reason, over the years, I’ve tended to call her “Squeaker” or “Li’l Squeaker” or, on occasion, “Squeaker Fromme.” In fourteen years she’s never once hissed, never growled, never snapped or used her teeth, never unsheathed her claws to use on anything except inanimate toys–not even at the vet’s office, where every vet and tech who’s ever worked with her is willing to swear an oath that Vashti is the sweetest cat they’ve ever seen. When we lived with Jorge, in a house that had a screened-in back porch Vashti could play on, she used to love to catch the little gecko lizards that are rife in South Florida. I’d let her out, and within seconds she’d have one in her mouth. I’d force her to spit them out (lizards eat insects, ergo lizards are our friends), and she never fought me. The lizards would always run off, visibly disgruntled but otherwise uninjured. It was as if Vashti wanted to make a game of catching them, but could never bring herself to actually hurt them.

If I had written a book about Vashti instead of Homer, I might have confessed the nagging guilt I’ve always felt deep down, that maybe I did wrong by Vashti when I brought Homer home. Please don’t misunderstand me—I don’t for a second regret adopting Homer. How could I possibly regret it? But Vashti’s always wanted to give and receive so much love and attention, and yet is always so unwilling to muscle past the other cats—who were always much more insistent than she was—to get it. Did I show her enough love? Did I do that thing that sometimes happens in a home where there’s a disabled “child,” where that child receives all the parents’ concern and attention to the detriment of the others?

Sometimes, when I see how happy she’s been with Laurence—how she’s blossomed under all the love and affection he showers her with daily, knowing that finally she has a human in her family who she doesn’t have to share with anybody else—I think maybe she was secretly unhappy all along and simply too much of a good soul to “tell” me so. I don’t know if she can have any idea how much I love her, how empty our home seems without her in it. I’ve spent the past 24 hours wondering if I’ve given her the life she deserved to have, if I’ve made her as happy as she deserves to be. I had to drink nearly a full bottle of wine in one shot last night, before I was able to fall asleep as I pondered that question.

The one thing I never appreciated about Vashti until she was gone is how truly she is the heart of our home. In many families there’s one person who’s the “glue,” and in our family the glue is Vashti. Since she left, Homer has been hiding beneath the covers in the spare bedroom where Vashti likes to nap in a patch of sunlight in the afternoons, and Scarlett has been following me relentlessly with an agitated, questioning meow. Vashti is the only cat who’s willing to play with Homer, the only cat who Scarlett is willing to play with, the one cat who is Laurence’s link to the life of the cats in our home. Now that she’s not here, I feel unmoored, somehow—as if all of us, at any moment, might break off into separate units and go spinning off on our own away from each other. Vashti is the only living creature in our family who every single one of us can agree on loving.

Vashti may not be the kind of cat who books get written about. She’s never done anything more exciting or daring with her life than be endlessly patient with all of us, bear our moods without complaint, put the things we wanted ahead of what she wanted for herself, and love each of us with more love than one little heart should be capable of holding.

Vashti, in the end, is truly the finest of us all.

Long live Vashti.

And It Only Took Four Hours to Get This Shot...

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 19:09:52 -0400

People ask all the time how Homer is coping with his new-found fame, and I always answer that, for the most part, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know. It’s true that he’s been getting a lot more treats lately (every time the book hits a milestone, my husband and I reward the cats so they get to celebrate, too!). And it’s also true that a lot more people have been coming through our apartment these days–photographers, videographers, reporters–and giving Homer even more attention than he’s been used to getting (and that was a lot).

For the most part, though, he’s taken all the hooplah in stride.

A couple of weeks ago, my publisher decided they wanted a few more publicity photos of Homer, and this time instead of sending somebody to our apartment they had me bring Homer to a studio a few blocks from my apartment. There was a photographer, a lighting tech, a couple of assistants, a professional groomer (not that a groomer was needed…I mean, the cat’s glossy and immaculate all the time. I should only be so glossy and immaculate!), a hair and makeup person…in short, it was quite the “dog and pony” show!

Homer doesn’t leave our apartment much, unless it’s to go to the vet. I’m almost positive he thought the photo studio was some kind of crazy vet’s office at first, because–unlike his characteristic fearless self–he spent the first hour or so hiding under a couch. He didn’t cower, exactly, or hiss or cringe or do any of the other things a cat in distress will usually do. But he did make it pretty clear that he wanted to be left alone. I don’t need any shots, thanks! was what he was clearly trying to indicate.

Once he realized he wasn’t in a vet’s office, and that in fact he was in a different kind of space than he’d ever been in before…well, then we had the opposite problem. He wasn’t hiding under the couch anymore, but he also had no interest in sitting in one spot long enough to get his picture taken. This is a pretty cool place! he seemed to be thinking. There’s so much neat stuff for me to do here! He was relentless. After he’d introduced himself to everybody working on the shoot, he set about climbing all the furniture, crawling into every crack and crevice, sticking his nose into everything within reach, and generally being a very difficult little “star.” Even my old stand-bys–catnip and Pounces–weren’t enough to keep him in one place.

At one point, we decided that maybe it was best if we let the camera follow the cat rather than vice versa. So every time Homer moved, the photographer, lighting tech, professional groomer, various assistants–and, of course, me–hustled to get all the gear and lights to wherever Homer was.

You really haven’t lived, by the way, until you’ve seen five or six grown people following a blind cat around with lights and cameras and things, saying: “Wait! I think he’s going this way now!”

Eventually, Homer got tired enough that we got him to sit in one spot for a good five minutes, and were able to snap the shot you see above. Although, as you can tell from the way Homer’s head is turned, he still hadn’t given up on trying to figure out if maybe something more interesting was happening in another part of the room.

All I can say is, I’m pretty sure that we’re done with most of the photo and video shoots we’ll have to do with Homer, at least for now. He’ll probably miss all the treats and attention, but I personally am grateful that I’ll have plenty of time to rest before we have to do another one!

Oh--and we found out last Wednesday that HOMER will be on this Sunday's (9/13) New York Times bestseller list!!! Did I bury the lead by not mentioning that first...? ;)

The Day That Is The Day

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:08:40 -0400

It was just about ten months ago when I first posted a story on Open Salon called “Night of the Hunter,” about the time when my cat Homer—who I’d adopted some twelve years earlier as an abandoned and unwanted blind kitten—chased off an intruder who turned up in my bedroom in the middle of the night. The story was a chapter-in-progress from what I hoped would eventually be a book about Homer called Homer’s Odyssey. It was an idea that I was starting to lose faith in, as for months before the Open Salon post what my agent and I repeatedly heard from publishers was that Homer’s story wasn’t special or distinctive enough…nothing that would make for a viable book.

“Night of the Hunter” was promoted as an Editor’s Pick, and from there it went viral with a speed and scope that even those of us who believed in Homer’s Odyssey were unprepared for. It turned up on Fark.com, Digg, Reddit, Propeller, pet websites, “women’s stories” websites, and more blogs than I could keep track of. It was mentioned in a Columbia Journalism Review article about the “gripping reads” that could be found on Open Salon. I received emails from all over the world from readers who were touched by Homer’s story and eager to share recollections of the cats who’d meant so much in their own lives. And, in a twist that amused my agent to no end, I heard from agents eager to represent Homer and—most thrillingly—publishers equally eager to publish his story.

Within a week of posting “Night of the Hunter,” I had a firm offer from Random House's Delacorte imprint. Even when I’d dared to dream big, I’d never dreamt Random House big.

It’s been a grueling and exhilarating ten months, and now The Day is here at last: Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, Or How I Learned About Love and Life With a Blind Wonder Cat hits bookstores today. Foreign rights have already been sold in 10 countries. The initially modest 20,000 print run has blossomed to upwards of 100,000. No less a person than the VP of Merchandising for Barnes & Noble told USA Today that Homer “will be huge.”

The past ten months still feel like a dream. I keep expecting my husband to shake me awake, saying, “Weren’t you going to work on that book proposal today?”

So on this, The Day That Is The Day, I wanted to thank Open Salon and my wonderful, wise, gifted, and endlessly optimistic fellow bloggers who were so integral in getting us to this point. The name or handle of everybody who commented on the story is mentioned with gratitude in the book’s Acknowledgments page. But that’s still insufficient thanks for how all of you and Open Salon have changed my life.

And special thanks to "The Bibliofiles" here on Open Salon for the lovely review of the book they left on Amazon.

To see photos of Homer checking out a box of his books, and of Vashti—one of my other three cats—claiming it for her own, visit my blog at www.gwencooper.com (for some reason, the files are too large to load here).

Scarlett, curmudgeon that she is, remains resolutely unimpressed. Cats! ;-)

And for those who never read “Night of the Hunter,” you can find it here: http://open.salon.com/blog/gwen_cooper/2008/10/01/night_of_the_hunter

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!

"Ballparking" the Debate, and Election Day Predictions

Sat, 1 Nov 2008 08:11:54 -0400

Back in the days when I was super active with my high school debate program, there was a winning strategy regularly employed called “ballparking.” In a debate round, one debater takes the affirmative position and one debater takes the negative. Technically speaking, both sides put forward a case, then spend the rest of the round arguing for their own case and pointing out the flaws in their opponent’s. But, if one debater is demonstrably stronger and smarter than the other, what happens is that both sides end up debating the stronger speaker’s case: one side argues that she is right, and the other debater argues that the other side is not right, without putting forth a substantive counter-argument of his or her own. So both sides are playing on one “ballpark,” and the side whose ballpark that is will win nine out of ten times.

At this point in the election cycle, the Obama campaign has effectively ballparked the debate. The Obama campaign is talking more or less solely about Obama, arguing that he would make a good president. The McCain campaign is…also talking more or less solely about Obama, arguing that he would not make a good president. What the McCain campaign is not arguing is that McCain would make a good president, irrespective of Obama’s views or qualifications.

Both campaigns are playing on the Obama ballpark.

For this reason, my prediction is that Obama will win. Trying to convince people to vote against Obama is not the same thing as trying to convince them to vote for McCain.

Having said that, however, my unhappy prediction is that the majority of undecideds will break for McCain. Thanks to the efforts of both campaigns, the question facing voters at this point is not: Who should be president, Obama or McCain? The question actually facing voters is: Do you trust Obama to be president? People who still can’t quite bring themselves to answer “yes” to that question today will probably be unable, in the end, to answer “yes” to that question three days from now.

Along those lines, though, my further prediction is that third-party candidates will show better than is currently being anticipated, and will tip both the national popular vote and specific state electoral votes in unexpected ways. I think that a minority, but still statistically significant number, of people who can’t quite bring themselves to vote for Obama will also find that they’ve been given no compelling reason to vote for McCain, and will cast their votes for third-party tickets. I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of between two and four percent.

Ultimately, I believe this will benefit Obama, as his constituency is by and large strongly supportive of him specifically, whereas a large contingency of both McCain supporters and undecideds are not nearly as enthusiastic about the Republican ticket.

But here’s the thing: the Conventional Wisdom right now says that Obama must maintain a 50% majority; if he slips to so much as 48% or 49%, the undecideds will break for McCain and give him the victory.

I agree with this in part. However, what most of the handicappers are forgetting is that the McCain campaign hasn’t bothered to build its own ballpark, much less invite voters to visit it. If McCain loses so much as 2% of the undecideds to Obama, third-party candidates, or some combination thereof, it’s game, set, match.

And I predict that he will.

In the end, I think Obama wins the popular vote at right around 50% (versus a McCain 47%, let’s say), and wins the electoral vote by a convincing majority, with a couple of the very close states—Iowa, Missouri (for example)—flipping for him due to third-party votes.

Hey—I could be totally wrong. What the hell do I know? But that’s how I’m calling it now!