An unforgiving deadline has distanced this column from destiny. At the time of writing, Monday night, George W Bush and John Kerry were still kneeling at their respective bedsides, reciting the Overlord’s Prayer (‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my yes-men their vows to keep —â€), and the future seemed uncertain.
Indeed, Monday’s observer (trapped five days in the past by the slow wheels of print journalism), had to make do with supposition. Would voting on Tuesday go smoothly, with only minor scuffles between Democrat-supporting New York Times journalists and the Nebraskan farmers they were harassing into suitably antagonistic poses?
Did the initial outcome, that raw material of democracy, prove malleable enough to be forged into new statistics by lawyers on Capitol Hill? Is President George W Bush now urging his followers to cede from President John Kerry’s Republic, to found the Reformed Previously United State of Texas-America? Is Senator Kerry sharing a lonely drink with Michael Dukakis in an empty bar, the balloons deflating and the streamers unthrown, as the 101st Airborne float down through moonlit skies over North Korea?
In fact, the temporally challenged columnist can only be certain of one thing: there will be lawyers involved. There are almost always lawyers involved in the United States, great men steady of eye and quick of wit: Perry Mason, Gregory Peck. The OJ Simpson guy. Gregory Peck. The list is endless. Did I mention Perry Mason?
But wander away from the marble halls and the oak paneling, stumble into the legislative backwaters of the Union, and one quickly encounters a history of kinks and perversions, excesses and dementias, a time when the law was a strong rope and a pine box, when a small band of self-exiled Puritans saw Satan in every chicken and gorse-bush.
Ask most Internet surfers and Yank-Haters, and you’ll hear a catalogue of the peculiar laws still in effect in the US; how Minnesotans are not permitted to tease skunks; how residents of Pacific Grove, California, can be fined $500 for ‘molesting†butterflies; how the courts of Tennessee frown on using a lasso to catch fish.
Yes, in Kansas it is illegal to carry a concealed bean snapper; and in Texas the Encyclopedia Britannica is still technically banned for containing a recipe for making beer at home. The good folk of South Bend, Indiana, will have to go elsewhere to see a monkey smoke cigarettes. English is illegal in Illinois since state law stipulates that the official language is ‘Americanâ€.
After all of this, it seems positively dull to recount that it is illegal, anywhere in the US, to bet on the outcome of a presidential election. But beyond American influence, in countries where not very much at all is illegal, such odds must have been irresistible.
Sports betters (addicts legitimised by the illusion of being aficionados) will offer a spread on anything. They’ll go high a thousand a minute on Schumacher peeling off his visor with his left hand instead of his right after lap 20; get 100 to one odds on David Beckham being photographed with a blonde one-legged physio rather than a brunette with shingles. The infamous odds offered during Marshall Tito’s final illness (billed as ‘Thud†by Ladbrokes — Tito’s Hours Until Death) seem stodgy in comparison to India’s cricket economy and the delights of conjecture it presents. You wait, buddy, I call my brother-in-law, he get you the latest on Tendulkar’s brand of toothpaste: six to four says Sachin uses Colgate tomorrow and makes 65, it’s a sure thing, buddy. Minty Fresh? With bicarbonate cleansing bubble action? Hey, that’s crazy talk, guy! You some kind of tote-junky, cowboy?
So what spreads did New Delhi’s finest offer this week? Did punters lay down a gee per balloon popped at a Bush victory rally? Two gees for every verifiable glimpse of Kerry’s actual eyeball, flashed momentarily under the bloodhound droop of eye-socket? Ten to one on the next Pakistani hat-trick being taken under a Republican president? Five hundred to one on the 2010 Ashes series being postponed by thermonuclear war, with the option to adjust to 600 to one should Kerry win, but with a 400 to one loophole in case he came to be considered a paper tiger, a lapdog of the decadent right, by China circa 2006?
Hey, buddy, put your kids through typing school easy with them winnings. If nuclear war, no need to work; if not, happy days. You in?