(SCENE: A press conference on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol. Gretel Anderson-Rage of the League of Women Voters, Mike Boing of Common Cause MN and Irving Blotnik of the ACLU-MN are hosting a group of speakers, as two reporters, a homeless guy, and Carrie Lucking (of Alliance for a Better Minnesota) look on.
BOING: We are here to bring the voices of Minnesotans who will be disenfranchised by the Voter ID bill if it’s passed. We have four speakers for you today. I’d like to introduce the first; representing the Deceased-Minnesotan community, Elmer Torstengard.
TORSTENGARD: (Looking a bit pale) Hello dere. I just want to make sure the rights of dead people are upheld We worked long and hard for this country, and our voices deserve to be heard. Why should the fact that I died in 1992 silence me? (Shuffles back to seat)
ANDERSON-RAGE: Thank you, Elmer. We are here today to bear witness to the voter suppression inherent in this bill, which will disenfranchise 100,000… (LUCKING waves arms, points fingers upward) 200,000 (LUCKING frantically waves, points arms way up as she jumps) 500,000 (LUCKING frantically makes “go big” sign) Five Million Minnesotans. One of them will be Jacob Hemmerling-Doltz, a student at Macalester and a representative of the Duplicate-American community.
HEMMERLING-DOLTZ: Dude. I’ve got candidates I support down at Mac, dude. And back home in Madison, too, dude. And in Uptown Minneapolis, where I stayed last summer when I was interning with MPIRG. I’ve made my contributions in all three places, why should my voice not be heard in all of them, dude. I mean, dude? Hello? And maybe Dinkytown (Sits down)
BOING: I regret to announce our third speaker, Ingrid Bloff, representing the Inattentive-American community, seems to have forgetten to attend today’s event. So we’ll move right along to Mr. Mick Maus, who represents the Fictional-American community.
MAUS: Yeah, like, who says I can’t be living in a laundromat with nine other characters….er, Minnesotans? Just because we don’t meet your antiquated Eurocentrist notion of “proof we exist” doesn’t mean our voices aren’t perfectly valid! You can’t prove they’re not! Where are the convictions, huh? Where are the convictions? You got nothing! Suck it! SUCK IT!
BLOTNIK: Thank you for your attendance. Just a quick note, you may be breaking campaign finance law by being here, or reading about the event. Or maybe not. We haven’t decided.
BOING: Thank you!
(Group leaves the steps as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” plays on tinny loudspeaker)
(And SCENE)
Gretel Anderson-Rage and Jacob Hemmerling-Doltz are two of my favorite members of the Hyphenated American community. They often hang out with Lileks’s favorite BBC reporter, Linda Prithee-Wombat.
If you bombed every house in Southwest Minneapolis that has a woman with a hyphenated last name, the conflagration would make Dresden look like a Girl Scout campfire.