Last Days

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3 This week of patriotic drag queens,
murder-inducing kittens, and deep, ravishing triumph kicks off today
with a burst of exemplary citizenship out of Arizona, where
today a Chino Valley woman was jogging along the base of Granite
Mountain when she was attacked by a fox. As the woman told
authorities and authorities told the Associated Press, the fox first
bit the woman’s foot, after which it lunged for her leg, inspiring the
woman to grab the fox by the neck and the fox to sink its teeth into
the woman’s arm. Suspecting her attacker was rabid, the woman was loath
to let the fox escape and terrorize others, and so as the AP reports,
“With a fox locked onto her arm, an Arizona jogger ran a mile to her
car, where she was able to dislodge the animal, throw it into
the trunk, and drive to a Prescott hospital.” Vast congratulations
to the mystery jogger, who was right about the fox’s health status (the
beast indeed tested positive for rabies), and who is receiving rabies
vaccinations.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4 Nothing happened today, unless you count an
absolutely amazing election night, an evening that will rank
among the lifelong high points for millions of Americans who’ve never
proudly identified themselves that way before, and a night that
announced the rebirth of a nation for which Last Days would happily jog
a mile with a rabid fox biting our arm. At the center of today’s
hurricane of joy: Barack Obama, the approved-by-a-landslide
president-elect who took the stage tonight at Chicago’s Grant Park to
deliver a speech that rejuvenated the hopes of voters who’d given up on
seeing their personal ideals reflected in the country’s leadership,
included gays by name in the first 30 seconds, and drove a large
number of Americans to screaming, foot-stomping joy. Added bonus: the
civility of the Seattle police, who allowed the city’s handful
of peaceful-but-occasionally-law-bending street celebrations to
progress unimpeded.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 The week continues with the glorious
aftershocks of yesterday, from spontaneous bursts of cheering
aboard packed Metro buses to sporadic bursts of sobbing from citizens
reliving the night through various day-after media. (Last Days’
preferred postelection emotion porn: Newseum.org‘s collection of
Obama-
celebrating front pages from around the globe and that
YouTube footage of the drag queen on the roof of Neighbours leading an ecstatic mass of street revelers in the national anthem.)
This “I’m really happy, but am I dreaming?” vibe will be summed up
eloquently this weekend by New York Times columnist Frank Rich:
“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small,
bigoted, and stupid—easily divided and easily frightened…. We
heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe
it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every
Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn
against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect
a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start
to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer. So let’s be
blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given
by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday
night.” Hallelujah, stay tuned.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6 After two days of hopeful joy, today
Last Days dives into intoxicating schadenfreude, provided most
readily by Sarah Palin, the evangelical Christian governor of
Alaska who offered herself up for exploitation by a desperate GOP and
was today sent packing with a growing number of Republican knives in
her back. Among the Palin-bashing revelations released by McCain aides
in the wake of their candidate’s failure: Would-be vice president Palin
was unaware that Africa was a continent (not a country), couldn’t name
the member nations of NAFTA (the U.S., Mexico, and Canada), and refused
help in remedying her political ignorance in advance of her disastrous
interview with Katie Couric. RIP, Caribou Barbie. (Now let’s never
speak of her again.)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7 The week continues with a pair of pet-related
potboilers from Washington State. Story number one comes from
Moses Lake, where authorities say a dispute over a kitten led to the death of a man, identified by the Associated Press as
49-year-old Jeff A. Smith, who was found fatally beaten in his home
October 12. This past Wednesday, Grant County authorities arrested
two men and two teenagers, who police allege were driven
to beat Smith after learning he’d killed a kitten one of the
four alleged attackers had given him the previous day. All four of the
alleged attackers were charged with second-degree murder. Meanwhile in
SeaTac, the owner of two pit bulls that severely injured a
72-year-old woman was today hit with criminal charges for the September
8 attack. Details come from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
which identifies the owner as 36-year-old Travis Dean
Cunningham, who investigators allege kept his dogs in an unlocked
kennel with missing boards, enabling the dogs’ easy escape and
facilitating the brutal mauling of Huong Lee, who was standing in her
front yard when the dogs attacked and essentially ate her face. (Lee
suffered severe injuries all over her head and lost an ear.) The dogs
were shot dead at the scene, and Cunningham was charged today in King
County Superior Court with possession of a dangerous dog as well
as two illegal guns, for which he faces up to a 13 years in prison.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8 Nothing happened today.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9 As the week ends, Last Days turns to the most
conspicuous fleck of shit in the week’s sweet sundae of justice: the
passage of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that
seeks to revoke the marriage rights of the state’s same-sex couples. In
a heartening turn of events, Prop 8’s hateful step backward inspired a
few dozen thrilling strides forward, from the immediate announcement of
California’s attorney general (who assured married gays that Prop 8
could not be applied retroactively) to the official encouragement of
California’s Governator (who told marriage-equality seekers to keep
fighting) to the hundreds of thousands of people (gay and straight,
black and white, godly and not) who took to the streets in Los Angeles,
San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and Salt Lake City to protest Prop
8’s blatant discrimination. As Last Days wrote in a letter to loved
ones (several of whom journeyed to California to watch us get married
in September), the passage of Prop 8 feels like the start of something
huge, rather than the end of anything.

Get up, get into it, get involved: March for Marriage
Equality, Sat Nov 15. Gathering at 10:30 am in Volunteer Park,
march to Westlake Center at noon. Send Hot Tips to lastdays@thestranger.com, and
comment on Last Days at www.thestranger.com.