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There are a lot of dumb old laws in the United States. In North Carolina, for instance, it is illegal to plow a field with an elephant, a law that owes its existence to a P. T. Barnum publicity stunt. Often, these laws don't get repealed, because it would take up a lot of time, and our legislators are very busy trying to get re-elected. And plus, it's not like anyone is going to arrest you if you find yourself in North Carolina with an unplowed field and only an elephant to assist you.

It turns out that this willingness not to enforce absurd laws is one of the primary differences between North Carolina and Chicago.

If you don't believe me, just ask Salvador Garcia, a young Chicagoan who was arrested thanks to an antiquated obscenity law still on the books here. The law says that you can't "utter lewd or filthy words," and Garcia was allegedly standing on a street corner announcing that he was a "love king" and a "dragon killa" at passing cars. Apparently, these constitute lewd and/or filthy remarks.

Let's be perfectly clear about this. We live in a city where you cannot legally advertise your services as a slayer of dragons or brag that you're the monarch of amorous admiration. Now, that doesn't much bother me personally, on account of how I am by no stretch of the imagination the king of love - to be honest about it, I'm not even a minor baron. Nor am I a dragon killa - I'm barely even a house fly killa. What concerns me is that there's no list of objectionable words in the body of the law - if there were, I suppose we would have to arrest the law itself. This means the police can technically arrest us for saying, um, anything. I mean, if shouting "Love King" is lewd, then maybe screaming, "No Blood for Oil You Dirty Fucking Warmongers" is lewd, too. And that's just not right.

I wish we had left the obscenity law to rot away quietly with other unenforced laws in Chicago. But now Mr. Garcia has, understandably, filed a lawsuit arguing that this obscenity law is perhaps just a wee bit unconstitutional.

So maybe we should repeal the law, since it's idiotic and everything. But I'm sure the City has a response to that argument. You're living in the New America, they'll tell us, where the sacrifice of civil liberties is a patriotic rite of passage. And we can't have people walking the streets threatening to murder dragons. What if the dragons hear?! They'll sweep down on us with fiery rage and burn the city to the ground, and no single dragon killa will be able to stop them.

What good will your precious freedom of speech do ya then, they'll ask. The City and its police force must protect Chicagoans from the threat posed by dragons and those whose braggadocio might incite dragons to violence-even at the expense of our beloved civil liberties.

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I'm not much for protesting. For one thing, I'm always that guy who screws everything up by taking the chant one round too far. Everyone except me seems to have an internal chanting clock that tells them exactly when to stop, but I always find myself screaming, "NO WAR NO WAR N- oh. yikes."

Also, I don't like conflict. I generally prefer compromise to conflict, which is why I'm opposed to wars in the first place. The protests here have featured quite a lot of conflict, with pro-war demonstrators chanting "U-S-A" and anti-war demonstrators chanting "U-S-A" right back at them, like a patriotic pissing contest. It makes me feel like I'm five years old again: My parents are fighting about who hates cleaning up after our incontinent dachshund more, and I'm standing in the middle saying, "Look, can't we just leave him in the woods and say he ran away?"

But despite these deep-seated protest-related anxieties, I decided I had to join in, because I feel pretty strongly about the war in Iraq. I'm fairly sure that my unshakable belief is that America should not sound the death knell of the UN Security Council by preemptively invading a sovereign nation without international permission. But there is a small chance that I'm unalterably convinced that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous tyrant who must be removed from power by any means necessary. I'll tell you for sure in 20 years, when the historians have figured out who was right.

Just to make sure I can one day tell my children that I demonstrated for the right cause during Gulf War Redux, I spent some time with both sets of protesters. Carrying a straddle-the-fence poster that read, "We Support the Troops," I hung out mostly with the anti-war crowd, partly because I've never learned to appreciate American-flag inspired t-shirts but mostly because they had better slogans. Chanting "U-S-A" gets tiring after a while, but I just couldn't get enough of the catchy cadence of "Hey hey! Ho ho! This racist war has got to go!"

For the most part, it was a surprisingly civil affair, sort of like a dinner party discussion of American foreign policy, except that many of the dinner guests were slathered in face paint and wearing homemade protest fedoras, while others were decked out in riot gear. Everyone agreed with me about supporting the troops, although there seemed to be some argument about whether they should be fighting in Iraq. But the underlying dispute I saw again and again was over whether or not our current President is an idiot. I kept saying, "Can't we all just agree that the President looks like Curious George and Alfred E. Neumann had a baby and go home?" but I did not bring a bullhorn, so I couldn't be heard over the shouting.

I didn't mind the shouting so much as the generally festive atmosphere. Call me a curmudgeon, but I just don't see the political efficacy of jumping around and gesticulating wildly while smiling with your pals. I mean, I'm all in favor of stopping traffic on Lakeshore Drive, whether you're doing it to stop the war or just to remind people that - hey - we wouldn't have to fight wars for oil if y'all just took the el. But do we have to dance in celebration when we take over the Drive?

As both an observer and a participant, I've felt moved and challenged by local rallies on both sides--so long as they remained serious and impassioned. But it's just too easy to dismiss funny hats and face paint.


War isn't fun, and I'm not sure protests should be, either. I do not recall reading that face paint was a central feature of Gandhi's salt march, for instance, and if we want the anti-war movement to be taken as serious as Gandhi was, maybe we need to be serious.

I used to date this Republican girl, Katherine. You can say a lot of nice things about Katherine. You can say, for instance, that she has never literally stabbed anyone in the back. But you cannot say that Katherine feels a great deal of compassion for the poor. Once, when I challenged her assertion that all poor people are genetically lazy, she revised that generalization: "I guess some of them are just dumb."

Katherine is the only Republican I have ever known--well, at least in the Biblical sense--so up until recently, I assumed that all Republicans were just like her: cold, apathetic to the struggles of the working poor, and prone to dumping liberal, young writers for hirsute financial analysts
named McLean.

But then President Bush showed up this week at the Economic Club of Chicago, which is basically, from what I understand, a group of people who sit around lighting thousand-dollar cigars with fifty-dollar bills, and made an announcement that knocked the angora socks off Chicago's financial elite. President Bush wants to cut taxes for the middle class! He wants to extend unemployment benefits!

Oh, and he also wants to eliminate taxes on stock dividends, which will only benefit people who are rich enough to invest in the stock market above and beyond their retirement accounts. In short, the middle class gets richer and the rich get richer.

Everybody wins! -- well, except probably the poor, who always seem to find a way to lose.
Now I realize that the Republican Party is nothing like my ex-girlfriend Katherine. It's much more like me: passionate, idealistic, and utterly irresponsible. The problems with financially sound economic stimulus packages are that A. they are boring and B. they do not promise to give people free money. President Bush's new plan to give the bulk of tax cuts to the wealthy avoids both pitfalls, and I'm sure it will stimulate the economy. But as a new convert to his domestic vision, I wonder why we can't stimulate it more.

Like, for instance, is there any way we can improve the economy by destroying the environment? Could we sell North Avenue beach to Wal-Mart, maybe? If it will help the economy, I'm sure our President will get right on it.

After all, President Bush's indisputable financial genius, as proven by his immense success at being a failed oil tycoon, has already led him discover the injustice of taxing corporate profits twice--once when they are reported as corporate income, and then again when the remaining profits are distributed to shareholders as dividends. But why do we tax corporate profits at all? If America really wants to foster the entrepreneurial spirit, we've got to reward successful corporations and individuals by freeing them of all tax burdens. Then we'll tax the living daylights out of people who aren't financially successful, thus terrorizing the American people into wealth.

"But wait," you say. "What if I don't measure success by the amount of money I earn?'
Well, I think President Bush has made it pretty darn clear that that's just un-American. You, my friend, should move to Canada.