I don't remember exactly what she said after that, because at that point I stopped taking notes and started working on this really cool drawing of a samurai fighting a giant spider. But I seem to recall more of the same type of exuberant rhetoric aimed at elevating the adrenaline supply to the bleeding hearts of college liberals. If I'd known I was going to a pep rally, I would have painted Subvert the Dominant Paradigm on my chest. Eventually, the woman stopped talking, and everybody applauded for a while. Then Nader stepped up to the mic.

He was remarkably calm and lucid. Maybe the warm-up act was just there to make Nader look good. He opened with a custom-tailored joke: "I was just at Yale. The place was full. YALE!" {Roaring Laughter} There's no actual joke in there, but Yale always gets a response out of the Columbia College kids, who we all wish they went there. Don't try to deny it.

Nader quickly moved to counter the main left-wing objection to his campaign: that he would draw liberal votes and throw the election to Bush. His defense was that the outcome of this election is going to make no effective difference in the political sphere. He pointed out that he same giant corporate lobbies who pay the republicans to pass legislation that favors them are also paying the democratic officials to sit on their asses and watch.

Those are fighting words, to be sure, but coming out of the mouth of Ralph Nader, they seemed to make a lot of sense. The man is an incredibly convincing speaker. Rather than rattling off buzzwords or appealing to lofty ideologies, he carefully backed up his assertions with concrete examples. "The last time I was in Washington," he said, "I crashed a benefit party hosted by the Gore Campaign at the Foxy Playground. It wasn't long before Gore, Clinton, and Lieberman were up on the stage, getting freaky with those poles. Man, those democrats are out of control. My buddy Tom got a lap dance from Lieberman. Stuff a soft money contribution in his g-string, and he'll sign anything," Nader leaned across the podium to nod knowingly at the audience, "Anything."

Nader's not in this race to win. The purpose of the campaign, as he explained near the end of his one-hour speech, is to draw public attention to the ugly realities of the American political climate, and generate a progressive movement to establish a legitimate watchdog party in Washington that would break up the two-headed machine running our government by forcing the democrats become actual reformers at the risk of losing their party identity. The speech culminated in the catchy phrase that has become Nader's battlecry: "If you're not turned on to politics, politics will surely turn on you."

For a few minutes, the inspirational words filled me with the progressive spirit. Hell, I even thought about registering to vote. Did you know that 50% of the wealth in this country belongs to 5% of the population? Goddammit! It's just not fair. Why must there be such disparity between those who have and those who have not?

Oh yeah, I forgot. It's so after I graduate I can get a job where I trade stocks on the internet all day. I can keep paying for cell phone service, Japanese food, and antidepressants without actually having to work, provided my fancy Ivy League BA does what it's supposed to gets me into that top 5%. Glad we got that one cleared up.

You can vote however you want. Personally, come election day, I'll be playing Soul Caliber on the Sega Dreamcast and 19-inch RCA television in my dorm room, relying on Phillip-Morris, Microsoft, and Pfitzer to maintain the status quo.