Don't Know How Lucky You Are, Boyz

Out for dinner last night with my good friend David trying to get my blood moving with some spicy Vietnamese food at the Ha Long Bay Cafe before heading home to write the previous entry about Russia. Much of the fuel for that entry came from our dinner conversation, so here is a follow-up straight from David, because I still can't tell a joke. Well, not exactly straight from David--I also can't help but embellish just a little...

A train was heading east across Russia from Moscow. In one car, obviously private, sat four men, Vlad, Joe, Mikhail and Vlad Jr., none of whom confessed to ever reading Trotsky. For most of the long journey, they hardly spoke to each other, finding historic precedent to be sufficiently telling. Besides, everyone but Vlad the Younger was so old they dozed throughout most of the journey.

Then, with an horrendous screeching of metal on metal, the train screamed to a sudden stop. Everyone awoke. A conductor poked his head into the car. "Tracks ended," he shrugged. "We're stopped." And before anyone could question or incarcerate him, he was off. In Russia, no one lingers for the next round of questions.

The four leaders stared from under eight heavily knit brows at the end of the trail, the swirling snowy emptiness of the Siberian landscape all around. Lenin spoke first. "We'll have to appeal to the revolutionary zeal of the masses to come finish this track across the rest of Siberia." Stalin gave him a sharp shove back into his seat. "Not while I'm on this train!" he scowled. "We'll round up the enemies of the state and force them to lay the tracks. That way we don't need to supply coats!" Gorbachev, meanwhile, had called for a tray full of vodka and now motioned Stalin into a seat before directing the steward to pass out shots all round. "Is unnecessary to force anyone to do it," he counseled solemnly. "We'll form a committee and formulate a 10-year-plan that will include not only train tracks but roadside stations and world class restaurants." Young Vlad Putin, meanwhile, was ignoring all of them and calmly pulling closed the old velvet curtains across the train car's dirty windows. "Nonsense," he reprimanded them in an low voice that made all the old leaders strain to hear him--how he loved making people strain to understand him. "We don't need to do anything at all. We just close the curtains, sit back, and pretend we're moving forward."

Wisconsin's motto is "Forward." We were the birthplace of the Progressive Party and we are now the home state of Russ Feingold. Click on the link and check out how he's entered on the NYT chart of major events in the last decade. Yes. Open the curtains and look at what's happening out there. We need trains.  We need genuine forward momentum. We need Russ. This is not Russia, after all.