THE REPUBLICANS ARE INVADING! RUN!

That seems to be the reaction of everyone at my job. The entire Sales staff, PR/Marketing department, and HR pool informed me last Thursday that they will be in New Jersey this week, in order to avoid whatever chaos is brought about by the Republican National Convention.

Even my supervisor, Odin, said he might take a few days off (He’s still nursing a chronically bad back.) Unlike him, I am not a salaried employee, so I fully intend to be around. No need for self-pity; 95% of the office will either be in Jersey or working from home, so my job as Office Operations Coordinator will be pretty easy. Let’s face it, if nobody is in the office, I probably won’t have much to order in the way of new ink cartridges or paper towels. True, I’ll still have the UPS flat file to deal with, but something tells me NEXT Monday’s will be light on outgoing packages.

But whether or not I punch in at Nautica, that doesn’t change the fact that the Republicans are coming to town. I admit that I was perplexed, even a bit insulted, when I first heard the news. Unless I am mistaken, New York City is a traditionally Democratic stronghold. The last three Presidential elections swung in favor of either Clinton or Gore; Hillary Rodham Clinton is our Senator; and while Mayor Bloomberg is Republican, he was elected into office by the slimmest of voting margins, and I recall his campaign being less about denying a woman her right to choose and amassing huge budget deficits than about making New York City fiscally sound for the future.

What the heck is our current, Supreme Court-deemed president doing giving a speech at Madison Square Garden, the outside of which will likely be vice-gripped by anti-Bush sentiment, instead of at a more hospitable venue, like a prison in Waco, Texas, beside an electric chair?

The eternal optimist in me wants to believe Bush is coming here because he sees all the hostile New Yorkers as a challenge. After all, it would be easy to preach to the converted; much more difficult to change people to his way of thinking. And lest we forget, New York is a battleground state, and Bush needs to convince us that the war in Iraq is a just war, and that he is the better choice to lead this country against its terrorist enemies, if he wants a decent shot at the White House. Still, he could have easily asked Rudy Giuliani to be his political loudspeaker here. His choice to come to this city—the home base of many liberals who dislike him vociferously—in person, is, I think, a really ballsy move which has to be respected.

At the same time, the eternal pessimist in me argues that the only reason the GOP is renting out Madison Square Garden is because Bush wants to milk the September 11th attacks until the teet is withered and brown. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have the guts to go where he isn’t wanted. But the Bush administration didn’t have an identity prior to the destruction of the World Trade Center. As a result, the man must come to the city where those attacks took place, in order to capitalize on his image as our "War President."

Is Bush acting as a gutsy politician, or just a politician? Would anyone really give a damn about the answer, if not for the expectations of traffic gridlock and mass transit delays? What about all the talk of possible terrorist attacks on the news? Not to mention all the talk that all the talk of possible terrorist attacks on the news is part of a right-wing media conspiracy to make Bush—who needs to capitalize on his image as a "War President"—look all the more vital?

All I can say is this: Two weeks ago, I went into the heart of Harlem for "Monroe College at the Apollo," a benefit concert for which I wrote a keynote speech, and helped spread word of to the print media. Harlem is a nice place with really wide streets, but it’s blacker than MC Hammer’s rectum, and just as destitute.

If there’s one thing I learned about Harlem that night, it’s that Harlemites don’t like people who are neither black nor poor. We had quite the gallery of ignorant, peanut-headed Negroes. They loudly booed the Monroe College Dean who brought them over three hours of quality entertainment (including Deborah Cox of "Aida") for a relatively low ticket price; they refused to applaud a clearly-brilliant singer because she dared to cover Aretha Franklin without (gasp!) being black; and they reserved their biggest burst of applause for a spoken word poetess who took a cheap shot at the (not black) woman who claimed Kobe Bryant raped her.

Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t have minded the applause if the poetess had mentioned that Kobe Bryant wouldn’t have been accused of anything if he had kept his cock in his pants. But in Harlem, falsely accusing someone of raping you is a much worse crime than cheating on your wife. It’s this kind of moral rectitude that explains the relatively low percentage of teenage births and single-family households in that part of the city.

For shame on the white woman from a middle-class Colorado family, who dared point her finger at a brotha. And let my ordeal teach something to President George W. Bush: Don’t go where you’re not wanted, unless you’re ready to be made uncomfortable by the response you receive.

And if you're planning to make a stop in Harlem, Mr. President, you better not have accused Kobe Bryant of raping you.