There is something truly nauseating about the Democratic candidates for president prostrating themselves at the altar for votes, as witnessed last night on CNN.

I understand that, according to some research, 70% of Americans are “believers” of some sort (including myself), and we certainly don’t want what should be God’s votes going to Satan, the way they did last time. But is this any way to choose a president? My god at the moment leans toward Bill Richardson for president, but he must be a lesser god because Richardson can’t even get equal time in a debate, goddammit.

At what speed are Jefferson, Adams, and Monroe spinning in their graves?

“Life is pretty damn good and we should appreciate it more.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that that is the key takeaway from the author of “The Road,” the novel more than any other in the past year (perhaps in the past 10 years) that I’ve been thinking about, talking about, dwelling on, and recommending to friends, in his interview today by Oprah Winfrey. The bleakness of the post-apocalyptic “Road” is a reminder and an inspiration to recognize the value of what’s here now (and, with luck, to preserve that value). I remember in the immediate weeks after reading it thinking throughout every day that nothing I would face that day could be truly troubling by comparison. And isn’t that the strength of literature: to make you feel life anew?

I should also take a moment to profess my abject love of Oprah. This is probably only the third time I’ve watched her show, but every time I’ve been struck by her obvious genuine interest in the interviewee and the subject. (Want to see the exact opposite? Check out a man named David Letterman.) Some years ago I saw her interviewing a man who had written a book called “No Bad Boys,” about helping troubled youth; this author (and psychologist) was saying that he didn’t believe in “bad boys,” but in boys who needed help. As I watched that profile and his work with some of these boys and Oprah’s questioning, at one point I was reduced to tears. Sentimental? Sure. Heartfelt? Absolutely. I don’t believe in bad boys either, and I was glad to know that someone out there was doing something about that.

Maybe part of my love for Oprah, even given my limited exposure, is her determination to fix little corners of the universe. I too think things are fixable, or at least improvable. Oprah has no room for cynicism, and neither do I. She loves books and wants to talk about them with their authors. In a mainstream way, who has done this since Johnny Carson a long, long, long time ago? No one. It’s fashionably cynical to dismiss Oprah as a sentimentalist, but like her or not, she’s creating new readers for writers like Cormac McCarthy.

In this interview, McCarthy responds in style. He’s not a press hound — this is his first television interview ever, and one of very, very few interviews in his career — and that self-protectiveness may have contributed to his simple, matter-of-fact humility and wisdom, present throughout this interview. With regard to his seemingly odd punctuation style, which some have slammed as an affectation, he says, “I believe in periods and capitals and occasional commas. That’s it.” That style, he says, is “to make it easier to read, not harder.” Disagree if you will, but his books are beautifully written and quickly read.

If you missed the interview, it’s online at Oprah’s website. Here’s the link. If you’d like to see a talented contemporary novelist untrammeled by his recent success and wealth, one who acknowledges debts to forebears remembered (Faulkner, Joyce) and forgotten, watch this. To do so you’ll have to join Oprah’s free online book club (which you can later quit if you like), but is that so much to ask? You can always quit later, and all she’s trying to do is share her love for books she admires. Just like the rest of us.

I haven’t been a fan of Roger Ebert. Until now. He’s been sick with cancer — and hopes he’s getting better — and has had ugly, deforming surgery. But nothing is going to keep him from his film festival.

I like to think that if something like this happened to me, I’d still go to the San Diego Comic Con. Unlike Ebert, all the media wouldn’t turn out to photograph me in my post-surgical state.

Good for him. Character before beauty.

Life in comics may be hard for comic-book characters such as Captain America and Thor (both currently “dead,” both sure to return at some point). But as evidenced by the good health of Cap co-creator Joe Simon, 93 years old and still going very very strong, and the long lives of many other Golden Age greats, doing funnybooks keeps you going.

This seven-minute clip seems to be from a documentary I haven’t seen (yet).

Vonnegut’s mordant humor is well-served by his wry reading voice.

I really miss this guy.

One person I never thought would be the new Imus is this guy: sauve singer Bryan Ferry. I have been a Ferry (and Roxy Music) fan for almost 30 years, since picking up cassettes of both his solo album “The Bride Stripped Bare” and a Roxy Music compilation album from a discount bin at Woolworth’s. I listened to them endlessly and without further investigation — it was a couple of years before I discovered that the same man was behind both.

Ferry is in hot water for praising the “beauty” of Nazi imagery. I understand what he meant — he wasn’t praising evil, but recognizing the potential attraction of its fashion — but it does come off like admiring the sleek flowing lines in a KKK robe. Ferry sounds abjectly mortified. Here’s the story, and his apology. Thanks to Paul Crist for sending this link.

For years I have joked to friends that I’ve been trying to get my plays protested — if only angry villagers would show up and condemn me, then I could hit it big. Lately I’m not so sure.

Several people today have emailed me with links to the plays of Cho Seung Hui, the student behind the Virginia Tech massacre. Click here if you’d like to read them yourself.

They don’t tell us much beyond this: Mr. Cho was a very bad playwright. Really bad. The dialogue is forced and expositional, the staging doesn’t work, and characters such as the stepfather are set up as paper tigers for other characters to express their viewpoints. In fact, the only thing I like is the stepfather character’s name, Richard McBeef, but then only for a play in the style of Alfred Jarry.

Here’s the statement that these plays do not — repeat, do not — make: that because these are dark, troubled plays, Cho was clearly a dark, troubled person, someone who was going to be a murderer. No. These are dark, troubled plays that happen to be by someone who turned out to be a dark, troubled person who happened to turn out to be a murderer.

It always troubles me when people confuse the unattractive character in a play with its creator. Just because you’ve written racists, pederasts, murderers, and even Republicans into your play doesn’t mean you are one. It means that you are writing about them. Ian Fleming was in no way James Bond, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not raised by apes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have an uncle named Tom.

These things may seem obvious to most of us reading this. Yet all across the net tonight people are reading the plays of Cho Seung Hui and deciding that someone “should have known.” If Cho gave other signs of mental distress, that’s one thing. But the writing in these plays tells us only that he had no future as a playwright.

Except — and here’s an irony — I guarantee that some enterprising director or producer somewhere is right now printing out those plays and getting ready to produce them. Remember, you read it here first.

Yesterday there was a shooting spree at Virginia Tech. I don’t need to link to it — you’ve already heard about it. And been depressed by it. And today the polarized camps of “take away the guns” vs. “I have a right to bear arms” are once again all over the internet, still locked into their positions.

My position is somewhere in the middle. (But then, that’s where I think most sensible positions on most things are — somewhere between the polarized positions.) I was raised by gun owners and gun users and was one myself and I don’t recall any of us ever shooting anyone. Not for fun or sport, not out of dementia. In most ways, though, we were (and are) responsible people, so we also didn’t run a meth lab or produce child pornography in the basement or plunder savings and loans and bill the government for our reckless greed. I realize that not everyone can make these claims, and that laws exist to protect us from the irresponsible people, not the responsible people.

I don’t have much to add with regard to the gun “debate” — as much as there is a true debate — except this:

1. I don’t trust people who make their living being in either camp. That’s their butter in what is a guns and butter debate.
2. No matter what anyone in the bluest areas of the country think, no one is going to be able to round up all the guns in this country. There are dozens of millions of them. We’d better find better ways to live with them, and we would do better to limit the extremely crazy varieties (like automatic weapons that would leave nothing of Bambi’s mother behind to cook).

A couple of years ago Reason magazine ran a debate — a true debate — on this issue. Here’s a link.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you come across someone on a help line who is actually, well, helpful.

Today, I tip my hat to “Dennis,” wherever he may be.

If you’ve been following my ongoing data nightmare, which I began writing about here, you’ll recall that while I have all my data (and therefore can rest somewhat easy), I haven’t had access to it. I have a variety of computers both here at home and at my office, but I couldn’t see any good reason to restore it all to any of those — better to wait for the return of my primary laptop. Astonishingly, it came back yesterday, after only a little over a day in the shop. Now I’m putting the data back. So far it has been a major timesuck, but not too frustrating — that is, until I hit the QuickBooks accounting issue.

Last night I attached the MacBook Pro (recently fixed) to my old iMac via FireWire and did a “new computer” file swap that Apple allows when you’re configuring a computer for the first time. It’s incredibly easy and, once again, worked like a charm, transporting all the files from the iMac onto that laptop and, with it, all the various configurations. That means that applications I own but don’t have the software for, such as Appleworks, came over. That’s a good thing. It also means that the internet settings and accounts (and I have multiples of them) came over as well. Another good thing. It also brought over QuickBooks Pro, and I was able to download from .mac my backed-up file. Again, good things.

Then I booted up QuickBooks and was asked for a key code to register the product. I entered the key code directly from the software label — this is one piece of software that, believe me, I keep close to hand. It wouldn’t accept it. I tried it again. Wouldn’t accept it. Then, providing a physical picture of the definition of insanity, I tried it yet again hoping for a different result. Nothing doing. I was able to access my file, but the screen warned me ominously that I had 14 boots left, after which I’d have no access. Bear in mind that I’ve been running my business from his file since 2003. Resisting the urge to have a really strong drink (which would have led to many more), I went upstairs and watched a boring bad movie and finally fell asleep fitfully.

This morning, after putting off the inevitable, I finally called Intuit, maker of QuickBooks. I got what I expected:

1. Someone teenage-boy-sounding who suggested I go online to www.quickbooks.com/keycode, and who then chased me off the phone. I tried the URL — again, three times — and each time it redirected me to Yahoo. Evidently, that URL doesn’t exist.
2. I called back and spoke with another person who sounded like a teenage boy. This one suggested that I buy a new copy of the program ($249). I said I didn’t see any reason to do that — I already own the program, have registered it, and have a key code on the disk, it’s just not working. He told me to go to the quickbooks.com site, search for “keycode” and follow the directions. I did that, and it promised to email me a new keycode. When? It didn’t say. That wouldn’t do. Had it said even “today” I might have felt I could wait.
3. Third time, again navigating through the aggravating phone tree, I went to gethuman.com, a directory that provides prompts to avoid aggravating phone trees. (Use it often!) It worked — and I wound up talking to what was clearly India. I could barely understand this man, not only because of his accent, which was thick, but also over the din of about 5,000 other Indians on other phones behind him. I was irritated but did my best to keep it out of my voice; I didn’t want anyone, no matter where in the world, confusing my irritation with Intuit and my software issue with, possibly, irritation about speaking to Indians as a people. I also didn’t want to spread the image of the Ugly American — and I was certainly feeling ugly. This gentleman gave me a new number to call. You guessed it: It was the number for sales.
4. But this time, I got lucky. Whomever “Peter” in sales is, he took pity on me, even though I wasn’t going to buy anything. Although he’s now in Phoenix, he looked back fondly on his time spent living in Burbank, even mentioning the Black Angus that my friend Grant criticized for having food that was “too salty.” I explained my situation, and he said (before I could), “You shouldn’t have to buy a new version, you already own a copy.” And he transferred me to Dennis — evidently the lone helpful tech at Intuit, who gave me a new keycode and my registration number.

So now I have access to my accounting again. Thank you, Dennis, and thank you Peter for forwarding me to Dennis. I suspect you knew Dennis would help me where others would not. When he did help me, Dennis said, “I don’t understand why nobody would do this for you before.” Well, neither do I.

Tonight in class one of my students looked up and announced, “Oh, Kurt Vonnegut died. A friend texted me.”

And so he had.

Vonnegut was an early and lasting hero to me. My brother introduced me to his books starting when I was 11 and I was quickly hooked. In fact, the first book I ever bought myself was a Vonnegut book. I had read “Cat’s Cradle” and one or two others already, including probably “Sirens of Titan,” when David Evans, one of my teachers at Arthur Rann Middle School, noticed my interest and started talking about “Breakfast of Champions.” I asked if I could borrow it. (That one didn’t appear to be in my brother Ray’s library.) The teacher agreed. Later that day, though, there was a call at home from Mr. Evans asking to speak with my father. I put my father on, then ran upstairs and listened in on the other line. Mr. Evans said something like this: “Your son is very bright and he’s reading books by a man named Kurt Vonnegut. Lee would like to borrow his new book, and I would lend it to him, but I wanted to check with you first because it has adult themes.” Mr. Evans stressed that I was already reading things along these lines. My father had a question or two about the adult themes, Mr. Evans filled in some additional information, and finally my father said, and I’ll never forget these words, “Don’t lend it to him.” I hung up the phone, went downstairs, got my bicycle out of the garage, rode a mile through the woods to Goetsch’s Market, and bought “Breakfast of Champions” for myself. I took it home and read it cover to cover, outraged that my father was trying to ban it, and eager to find the adult themes. When I was done I couldn’t imagine what the objectionable part was, unless it was the little line drawing of what looked like conjoined parantheses and which was clearly identified as “a cunt.”

(And let that be a lesson to all would-be censors everywhere: Your actions only foment demand.)

Vonnegut taught me early lessons in thinking for myself, both in this example and in his actual writing. Being of a pragmatic bent, I don’t share his dour view — I always think we can make life even just a little bit better, and in the meantime there is much that is glorious. One of the glorious things was his string of bitingly funny and wise books.

A couple of years ago when my son Lex was between books I plucked “Cat’s Cradle,” a book that for some years I reread every year, and handed it to him. He liked it a lot and moved on to “Slaughterhouse Five.” In “Slaughterhouse Five,” Billy Pilgrim famously “comes unstuck in time.” Similarly, other characters throughout Vonnegut’s oeuvre find themselves transported to distant times and places, whether on Earth, Trafalmadore, or elsewhere. One thing that will not be coming unstuck and leaving us is Vonnegut’s body of work.