Evan Fleischer - The Campaign. lyrics

1. The Prime Minister of Italy had just informed her team that she was going to campaign for reelection traveling backwards through time. But won't that be overly didactic, M'am? an aide asked. Not necessarily, the Prime Minister replied as balcony window light came in and conducted thousands of particles of dust with tiny orchestral batons. Aids imagined missiles flying in reverse through the air and clattering back into their silos like circus cannon jumpers, an Iraqi Museum that vacuumed scattered shards of pots back back through their doors, and phones losing photographs, music, and their screens altogether. Francesa Piraelli was 45. She'd been elected Mayor of Rome, was the daughter of a diplomat, and was three years into her first term as Prime Minister. Her posture carried with it a thin echo of the way the way the aqueducts themselves spined out across the city. And what's wrong with that? she continued. Begin with victory and end with hope. And the debates! She had gotten up from his desk and was pacing back and forth. My opponents won't know whether I'm coming or going! M'am, Giulio, her personal aide, said, making his way to lean on a corner of the desk. Francesca. My friend. What happens when you're the only one campaigning back through time? That wouldn't necessarily make any — he reached for a word — … sense, would it? Wouldn't it be better to do it the old-fashioned way? One day at a time? Oh, no, the Prime Minister said looking about the room. I'm planning on taking you all with me. The room went quiet. Those in the room had found the notion of traveling back in time caught in their throats, as if each and every one of them knew they had to say something, but they couldn't find the words. But what if we started to accidentally campaigning against Giuliano Amato? Julio, her national security advisor, said. Berlusconi? Emilio Colombo? What it we started campaigning against Camillo Benso himself? Don't be ridiculous, Francesa said. That wouldn't happen. (It did.) And, besides, the Prime Minister said, with some of them, I bet they wouldn't even notice. (They didn't.) What happened the other day? one aide wondered. The Prime Minister ran into some secessionists in Venice, Julio replied. They had that — you know — tank, the Interior Minister said. And you had — oh, what's it called — lunch on it, Giulio said, unconsciously mimicking Julio's style, though for evidently reactive reasons. (Someone dressed as an orange candelabra had stalked the stage of the piazza in the rain as De André's translation of Bob Dylan's “Desolation Row” played in the background from a nearby cafe. She cut through the umbrellas and extended her hand. What are you doing in Venice? How's my beret? I hear there was a tank. And, it's fine.) That's the thing, her Interior Minister said. We want to make sure you don't encounter yourself as you're campaigning. How would voting work? Would people just get increasingly agitated by the notion that they might have missed something important? She had grown up liking everyone and wanting to be liked herself, so when the favour wasn't returned, she was genuinely surprised — had she done something wrong? And, after a few years of shifting back and forth between a variety of social gears, dissembling from one direction to the next, she realized she hadn't. She was herself. She liked herself. And who the hell were they? 2. Piraelli and her team collected themselves and made their way to the nearest newsagent and grabbed the first paper they saw. That'll be two Euro, the newsagent replied, rubbing his temple as if he were pushing through a spiritual curtain in search of spiritual kitchen coffee. Would there be reports of the Prime Minister declaring victory, thanking her supporters, and disappearing in a syntax-eliding flash? They flipped page after page: some sport. A recipe. A pope. The answer appeared to be ‘No.' It was the end of February, 2009, and Piraelli was nowhere to be seen. They paid the newsagent, dazed with ebullience, and walked slowly around town and noted with surprise the restaurants that had reopened. Her bodyguard tried out the nickname of Madame Connecticut Yankee. Both Giulio and the Interior Minister furrowed their eyebrows in disapproval. Pigeons bounced up and down off the pavement of the square like they were attempting a spacewalk. 3. 1978. When she was younger, Francesa had lived in an apartment she once told someone was filled with spotlights dog-sniffing out the future at the expense of the present, so one day she decided to write a dictionary that would make it Christmas for a week. It had the ring in the ear of a child's wish, but there was a nugget of rebellion she felt like she'd managed to find in it, too. She came into the living room from the kitchen with a gla** of wine in one hand, a dictionary in the other, and an “A-ha” rolling off her lips. She had a stack of yellow notepads clutched in her left hand. The kitchen table welcomed her. A dictionary did not have an explicit thesis, she knew, but she knew how to arrange the parts like a Sunday crossword. She knew how to give a dictionary a goal, filled it with words that meant something like, ‘Slow, calming snow as seen from a bus window.' Before the week was out, one of her roommates had snowed-in s** and with absent-minded happiness filled a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows until the marshmallows began to tumble over the edge like a bag of popcorn jailbreaking its way out of a microwave, spotlights swooping and all. Francesca looked at her work and grinned. 4. 1921. “We've just received word that your opponent is actually campaigning by traveling further into the future.” “Sequentially?” “No, no.” Giulio shook his phone. It yelped in shock. He looked at it for a moment. “In one hundred year leaps and bounds, it looks like.” “Son of a b**h. How am I supposed to argue against someone campaigning in 2300 as a woman from 2015 through an audience from 1921, the majority of whom were probably born in the late 1800's?” “It is a challenge, M'am.” She climbed up on the stage, raised her hands, and summoned calm. “My friends. I know I stand before you as a woman, but women are changing the world. And they'll change the future, too. I'm not talking about what you've heard about suffragettes or the fact that women just got the vote in the United States last year. But I want you to bear with me and imagine a few things: I want you to imagine a woman in charge of the country. I want you to imagine her opponent. I want you to imagine that her opponent has decided to ignore the problems of the present and focus squarely on the future, focus so intensely, in fact, that the opponent travels into the future itself. Yes. Like something out of a Jules Verne novel or an old folktale. So when this opponent wakes up in the future, he is stressed. He is anxious. He is surrounded by strange shapes, colors, sounds, and beings. To de-stress — because he's feeling lonely, and who hasn't felt lonely from time to time? — he starts an affair with an alien. And though the physical mechanics of it are complicated — extremely complicated, in fact; some parts of the alien's anatomy exist in another dimension, for one — the emotional reality of it is sound. And some of you may accuse me of violating my campaign pledge to not run any negative advertising, but there's a difference between being negative and being critical, isn't there? So that's what I'm saying, and that's what I'm putting out there: my opponent is having an affair with a spaceman.” 5. 80 AD. “We really should go, M'am.” “Is there anywhere I can campaign?” “You're in Pompeii.” “So that's a ‘no?'” 6. Election Day saw Francesca rise in the councils of Caesar.