FROM judicial am-Bush to crashing Gore, the US election has produced such a surfeit of twisted puns and tortured jokes that it is easy to overlook the irony supplement. Look at the paradoxes. A man who claims to have been instrumental in the birth of the Internet—defeated because voting machines and ballot papers from the industrial age cheated his constituents. He monitors the confusion in Florida on an array of devices such as a Blackberry two-way pager, a high-speed laptop and a high-definition television. And worse, it all happens on the cusp of the millennium when America has defeated the Y2K problem and is poised at a technological launch pad for a journey that may well end up substituting the word 'living' with the term 'functioning'.
Such a confluence of misfortunes could drive strong politicians to suicide. But as it happens, it may have saved America a thoughtless trip to technological utopia. In the years to come, this country may well wonder if its "electile dysfunction" did not happen at the right time.
Yes, America needed the check because it had...
