So here’s a conversation that I’d love to have been party to: Douglas Rushkoff spends a couple of hours with Al Gore. And in his post about it, Rushkoff has the charming naive enthusiasm of a teenage crush. And by all accounts with good reason:
But still, I could imagine him back in the dorm room, sitting up all night with the rest of us and dreaming about how things might be – if we were ever in charge. With Gore, much more than Clinton, we almost got one of us in there. This was an inspiring thought to me, until I realized that this might be as close as we ever get
I’ve had a couple of minor collisions with Douglas Rushkoff in my life. I e-mailed him once about our mutual crush Grant Morrison, and managed to keep a conversation going online for a few days about The Bomb and whether or not he was doing a treatment for an Invisibles movie. And then a few years later Davo and I went to see him speaking in a café in Golden Square, where I desperately wanted to speak about a dozen times and finally squeezed out one rather hopeless question before becoming distracted by a cute bloke.
Nevertheless, I consider this to be one degree of association between us – the same solid degree of separation that would exist if we had shagged like bunnies or grown-up together in Arkansas. Diseases I had that day may have infected him. It’s possible. Which means that Al Gore could have been en-common-colded by me once-removed. If the disease lay dormant for just over twelve months and only sprang into action at the hint of uncharismatic but otherwise cool presidential candidates. We’re practically brothers.