Some time passed, and the subject moved to the house he owns across the way in Westminster, inexplicably zoned R-1. I asked him what that meant, and he explained that you could only have one house on it. He wanted to make it a duplex -- get it zoned R-2 -- but the city wouldn't let him. This was pretty amazing, seeing as how Orange County is suffering from the severest housing shortage in my memory. Now, Dennis is a pretty easygoing fellow, but he was clearly irked that, in the face of Wal-Mart having been given the green light for a major development just the other side of Trask, the city wouldn't let him put a measely second house on his own lot. Well, such are local politics, I told him, and left it at that.

The funny thing was, I later thought, that -- well, here's this union guy, right, who's voting for the soon-to-be-President Gorebot and his Highly Motivated Team of Trained Fascists, and probably making payments (whether he knows or likes it or not) to Gore's campaign through his union dues. Yet what he doesn't know is this: Al Gore is in favor of federal zoning committees. Yup. And if he thought building that add-on was tough when his opponent was some schmuck at the city planning office, well, wait'll he sees what the Gore-man has in mind.

This is what makes me mildly optimistic for the future of the country: as it gets wealthier, people may -- may -- actually wake up and occaisionally smell their self-interest. And I think for Dennis, and maybe a lot of other regular guys like him, federal zoning laws just aren't part of that.