DEJA VU

When the bombs started falling in Gulf War I, I was heading back to my on-campus apartment with my roommate. Because a couple of our roommates had dropped out over the summer, these two guys we didn't know were assigned to take their places midway through the year. They were truly scary -- let's put it this way: I'd bet my present-day mortgage that both wound up becoming charter Maxim subscribers. Amazingly, they both had girlfriends, and remarkably well-adjusted ones, too, though every time they brought them over, they invariably wound up berating them about being stupid. Most of the time, though, they'd just scurry off to their room, close -- and lock -- the door, and then chuckle to each other as they set things on fire and listened to industrial rock. A few years later, when Beavis and Butthead first came on MTV, I did a double take-- these guys WERE Beavis and Butthead, only with 300 or so more SAT points to share between them.

Anyway. We were driving back from dinner and heard on the radio that the war had started. When we walked into the apartment, there were our roommates, sitting in front of the TV, drinking beer.

"You're just in time," the blond-haired, Beavis-like one said. "We're toasting the kicking of some towelheaded ass."

So last night, after watching the little 48-hour ultimatum countdown clock expire on MSNBC (pathetic in its own right -- I was joking that Dick Clark would host the final hour), we turned the TV off. An hour or so later, my old roommate called.

"You got a beer in your hand?" he asked.

And so the circle goes unbroken.

Oh, and those two roommates? Their names were Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer.