"I had a horrible night last night," goes one joke in America this week. "I dreamed aliens landed and said, `Take me to your leader.' I didn't know what to do."
Jokes are keeping spirits up as the see-saw presidential election tests the country's capacity for melodrama to the limit. The mood has switched from excitement, to humor, to suspense and now to embarrassment.
In Florida, though, there is a deepening rancor. The state seems as angry and divided today by the legal battles to decide who should become president as it was a generation ago when the war raged in Vietnam. The atmosphere is reflected in the phone-in radio shows and the e-mail "chat rooms."
Comments over the past 24 hours include: "Maybe Florida should put candidates' pictures on the ballot like they do in the Third World," "Bush is just too dumb to be president" and "Gore and the Crybabies -- it sounds like some clunky rock group."
Delores Panter, 70, of Oklahoma, said: "Everybody's talking about it. Some want Bush to win. Others want Gore. The Lord will choose the one he wants. I'd like him to decide quickly."
Mark Hartshorne, 35, of Tulsa, Arizona said: "It's an embarrassment. We're supposed to be the strongest nation in the world and we can't even count."
Throughout America, in diners, offices and homes, one phrase sounds out: "Enough already." Safe in the knowledge that neither candidate will make a noticeable difference to the country when elected, most Americans now want their regular television programs back and the world spotlight turned off.
Many just want it all to end and have lost patience with the voters in Palm Beach, who claimed that a confusing ballot paper meant that they voted for the arch-conservative Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.
"If you are old enough to vote, you are old enough to read the ballot," said John Rieder, 49, in Wisconsin.
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