Washington, D.C. - Just after midnight last night, deep in thought as I perched on the gigantic white-marble lap of the (fellow great, Abraham) Lincoln Memorial ­ and, by-the-by, mezmerized by his equally gargantuan marble shoes just below me ­ I experienced an electrifying epiphany, a veritable fusillade of enlightenment that caused me to make, in the flash of a ridicholasecond, an exaggeronumental decision. So, Gentle Reader, recline further back in your dilapidated BarcoLounger, pop open a "cold one" of Pabst Blue Ribbon or some other equally excrementious domestic brew, and imagine, if you will, a piercing blast of trumpets pealing out Copland's "Requiem for the Common Man" ­ for I have an important announcement to impart to you!

bold envisioner of the future, not a benign septugenarian whose idea of "high-tech" is the fact that you can actually email the producers of C-SPAN. ("Liddy, look-they wrote back!!!")

B) He criticizes Hollywood's filmistines for producing calculated crapola, and then touts Independence Day as a "fine family film," despite its depiction of the dismal performance of Earth's defense systems against the alien attack. Any potential Commander-in-Chief that would commend such a Keystone Kops-like performance is not the man lead us into the century of high-tech military warfare. To paraphrase some of my friends in Silicon Valley, "Hey, dude ... didn't you see War Games?!?"

C) And finally, rather than viewing his nobly-incapacitated-in-WWII arm as a drawback, any cybersavvy candidate would have turned to the MIT MEdia-Lab for bionic enhancers that would have made his limb 100 times stronger than his rivals, thus allowing him to leverage his new powers and simultaneously debunk concerns about his age by annihilating Clinton and Perot ­ at the same time ­ in a nationally television arm-wrestling contest on ABC's Nightline. (C'mon Ted, you hop on there, too ­ I can take all THREE of ya!!!, etc.)

3. I, Ridicholas vs. Reform Candidate Ross Perot

A) As trivia buffs will no doubt rush to point out, it's true that this braggadocious billionaire did start his career at IBM and go on to create info-tech leader EDS before becoming Carson to Larry King's Ed McMahon. However, implying that this would help him serve us as President in a Wired Age would be like saying that daffy Schwartzenaggerian advicemeister Dr. Ruth could perform brain surgery because of her pseudo-medical status. In other words, just because it quacks like a duck (and he does, doesn't he?), doesn't mean it can fly.

B) Perot's deep and abiding ardor for running the show would be in direct conflict with the egalitarian, decentralized, barely managed chaos of an increasingly wired nation. And, given his love for periodic CIA-style intelligence scavenger hunts, I think a Ross in the White House would make Clinton look like Abbie Hoffman on the whole encryption issue.

C) And finally, Perot's love for colorful charts is remarkably ill-suited for a period when Website designers are becoming extremely conscientious about not loading up pages with infinitely-downloading graphics, java apps, holograms, bells, whistles, and VRML environments. If we think the Net is slow and crowded now, wait till President Perot starts designing the visual aids (and you know he will) for the several hundred "Virtual Town Halls" he would no doubt convene from the Oval Office. ("Honey, come quick! Tom Brokaw just said that the President's been learning PhotoShop! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!")

Your Email Opinion is Sought on the Following...

Well, my fellow Netizens, I'm sure the preceeding is only so much impassioned preaching to the converted. Surely you, of all constituencies, will flock to my banner. But there is a challenge of some magnitude ahead of us; to wit, spreading our message to the great unwired masses, who still turn to printed-upon pulp for their information and swim in the algaefied cultural waters of Rikki Lake for their divertisements. However, before we turn our attention to the dissemination of our raison d' etra, I must endeavor to make three collossal deliberations, namely, 1) the formation of a new political party under the aegis of which I will run, 2) the selection of a suitably-cyber running mate for our ticket, and 3) a platform for our young organization that will radiate with the illuminated brilliance of the distributed intelligence of the best, brightest, and most wired in our great nation.

I implore you to email me at once with your thoughts on party, running mate, and platform. Of course, while it is rare for an intelligence of a magnitude such as mine to seek advice from anyone save my inner muses, perhaps this little experiment in wired democracy will serve to provide you with an even higher level of enlightenment than usual from my column and its panaceaic effect on your life.

Well, then, stout Netizens ­ to your keyboards, all! Let the clacking of your keys be Digital Revolution's Shot Heard 'Round the World! We have nothing to fear but fear itself! Don't shoot till you see the ... uhh ... a foolish consistency is the ... hmm ... well you know what I mean!!! To the ramparts!!! I myself will leap into action by attending ­ with my beautiful and brilliant wife, Dante Exaggeronte ­ a dinner to be held in my honor at the Washington Press Club. Perhaps I can induce a few of those ink-stained wretches of the press ("press"! ­ how charmingly antiquated!) to feature our crusade in their publications. We shall see ... So, adieu, my compatriots! I have but one more task to attend to here before I go ...

No, no, President Lincoln, Java is a web application, not a stimulant, as you keep saying. Sheesh...

Next Issue: E-mail from the Future

George, Abe, Teddy and now ... Ridicholas

"So, uhh ... what's going on?" you manage to sputter, alternating between slurping your Pabst and dribbling it onto your keyboard. Allow me to further set the mis en scene for my shattering declaration. There I was, communing, Hilary Clinton-style, with the spirit of our greatest president, drawing inspiration for a chapter on cyberpolitics for my next book, Fleeing Digital, keys clacking like the hum of a thousand parallel-processing supercomputers, when suddenly, a mental image materializes with all the power of a SOMA-spawned Java app: like Lincoln himself, I, too, must now bend to the task of steering our great nation through a period of great turbulence. That's right, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Internet, I, Ridicholas Galileo Exaggeronte, hereby accept ... ahem, excuse me, declare ... my candidacy for the President of the United States of America!

Well, now that Pabst Blue Ribbon has undoutedly been splusssshed out all over your monitor, I will give you a little time to pull yourself together and clean things up with one of the pungent sweatsocks I imagine to be garnishing your "living room" floor like last year's parsley ... there ... that's better, isn't it? Now, to business: faithful readers of this column will have no trouble imagining the myriad talents and abilities that your humble cybercolumnist would bring to our nation's highest post. In fact, even Gen X politicharmeister JFK Jr. has seen fir to plaster me across the front of this month's issue of George, as well as interviewing me in-depth about all things presidential and exaggerontial. We are, after all, rocketing into the Digital Age, and we obviously need a leader who can both grasp and shape the dramatic changes being brought on by forces such as the Net, the Web, electronic commerce, the Email Society, cybercash, online political groups, real-time international chat rooms, virtual reality, information overload, the possibility of cyber-warfare, the prospect of digital "haves-and-have-nots," and, perhaps most disturbing of all, the People Magazine Website. Clearly, you need look no further for the ideal ubermensch for the job.

Exaggeronte: A True CyberCandidate for our Wired World

That much established, please allow me to compare my qualifications with those of my fellow presidential contenders, keeping in mind my respect for their various talents and abilities, severely limited though they may be. Let us begin!

1) I, Ridicholas vs. President Bill Clinton.

A) Despite Presidential lackey Gore's claim that he coined the term "infosuperhighway" ­ which, my mother reports, were actually my first words as a baby after "Mama" and "laptop" ­ Big Mac Billy evinces all the cyber-savvy of one of the portly frozen chickentrepreneurs that helped propel his considerable bulk from Arkansas into office.

B) He helped the loathsome Communications Decency Act snake its way through our Congress, carefully looking the other way until this bluestocking bill was finally given the kibosch by angry Netizens. Cyber Rights Now, El Presidente!

C) He is still in love with Democratic albatrosses such as the FDR-JFK-LBJ-AFL-CIO/New Deal/Camelot/Great Society/centralized economic planning model that the Net promises to turn into fiscal sushi with its burgeoning decentralized cybercommerce juggernaut.

D) And finally, he hasn't once consulted me on the great technopoliticalatte issues of the day, thus showing a startling paucity of inner-circle-selecting-acumen. "Four more years"? I fear not, my Noble Tumbleweed...

2. I, Ridicholas vs. Republican Candidate Bob Dole

A) Born shortly after the Civil War, our grumpy GOPappy seems to perceive the presidency much as a six-year-old would his turn on the amusement park Whirl-A-Gig ­ "Me next, me next!" But these paradigmorphing times demand a