September 2008 Archives

 

Walking home with Liam today after school, around 5:30.  Liam was chatting madly about a new dessert he's going to invent, "Butterscotch Caramel Kingdom," which - as near as I can tell - involves dipping butterscotch candy in caramel sauce and mixing each piece into ice cream.

Yum.

Walking towards us along Irving Place came a Hasidic man with prayer curls and a long beard, wearing the full ensemble: beaver hat, white stockings, round-toed slippers, long black coat.  He asked us which way to First Avenue, then continued on his way.

"Wow," said Liam, dessert thoughts temporarily banished. "He must be French."

 

The playground. To an outside observer, it is a noisy but innocent enclosure, in which children frolic and gambol, engaging each other in happy chatter and utterly compelling games of make-believe.

From the inside, however, the playground offers insight into the world Darwin saw in the Galapagos a hundred years ago: a universe in which the strong perch on monkey bars hurling projectiles at the weaker inhabitants below.

Consider, please, the sandbox.  Ever watched a two-year-old in the sandbox as he or she marches around snatching all the shovels, all the buckets, all the little sandy matchbox cars and plastic ponies and green octopus sand-molding thingys?  And then she herds these things into a corner, claiming that she NEEDS them.  She WANTS them.  They are all, in fact, HERS.

 

The parent nervously intervenes, tells little Coco or little Cooper that, no, the toys belong to the other children too, see, and won't it be more fun to play together? 

To which the child would respond, if the child had the proper vocabulary, "Fuck that. I got this stuff, possession is nine-tenths, lady, and those suckers are SOL." 

Every parent has been in the position of having to reach gingerly into the sandbox and redistribute the toys. And if you're a parent and insist that you've never had to do that...well, either you're not paying attention or you've given birth to Christ.

Don't you love the moment when you realize the only recourse is to lift your kid bodily out of the sandbox (ignoring all those veiled glances from the other parents  who are delighted that it's not THEIR kid causing the scene) and carry his flailing, weirdly strong little body (how a child can be so strong on a diet comprised basically of white food is anyone's guess) over to a bench for a little talk about how it's nicer to share. 

The kid may grudgingly agree with you, but it's a purely contingent acquiescence, designed only to get the hell back INTO the sandbox and start the process all over again, perhaps attempting to lure another child into becoming a co-pillager, thus deflecting some of the trouble away from himself.

Over the past few years, as I sit in the playground, watching all these would-be Masters of the Universe stomp around, I've had the depressing thought that maybe, at base, we are all ... base. Are greed, self-interest, and violence so deeply embedded in human nature that my endless reminders of "say please! say thank you! ask nicely! share with your brother!" will create only the thinnest veneer of civilized behavior and that as soon as the going gets too tough - or too easy - it will be every man for himself? Caveat emptor, mofo...

I trust that by now you see where I'm going with this? Let's substitute ... hmmm ...Wall Street for sandbox, and million-dollar bills for buckets and shovels.  Does the picture become clearer?

The men (and okay, probably not all men - Carly Fiorina comes flapping to mind) who have been running our economic show (into the ground) remind me of the seagulls in "Finding Nemo," who hurtle through the harbor, screeching "mine, mine, mine" until they get stuck, beaks first, and are unable to move.

  

So now Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke et al have their beaks in a sail (or asses in a sling; choose your visual) and we are supposed to do what, exactly? 

A $700 billion dollar bailout? That's a whole lot of buckets and shovels. 

As we say on the playground, there are consequences for bad behavior.  Do these guys really expect us to REWARD them for their greed and stupidity, their cupidity and amorality? 

We're going to give this big check to Henry P. and expect him to be the grownup who patrols the sandbox and gets everyone to behave? A man who only a few months ago was on the Sunday talk shows extolling the virtues of the "flexible" US markets?  He reminds me of the playground parent who sits on the bench furthest from the sandbox, scrolling endlessly through her blackberry while her little angel tramples everyone in the sandbox. This same parent, of course, swoops in, eyes blazing, as soon as anyone dares to chastise Little Angel for grinding sand into some other kid's hair.

If there are no rules - no rules that anyone can understand, anyway - and no punishments for skirting just to the outside of the law, then why should we be surprised that Wall Street is slipping slowly into New York Harbor? No one with any power to intervene seemed to notice, or care, that scruples were being compromised almost as fast as fortunes were being made.

And now these same people want us to give them back their toys, maybe even give them newer, bigger, shinier toys.

My own inner child - herself never far from the surface - looks at this mess and screams "NOT FAIR NOT FAIR NOT FAIR." 

She's right. It's not fair. But that's life in the sandbox, I guess, if there aren't any grownups paying attention. 

 

The other night my friend Chris asked why Sarah Palin spurred me to start this blog. At first I thought he was kidding - la belle Sarah rattled a lot of cages, not just mine.

I started to explain, no, it wasn't just the incredible cynicism of the McCain camp assuming that just because she's a woman, Palin would show all of us "vagina Americans," as Samantha Bee so wonderfully put it on The Daily Show a while back, that McCain could be an alternative to Clinton.

And then -- I confess -- my response became a rant.

"But ignore their cynicism," I said to Chris. "What about...the Supreme Court?"

Let's imagine it's ten years down the road. McCain is long since dead, and even though President Palin was ousted at the end of her first term, she managed to appoint three Supremes to the bench, who haven't just revoked Roe v. Wade, they've made it practically illegal even to THINK about abortion.

Now imagine that my oldest son, who is now almost eight, has decided he likes girls and has ... er ... gotten into a Bristol-n-Levi situation. What would we do? Fly Liam and his galpal to Canada or Mexico for an abortion? Or say to our almost eighteen year-old-son, "oh heck, honey, we know you made a bad choice, but let's do the responsible thing and have a wedding. And then, heckfire, you can both move in with me and daddy in our two-bedroom apartment and we'll find a space for the new arrival. Maybe the bathtub could be a bassinet?"
 
But wait. Here's an even darker scenario:

Imagine this: my younger boy decides that he likes boys, not girls. Then the shit will really hit the fan. Because in a post-President Palin society, it will have become illegal for boys to touch each other at any point, at any age, other than during a hockey or football match, when most of their bodies are carefully concealed under protective padding.

Now as it happens, Chris wrote a great book a few years ago, called Queer Cowboys, which is about the long tradition of queer culture that pervades that greatest of all US myths, the cowboy (It's available on Amazon - just use the portal to the right). Chris lives in PA half the week, with his partner Clyde, who is, coincidentally, a jockey - not quite a cowboy, but damn close. I'm hoping that my Palin rant over dinner the other night makes them get on their ponies and ride around the neighborhood registering voters, if for no other reason than to ensure that my kids--everyone's kids--can shtup without fear. Or at least, no fear other than the fear of being grounded for all of high school and maybe college, too.

What's that you say? Haven't registered to vote yet? No need to saddle up the ponies ... just click here!

 

I got a summons for jury service last fall.I know that some people think jury duty offers a fascinating glimpse into the court system; they feel all civic-minded (and revel in the "hey can't make that meeting because I'm on jury duty" excuse). 

Not me. 

So you can imagine my joy when a friend told me that full-time caregivers with children under the age of 12 can request exemptions from jury service. 

I got myself down to Centre Street, wandered around from building to building trying to figure out where I should stand in line, finally found the right line, stood there, stood there, stood there. Realized that I was nervous - as if I were about to be arrested for crimes I didn't even know I'd committed. 

When it was my turn, some very friendly fellow looked at the birth certificates for Liam and Caleb, looked at the form I'd filled out, made a few notes on a piece of paper, and said I'd be removed from the list until Caleb was old enough to be in kindergarten full time.

Et voila!  No jury for me, for at least two years.

But my exemption presents me with a very modern math problem: how is it that I can be a full-time caregiver AND have a full-time job?

I'm lucky: my job has the strange rhythms of the college school year, but lots of other parents don't have that luxury and they still confront the same math problem: full-time worker, full-time caretaker, one one-hundred-and-sixty-eight-hour week.

So while a jury duty exemption helps a teeny bit, it doesn't help when you're supposed to be giving a power-point talk about human resource development at the same time as you're supposed to be applauding your son's fourth grade dance recital.

Clearly, until our society figures out how to solve this particular math problem, we should all give birth to Hermione Granger time-turners at the same time as our children slide into the world.

 

I promised myself that I'd stop writing about Sarah Palin because frankly, what more is there to say? 

 

Then I saw this photo in the Times this morning and I got cranky all over again. What's that line from "The Godfather III"? Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in....

 

The sloganeering posters in this photograph are another reason why access to Photoshop should be regulated: here yet again is la belle sarah, but this time instead of the guns-and-gals image, her head has been superimposed on Rosie the Riveter. 

 

What's wrong with this picture? 

 

First a few facts:

 

Rosie the Riveter started as a promotional campaign that encouraged women to enter the work force during World War II, mostly by tackling the manufacturing and industrial jobs that had been vacated by men fighting overseas.

 

Women were told it was their patriotic duty to sacrifice the comforts of home for the rigors of work and they answered that call in droves: over six million women went to work outside the home during this period, an unprecedented rise in female employment. The work they did wasn't glamorous, "feminine," or domestic, but it was absolutely necessary: these Rosies kept the wheels of US manufacturing moving during the war years. Many of them worked in factories that produced the necessities of war for soldiers: bombers, tanks, weaponry.

 

Here is a less glamorous picture of women welders, by Margaret Bourke-White:

 

It's a slightly different image than pretty Rosie with her bulging bicep, but equally at odds with Pretty Palin, who probably HAS gotten dirty in her life (hard to field-dress a moose and stay moussed), but who always has a weather eye out for the best camera angles.

 

What does Sarah Palin have to do with Rosie the Riveter? As mayor, governor, and now veep candidate, she presents herself as a woman who can have it all, but she has never worked for any of the necessities that working women need:  health insurance, pre-natal care, affordable safe child-care, flexible work schedules. Call me crazy but I'd say that even stay-at-home-moms need those things, too.

 

I know that Palin had a full-time nanny when her kids were younger, and I find myself wondering who scrubs her toilets, washes her clothes, cleans her house? Does she do it, perhaps on one of those days when she's at home in Anchorage but billing the people of Alaska for the governor's work she's not doing in Juneau? Does the First Dude do dishes?

 

What do Palin and McCain have to do with Rosie the Riveter?  McC & P carry forward the policies of an administration that encouraged people to SHOP in support of the war effort.  Never once have we been asked to make any sacrifices to support the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistant.  

 

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a big fan of sacrifice but it does seem we're asking a relatively small percentage of families to support the war at the cost of the flesh, blood, and mental health of their children, shouldn't the rest of us do SOMETHING? Maybe, oh, I don't know, try to become more fuel efficient?

 

What do Palin and McCain have to do with Rosie the Riveter?  Rosie's image and her "we can do it" slogan have been linchpins of the feminist movement for as long as I can remember.  I have seen Rosie's face bobbing up and down at pro-choice rallies, at Clinton rallies, at "Take Back the Night" protests.  What do Palin and McCain have to do with any of these things? 

 

I can think of only one way to connect Sarah and Rosie: when women worked in the manufacturing plants, they earned roughly half what a man did for the same job. Men earned about $55 per hour, women about $32.  Would Sarah have settled for the Alaska governor's job if her salary had been that much less than that of her male predecessor? Somehow, I think not. Sarah has Rosie (and the legions of feminists who followed in Rosie's workbooted footsteps) to thank for that.

 

Sarah may be riveting her right-wing supporters but to the rest of us? She's just a pretty face pasted on a poster.  Pure P.R. intended to assuage Republican moderates that McCain is, in fact, a with-it maverick, who "gets" women and knows what they need.  But if his examples are Cindy on the one hand and Sarah on the other, then what McCain "gets" about women wouldn't fill Rosie's upraised fist.

 

 

 

 

At the end of class last week, one of my NYU students asked me where I was from and when I told her that I was originally from the midwest, she looked surprised. "You seem like I always imagined a New Yorker would be," she said.

I'm not going to hazard what she might have meant by that comment (fast talking? highly functioning crazy lady? digressive to the extreme?) because I was too busy realizing that as of this fall, I've lived in NYC for twenty years. Two decades.

Which means that for all intents and purposes I AM a New Yorker.

Which means that to Palin et al, I'm Scary Urban Sinner; to the Rudy G. who showed up in St. Paul, I'm cosmopolitan (said sneeringly) and flashy.

But I digress.

How to trace the journey of two decades? Ostensibly, I moved here in 1988 for a doctoral program in English at NYU, but really I moved here for a boy who said he loved me, and who I'd loved from afar for five years.

The boy didn't last. The doctorate did. And although I'd planned to come here, get my degree, and leave (with said boy) ... I stayed.

Stayed, and stayed, and stayed. Lived in a variety of hellish apartments, moving so often that my mother back there in the heart-land wrote my address in pencil because she was tired of scribbling out the entries in her address book (remember, kids, this was in the days BEFORE palms, treos, blackberries, iWhatevers).

Devastated by the boy's betrayal, I felt helpless against Manhattan's onslaught: the labyrinths of the subway, the nonsensical intersections of the West Village. (HOW could West 4th intersect with West 10th? Greenwich STREET and Greenwich AVENUE?)

I crumbled against the cacophony of Washington Square Park, that mythic heart of "the village" and the closest thing that NYU has to a campus.  At college, tucked in the quiet heart of New England, I had been funky -- barefoot in my Indian print skirt. Here? I was just another girl in paisley leggings and hightops.

Back in those days, the late 1980s and early 90s, drug dealers patrolled each entrance to Washington Square. Each man had a few square feet of sidewalk as his personal fiefdom but they all had the same chant: "cocaine, loose joints, tripsfoyohead ... cocaine, loose joints, tripsfoyohead ..."  

I never patronized that particular sales force, but the remnants of their wares could be found all over the park. All over the city, for that matter. It took me almost a year before I realized  that the sidewalk was NOT littered with the nubs of Bic ballpoint pens. (This is what happens when you're in graduate school: EVERYTHING is about studying.) 

Those little blue and red doodads everywhere were the tops to crack vials.

Where did those vials came from?  Were they, in fact, sawed-off pens? (Better a sawed-off pen than a sawed-off shotgun, I always say.)  Or were giant discount bags of nubbin lids available at office supply stores?  I imagined the signs: "Crack-vial Lids on Special! 1000 Lids for Ten Bucks!" 

But somewhere along the way during this last twenty years, the crack vials went away; the drug dealers went away (due to Rudy G.'s tough-on-crime days as mayor of this cosmopolitan, flashy city. Do those people in St. Paul know what Rudy looks like in a dress? Gawjus, jes' gawjes...

 

That Rudy went away; my hightops went away, leggings too. My friends moved away.

But I stayed.

I got a job. I got married. I got a kid. I got another kid. 

I got a family. In Manhattan. Now THAT is "tripsfoyohead."

Sometimes I look around wildly when one or another of my children calls out "mommy!" as we walk through the city...certainly it's not ME they're talking to, is it?

The only singsong chanting I hear in Washington Square (besides the eternally earnest folkies who sit under the trees doing Dylan singalongs) is me: "becareful, slowdown, don'tpushyourbrother."

Just for the record, I never smoked crack, but that's mostly because in my ill-spent youth, I loved cocaine WAY too much and knew that just one crack rock would send me straight to the gutter and an early death.  

There is, however, a new drug in my life and its remnants are everywhere: in my living room, under my dining table, the coffee table, my desk.

Legos.

 

 

Legos are the new crack: you need more and more to get off. A small set, innocently purchased as a "let's see what this is like," becomes a quest for the ExoForce Mobile Devastator (1009 pieces; my junkie eldest son, 6 ½ at the time, put it together by himself in about 2 hours. God only knows what he's going to be building when he becomes a disaffected adolescent.)

There is a particular lego piece, however, that we should notice: the nubbin. Perfect for capping a light-saber handle, a space-ship steering column, a treasure chest, a crack vial.

So there you have it. Two decades in Manhattan, spelled out in small, brightly colored pieces.

 

I promised myself I wouldn't write any more Palin-ontology posts. Susan, on the clothesline blog (http://www.clotheslineblog.com/) suggests that we should all shut about Sarah and concentrate instead on getting Obama elected, so that Sarah will slink back (in all senses of "slink") to The Refuge State and concentrate on her per diem paychecks (suspended during the campaign) and on making sure that all of Alaska gets their hearts right with god.

So instead I will write ... about my children. The younger one. He's four years old and deeply attached to what we call his "little plastic friend" (or LPF, aka his pacifier). He calls the LPF his "nookie," and boy you should see the heads swivel on crowded Manhattan streets when this child calls out from his stroller (or the back of my bike, or as he trots along beside me holding my hand), "I WANT NOOKIE! NOOKIE, NOOKIE, NOOKIE!"  

I imagine grown men walk by him and mutter to themselves, "Me too, kid, me too."

Except when thwarted in his desire for nookie, Caleb is a pretty cheerful little boy (and hey, aren't we all crabby when we're thwarted in that particular desire?). He's usually all dimples and smiles -- and the occasional right hook, but that's another post.

So the other morning, as we stood waiting for the elevator to go to school, on a lovely September day, it seemed out of character for him to be frowning, mournful, as worried as a shareholder in Lehman Brothers. He chewed on his nookie like a poker-playing old man chews on a cigar.

Me: Caleb, what's wrong? You look so sad.

Caleb: I don't want to get old, Mommy.  I don't want to die.

Me neither, kid, me neither.

 

As galling as it may be to admit it, Sarah Palin has energized the electorate: the far-right is thrilled to bits with her fundamentalist credentials, the left is terrified that a moose-killer who isn't Teddy Roosevelt may be heiress to the Whitest House ever; and those in the middle are in a muddle: they may not be convinced about Obama's ideas but they aren't sure they want the old guy and the pit bull to win, either.

I've been goosed by Sarah too, into (finally) starting to blog, although my intention initially was not to write about politics but instead to write about being a parent, professor, and writer in Manhattan. Now, however, I am riveted by Palin-otology and wondering what it is about her that makes me want to clench my fists and hop around like Rumpelstiltskin when he finds out that the Princess has discovered his real name.

It's not the accent, the hair-do, or the hypocrisy of advocating marriage and motherhood for her 17-year-old daughter. It's not her facile assertion that any woman can juggle work and family -- without bothering to mention the need for health insurance, a nanny, and a job (or the power) that makes it all right to bring her kids to work whenever she needs to.

No, it's none of those things. It's the god's will argument: that whatever she does is god's will -- and therefore unassailable. It's like we've been thrust back into the days of the divine right of kings, when to argue against the king was to argue against god, and therefore a double sin: heresy and treason in one fell swoop.  

Joe Biden offers an alternative: a deeply religious person not convinced that his god should be your god. Here's Joe on Meet the Press last Sunday (9/7), when Tom Brokaw asked him about abortion rights:

MR. BROKAW: But if you, you believe that life begins at conception, and you've also voted for abortion rights...

SEN. BIDEN: No, what I voted against curtailing the right, criminalizing abortion. I voted against telling everyone else in the country that they have to accept my religiously based view that it's a moment of conception. There is a debate in our church, as Cardinal Egan would acknowledge, that's existed. [...] How am I going out and tell you, if you or anyone else that you must insist upon my view that is based on a matter of faith? And that's the reason I haven't.

During that same interview, Biden also talked about McCain's new "change" mantra, saying "I heard Sarah Palin and John McCain talk about change. Tell me one single thing they're going to do on the economy, foreign policy, taxes, that is going to be change. Name me one. This is such malarkey."

The pastor of Palin's Wasilla church offered a clue about what "change" might really mean, for a McCain-Palin administration: it might mean readying the country for the Rapture.  On the youtube video of Palin's church (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGOu-X76rR0), he describes Alaska as a "refuge state," a place where "folks" can find safe haven during The Last Days. As he talks, you see Sarah nodding and smiling, while the congregation waves its hands and claps ...

Actually, if Sarah wants to run Alaska based on that premise, that's fine. I feel bad for those in Alaska who maybe aren't so Rapturously inclined, but could she please leave the rest of us in the Lower 48 alone? 

So what I'm thinking here is that in fact, Sarah is malarkey: Ma Larkey, winging around the country, talking only to "real people" but not the press (when did reporters become cyborgs?); claiming sexism is behind every policy question she's asked (it's not sexist to ask about her record, only to ask what she was wearing when she did -- or did not -- order the Alaska National Guard to do...something); and  spouting claims about her reformist zeal when the record shows that her zeal is reserved pretty much for god, Todd, and the "gold under the ground," as she says in the church video (begging the question of where else one might find gold).

McCain and Palin equal changin'? Seriously? Can anyone else taste the old wine swilling around in these new bottles?

What's next? John, Sarah, and Cindy, holding hands and singing Dylan tunes?

On the church video, Ma Larkey tells her audience that it's time for the people of Alaska to get their hearts right with god.

Here's hoping that most of the US opts for Skynyrd's "Free Bird" on election day and puts Ma Larkey back in her snowy cage. 

 

  After watching the RNC, albeit in an abbreviated form--there's only so much yelling at the television a gal can do before she wonders if the nice people in white coats are going to come in and give her a happy pill--I realized what this election is about:

How many crackers are there in this country?

And will they vote?

Will they vote early and often and even if they're dead?

Are there enough of them to swing the election away from those who can speak in extended sentences, nay, full paragraphs?

As I watched McCain try to smile, I wondered why "cracker" had become an insult -- and why people take it as a point of pride to be one.

The OED, as usual, provides unexpected answers."Cracker" originally was a Celtic word that meant a boaster, a braggart, a liar--as seen in this line from Shakespeare: "What cracker is this that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath."

How perfect is that as a description of the RNC? The entire thing, including the lipsticked pitbull's speech on Wednesday night: an abundance of superfluous breath that deafed my ears.

Palin's soon-to-be-son-in-law, Levi Johnston -- the gum-chewing, stiff-armed young man on stage Wednesday night (he looked so stunningly out of place that one could almost, almost feel sorry for him) -- Levi knows that crackers are boasters; they are, in fact, boasters who like to brag about being crackers, as his facebook page demonstrates in all its asterisked glory: I'm a f***in redneck, he proclaims. A redneck who has a girlfriend but don't want no kids.

Is his page still there? Did someone from the campaign f***in remove it before less sympathetic readers decided that Levi's happy embrace of narrow-mindedness might suggest something less than positive about his presumptive in-laws?

Does it make me a member of the media elite because I wonder why it's a good thing to brag about being something associated with stupidity, racism, sexism, and violence?

Why does the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of US culture seem particularly dangerous at this moment in our history? Is it because it smacks of ostriches with their heads in the sand as the tsunami rumbles closer, about to smash their tail-feathers to kingdom come?

Is that the point? Use up the earth's resources to bring about the end of the species -- ours and all the others, in order to hasten the Rapture? Get the Kingdom to Come that much sooner?

All the superfluous breath blowing around St. Paul the last few days seemed very much in keeping with the swirling air blowing through Louisiana at the beginning of the week. I only hope that the hot air blowing from  Minnesota will be less destructive -- but I have my doubts.

I'm sure that McCain thought choosing Palin would lift him past Obama, float him into the White House on a tsunami of ignorance and fear. Maybe for McCain, choosing Palin was like whistling while walking past a graveyard: he hopes that twenty-five years of right-wing decisions won't come back to haunt him.

But we all know it's impossible to whistle with crackers in your mouth.

I'd been shilly-shallying around with starting this blog, equally afraid that no one would read it ... and that everyone would read it.  

In fact, I was going to write an entire post -- the inaugural post -- about that fear, about being trapped between fear of going unnoticed and being noticed. It's a rather a tricky line to walk as a writer and so I was handling that tricky balancing act by ... not writing.

Not writing is, of course, a time-honored way to handle writing dilemmas.   

Whitman -- from whom I've borrowed the name of this blog -- didn't suffer from writers block that I can tell. Edition after edition of Leaves of Grass ... endless iterations and revisions of his ideas and his visions of the United States. Whitman loved the infinite variety of this country, loved the infinite variety of faces he saw as he walked down the streets of Mannahatta, gazing across the East River towards Brooklyn.

Whitman was a cosmopolitan, like the man with whom he is often paired on literature syllabuses: Herman Melville. They saw difference as an opportunity to be explored, not something to be papered over, ignored, or -- feared.

And it's fear of difference that I see spraddled before me -- paraded before me -- on the screen of the Republican Convention tonight and that prods me out of silence.

Sarah Palin parades her family in front of us all, smiling and snarking at her opponents. She smiles when she says that she started as a PTA President; she smiles as she talks about her small town; she s`miles as if she doesn't realize she sounds like an extra from Fargo. 

I'm watching all the smiling pink faces gazing back at Sarah's pinkly white face, and Sarah's pinkly white family, and -- WAIT -- there was a black man! And wait--another black man! Oh, wait, that black man is a singer, the entertainment.

But I digress. I wonder what Sarah would think of Cindy's ranch in Arizona, where the sycamore trees have ceiling fans (seriously, it's in the interview the Barbituate Barbie gave to Time magazine). Did Cindy ever serve on a PTA?  Did Cindy's kids go to public school?  Somehow, given the sycamore/ceiling fan juxtaposition, I doubt it.

Sarah's experience on the PTA may have prepared her for the city council in Wasilla or whatever it's called.  

But my family lives in New York. My children, whose white maternal grand-mother remarried a few years ago to an African American man; my children, whose paternal grandfather was born in Karachi; my children, whose other grandmother was born in the Philippines; my children, who have a gay uncle and -- perhaps even worse -- another uncle who is FRENCH!  (And one from Long Island but that is neither here ... nor there).
 
My Pan-Asian children, my Asian-fusion children ... my children go to a public school in Manhattan--a school where Whitman, gay inconclast that he was, might have felt at home.

Our public school, where there are any number of single parents, where there are many more than an handful of gay and lesbian parents, where Spanish, English, and Mandarin mix in the halls; where the children are equally at home playing tag in the playground or painting self-portraits in the art room ...

This public school -- it's a great school, mostly due to the parents who do everything from re-wiring the sound system in the auditorium to cleaning up after bake sales. We have a great principal and a terrific energetic teachers who manage to do great things with our kids, despite working in the crazed, through-the-looking-glass-world that is the NYC Board of Ed.

In many ways, this school avoids many of the horrors we hear about New York City schools -- no rats (some small mice, maybe), no violence, not too crowded. But in other ways, it's not that unusual in its mix of families and demographics, rich and poor, brown and white. 

I'm not just a parent at this school, however. Full disclosure: I share a bond with Sarah Palin.  Which horrifies me, but here goes:  I'm co-president of the PTA at this school. 

I handle a budget probably about the size of the budget that Sarah Palin dealt with as mayor -- at least, before she got all that money from her congressional lobbyist (who used to work for the captain of the Bridge to Nowhere ... which Sarah first strode across and then skittered backwards like a scared jackrabbit when it became clear that she was standing in the middle of nowhere, supported only on piles of taxpayer money).

There are about 500 families in my school, about 600 kids.  That's ... hmm ... that's like 10% of the population of Wasilla.

Here's the thing, ultimately, that gets me off the couch, repress my fears, and out into the blogosphere or whatever you want to call it.

There are PTAs and PTAs. There are PTAs that look a lot like most of the country and there are PTAs that look like ... only some of the country. 

If a PTA president is going to be the proverbial heartbeat away from that other presidency, then I would like her (or him) to have been president of a PTA that looks like all of us. Not just some of us.