Politics: November 2008 Archives
On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof's column addressed the "second most remarkable thing" about Obama's election: the country will welcome into the White House "an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual."
That's right, folks, a member of the professoriat has achieved the highest post in the land (and no, I don't mean the Presidency of Harvard, sorry Drew Faust).
Does Barack's election mean that it might start to be cool to be smart? Every fall, I teach groups of first-year honors students - kids who are complete over-achievers, who work hard, who spend hours in community service (not just at the holidays), who get terrific grades - and I always ask them if, in high school, it was considered cool to be smart. Almost to a person they shake their heads, "no, no, no way." The kids who do say it was okay usually went to very small Catholic high schools, where the nuns had done such a number on the students that they all thought they were idiots - and thus there were no "smart kids" to ostracize.
At the other end of the spectrum are those kids for whom doing well academically is seen as some kind of sell-out, some kind of betrayal of family or neighborhood or friends. I've worked with these kids and it's dreadful to watch them undercutting their own achievements because failure is more familiar than stretching towards something unknown.
Or maybe, additionally, Barack's election means that now professors should start being slightly more sartorially savvy. I mean, is there any logical reason that rumpled = intelligent? I know, I know, professors are too busy Thinking Serious Thoughts to avoid things like pleated trousers, "fun" ties, and bad shoes. Or maybe we're all too broke to upgrade our wardrobes with any regularity.
Kristof's column brought something else to mind, however, besides the possible smartification of the country.
It gave me a theme for the Barackian Presidency:
Bringing Brainy Back.
Think about it: both Barack and Justin Timberlake have graced the cover of Rolling Stone numerous times; both men espouse a Rat Pack fashion sensibility (skinny ties, narrow suits); both borrow heavily from a mixture of racial vernaculars, although doubtless Timberlake is the better rapper. And let's face it, they're both rock stars.
Timberlake's pop song starts "I'm bringing sexy back/Them other boys don't know how to act" - and doesn't that, with one minor change, sum it up: Obama brought brainy back, and those other boys (and girls) don't know how to act?
Of course, the song itself, which lasts roughly four minutes, is composed of about forty words in total and makes some unfortunate references to slavery, shackles, and whips - not in the historical sense, mind you, but in another, uh...more intimate context. Clearly unsuitable for Inaugural Dancing.
But we're bringin' brainy back anyway, with or without that pesky final "g."
6:32AM, the day after election day.
"Mommy, Obama won, he won!" The same four little hands as yesterday, but this time chilly from already having gone downstairs for the paper before I was even awake.
The boys want to know the score, because of course if someone won, then there's a score. Once I'd gotten some coffee into me (don't I realize that I'm too old to start drinking champagne at 11PM? I guess one must suffer for history), I realized that there were, in fact, a whole lot of ways to answer that question:
- The electoral college score: 349 to 173 as of mid-morning, with North Carolina still uncalled.
- The voter rolls: more than 3 million first-time voters
- The international opinion meter: way higher than on November 3rd
- The national optimism meter: WAY higher than on November 3rd
- The correcting-history score: off the chart
Because I live in Manhattan, I could be pretty sure of encountering equally elated citizens this morning as I went around doing my errands after dropping the boys at their respective schools. (Okay, so Caleb has maybe just a little glimmer of a fever, but Mommy has Got Stuff To Do and it doesn't involve pushing a four-year-old around in a stroller all day.) At the grocery store, the farmer's market, Staples ... everyone had a little smile, and the "have a good day" exchanges seemed particularly meaningful.
For someone like me, who has a pretty cynical worldview (and okay, I'm often bitter, too, but without the guns and religion), what seems perhaps the most unreal about today is the emotion bubbling inside me. I think - dear god could it be? - I think I feel ... patriotism. Actual patriotism: pride about what my country represents, about what it did for itself last night, about the amazingly peaceful transition that just took place and that continues to unfold. Think about it: an entire regime has just been deposed without a single shot.
It's true: this liberal cynic feels patriotic, dammit, like maybe I should be wearing red-white-and-blue, or a flag pin or something. I am, frankly, amazed that my country, which so often takes pride in its xenophobia and ignorance, and which has for so long clung to narrow and parochial views of difference, managed to shake off its blinders and move forward towards something - dare we say it - that has the potential for magnificence?
Last night, in his amazing speech in Grant Park, Obama said "that's the true genius of America, that America can change." We needn't be trapped by tradition, or convention, or the bleaker parts of our own history. Let's revel in this particular change, shall we? Here's an image that will bring a smile: imagine Dubya trying to make that speech - no, not write that speech, we all know that's impossible - just trying to get his mouth around all those elegant, powerful words - those elegant, powerful ideas.
Before we left for school this morning, Liam and Caleb were working together (see? Barack does work miracles) on a lego fortress/castle/poison destroyer. Liam was sing-songing to himself as he worked: "we have a president and his color is black, we have a president and his color is black." Every now and then, Caleb would chime in "and blue!" because he's very excited about the Empire State building being lit up in Democratic blue tonight.
I guess you could say, then, that today, for a change, black-and-blue are the color of victory.
"Mommy, wake up, wake up." It's my typical alarm: four little hands patting me out of deep, luxurious, all-too-brief sleep. During the week reveille is between 6:22-6:46; on the weekends I get until the ripe old hour of 7.
I opened one eye, thought fast: "hey, guys, why don't you go downstairs to get the newspaper and check out the line at the polling place. It's election day." Our voting place is, conveniently, in a student lounge space in the back hall of our building; the boys always come with us to vote, usually in their pjs.
"ELECTION DAY! ELECTION DAY!" You'd have thought it was Christmas and birthday.
They stomped out of the bedroom, chanting "O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!" and I heard them racing down the hall to the elevators, intent on scouting out our voting prospects.
Their enthusiasm was dampened by the line at the polling place (confession: we inadvertently cut the line, so what should have been a ninety minute wait was maybe 45 minutes.To all who waited in line around us: apologies).
We finally wedged our way into the voting booths - Husband with Caleb, me with Liam. I watched Liam pull the lever for an African American presidential candidate.
Will Liam remember this, when he's finally old enough to vote on his own? Will Caleb? What if they remember the Obama presidency with the same ruefulness with which I think about the first Clinton term?
Remember the heady thrill when Clinton was elected? I was at an election party with graduate student friends, all of us totally broke, but we scraped together our credit cards to buy celebratory champagne. And then over the next four - eight - years, that elation just dribbled away.. But I won't think about that now.
Instead, over the course of the day, I started to feel - well, almost giddy. Like Liam and Caleb this morning (before the line-waiting part)
We had to pry Liam away from the TV earlier tonight for bedtime - he was furious about having to go to bed before it was all over and I will be sorely tempted to wake him up if Obama wins.
Now it's ten o'clock and they've just called Ohio for Obama. So okay, I'm going to say it - when Obama wins.
Maybe our country really can do this, really can cast off the ugliness of the past eight years. When I see the 70,000 people crowded into Grant Park in Chicago, I want to cry. I'm sure I will cry before the evening is out - not just out of relief, but out of pride. Pride in the people of this country who waited in line for hours to vote, who worked and worked and worked to get this man elected. (Swivelheader writes about this too, very eloquently.)
My mother is at a friend's apartment in Chicago, overlooking Millenium Park; she's planning to walk with her friends down to Grant Park later tonight, although she says she can hear the crowds from the apartment balcony. She's been an Obama supporter from his early days in Illinois and when she called me just now to exclaim over the Ohio thing, the phone practically vibrated with her excitement.
Some of my earliest memories are of canvassing with her on the North Side of Chicago; of going to "headquarters" to help stuff envelopes; of leaflets from this or that political campaign being piled under the dining table. Politics - good old-fashioned progressive politics - has been an integral part of her life as long as I've known her. And although I've never been as active in politics as she has, I'm hoping to give my children what she's given me: a firm belief that politics can be an honorable profession and that it does matter who runs - and who votes.
This election - and maybe all US elections going forward, until we institute serious voting reform measures - will occur in the long shadow of What Happened in Florida in 2000 (and, to lesser degree, in Ohio in 2004).
Much of what happened in 2000, however, I didn't realize until I saw the HBO movie "Recount," which is a fabulous - and maddening - dramatization of the grand-scale theft of Gore's victory (and concomitant disenfranchisement of who-knows-how-many US citizens).
It's not that I didn't want to pay attention to what was happening while it happened; it's just that I was distracted. I was about thirty weeks pregnant in early November; my baby was due in early January, everything was going swimmingly, absolutely according to plan. And then, suddenly, all our careful plans went kaflooey. November 18th marks Liam's 8th birthday, but he began to be born, in a fashion, the day before Election Day 2000, with a doctor who clearly failed "Bedside Manner 101" in medical school.
So now imagine that rippling effect you get on soap operas when they segue to a flashback - come with me, if you will, to a dark ultrasound room somewhere in midtown Manhattan, where I'm flat on my back, blue goo smeared on my six-months pregnant belly, and a doctor is about to interpret the flickering bluish picture on the ultrasound screen.
"Basically, you have a crappy placenta," the doctor said, snapping off her rubber gloves.
Pregnancy had been astonishingly easy thus far, so it took a while for her words to penetrate my mushily gravid brain.Crappy placenta? Howzzat?
"So you need to be on bed rest." Bed-rest? Wasn't that something for 19th century heroines, or maybe that crazy lady in "The Yellow Wallpaper," who by the end of the story is crawling around the attic attempting to escape her "rest cure"? But now? in the 20th century? ME?
"Starting now. For at least ten days, and then we'll see. Who's your doctor?"
I gave her the name of my midwife. "Oh," she said after a long pause. "You have a midwife." As if somehow that explained the crappification of my placenta.
(Just for the record, the ob-gyn who ultimately delivered my tiny baby in an emergency c-section credits my midwife, the amazing Sylvie Blaustein, with catching the problem early - Sylvie was the one who sent me to the ultrasound and who, at the risk of sounding dramatic, may have saved Liam's life with her knowledge of babies and women's bodies. If I were ever to move out of New York, I would probably travel back from wherever I was in order to have Sylvie be the person I go to for checkups and all that lady-plumbing stuff. Midwifery of Manhattan - MOM, get it?)
The idea behind bedrest, as near as I can tell, is to give over all your bodily resources to the entity that has nested inside it (in much the same way that all financial resources will be given over to this entity once it's born). And yes, bedrest seemed like a great idea - sprawl against the pillows, be waited on hand and foot - for about ten minutes. Then the itchy, scratchy, maddening reality set in: I was allowed to walk to the bathroom, but that was about it. I had to beg Sylvie for permission to leave the bed in order to vote, and she only said yes because the polling place was literally around the corner from our apartment.
So on the second day of bedrest, I shuffled to the polling place, pulled the lever, then shuffled home to my pillowed prison, certain that in the next twelve hours Al Gore would become the next president.
The next ten days - the next two months - were an astonishingly surreal convergence of the body politic with my maternal body: both in suspension, both hostage to forces beyond their control. I had no way of knowing if my horizontality was helping "Burbage," as we called the blob inside me (a name courtesy of Dick and Nancy Horwich).
Bed-rest rubbed my face in the hardest part (for me, anyway) of being a parent: the part where, basically, you're not really in control. I mean, you might think you're in control because there are rules about this or that, or because you can take away "privileges," or because your children think you can magically cure the pain of a boo-boo. But it's all a charade: they are their own people from the moment they first breathe air.
Parenting is more like lion-taming, you know? The trainer gets in there with the whip and the stool and the occasional treat of raw meat, and the lions kind of go along with it because, well, frankly, what the hell else do they have to do? But at any moment the lions could totally take over. The trick is not to let them know that they outnumber the trainer ... (this analogy holds true, by the way, even if you are the parent of only one child. One child is more than a match for two parents, which is why those of us in two-parent households should bow down and worship in awe at the feet of single parents).
A week passed. Still no president, still no baby - but an increasingly angry electorate and an increasingly angry mommy-to-be. I was FINE and bed-rest was STUPID and there was nothing WRONG.
Ten days of bed-rest later, still no president, still no baby. Husband and I go for a follow-up ultrasound (not with the "crappy placenta" doctor but with the perinatologists at Babies Hospital). In the tiny exam room there is barely room for a table and the technician, who announces that she can't "see" the baby with the conventional ultra-sound tool so she brings out ... The Probe. And boy, that's just a whole lot of fun. Makes me hope I'm never abducted by aliens.
So she's probing and looking concerned and not answering my questions. She calls in a bunch of doctors and if I hadn't been so terrified, I would've laughed: in this tiny room there are four doctors, the technician, me, and Husband, although we were clearly last on the list of priority: the doctors only wanted to see the ultrasound screen.
Suddenly we got a whole new set of vocabulary words to match the other new set generated by the election - to hanging chad and butterfly ballot, we added S/D ratio, doppler, deceleration.
The doctors talked about whether to induce labor, to wait, to do a c-section...a blur until someone told me that I needed to be admitted immediately so that they could monitor the fetus.
So boom! there I am in the hospital, with the central question being whether this now thirty-two week-old baby would be better off in the NICU or in me. At 33 weeks, babies are considered "full term" but this baby was only the size of a twenty-five week old baby - and they weren't sure how he would fare, were he to be delivered that small.
To my host of aches, pains, and anxieties, steroid shots were added, to help develop the babie's lungs. "You know, his lungs are like little smears of jelly right now" said a particularly jolly resident. Lovely. Thanks for that image.
The residents tied themselves in knots trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Usually IUGR (intra-uterine growth restriction, which is apparently the fancy name for "crappy placenta") happens to people with high blood pressure - or to drug addicts, alcoholics, and prostitutes. As I answered no to all their questions - no high blood pressure, no alcohol, no placenta abruption, no placenta previa, kicked that nasty heroin habit years ago - I imagined the residents madly flipping through the medical textbooks in their brains, trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
And the answer is...medical anomaly. There is NO REASON for what happened, other than the fluke of a crappy placenta that refused to nourish Burbage the way it was supposed to.
You know, like the t-shirt says, Shit Happens.
Liam was born before the presidency was decided - and I promise that I made no bargain with the gods about exchanging the country's well-being for the well-being of my baby. Promise.
When Liam was born, at dawn on November 18, in an emergency c-section because the doctors saw that his heart-rate was decelerating, he weighed 1 pound, 10 ounces, a little bit more than a full-size loaf of bread. He looked like Gandhi, like Yoda, like the most fragile baby bird you've ever seen in your life.
They wheeled Liam away in the little plastic shoebox where he would spend the next two months and we were given a long list of the potential afflictions that such a tiny body might face: respiratory problems, heart problems, liver and kidney problems, developmental delays. He simply wasn't ready to be in the actual world, poor thing, so we held our breath and prepared for the worst.
But in spite of everything he became the tiniest, healthiest baby in the NICU. He flourished. Would that I could say the same for the country.
Liam turns eight in a little less than two weeks; his days as a medical anomaly are - I hope - behind him. And at the risk of stretching a metaphor to the breaking point, perhaps tomorrow's election will demonstrate that the previous two elections were not part of a systemic infection but were in fact anomalous: the crappy placenta that may yet give birth to something amazing.
*Oh, and those teensy feet at the beginning of this very long post? Liam's, the day he was born. In actual fact, the footprint is slightly less than two inches long. And yet he STILL had toenails. Miracle.
It's Sunday before election day. Do you know where your vote is?
Well-intentioned friends and loved ones, including the other adult in this apartment, keep sending me statistics and polling data: Barack is up by 10%, Barack leads by 5%, Obama will carry 15% of left-handed, brown-haired,fifty-year-olds in the lower-right quadrant of West Virginia. To all of them I want to say STOP! DON'T JINX IT!
Call me superstitious if you want to (and some people who live here have, let me tell you), but right now ... it's like walking past a graveyard or a cave with a big mean dog inside: the thing to do at this point is hold our collective breath and be very, very still, lest a single inadvertent movement tip the undecided voters (all 4% of 'em) into the McCain column and lose us the whole shebang. (Did you read David Sedaris's piece in the recent New Yorker about undecided voters? That at this point it's like being offered chicken or shit with ground glass on top of it and saying, "uh...how is the chicken prepared?")
I don't need to tell you what a big shebang it is, right? It's huge. Epic might not be too big a word. No need for me to rehearse the reasons why the tall skinny guy from Illinois should win (and yes, I do mean for that description to resonate with the OTHER tall skinny unlikely president from Illinois); why it's become, as far as I'm concerned, a moral imperative that he does win; why I shudder to think what will become of us, individually and as a country, if he doesn't win.
A friend worked with a group called Progressive Futures on a wonderful short advertisement about what's at stake, set to the plaintive strains of Paul Simon's "American Tune":
http://www.progressivefuture.org/american-tune%22
What if we had an election in which we didn't just pay lip-sevice "democracy"? Think about it - if you're twenty years old, you've grown up in a country where in the past two elections, huge swaths of people were systematically disenfranchised. It's a far cry from Whitman's description of democracy:
Did you, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it might pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools - democracy in all public and private life.
Sounds good, eh?
The other day on NPR, I heard Melissa Block interviewing African Americans in St. Louis at a job re-training site. One of the men interviewed said, "well, there's a saying going around in the black community: Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack is running so our children could fly."
Maybe it was the really crappy traffic on the FDR (where I had my rant about blaming Nader for the country's ills), but I got all teary-eyed when I heard that.
Fly, indeed. I know that electing Barack isn't going to erase two-hundred-plus years of institutionalized racism, but his victory would go a long way towards putting a new face on our country's future - a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan face, equally at home in both Manhattans: Manhattan, Kansas, and, you know, The Manhattan (the one in "not real" America).
Of course, another person in this same NPR interview said, "well, can't be too sure - any fugazy thing can happen with the 'publicans."
I think I'm too old to know precisely what "fugazy" means, but I get the gist: be careful or they're gonna steal this fucker too.
