Stuck in the Office

It's raining outside and I'm stuck in my office, so I'll make the most of it by writing my first blog of the year, two days before Obama takes office and even as the sigh of national relief begins its slow release, not toward rest, but to regather for the hard work ahead--so much damage to undo, more than we even know of, no doubt. Expectations are high, but I'm just hoping he can crash land this mother like Sully into the Hudson. Extracting the tendrils of incompetence (i.e. ideological hires in career positions) from so many institutions is going to prove tricky, at best, but here's to hoping for the best. But he can change the American ethos.

Two of the members of my Harlem Renaissance class are attending, and they will offer their first-hand accounts in class. It's a good time to be teaching a Harlem Renaissance class with its theme of liberation and free expression in the face of a nation besotted so long in bigotry and lynching. Harlem in the twenties offered hope through literature, art, and music that carries through all of this, and so, as the music plays and as Elizabeth Alexander reads her poems this week, I have to think those early voices speaking out, those humanizing voices, have finally won their argument.

Finally

For the first time in my life, I feel that I have a president. His speech moved me. His humility and grace, his sense of purpose, his refusal to bask in the glory of his triumph and instead point to the tasks ahead, well, Yes We Can.

McCain's concession flashed a return of a candidate I once admired even when I disagreed with him in 2000.

It's good to see the results closing very late in Georgia, even though it won't be enough.

We cannot rest. We cannot rest.

(But I can't resist celebrating with a good Barolo for Barack.)

Lucky 100 for Change and Hope: Random Thoughts.

Rest in peace, Toots. I hoped you'd be around long enough to see your grandson become president.

Polls show Obama with a large lead, but polls don't vote, so you have to. I "voted," but on Diebold machines, so who knows? Mark Crispin Miller and others say maybe I didn't. And even if I did, no one can prove it. If Obama wins Georgia, it'll put me at no end of ease, and I'll have to direct my paranoia elsewhere.

Sadly, a student reports a bunch of Obama signs stuffed behind the local Baptist Student Union and supposes they were stolen from people's yards. I guess "Thou shalt not steal" can be trumped by political self-righteousness. Funny how secular humanist relativistic reasoning comes in when these otherwise absolutists need a little ethical wiggle room.

What will I do with my time now that I'm not glued to fivethirtyeight.com, watching numbers rise and fall, trends dissected, etc.? If Obama wins, I'll start looking for the next Newt Gingrich. If he doesn't, I'll be looking at election returns the way I did in '04.

On a thoroughly pleasant note, it's Andrea's birthday today. Hope Atlanta is treating you well.

Interregnum: Trip Interrupted by Trip and Cold Water and Politics

I promised to blog but I'm so far behind I'm trying to remember remembering the details of my journeys--devil's horns under my seat--but it will all come out, Woodstock and California and the adventure of living without hot water for 6 weeks. Stay tuned, loyal reader. But in the midst of these interruptions, I interrupt myself with a rant:

I. The Free Market is My Weakness

Economic crisis? What crisis? A serious depression would have been the free market solution they've been promising all along, because a true free market is absolutely Darwinian and mercilous. Now we find out how those free marketeers react when they step out into the real wild: "Help me, mommy." Every promontory leads to an abyss and woe to those without precious metal parachutes. Most of us carry lead and bears are at the bottom, snarling, hungry.

In summary: capitalism, of course, capitalism, Capitalism, Capitalism!, CAPITALISM! CAPITALISM! CATACLYSM! Oh, socialism. . . . Better red-(faced) than bread (lines, that is). Just think of the "bailout solution" as, like, ANWR's for banks, where cash can still run free, protected by fiscal rangers to keep out the greed poachers and the financial "drill-baby-drillers."

I suppose. Better if someone had figured out ideas of balance and fairness, you know, like, rules, like, say, in baseball, where competition reigns, but you generally don't get four strikes and you have to stop at second if the ball you hit bounces over the center field wall.

Look, the free market isn't all bad. It's great for ipods and fast cars and boner pills and giant fake breasts and anal bleaching and baldness and cell phones and single malt Scotch and reality TV and make-up and golf clubs and fine, leather fetishwear and all things chia.

It's just lousy for antibiotics and health care and education and nation building and natural disaster recovery and our voting procedures (those softwares are a protected trade secret, your honor). You don't want someone looking in your jaundiced eye saying first, "We've got a spectacular new ocular peroxide treatment that will take that yellow out, pronto, Susie. No one will ever know you have scirrosis." You don't want Blackwater thugs on the streets of New Orleans with semi-automatics and immunity and no clear chain of command (that's a trade secret, your honor).

Yes, the free market can do some things better, but certainly not everything. And it's funny how so many of those so-called free marketeers adulate the military so much, despite the fact that it's the biggest social(ist) program in American history, despite Donald Rumsefeld's attempts to auction as much as possible to the least competant but most well-connected bidder. It's hippocrazy season again.

II. Christian Fundamentalism (What would Jesus Do [without you]?)

Clearly, if you were are a born-again, fundamentalist evangelical Christian who believes that global warming is God's will and Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, don't you have to vote for him? I mean, if you're completely right about prophecy included in a selected anthology compiled a few hundred years after quasi-historical events? Don't you have an Obama sign in your yard? Clearly, God isn't omnipotent enough to handle Armageddon without your personal intervention, which is why you're so interested in Israeli politics, after all. Clearly, that "Render unto Caesar" detail wasn't about separation of church and state. It certainly was not about that Roman governor who sentenced your community organizer to death. So, yes, a true believer and avid reader of Left Behind books would have to vote Obama.

III. Rovey Wade

This is the most egregious fake political issue in history. This is where liberals are most conservative, and conservatives most liberal. Roe vs. Wade is a conservative decision. It keeps government out of your decisions as long as possible. The government has no business, as it were, in your lady business, period (no pun intended), or lack thereof (ok, intended). I'm pro-choice and anti-abortion with respect to my own personal decisions (nuance alert: I don't believe life begins at conception, nor do I confuse seeds with trees, and I am, to follow through, snipped), but I don't presume to impose my personal values out of inspired self-righteousness on others. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who is truly pro-abortion, who would like to see abortion figures increase (though many pro-lifers are for the death penalty and would cheer more executions; go figure).

The problem is, pro-lifers are being manipulated (Karl). No one tells pro-lifers that Roe vs. Wade also protects women from forced abortions. No business in your business? Why should it work for the free market but not for your body? Ok, it doesn't completely work for the free market (see above), but I don't think anyone advocates late term abortions as a method of birth control, either (though, ironically, post-term abortion [capital punishment] remains popular). A significant personal and spiritual ambiguity exists here, and a decision should respect a woman's choice and her faith, whatever it is, and should ultimately strive to preserve her health. Roe v. Wade does that.

Five percent solution?

Hillary wins by a tear, according to the pundits. I saw the clip, and she seemed genuinely moved, and such a moment shouldn't be read as weak, though among the more endomorphish Americans, those who would prefer the cartoon from 300 for president, or Ahnold, the tear will provide proof that Hillary should go back to baking cookies.

But that's not the point. The real point here is that the press is jonesing so hard for story that they're starting to make them up, passing judgments and pronouncements so often that they don't even have time to notice their own contradictions, their own shaping of the outcome. To whit, while everyone argues whether Hillary weeps the tears of a clown (though the press was around) or crocodile tears or that this redeems Edmund Muskie's "dirty trick" snowflakes, the real story goes untold, perhaps because one might have to make reference to observer effects (you know, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics).

The press spent so much time salivating over Obama's poll numbers that it affected the outcome. Why be part of a double-digit assured victory when one might have more New Hampshire-style impact by voting in the republican primary to dump Romney? There's also the little matter of ballot design, which a Stanford scholar argues cost Obama 3% of the vote. But a single tear, a five percent solution (i.e. a ten percent swing) to a double-digit deficit? That's a better story. It's just not the real story.

(I haven't, by the way, joined the camp of either candidate, but the way this has been covered, even on NPR, has been outrageous, though an astute New Hampshire caller on the Diane Rihm show this morning pointed out the anti-Romney response to the earlier polls suggesting Obama was a lock.)