20 January 09
And The Heavens Smiled
If not the heavens, at least we all were smiling this morning at the inauguration party hosted by our friend Barbara. Bagels, orange juice, and champagne made up for a yummy breakfast. A couple of people in my office were at the actual event; I’m glad I at least made it to the televised version.
5 November 08
Onion Soup
Following an election night tradition she learned from Arthur Goldhammer, Pica made and brought onion soup to an election party we had over at Mary’s this evening. We’re all verklempt at the result.
3 November 08
Slogging Through the Rain
Numenius was in San Francisco two days this weekend, so I decided to spend Saturday walking precincts in West Sacramento. My job was to put a reminder to vote on the doorhandles of people who have been identified as Obama supporters but who have a low propensity to vote. It suggested who to vote for downticket and how to vote on propositions, of which there are the usual poorly written baker’s dozen for California.
It was raining. Warm, lovely, hard rain. I was soaked before I left Davis. Jeans-up-to-the knees soaked. The lists I had of addresses in a part of West Sacramento I’d never been to (demographic: heavily immigrant, lower-middle class, lots of Yes on 8 signs) were soaked too. I had foreseen this and made photocopies so I could turn in something legible.
GOTV GOTV GOTV, they say. Get out the vote. I don’t like doing this, it puts me way outside my comfort zone. But if Obama can stand in the rain urging people to get out the vote, then go and do it again in the next town, and the next — for all these days and weeks and months he’s been doing this — I can put up with a little going outside my comfort zone and get soaked. Nothing a change of trousers and a cup of chai couldn’t sort out.
I arrived back at Davis headquarters, a bedraggled thing, with my sopping-wet map and a smile. Crinkled fingers. I did it. They welcomed me with a smile and their own stories of a wet day.
This campaign has been so well-organized it’s frightening.
Hope. The world is watching, hoping…
31 October 08
Angie's
I’ve hurt my back, a minor but occasionally stop-in-my-tracks tweak that has me reaching for Ibuprofen, doing cat stretches on the floor at work, and generally walking like Frankenstein. Washing my hair was going to be out of the question, so I went last night to the hairdresser across from the Coop for a quick wash and trim.
Angie owns the place. She is Mexican — Angelina — and so are most of her staff. I’ve been going there since we moved to Davis — it’s cheap, it’s a perfectly fine cut for a long-haired greylag like me, and it’s the one place where I get a good solid chunk of time to speak in Spanish.
I asked last night whether they’d voted. No, they said. I recommended getting to the polling booths early on Tuesday because a record turnout is predicted in California: they’re expecting 80% participation, way higher than ever, including Reagan’s two landslides in the 1980s. Obama has a 25-27 lead in the polls here, but a heartening (and almost tearful) phone call from a friend yesterday with reports of lines of students at the Memorial Union to vote may be indicative of an even higher margin. (The big issue in California is Prop. 8, the gay marriage ban initiative, VOTE NO and please donate.)
Oh, but what can he do, said Angie. Look at this mess. Business has been dead for three weeks. She’s worried — they all are. Las que tenemos y las que no tenemos. Ana María’s husband had a stroke three weeks ago; her daughter is pregnant. Health care is a huge issue for them. They are frightened and despondent. (But they will stand in line to vote.)
The Republican self-destruct machine would be something to rejoice over if they hadn’t pulled us all in to the mire — in California, in the US, in the world. Voting them into the dustbin is only the first step in a long, painful process of potential recovery. And it’s going to take all of us working hard to do it — no quick fixes.
Roll up your sleeves…
13 October 08
A Busy Sunday
It is the UC Davis Centennial this year, and a weekend-long series of events and street parties filled the windblown streets of Davis. We worked registering voters until we were told to move on by some officious gal who said Yolo Unite had only paid for one booth. (Registering voters is a civic act and we should have argued with her, but we’ll know next time.)
We took ourselves off to see Religulous which was funny and irreverent and serious, deadly serious in the end. Oddly enough, the Catholics came off as the most rational of the religious groups Bill Maher spoke with.
Barbara now tells me that a priest in Fresno has been fired for opposing Prop. 8, an attempt by the right-wing religious to overturn same-sex marriage laws in California.
Right. That’s it.
Obama will win California, but these guys, funded by the Mormon Church, have given Prop. 8 a serious chance of passing. I’m campaigning, from now until the election, against Prop. 8. Please join me, or please consider donating. This isn’t a religious issue, it’s an issue of human rights. If you’re Mormon or Baptist and Catholic and gay and think it’s a sin to get married, don’t do it. Fine by me. Otherwise, get your religion out of my state and THE state.
8 September 08
Satire In The Park
The San Francisco Mime Troupe made their annual visit to Davis this afternoon, setting up their outdoor theatre in Community Park on a hot day ( it always seems to be hot when they come to town). This year’s musical political theatre was entitled “Red State” — the plot centering on the down-and-out town of Bluebird, Kansas who because of a improbable electoral tie and a voting machine malfunction wind up with the job of determining the result of the 2008 presidential elections after all the voting has ended everywhere else.
The trouble with political satire these days is that reality is now more outrageous than the satire.
31 August 08
Trap, Metatrap, or Stupidity?
It’s been 40 hours since I first heard of Sarah Palin and I’m still shocked by McCain’s choice of a running mate. She has such an underwhelming resume that there is surely some hidden strategy here. First, maybe it’s a trap: McCain figures that the scorn that the Democrats will heap on her will lead to a huge backlash and her gathering a large sympathy vote from women voters. Second possibility: it’s a trap at a much higher level. McCain isn’t making a play for the disaffected Clintonistas at all, rather it’s a play for the hardcore rightwing fundamentalists. Indeed, this marks abandoning any pretense that this election is about policy at all, instead it will continue the metaphysical debate brought to the fore in the past two elections about pluralism versus fundamentalism in this society. (See LithiumCola’s excellent post today on DKos about this theme.) Third possibility — it’s simply stupidity on McCain’s part. His legendary rashness finally comes to the fore. Seeing that the Democratic Convention was turning out to be a spectacular success, McCain panics, backtracks on his plan to select Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who was apparently his choice earlier in the week, and finally settles on Palin at 11 AM on Thursday, needing a game-changer at this point.
It’s bizarre. But as they say, no one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people, and that is the scary thing about this choice. There are plenty of people out there who think “oh cool, this women has five kids and got to be governor, and now she might be V.P.!”, only less coherently than that. People vote for who they identify with, and low-information voters are a trouble spot for Obama.
But I have a lot of faith in the strategic mastery of Obama’s campaign team, and think they will turn this campaign twist to their advantage. Put another way, Obama is playing go while McCain can only master craps.
4 July 08
Lapelgate
The opening scene of Schindler’s List features the main character getting ready to go out in the evening. Combed hair, pressed shirt, tie, handkerchief. The final touch? The Nazi lapel pin. This will function for him as a pass-card; it’s membership in the club of the powerful and terrifying. Industrialist Oskar Schindler is mostly interested in making money, and he makes a fortune thanks to the Nazis and their war. The lapel pin gets him places. Really nasty places, and his story of redemption is the story of a struggle with his conscience, of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, and because you can: it’s a choice.
I grew up in Franco’s Spain near the northern Madrid Guardia Civil headquarters. We’d see them wandering, always in tricornered pairs, always with tommy guns; but when they drilled at the Quartel, they’d pass under the Spanish flag (in those days it said “Una, Grande, Libre” (one, great, free) unlike the confederate version so in evidence during the recent Eurocopa) and kiss it. Kiss the flag. Take it in their right hands and press their lips to it. The motto of the Guardia Civil was “Todo por la patria” — everything for the motherland. Everything: extreme suppression of dissent, torture, intimidation, wiretapping. Everything. No freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom to assemble, nada. Behave and we won’t hurt you. Everything. Por la patria.
My country, right or wrong, in other words.
One of the most striking things about the Declaration of Independence — and the U.S. Constitution, which I’ve only recently read for the first time — is how they both assume that citizens not only want to be, but are, in fact, grownups. They reject the model of the powerful parent, either monarch or state, and instead require that the government serve at the pleasure of the people.
Of course this requires that the “people” take their civic responsibilities seriously; that they engage; that they inform themselves; that they vote. It is not a model of blind obedience. It’s hard work, citizenship. It involves wrestling with the angel of democracy, as Susan Griffin says in her new book. Not for kids. Not for fearful adults or stupefied zombie-like drones (see Wall-E for an example of how frightening that could really be). Grownups.
Ever since 9/11 the flag-fetish has become a cudgel. Ever since I’ve been alive I’ve been aware that Americans hang flags more, much more, than Europeans; even in Fascist Spain, it was only the state and associated enforcers who engaged in it. Here, lots of people hang flags. It’s called “patriotism.”
So now they’re going after Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin. The omission is somehow his entry into the club of world terrorism, a sign that he secretly hates America and wants to blow it up. He’s not “patriotic” enough.
It remains to be seen whether the damage inflicted on the citizenry by these crazed fearmongers will prevail in November.
I really hope not, because what was embodied in the Declaration of Independence — and later in the Constitution — is nothing less than faith in the ability of reasonable people to arrange their lives, reasonably. How civilized. And, on this Fourth of July, what a great gift to the world.
25 June 08
Hardy and Hillary
I’ll admit it, in public, and in fact have on one of those “books you hated but everyone else loved” websites: I can’t stand Thomas Hardy. Labored, ponderous, not quite getting it right with his female heroines, and they such drips. Tess should have clocked a bunch of people around the face before setting to them with a knife.
But he straddled, didn’t he, Victorianism and Modernity. Someone had to do it. Woolf went to visit him, it is said, not too soon before he died in 1928. She straddled that same divide, more on this side than that. He paved her way.
How could he stand it? How could he stand those bloody complacent Edwardians? Well, he couldn’t, so he kept WRITING.
Hillary has straddled a similar divide. Before her, woman-as-president was laughable. She has facilitated, like Hardy, a cultural transition. Not for herself, perhaps, but for all who come after. It still pains me to recall her speech two weeks ago, when she was passionately, and vocally, and authentically Hillary (as opposed to whatever the guys managed out of her). If she had been that in, say, Iowa, Obama would have had no chance.
I’ve been as much of a fan of Hillary’s as I have of Hardy’s. It had a lot to do with how she voted on the war, and how she refused to acknowledge she’d been duped. But she’s made a lot possible for little girls (and big girls) to dream, and I salute her for that.
5 June 08
Vetinari Ascendant
We’ve reported on how Barack Obama bears more than a passing resemblance to Lord Vetinari. This scene in the Senate today could have easily been written by Terry Pratchett, especially the bit about smiling up at the press at the end.