BARACK OBAMA IS THE NEW PRESIDENT

AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING.

I am crying.  This is beautiful.

Nov 4th

ok so i have about 3.5 million things i should be doing right now other than blogging. this will be a short post. but i felt the need to say SOMETHING seeing as how tomorrow is...momentous.

i've been talking with friends, and a lot of us seem to be in the same general mental state: TOTALLY FREAKING OUT.

most of us seem too scared to even voice out loud what everyone else seems to be screaming from the rooftops - that obama is going to win tomorrow. the thought of proclaiming it, letting yourself believe it, and then having your hopes crushed is too terrifying. as many people have already said, liberals in this country have forgotten how to be happy, or even optimistic. the emotions we're generally most familiar with are terror, rage, and despair. so we're feeling all of those right now despite the fact that things are actually looking up. so in the spirit of that, i'm not going to talk about anything happy right now. although hopefully it IS something interesting...

I was reading an article today about who-can-remember-what, and it quoted a woman in North Carolina (I believe) who said she was scared of Obama, and that she worried he was planning on changing the American flag to something else. and for some reason that fairly insane fear, out of all the ones i've heard so far, suddenly made me feel this crazy empathy with this woman. Its so easy to see all those supposed masses of "real america" residents who hate and fear obama and think "man, those people suck." but as I was reading this article it dawned on me that if i were her, i'd probably be scared too. The fear is not of Obama himself, but of the symbolic power shift implied in electing a seemingly liberal black man as president - something is going to change, and a lot of people don't quite know what that something is. I don't think I can say it better than my friend Ann did earlier today, so i'll just quote her here:

"There is something to the fact that many of the people who actually are afraid of barack obama because of his race, or because of his liberalism, or because of both of them combined, are actually not the most secure people in america. Confused white people in western pennsylvania are not high rollers and their jobs aren't that secure. They might have relatives in prison, and relatives in iraq. The people who are against immigration viscerally are people who fear losing their jobs. The people who are afraid of changing sexuality, are also afraid of having their religion become obsolete and becoming culturally irrelevant. The people who are afraid of a black president probably are playing into the same fear that people have been harboring for centuries in this country, (is this really racist against white people to say) but a white sharcropper mentality. Super racist because your position isn't that secure either, because if I don't have whiteness, I have nothing."

I think that we among the 'liberal elite' spend a lot of time wondering why so many people who are relatively poor vote republican, when the republican party clearly does very little for poor people. But I think Ann's hit on something important which is that if you're a powerless minority in this country, you don't have much to lose. but if you're a powerless member of the majority, whether it be your whiteness, your male-ness, your heterosexuality that ties you to the faces of power in this country, you have a real fear that if you lose that one tie to power, you'll have nothing. For a poor white person, seeing another white person in power is as symbolically relevant as i can only hope seeing a black person in power will be for black people. and i just realized this post isn't as short as i intended it to be, so i need to get back to work.

good luck out there tomorrow.

always the professional

for your viewing pleasure

obama's 30-minute primetime spot. its good.

a flaw in the model

in a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mentioned Alan Greenspan's testimony before the House of Representatives that seemed interesting enough to check out. His speech was fairly uneventful - something about an economic tsunami, shock, dismay...you get the drift. what was most interesting was this interaction during the questioning:

Mr. Greenspan: I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the
critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to
speak

Chairman Waxman: In other words, you found that your view of the
world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

Mr. Greenspan: Precisely. That's precisely the reason I was shocked,
because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable
evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

so now...if i'm understanding this correctly, Alan Greenspan just decided, because of this financial crisis, that free market economics as a concept is just wrong. granted, a lot of us have known that since we were like, 5, and he's 82. but still, this seems like a big deal.

i don't know, though. its a little bit of a let-down. when marx said capitalism was going to self-destruct, i kind of pictured fire, riots, and guerrilla warfare. not just an 82-year-old man getting in front of congress and saying "whoops."

oh well.

dear god

no words.

where there is life, there is hope.

you heard it from grover first.

term limits and protests

so city council voted today to extend term limits so king bloomberg can get a third term. feel free to ponder that, while you also ponder the following: as with any event, major or minor, this elicited a protest outside city hall. but whereas the past few days the park has been filled with black and brown people protesting for better schools and better health care, today was white professionals in suits, still working via blackberry while protesting term-limit legislation. fascinating.

battle for the earth: Hope vs Skepticism

How many times have i said or heard said among friends that this election really feels like an epic battle between good and evil? The "battle for the earth: heaven vs hell" metaphor seems to really be taking hold as people get more and more concerned about the state of the country, and as the two candidates personalities drift farther to their respective corners (recall tina fey's characterization of barack this week: "when he's talkin' it's like an angel whisperin' in your ear," and barack's joke at the Alfred E. Smith dinner that "contrary to the rumors that you've heard, I was not born in a manger..."). But I think in all the excitement about the battle for the earth, the possibly legitimate fear that john mccain is the modern-day anti-christ, and the overwhelming desire we all seem to have to throw ourselves into this election like it's the only thing that matters, we're accidentally or intentionally overlooking a quieter but in no way less important battle. This battle is also for the earth, but John McCain has nothing to do with it - it's the battle between two Obamas - the one we hope he is, and the one we fear he is.

I like to think of this as the battle between hope and skepticism, or perhaps the battle between great and just 'good.' This article by Mike Davis does a wonderful job summing it up from an economic standpoint, but it's more than just economics: the Barack actually standing in front of us on TV is significantly more conservative, more vague, and less powerful than the Barack we see in our dreams. He promises all of these wonderful things: universal health care, fighting climate change, and a better foreign policy, but we know in our hearts that he has yet to actually make a compelling case for HOW he's going to do these things. We also know in our hearts that he's intelligent, and I think that's the crux of this less thrilling but perhaps more important battle-for-the-earth. We HOPE (and we hope that Obama's message of 'hope' is a wink in our direction) that Obama is so intelligent that he's figured out the system - that his vagueness is his way of getting where he needs to go, and once there he will make the changes we want to see: changes that, if he said them out loud now, would cost him the election. We HOPE that with the possibility of a simultaneous Barack Obama presidency and an overwhelming Democratic majority in the House and Senate, we'll begin to see this country go in an amazing new direction "from day one." But we're also SKEPTICAL because wouldn't that just be too good to be true? We know how American politics work. No one's that good. If Obama's gotten this far, maybe he's not the man we hope he is. Or as Mike Davis put it in the article linked above,

"Am I unduly cynical? Perhaps, but I lived through the Lyndon Johnson years and watched the War on Poverty, the last true New Deal program, destroyed to pay for slaughter in Vietnam."

Is it even possible for Barack Obama to bring us the change he's asking us to hope for? Or are we gearing ourselves up for a slight shift in pace that will in no way actually turn us from the collision course we're currently on with our own demise? It may be impossible to know, but as with all battles for the earth, it's certainly worth thinking about...

colin powell endorses obama

a bit late in the game, yes, but still.



if you don't watch the whole video, please skip to around minute 4:30 - it makes me mad/sad that so few democrats have been willing to say what powell says here, and i'm glad he said it.