Anonymous Thoughts On The Election: 1
Anonymous Thoughts On The Election: 1
- Mail me at vwithshoes at yahoo dot com if you want yours posted.
I don’t remember being this excited about politics, about change, and possibility. I can remember voting for Clinton in 1996, when I was 18, and that was exciting, but when you’re 18, you don’t really know shit. I was a smart 18 year old too, and idealistic, but I hadn’t really lived yet. I could only understand most of the issues in the abstract. We went through a prosperous 8 years under Clinton, and now it’s hard to imagine the biggest issue of the day being who Clinton fucked while in office. It was hard to be excited about Gore on a college campus in 2000, when seemingly all the idealistic liberal students supported Nader. Vocally, visibly supporting Gore was passe. “Gore is no different than Bush!” most people cried, and you were made to feel hopelessly establishment or conventional if you believed otherwise. I knew better, maybe they knew better. But they took a chance, they voted with their conscience, and who could have predicted the result? So Bush won, eventually, by the narrowest of margins, and suddenly no one would admit to supporting Nader anymore, because OOPS! of COURSE Gore and Bush weren’t the same and WHOOPS! Gore would have won if not for Nader, and we all buckled down for whatever Bush would bring. I’m still pissed about those fucking Naderites.
Who could have predicted the utter fucking travesty, the complete devastation, of 8 years of Bush? Who could have predicted the squandering of all the world’s support following 9/11, the tragedy of a criminal war in Iraq based on lies, the torturing and killing of prisoners in Afghanistan, and Iraq, imprisonment without end in Guantanamo? Or a vice president who thinks he’s King, and a president who answers to Jesus. We let the black people drown in New Orleans after Katrina, and we let the brown people waste away in prisons in Guantanamo, even the ones we know to be innocent.
Has this campaign been going on forever? Why does it feel that way? Along comes Hillary, and our first real chance to elect a woman, finally! For once! And I get my feminist loins are aflame for this chance! And she does brilliantly, and I love her, I truly love her, both who she is and what she stands for. She would have made an outstanding president. But her campaign made serious tactical errors, and Obama’s made all the right decisions. And fuck, the man is charismatic, and he won fair and square. It’s hard for men to imagine what it feels like, as a woman, to envision the possibility of a woman being the most powerful person in the world, and to lose that so narrowly. I was crushed. Not just by her loss, but by the often pat responses of men I knew, smart men, politically aware men, who just didn’t get how disappointing it was to see a woman come so close, and lose.
So I was a bit slow to come to Obama. I knew I would support him. But it took me some time to warm up to him. And I don’t remember when it happened, but I feel like there was a period of acceptance, and mourning even, of Hillary’s loss, and a gradual realization that this man was something special. Suddenly I found myself in love with this man, with this booming voice, and megawatt smile, and sense of innate fairness and intelligence. And goddamn is he SMOOTH. Whereas before I looked at his desire to keep from slinging mud as naive and unrealisti when I had supported HIllary, I gradually realized it was the real deal. And he ran a clean campaign, from beginning to end, amidst the ugliest of accusations, the basest of assumptions, never faltering, never slapping back. Staying on message. It was about ideas, and hope, and change. When they called him a terrorist, they were saying “Black man.” When they called him radical, they were saying “Angry Black man.” He’s the Other, not to be trusted, because America stills fears the black man, especially if he’s angry. We can’t have that, can’t be called to account for past sins or current grievances, can’t upset the social order or our own sense of reality, not in that way. Ordinary, average Americans still believe he’s a Muslim, and I really think that’s their defense mechanism for refusing to admit to themselves that they fear and loathe him because he’s black.
Well, it looks like this black man is going to take all. This very fair, very rational, accomplished, handsome black man. He’s the best of America, vigorous and passionate, a graduate of our best universities, a mixture of races and cultures, and easy on the eyes to boot. Hell, what can be wrong with that? All I know is, I’m getting my drink on, toasting to the end of 8 long years, and I’m just fucking happy.
