An Election That's Anything But Black and White ...

Maybe it's all the time I've spent talking politics over the past few weeks, or maybe it's that I'm fully dialed into the election now. Whichever it is, Obama, McCain and the politics of race is the subject of my October Times column. Here's a preview:

Finally, the 4th of November looms and this endless season of sanctimony draws close to its conclusion. The polling and the crowning of a victor come not one hour too soon. For all the talk of history being made in this election cycle, first black this, first female that, the landmark that stands tallest to me is a new pinnacle of false piety from both sides.

Let me be abundantly clear here: For months I have examined both candidates, the combustible chameleon from Arizona and the cardboard cutout from Illinois, and for all that analysis I have come to feel that little more than a coin flip separates the two senators in terms of qualification to lead this country. Whoever wins, if there comes a 4 a.m. soon when the White House phone rings, I'm rooting for it to go straight through to voice mail.

You want a prediction? I feel confident I can pick a loser between Obama and McCain.

America. We are the poorer for having lived through Election 2008.

The funny thing is, the candidates haven't been the worst part of this billion-dollar beauty pageant. The two senators remind me of the renegade zoo lion who mauls his trainer suddenly one morning: They're just predators being predators. It's the gawkers at this zoo who I've found all the more insufferable. Republicans, Democrats, Obama lovers, passengers and conductors on the McCain Straight Talk Express, the media elite, the talk show blatherers – it's hard to imagine any of these folk know how shrill they sound, how much like bleating sheep, baa-baa-baaing their self-professed intellectual and moral superiority.

Anymore in 21st century America, people no longer seem able to simply disagree on politics. Now to hold an ideological opinion is akin to holding down a perch on Mount Olympus. You love the view where you are. Everyone else is beneath you, the masses not fit to breathe the same air.

A holier-than-thou tone has been everywhere this campaign season, most especially when the subject turns to race. I write this screed with a new poll from the Associated Press ringing in my ears, and with these opening paragraphs fresh in my head:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about 2.5 percentage points.

The net impact of prejudice in this race, according to the poll?

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

Excuse me while I go take a shower to wash off the self-righteousness that underlies that assumption.

What do I find so objectionable about this study, besides its potential divisiveness, flimsy math and lack of anything resembling courage? Only this: Its inherent racism.

Nowhere did the pollsters seek to measure the impact of skin color on this campaign in a 360-degree way. Nowhere did they ask the sorts of questions truly color-blind scientists would have asked: Like what percentage of blacks are voting for Obama based on race alone? Or what percentage of blacks have sworn off McCain as too melanin-deprived for their taste? And, even more interestingly, what percentage of whites find themselves leaning toward Obama not for his stands on Iraq or on abortion rights, but because they want to feel good about their open-mindedness, positive about their race-neutral ways, by virtue of their having cast a vote for a man whose skin tone bears so little resemblance to their own?

Of course race has played a role in this election. I'd be a fool to deny it, just as you would be a fool to assume that race can do nothing more than harm Obama. But foolishness is what you get when those who can at best only assume confuse their capacity to take a flying guess with the ability to peer deep into the electorate's soul.

Not to beat the metaphor of color into the ground here, but if there's one hue that defines the election of 2008 it isn't skin color or red states versus blue states, it's all the various shades of gray. Just as it's impossible to fully predict what's in a candidate's heart, it's similarly impossible to predict why any one voter makes any one choice once the curtain closes and it's time to punch chads.

Is it possible that the bigotry of a handful of American whites will keep Obama from the presidency? Without a doubt, just as it's possible that his race is – for a different handful of voters on the first Tuesday in November – the very best reason to vote for the man.

To me, the question was never black and white, never black nor white, never really about skin tone at all. For whom to vote is simply one more query with no good answer in a country where everyone seems to hold their own version of the truth as the word of God.

Somewhere down the line, maybe we'll all stop asking which side we're on and instead wonder aloud about why we were so sure in the first place.

Well, at least no one will be left wondering how I really feel, huh?

Better Dead Than Well Read ...

I've always been a freak for lists. When I was a kid, you couldn't pry the Book of Lists out of my hand. Now I'm always up to compare my endless opinions against someone else's. So the English geek in me was sort of entranced by this story from the London Times:

10 Books Not To Read Before You Die

The producer of at least three television shows that you may quite like shares with us his definitive list of books that just aren't worth the bother

Richard Wilson

Recommended lists of ‘essential’ reading are the most pernicious ‘to do’ lists of all. Lists of physical achievements or magical holiday destinations or wonderful restaurants or fabulous hotels make you feel like your life has been wasted; a list of great books you should have read makes you feel like your brain has been wasted.

Most people embarking on a journey into a new book will feel they have to hack through a hundred pages of dense undergrowth before their conscience will allow them to give it up as a lost cause. But how many people feel secure enough in their own judgment even to do that? How many times have we all ploughed on to the end to find there’s actually no treasure after all? A book, even a useless one, can take several days out of your life so it’s a big investment.

The best way to fight the massed ranks of recommended books is with an offensively glib and, if possible, ill-informed reason for not bothering with them.

10: Ulysses – James Joyce

There’s a brilliant scene in the much-underrated sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, when Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) snatches a book from Mr La-di-dah Gunner Graham and says:

‘What’s this you’re reading? Useless?’

‘Ulysses, Sergeant Major.’

At school I remember my English teacher saying that he knew no one who had managed to get to the end of it. It does sound rubbish, doesn’t it? I’d have thought it was the duty of a great book to drag you along to the last page. But in a way, that’s good to know: if it’s famously hard going you have the perfect excuse not to bother with it.

9: Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien

The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I knew I would have nothing in common with anyone who had read it. Their taste in music, clothes, television, everything was predetermined by their devotion to Gandalf. Without a shadow of a doubt, in a few years, these people would be going to Peter Gabriel gigs and reading Dune.

8: For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

The Hemingway style is impressive at first. Simple sentences with few descriptions. They avoid adverbs and adjectives and, as a change from the over-elaborate works of Dickens and Austen, it’s OK for a while. Then you realise it’s a bit dry and boring and the more you find out about Hemingway, the more you realise he was a bore too: a terrible macho bore obsessed with bullfighting, guns, boxing and trying to catch big fish; really quite a tiresome bloke you wouldn’t want to spend time with.

7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust

Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.

6: The Dice Man – Luke Reinhart

Basically, this fairly unpleasant bloke does whatever his dice tell him to do, which is often quite terrible. But there’s a flaw in the structure of this book. He writes down an option for each number of the dice and then lets the dice decide what he should do. ‘Throw a six and rape the woman upstairs’?! How did that get on his list of things to do? If he’d written down, ‘Throw a six and have three crispy pancakes for tea’ he wouldn’t have got into so much trouble.

5: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Dreary ramblings of an unreliable and workshy tosspot. Its sole distinction consists in the creation of ‘Gonzo journalism’, which made it OK for journalists, particularly rock journalists, to get shit-faced with whoever they happened to be writing about.

4: The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolff

I don’t know if Naomi is a genuine academic – I couldn’t be arsed to Google her – if she is, she is probably Emeritus Professor of the bleeding obvious. The Beauty Myth is about how women feel under pressure to look good and lose weight. There you go. That’s it. I could get a similarly sophisticated level of socio-political analysis from the fishwives on Loose Women.

3: War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Way, way too long.

2: The Iliad -- Homer

The very idea that you are somehow culturally incomplete without knowledge of Homer is ridiculous. The Iliad is one of the most boring books ever written and it’s not just a boring book, it’s a boring epic poem; all repetitive battle scenes with a lot of reproaching and challenging and utterances escaping the barrier of one’s teeth and nostrils filling with dirt and helmet plumes nodding menacingly. There’s a big fight between Achilles and Hector and that’s about it.

1: Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

From what I can gather it’s Mills and Boon from the olden days, and really boring Mills and Boon at that. I did try reading a Jane Austen novel once, but it hadn’t got going by fifty pages so I guiltily gave up; the characters spoke in a very oblique way and it seemed to be all about hypocrisy and manners and convention; worse than that, it was really difficult to find the doing word in a sentence.

True confession time: Out of the 10, I'll admit to having read four: Lord of the Rings (I was like 10), For Whom The Bell Tolls (can't avoid Hemingway if you get a Master's in lit), Fear and Loathing ... (a journalism school requirement) and Pride and Prejudice (I was getting in touch with my inner chick lit self). Truth be told, they all kind of sucked, at least in the sense that I wouldn't read them again even if I was on a five-hour flight to New York without a book and I found one of them in the seat-back pocket. But, jeez, how do you make a list like this and leave off so many prime candidates. My Top Five additions?

1. Anything at all by Joyce Carol Oates. In the time it took me to write this blog entry, she wrote another 700 pages of dreck.

2. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. Makes a great doorstop.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon. Great writer. Not a great work, no matter what the critics say.

4. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison. Call me a racist if you must, but it just doesn't illuminate much of anything for me.

5. This blog. If you're here now, you should really reconsider your taste in e-literature.

Which Side of the Ball I'm On

The other night at dinner, my new friend Brian was telling me about how he views his approach to life. I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get the idea:

Him: "I guess I've always been more about playing defense than playing offense. That's something I'd like to work on more. I should play more offense."

Me: "I'm not sure what you mean?"

Him: "Defense is more reacting to things. Offense is more about making things happens. Defensive people, I guess, they just capitalize on whatever happens to find it's way to them. Offensive people search out opportunities. They find things."

His explanation was a good one, though I didn't realize how good it was until last night when I was walking through downtown Portland back to my hotel. It was a perfect night, cool and breezy, the streets teeming with people determined to savor every last hour of this gifted stretch, and it gave voice to what I've been thinking the past few days:

God, I could so live here. Really, I should just up and move.

That was when I fully understood what Brian meant by offense versus defense. An offensive-
minded person would have commenced finding ways to make such a move happen. Instead I began to find reasons why I could never do it:

What it would do to your career? How could you earn a living? You don't know but a handful of folks – could you make all new friends? What about the friends you'd leave behind? You could never sell your house in this market. That would suck. Could you really build a whole new life here, ground up, at 43 years old?

The more I went over it in my head, the more I felt the split between offense and defense. There was a time, all through my 20s and into my 30s, where I was far more on offense, when I'd gamble with my life in a moment to make some half-assed dream happen. That wasn't a bad thing: It led me to writing as a life, to journalism, to move out West, to enough self-discoveries to make happiness a possibility. Somewhere along the way, though, my tolerance for risk began to diminish and I became more about protecting what I have as opposed to trying to amass more. I'm not saying this version of me is bad or good – it simply is. I still take risks, and I'm glad I do. Playing offense has led me to advertising and to friends like Louie and Kat and Jos, who have taught me so much about the kind of man I long to be. Now, though, there's less I'm willing to risk, less I'm willing to throw down as a bet. I'm on defense more, looking to ward off disaster, looking less to create opportunities and more to avoid the sorts of bad choices that you might label "the opposite of opportunity."

Maybe I'm content this way and maybe that means I'll never live in Portland. Or maybe, like Brian, I should encourage myself to play more offense, to risk more in an effort to get more. We shall see …

A True Believer Among Us ....

It never ceases to amaze me, in this Age of Apathy, how some folks have managed to retain their passion for politics. Me, I think of election cycles as a game, a farce cast full of clowns on both sides. I know that sounds cynical, but I've spent too much time around politicians and I've heard too much bullshit rhetoric and pandering to be swept away by anyone's sound bites. The folks who have stayed full of fire, the ones who still get excited by the speeches and the possibility of hope ... I really admire them.

Like my pal Juliana.

Just this morning, we were sitting around her table in Portland when talk turned to the presidential election. She's an avid Dem (me, I'm avidly contemptuous of both parties) and she couldn't be more appalled by John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as VP. I think her quote went something like, "To have that woman a heartbeart away from the presidency, I can't even imagine it. And McCain, he's 72 years old."

That's when I made my near-fatal mistake. I compared Obama to Palin.

Me: "What qualifies him to be president? What's on his resume?"

Juliana: "Grrrrr. Grumble. Grrrrr."

Me: "Seriously. The guy was a community organizer, then in the Illinois State Senate, then a U.S. Senator. Now he's ready to run the country."

Juliana (with blood in her eyes): "At least he's inspirational."

Me: "So now we're electing a president based on ability to inspire? How is that a qualification?"

You can imagine how badly the talk went after that -- especially when I admitted that I'd likely vote for McCain based on how well I've come to know him over the years (and the fact that he called me an "asshole" a few years ago, which is kind of cool). The moral to the story? That America was a simpler place back when we didn't talk politics in polite company. And that, for every guy like me, who thinks of the political process as a lame joke, there are still some true believers out there.

By the way, here's the coda to the tale. Juliana had a quote that deserves being memorialized for the next few years, at least:

"Mark my words, if McCain is elected president, we'll go to war with Iran within two years. Right after that, they'll appoint as many conservatives as they can to the United States Supreme Court, so I as a woman will no longer have any reproductive rights."

-- Juliana Lukasik
September 9, 2008

There you have it, folks. A vote for McCain could be a vote against uteruses everywhere.