The Sins of the Mother: Can We Just Leave Bristol Alone?

Look. I never thought Sarah Palin should get a free pass on 1) using motherhood as one of her chief qualifications for public office and then 2) telling America we had no right to know anything about her family. I sharply criticized Palin for getting on an airplane while leaking amniotic fluid. I thought it was reasonable for people to criticize her for marketing herself as a perfect mother when, clearly, she's not.

But back in September, when Bristol Palin turned up pregnant, I also wrote that criticizing her was out of bounds:

There's no room for schadenfreude. She shouldn't be made the poster child for the failure of abstinence-only approaches to teenage sexuality; we have too many such poster children already. She's going to face the difficulties of early motherhood with the added burden of publicity. She'll also find deep joy in her baby, I'm sure - a point too rarely mentioned for all the moralizing about "teenage mothers." She's embarking on an amazing adventure in one of the hardest ways possible. I wish her well.

Now that Bristol has given an interview and basically said, yes, it's hard but I love my baby, I don't really have anything more to say about her - except that I really feel for her when she lets slip that she mourns a chance to just be herself, for herself.

But darn it, too many people that I otherwise like and respect are amplifying the Bristol interview and making her into, well, the poster girl for the bankruptcy of abstinence-only education. Sure, Bristol herself said it doesn't work. That's worth reporting. But Rebecca Traister at Salon goes on to comment:

Bristol went on to make more (perhaps unwitting) feminist points about what, exactly, the responsibilities and consequences are for young women who choose (or are forced down) the path she took.

At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte quotes Traister's article approvingly, adding:

For the rest of us [non-prolifers], of course, the whole thing is a horror show.

Both Rebecca and Amanda then go on to give Sarah Palin the drubbing she deserves. I'm all for that. I just wonder: Can't we call out Palin on her hypocrisy and failed policies without dragging Bristol any deeper into it? I mean, Amanda sees the problem when it's coming from the opposite direction:

Abstinence-only had been sold to the country as a teenage pregnancy prevention program, but the right wing reaction to Bristol made it clear that it was a teenage pregnancy inducement program, and Bristol was the poster child for its intended effects. [my emphasis]

Analytically, I agree with Amanda 100 percent on what the 'wingers were up to. Yet I think we can make this argument without making Bristol the poster child for a feminist critique of wingnutty views on sexuality. Otherwise, we're reversing the terms, not redefining them.

And we can certainly condemn the failures of abstinence-only without endorsing statements that hold Bristol up as a "perfect example " and assume we know just what went down between Bristol and her mother. In fact, we don't know whether Sarah Palin forbade Bristol to have an abortion.

Let's not make Bristol pay for the sins of her mother.

A Bear, A Tiger, and an Awesome Inauguration

I watched the inaugural festivities in the university's grand (i.e., scandalously expensive) new student center, surrounded by dozens of friends and colleagues and happy strangers. (Oh, and my husband, too.) We shared high-fives when Biden supplanted Darth Cheney. We cheered when the clock struck noon and made Barack Hussein Obama our 44th president. And I wasn't the only one who spent most of the hour teary-eyed. I am, as the Germans say, "built close to the water," but yesterday seemed to a high-water day for an awful lot of people.

My kids had a different take on it. The Bear thought the ceremony was "very cool," but his class had to do math worksheets while the TV droned in the background. Aaargh! History in the making, and the kids are cramming for those damn standardized tests! I have sympathy for the third-grade teachers, who are evidently feeling the crunch from all the snow closures; we've had five days with two-hour delays, plus three actual snow days. But still!

The Tiger watched the inauguration in the cafeteria at lunchtime. His take? "It was not awesome." (The Tiger currently divides his whole world into two categories: awesome and not awesome.) And why not? "There were only grow-mutts." Only adults. He was only slightly mollified when I told him about Sasha being close to his age - and apparently about as bored as he was.

Aside from those few miniature dissenters, it was an awesomely awesome day. We kept the kids up way too late at a party, where it was also awesome to see a bunch of fellow campaign volunteers for the first time since November 4. Catching up on things today ... well, that's been not awesome. But oh, so very worth it.

With all due respect to my dear little Tiger, I loved Obama's sober tone. I loved his call to collective responsibility. I loved his reference to "putting away childish things." I happen to think it's awesome that there's a grow-mutt in charge of the White House again.


This, by the way, is the poster I won in the end-of-campaign raffle for all the local canvassers and phone bankers. Look closely and you'll see where Biden signed it during his stopover in Athens. (My winning it was undeserved; lots of people put in way more hours than I.) The pic below gives you a better view of Biden's scrawl.

The Thing with Feathers

I know that we're all still supposed to be jubilant over the election. This is supposedly our honeymoon, these days between Obama's victory and his inauguration, before he's had a chance to start disappointing us in earnest. But elation hasn't been my mood; not at all. Maybe I'm just too tired from the endless campaign, but I've felt cautious, depleted, reflective, even a little melancholy. The November days are short and bleak, and the thing with feathers threatens to fly south for the winter.

Photo by Flickr user tanakawho, used under a Creative Commons license. No birds were harmed in its making.

And so I find myself mulling over this business of "hope" and what it's good for - what the "thing with feathers" might animate, beyond the sloganeering.

For one thing, I think hope is an effective antidote to fear. As such, it's crucial to real democracy. Of all the laws and policies born of fear during the past eight years - the Patriot Act, the Abu Ghraib interrogations, the Guantanamo Bay internments, the rampant wiretapping - I can't think of one that was wise (and many were plain unconstitutional). Fear turns off people's critical faculties and turns citizens into subjects.

Uncritical hope can be exploited by demagogues, too, but not so easily. Hope is not self-sustaining: Reality has a way of intruding on hope while tending to reinforce people's fears. Historically, dictatorships have rested far more on fear than on hope, and idealistic revolutions-gone-bad have always shifted from hope toward fear before spawning such atrocities as Stalinism or the Terror. Hope can move people to take to the streets, but fear is a far more potent motivator if you're out for blood.

But even in times of threat and crisis - especially then - hope can lead us back to our core values. Hope can guide us toward a foreign policy aimed at strength through alliances rather than intimidation and militarism. Hope can inspire an economic rescue plan aimed at restructuring our economy - moving our automotive industry away from gas guzzlers and our energy infrastructure toward renewables - instead of just panicking and giving AIG and Citibank whatever they want.

Hope itself is a renewable energy source. We're going to need that in the months and years ahead.

Hope is also a gift to our children. It's an example of how to live, a precondition for making the world better for them, a source of joy. It can help them cope with their nascent awareness of injustice and violence; it can nurture their empathy and protect them against cynicism. It's part of the very air I want them to imbibe. I just loved how Tim Wise captured this in a recent essay on Alternet:

[M]aybe it's just that being a father, I have to temper my contempt for this system and its managers with hope. After all, as a dad (for me at least), it's hard to look at my children every day and think, "Gee, it sucks that the world is so screwed up, and will probably end in a few years from resource exploitation...Oh well, I sure hope my daughters have a great day at school!"

Fatherhood hasn't made me any less radical in my analysis or desire to see change. In fact, if anything, it has made me more so. I am as angry now as I've ever been about injustice, because I can see how it affects these children I helped to create, and for whom I am now responsible. But anger and cynicism do not make good dance partners. Anger without hope, without a certain faith in the capacity of we the people to change our world is a sickness unto death.

(Read the whole essay, "Enough of 'Barbiturate' Left Cynicism," here.)

Paired with a sense of responsibility, hope is also a lot of work. (Maybe that, too, is why I feel so darn tired?) That's where Emily Dickinson got it wrong. She wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I actually think hope demands our all. It's voracious. It will swallow us whole. And so technically, I guess, it won't "ask a crumb of me" since it doesn't settle for crumbs.

Hope is much like bell hooks' notion of love as she describes it in her essay, "Romance: Sweet Love." Unlike romance (which she equates with infatuation and putting up a false front), love requires a choice, hooks writes. Love demands that we commit to it over and over and over again, every day, for as long as we want it to endure. I think hope is like that too; anything easier isn't hope, it's mere romance and self-delusion.

In other words, hope is a whole lot like a longstanding marriage. It's not always easy to sustain. It requires a body-and-soul commitment. It demands our energy.

But like love and marriage, hope can give energy, too. And when that alchemy of hope occurs, that's when the thing with feathers takes wing. That's when its chirps meld into full-fledged song. That's when it keeps us warm.

Photo of a lovely befeathered kitty named Lynksys by Flickr user SuziJane, used under a Creative Commons license.

A Bearish Birthday, and Nine Years of Parenthood

The Bear turned nine today. We celebrated by going to a concert where his choir performed. (Audio is here for anyone who's curious; if you're plugged into a real speaker you can actually hear some decent music behind the audience's rustling and coughing.)

Afterward, we got together with some dear friends and ate this cake:


Apart from the obvious model, the cake was patterned after some cookies at a post-election party that got devoured before the Bear had a chance to try them. This was my attempt to make amends for that little disappointment. (It was also a design that didn't require any cutting, and since I'm still semi-debilitated, I wanted to keep things simple.)

Contrary to appearances, I'm totally not trying to indoctrinate my kids. I do think that being a parent means you get to try to pass on your values. Very, very high in my firmament of values - ranking just behind kindness and empathy - is critical, independent thinking.

So I've told the Bear he may well vote contrary to me someday. (Secretly I tend to think he probably won't; if I teach him to ask tough questions, he's virtually immunized against voting for the next G.W. Bush.) Way back during the primaries, I asked him why he thought Obama would be a good president. Ending the war in Iraq topped his list. Education was way up there, too.

The Tiger, for his part, just likes to jump up and down and say "Obama winnded! Obama winnded!" He still has a ways to go with both his political consciousness and his past-tense verbs.

---------

Earlier today, I mentioned to the Tiger's father that we've now been parents for nine years. His response? "Ha ha ha ha ha!" That captured my incredulity, too.

I laugh at all the moments of absurdity. Just yesterday, the Tiger turned up with ball-point ink crisscrossing his face, resembling a psycho Spiderman. He steadfastly denied applying any ink to himself.

I marvel at how the time could go so slowly and so swiftly all at once. Those near-sleepless nights and endless tantrums seemed to expand into eternity. And yet, looking back, I wonder what happened to the mini-Bear who'd throw his beloved stuffed animal, Mama Bear, out of his crib, and then bellow with fury that she was no longer snuggled up against him. Wasn't that just a few weeks ago?

I still wonder why I thought I was qualified for this job. No one really is, are they? It's all on-the-job learning, and if you screw up, there's a whole world hanging in the balance. Hmmm ... it's not so unlike the presidency, in miniature, when you think about it.

The Bear has extremely keen hearing unless he's being asked to clean his room. Predictably, he overheard my comment about nine years of parenthood. His response: "What does that have to do with anything?"

What, indeed, my darling little Bear? Nothing, of course, from the center of a world in which I've always been his mama, in which I'm as taken for granted as oxygen and his still-beloved Mama Bear.

And yet everything - more than he can possibly know unless he too someday becomes a parent.

Prop 8 and Obama's Better Angels

If any of us were truly naive enough to believe that Obama's election would bring all Americans together, walking arm in arm, singing "We Shall Overcome," the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Barack's chief of staff doused any such delusions.

I'm not sure what I think of this pick. Maybe Obama needs a tough enforcer to keep Congress on board. Or maybe Emanuel will become a polarizing figure who creates additional tensions between the White House and Congress. Best case scenario, as Mike Madden puts it at Salon: Emanuel will be the bad cop to Obama's good cop, allowing Obama to get stuff done without himself getting too bloodied in the fray.

What I hope: That even as he inevitably makes mistakes and betrays progressive principles, Obama will still be able to inspire our better angels. In return, we progressives will have to call on his better angels. We need to press him so that those betrayals are few and infrequent. In fact, as Digby argues eloquently, he can't govern left-of-center, even where he wants to, unless we keep the heat on him. For perhaps the first time ever, progressive voices - from Rachel Maddow through to us itty bitty kitty blogs - are strong enough that we should be able exert real influence.

Here's one crucial place to to begin: by mitigating the damage caused by Prop 8 in California, the harshest disappointment of this week. Glenn Greenwald notes that Obama can help to this by repealing at least the worst sections of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Obama is on record as having opposed DOMA from the get-go. During the primary campaign, Obama called for its full repeal. In the vice presidential debate, Joe Biden promised that gay and straight couples would have identical civil rights under an Obama-Biden administration.

Time to deliver, guys. It's the least you owe to the countless LGBT voters whose votes were crucial to Obama's victory. It's the least you owe to basic human decency - not to mention the constitutional principle of equal protection.

Greenwald says that while repealing DOMA wouldn't repair all the wreckage of Prop 8, simply revoking its provisions that bar the federal government from extending full rights to same-sex couples would transform many lives. He cites the case of binational couples who are forced to live apart or outside of the U.S.

That's an example that really cuts close to home for me. I was able to "import" my husband from Germany because he has boy parts and I have girl parts. How arbitrary is that?

So, President-Elect Obama, I may not be an angel, much less a better one. Please hear us anyway. Please make repealing DOMA a priority for your first hundred days. The "fierce urgency of now"demands no less.

The angel in the photos is not a random one. It's "Gold Else," who perches atop the Siegessäule in Berlin. The same Siegessäule where Barack Obama gave his grand Berlin speech last July. The very same Siegessäule that is Berlin's paramount symbol of gay rights. I took these photos just before Obama began to speak (moments before my camera batteries crapped out).

But Can Palin Spell "Potatoe"?

Photo of multicolored potatoes by Flickr user libraryman, used under a Creative Commons license.

Dan Quayle was roundly mocked when he couldn't spell potato without adding an E, but he had nothin' on Sarah Palin. Via the HuffPost, Fox News is reporting that Palin was way more clueless than even the Katie Couric interview revealed. She thought Africa was a country!!!!

(I promise not to get in the habit of citing Fox News, but I bet they'll offer a great view of the Republicans' circular firing squad over the next few days. I'm not above a little schadenfreude.)

Not only was Palin unable to name the NAFTA countries when quizzed by her handlers. Worse, she didn't even know which countries are on the North American continent!

What did she think: Alaska, Canada, and "pro-American areas of this great nation"? That makes three, all right.

Wow. This goes way beyond potato, potahto.

I've said before that Palin lacks curiosity but can't be dumb as dirt. Otherwise she wouldn't have come this far. Now I'm wondering if I overestimated her. Or if she learned her geography from the Alaska Independence Party.

Either way, I'm hoping she won't slip into Washington on the criminal coattails of Ted Stevens, assuming Alaskans really were daft enough to re-elect him the day after his conviction on corruption charges. Sarah Palin does not need to replace Stevens in the U.S. Senate. She needs to rev up her snowmachine and do a little racin', maybe some moose huntin', and a lot of forgettin' about another run in 2012.

Update, 11/13/08: Okay, so at least the "Africa" comment appears to be completely fake - confabulated by a certain Martin Eisenstadt - which the New York Times describes as the fictional creation of a couple of filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish. No word yet on whether Palin's NAFTA comments were also cut from whole cloth. Go read the Times article anyway; it's very, very funny.

This is my karmic punishment for having cited Fox News. Bill O'Reilly, no less. I deserve ten strokes with a loofah - or was it a falafel?

My Blue Heaven

Who knew it could be such fun to feel so blue?

In the whole state of Ohio, only one county went more heavily than mine for Barack Obama: Cuyahoga County, at 68.5%. Athens County came in second, with 66.5% for Obama, and that despite our heavily white population. (The New York Times shows county results if you click on the states.) My friend and candidate for state representative, Debbie Phillips, also won, helping regain the Ohio State House for the Democrats after many years of Republican control. (I got to hug her at school pickup today; I'm still waiting for my hug from Obama.)

I was watching the returns at home last night when the networks called Ohio for Obama. I did the electoral math and realized the election was over. We hauled the Bear out of his bed and whooped and hollered and shed a few tears. We put the Bear back to bed and opened a bottle of white wine (I'd been too busy to even buy deodorant, never mind champagne). My sister, who'd supported John McCain, called from California to congratulate me on singlehandedly tipping Ohio for Obama. She was as gracious as McCain in his concession speech but a whole lot funnier. I do love my little sis.

Of course, my part in the campaign was minuscule. I didn't stop out of school to work full-time for the campaign, like my former student Rence. Nor did I practically move into the local headquarters like my friend Vicky. I didn't get a mere half hour of sleep on Election Eve, as did my student Meredith, who helped lead the on-campus campaign.

I'm stunned by the dedication and sacrifice that went into Obama's victory. I'd love to know how many people volunteered for the campaign. It must be in the hundreds of thousands. It has been a thrill to bathe in the spirit of common purpose - to indulge in hope and make it real.

My part was small indeed. Okay, so I did face down a man with black teeth. I braved vicious dogs. (And by "braved" I mean "cowered before them.") Everyone who's heard about my adventures canvassing in Pine Aire Village thinks that Mr. Blacktooth was definitely a meth head and maybe had a lab of his own hidden in one of those decrepit trailers. I'm no expert on meth (and thank goodness for that), but I remember similar scenes from a Donna Tartt novel, The Little Friend, which featured a character with a serious meth habit and nasty teeth. Now I have a vivid visual to go with the book when I re-read it someday. The irony is that my encounter with Mr. Blacktooth did nothing to advance Obama's win, since he was a non-voter and apparently a nasty racist to boot.

My impression is that most volunteers gave the time they could afford - and then a bunch more. Maybe that explains why so many of us are about to collapse today, even those of use whose contributions were modest; we're almost too tired to feel the joy. Our families gave of their time, too. My husband ferried the four of us through the woods on Sunday, navigating ridges, hollows, and perilously steep driveways while I dropped literature. He tended the kids during most of my outings. But my boys also went out canvassing with me a couple of times, including the final round of get-out-the-vote door knocking yesterday evening.

I hope my sons look back on this someday and feel like I do now: privileged to have played a bit part in overcoming the scars of American history.

I hope they'll look back and say, with pride and pleasure: Yes we did.

(Although I do have a few pansies blooming right now, this one is from a few months ago; it just happened to have the right color.)

Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Racism's Door

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm still worried about whether American racism - overt and latent - might be strong enough to tip this election to McCain? Frank Rich thinks it won't, according to his last column in the New York Times:

Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

But then the Columbus Dispatch thinks race could be enough to drag Obama to defeat in my neck of the woods. The Dispatch may be deluded enough to endorse McCain but it's in close proximity to the various Ohio bellwethers. As am I, minus the delusion (or so I hope?).

Here's my encounter with racism on the campaign trail. It's enough to make me plenty nervous, even as it stokes my hope for slow, slow change.

The first day I went out knocking on doors for Obama, I met a frayed-looking middle-aged couple enjoying the mild sunny Sunday afternoon on their porch. They were the very first people I found at home as a freshly minted canvasser. They lived in a neighborhood of modest homes built in the 1950s. I wasn't out in the impoverished countryside; I was among young families and retired professors.

The man said he was genuinely unsure who'd get his vote. And so I sat with them for a good half hour, asking what issues worried them.

It didn't take long to unearth a major concern. The woman said she planned to vote for John McCain. But even if she didn't ...

"I have to tell you something," she said. "I'm not racist." Long, long pause. "But I'd have a problem voting for a black man for president."

Before we were sent out to canvass, we'd been warned that we'd encounter open racism sooner or later. I still wasn't prepared for it in my maiden experience as a canvasser.

And so I circumnavigated. I asked them how they felt about the economy, which had just begun its meltdown. I inquired how they felt about the current president. Once they'd expressed their deep dismay at the status quo, I wondered out loud if they might want to take a chance on the new guy, even if they had to go outside their comfort level.

I wasn't trying to convince the wife, who'd made her allegiances clear. I was just trying to gently nudge the husband back into his self-declared role of canceling out his mate's vote.

But she was the one who eventually moved - not into the Democratic column, but possibly into a different sort of self-awareness.

"You know," she mused, "Maybe I am a little bit racist after all."

I tell this story not to open her up to mockery. In the late September sunlight, the day before my birthday, I took her reluctant but unforced confession as a gift, the more precious for its fragility.

As I said a day ago, canvassing is very much like teaching. You plant a seed. You hope for gentle rains. You never know for sure what will sprout and grow and blossom.

And then there are people who dash your hope altogether. My younger son, the Tiger, is having some trouble with a kid in his kindergarten class who's hitting and calling names. About half his classmates are also being bullied. The insults include "stinky black," aimed at one of the Tiger's friends who is half Latina, half African-American, coupled with taunts that "Obama is stinky."

Kids don't make this shit up on their own. I don't know if he's getting it from his parents - at least theoretically, it could come from other relatives - and I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt than judge them prematurely. Whatever the source, he's sure not inventing racism out of thin air.

Here's what we're up against. The Columbus Dispatch reported on the ubiquity of such attitudes a few weeks back:

Like most other Democrats in southeastern Ohio, Hendrickson, a single mother of two struggling to support her family as a waitress, voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary.

With Clinton out, Hendrickson says she plans to vote for Republican John McCain. She doesn't trust Democrat Barack Obama.

"I just don't feel comfortable with him," said Hendrickson, 36, of neighboring Portsmouth. "I don't think he's being honest about what he's going to do."

The political landscape of the 14-county southeastern region, a swing area of Ohio where chronic unemployment and poverty have left many feeling forgotten, would seem to favor Democrats.

But an uneasiness with Obama prevails in Appalachia, and for many it comes down to race.

"I'll be voting for a Republican for the first time in my life," Jeff Justice, a 46-year-old ironworker, said as he finished his lunch at Hickie's.

Asked why, Justice, a white former Wheelersburg resident now living in Florida, didn't hesitate.

"He's black."

But as the economy has tanked, people's willingness to set aside their prejudices has seemingly grown. At Salon, James Hanrahan suggests that racists fear lots of thing even more than they fear black people. As Sean Quinn reported at FiveThirtyEight, a canvasser in Pennsylvania witnessed the following exchange:

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

It may be cold comfort to those whose retirement savings have evaporated over the past few weeks. But if tomorrow's vote is close, we can reasonably assume it will have been the economic meltdown that pushed bigots into voting for a black man. If Obama does well enough to claim a mandate, we can still assume "it's the economy, stupid."

Either way, these elemental fears of economic survival are surely multiplying the number of people who call themselves - with a dose of charming self-mockery, to be sure - "Rednecks for Obama." I took this photo a couple of blocks from my house, but I've seen more than one similar sign since then, including one deep in the woods while canvassing yesterday.


By the way, I'm not at all suggesting that self-proclaimed "rednecks" are racists. Only that the current crises are inspiring them to vote for a candidate who - for reasons of race, yes, but a host of other reasons as well - doesn't look like their typical guy.

I am suggesting that if "rednecks" are turning out for Obama, all of us who back him had better do the same.

A new, kinder chapter in American history just might begin today.

In the Belly of the Bellwether

About being the "bellwether" in this election: It's wonderful and horrible. I've been grateful to be in a spot where - in some small way - I might possibly help tip the election toward Barack Obama. Now, on Election Eve, I'm nervous as hell.

Technically, Athens County, where I live, isn't even the bellwetheriest part of Ohio. That has been variously identified as Chillicothe, west of here, or Perry County, which abuts Athens to the north, or maybe the entire southeast region of Ohio. The town of Athens itself is a little island that combines progressive politics with the kind of neighborliness that you thought went out of fashion after 1959. It's dotted with nearly as many Obama yard signs as there are houses. Athens County voted 63% for John Kerry in 2004, which I believe only Cuyahoga County topped.

We aren't at all typical of the region, though. Much of the surrounding county suffers from rural poverty (though generally not as bad as what I encountered this weekend). Our neighboring counties are even worse off; in August of this year, three of the state's six counties with unemployment rates upward of 10 percent were adjacent to Athens County.

And so it's not at all surprising that people in southeast Ohio often feel disenfranchised. This feeds into my three big fears for tomorrow:

• Republicans will try to suppress the vote through challenges to voters at the polling places and various other tactics.
• Democrats may stay home because they think Obama's got it sewed up and their vote doesn't matter anyway.
• Racism may prove more durable than we've all hoped.

At school pickup today I heard a rumor that the GOP has been using robocalls to deceive some Athens voters into falsely thinking that their polling places have changed. Maybe this is just a rumor. If the vote is close, though, I expect that Republicans will comb through every last voter registration, hunting for the most minute or irregularities.

Based on my occasional canvassing work over the past month I'm pretty sure people aren't too complacent. When asked if they planned to vote, people quite often said they'd already voted early. Of the rest, most said "I wouldn't sit this one out for the world." At least in and around Athens, the general sentiment is that this is a historic election and we'd be fools not to vote.

Apart from those who live in the most grinding poverty, even a lot of the less likely voters sound motivated. Yesterday, I dropped off literature at a trailer home where a dead deer lay in front of the steps. The residents were in the yard. They told me they were definitely going to vote on Tuesday.

As for my third worry, racism? Well, that's a topic for my next post.

Update 11:15 p.m., November 3: In an all-too-apt illustrations of how rumors spread and morph, I botched the one above. I originally wrote that postcards were allegedly being used to deceive Athens voters about their polling places. At my local Obama campaign headquarters tonight, other volunteers set me straight on the actual allegation, which involved robocalls to do the same thing. Either way, it's second-hand information. I've updated my post to reflect the most accurate gossip I could gather. :-)

Starving the Political Imagination

While canvassing for Barack Obama this afternoon, I visited the poorest, saddest, most hopeless place I've ever encountered up close in this country. Sure, I've passed urban housing projects ... and kept going. Today, I walked willingly into a pocket of grinding rural poverty. What I learned about my poorest neighbors' lives will keep me awake tonight. As well it should.

I went out with another woman who teaches at my university, and we decided to start with Pine Aire Village, a trailer park on the outskirts of the next town to the west. ("Mobile homes" is not the right term; there's no mobility to speak of in this place, just transiency, eviction, and abandonment.) She'd been out there fifteen years ago when she'd had a nanny who lived there, so she knew the way.

The first thing we noticed were all the largish dogs lunging at their chains. The next thing? My friend said, "Wow, things have really gone downhill since I was here the last time." Most of the trailers are rusted. Virtually all of them are surrounded with that sprawl of junk typical for rural poverty: broken toys, old tires, unidentifiable plastic parts. I remember this from the Indian reservations that dotted the North Dakotan landscape of my childhood. The only difference is that Appalachia has bigger hills and a lot more trees.


We spoke first with a man and his teenaged daughter who were excited about Obama - well, at least the girl was, though she wasn't quite old enough to vote. The girl seemed sweet and sincere and even enthusiastic. Her dad was sure that voting wouldn't change a thing. They took a yard sign anyway. I wondered how long it will last before it's stolen or trashed or just incorporated into the overall junkyard effect.

From them, we learned that the trailer court was teeming with drugs. I didn't ask what kind. Thinking back to what my former hairdresser told me about rural drug use, I'm guessing meth and Oxycontin.

While my friend went back to her car to fetch them their yard sign, I strolled a few steps down the road. A man with blackened teeth (maybe my age, but he was so run down I couldn't tell) approached me and asked who or what I wanted. I explained that I was volunteering for Obama and looking for a particular house number. He told me I wasn't going to find it or anything else down at that end of the court. As he spoke, he moved in front of me, almost blocking my way. That's what clearly tipped his behavior over from "possibly trying to be helpful" to "definitely trying to intimidate." It didn't help that he kept mumbling loudly that he wasn't going to vote, he didn't believe in voting, but no matter what he would never, ever vote for Obama.

My friend came with her car just then and rescued me. Ensconced in our metal cocoon, we drove down to that end of the court anyway. My hostile new friend was right. We didn't immediately find another number on our list - though we did once we rounded the corner, and I'm still wondering what he was trying to deflect or protect or hide.


What we did find: A swastika, spray painted in red on an abandoned trailer. And then another, and another.

My friend is Jewish, but frankly she was still far more worried about vicious dogs. Myself, I was pretty nervous about the combination of nasty dogs and anti-Semitism, but if I'd said that we probably would've felt compelled to give up, and neither of us was ready for that.

The next place we knocked, a young man barely old enough to vote answered the door sleepily. He said he'd just laid down for a nap but then proceeded to ramble on about how he was voting for the sheriff, which meant he couldn't vote for president, though he kind of liked Obama anyway, but hey he had to go to court, so he wouldn't be voting for anyone ... My friend thought he was on something, though it's possible he was just paranoid and confused due to his legal troubles. Then, in a sudden flash of coherence, he warned us to keep our distance from a certain red pickup truck whose owner drank constantly and kept a bunch of mean dogs. This was apparently the pack of dogs we saw upon our arrival.

This young man wasn't sure whether he was actually registered to vote.

Across the street, we spoke with a lovely woman in her early eighties - bright, thoughtful, warm, still perfectly sharp. Her tiny yard was neat. Inside, her home was tended with care. I was almost more touched by this than by the naked despair on every side of her.

She followed the news closely, she said. She despised McCain. But she was just heartbroken that she couldn't vote for Hillary, and so she was planning to sit this election out. We spent twenty minutes discussing with her how the best thing she could do to defeat McCain would be to hold her nose and vote for Obama. In the end, I think she probably will, unless she's feeling poorly on Tuesday or life otherwise intervenes.

Canvassing is like teaching that way. You plant a seed. You never know if it'll sprout. Pine Aire - despite its would-be picturesque name - is pretty arid ground.


From there, things deteriorated. A fifty-something woman with leathered skin and long platinum hair told us that nothing you did mattered, "them politicians" only cared about money anyway. She hated Bush, she hated the war, she worried about jobs. But she wasn't even registered to vote. (I guess we should've asked that first.) While we spoke, three men sat drinking beer in her yard, listening to loud country music. Every time she stated a political opinion - and she had many, and could cite pretty persuasive reasons for them all - she'd immediately collapse into herself. Her shoulders would slump, and she'd repeat her mantra that voting wouldn't change a thing.

This woman - who fought so hard against the ravages of time on her flesh but couldn't even imagine waging a political fight - could have been the poster girl for nearly everyone we spoke with. Time and again, we heard that one person's vote didn't matter. That politicians were all corrupt. That all our jobs were getting sent away overseas and we couldn't stop it. That there was no reason to even register to vote.

This is yet another cruelty of poverty, all the harsher because it locks us into a society where some are desperately poor: People are starved of hope. They are deprived of any sense of agency and efficacy. They are so far beyond disenfranchised that there's not even a word for it.

This is intentional. If all the people I met today did vote, they'd break strongly against McCain and the Bush legacy. Of course, we don't know how many of them would have an issue with Obama's race. (That's a matter for another post.) But they are so deeply discouraged that they can't even begin to imagine a politics that would give a damn about them and their lives.

All photos courtesy of my husband, who visited Pine Aire a few weeks ago while researching the local history of coal mining. Prudently, he stayed in the car and didn't go too far into the trailer court. This is why he didn't see or photograph the swastikas. Believe me, they're real, and I'd be too afraid to take pictures.

Close Encounters of the McCain Kind

Long-time readers know that Kittywampus once came to a (rather tepid) defense of Cindy McCain. But that was only because her husband was acting like such a royal douche toward her. We do not harbor some secret affection for her.

And so here's a very funny (if uncharitable) spoof of her origins, courtesy of the Onion (via Broadsheet):


Cindy McCain Claims She's Just Like Any Other Female Human

For a while now I've thought Cindy McCain bears an odd resemblance to Rudy Guiliani. Maybe he comes from the same alien planet. I think the similarity is around their lips, which are probably just naturally thin but always strike me as tense and bitter.

More to the point, Cindy McCain conjures up Ghosts of Republican Wives Past. Her brittle, superannuated-Barbie facade reminds me a little too much of Nancy Reagan. I imagine the plasticky surface is a bipartisan occupational hazard of being a political wife. Same for the distortions caused by cosmetic surgery and Botox.

But the glassy stare? I have to wonder if that's nerve damage from hearing too much Republican propaganda over the years.

Trick or Treat for Change

Since I live in Halloween heaven (or hell?) - a college town where tens of thousands of revelers will cavort in the streets this weekend - my little town schedules trick or treating on the preceding Thursday. I guess the goal is to separate the wee ghosties from the rioters. (Never mind that the actual riots usually break out only as the bars are closing.) It took me a couple of years to get used to this, and I still think it's weird. As my sister said today: "And do you celebrate Christmas on December 23, too?"

So yesterday we went trick or treating, and I saw this cool Barack O'Lantern (not ours, I'm sorry to say):


Today I saw something even cooler. At 3:45, no fewer than thirty-five people were lined up on Court Street. I stopped my bike, brakes screeching, to see what was up, expecting maybe free drinks for the holiday. But no! They were all in line to early vote at the Board of Elections. I later heard that the line had been much longer at noon. This is a town that will probably break 80 to 90 percent for Obama.

My little town is not at all typical for the rest of southeastern Ohio. Nonetheless. I'm starting to hope that Ohio might not embarrass itself again this time around.

I've Been Biden My Time ...

... but I think I'd better get this post up before the election's over.

Joe Biden came to town two weeks ago, and I got to see him before I had to go teach. The timing was tight, so this involved a lot of high-speed bike riding to and from the local fairgrounds. Okay, my definition of "high-speed" is pretty laughable, and to be honest I rolled into class about a half minute late, but it was worth the fuss.

The speech Biden gave closely tracked the campaign's themes in recent days. Support for the middle class. Energy independence. Health care reform. Prudence abroad. If you watched the debates, you know the spiel.

Which frees me to be totally silly and superficial. (Oops, I just typed "superstitious." Talk about a Freudian slip - I am completely, foolishly superstitious about this election.)

Biden's talk was preceded by the entire Democratic food chain. First up was our wonderful local candidate for the Ohio Statehouse, Debbie Phillips. I rode in too late to get a picture of her. Then again, I know what she looks like; she's a friend, and her daughter's a year ahead of my older son in the same school. She'd in a tough race against one of the very few local Republicans who is not a complete loser. (Their gene pool is small.)

Next up was Richard Cordray, who does not look anything like comedian Rob Corddry, formerly of the Daily Show, although I keep mixing them up - never mind that their names are even spelled differently.


He's running to be Ohio's next attorney general, after his predecessor disgraced himself. I liked him. And I thought he was rather cute, but the prize for "much cuter in person than I expected" went to Sherrod Brown, Ohio's single Democratic Senator. (See, I warned you this was not going to be a deep analytical post.)


By contrast, our governor, Ted Strickland, is impossible to photograph except when he's making some sort of funny snoot.


I got to shake Governor Strickland's hand after the festivities. I didn't get my paws on Joe Biden, though not for lack of hanging around and looking overeager. Even though it was a fairly intimate rally with a few hundred attendees, Biden was too swamped by the throngs of people for me to get very close. As budding political celebrity whore, I guess I have to work on my skills.


My favorite part of Biden's talk was the anecdote he told early on. While a student at the University of Delaware, Biden visited Ohio University one weekend for a football game. The Athens News took better notes on this than I did:

"I made a little mistake here," Biden told the crowd. That error, the vice-presidential candidate said, was going along with a group of young women he'd met to their dormitory. After walking in that night, Biden said he was immediately accosted by an officer, a quick reminder that men often weren't allowed in the women's dorms in those days.

"But I promise you I never breached the first floor," he joked with the crowd, saying it was only a brief detention with the police. Referring to his experience at the dorm, Biden said, "That's what I remember most about Athens."

And you know, I believed him. It was a rehearsed story, sure, but also a glimpse of the young Biden, carefree and silly and not yet wed to rules of political propriety. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only person at the rally who felt like we knew Biden a little better afterward - and liked him better, too.

Vlad and Boris Romance the Bering Strait

I'm due to lighten up after the last couple of posts. On top of that, I got my eyes dilated at the ophthalmologist today, so I spent much of the day with lots of trippy visual disturbances. This is not at all the same trippy fun. I had a close encounter with a University Administrator of the most hidebound variety this afternoon, and it was very hard to take her seriously while my pupils kept trying to focus somewhere between the office window and, oh, Jupiter.

(This is probably why the most hallucinogenic thing I do these days is overdose on coffee. Hmm. Did that today, too, in a totally ill-advised effort to still my pupils.)

Anyway, since I still can't clearly focus on the screen, here's a video clip that one of my husband's grad students passed on to him. It's tasteless and funny (in a sort of PG-rated Borat vein).

Can anyone tell me where Vlad and Boris really filmed this? I don't think it was either Russia or America. Any theories?

What to Watch When Your Sewer Backs Up

So here at Kittywampus, we seem to have a semiannual tradition of the sewer backing up and flooding the basement. Today's episode was very very minor compared to the inaugural flood of last November, Die grosse Scheisse, or its sequel in May. (In fact, it was small enough that I'm not sure we've satisfied the gods of bad sewer karma.)

Which brings me - logically enough - back to politics. Y'all know that I want Tina Fey to run for president. Here's as good a reason as any: Anyone who take transform shit into laughter just might be able to stop the perpetual sewage backups in our economy and foreign policy. And wouldn't Will Ferrell make a marvelous VP? Watch and see (if you haven't already):

Socialism with a Republican Face

Statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Berlin, Germany, photographed by Flickr user Pete Johnston, used under a Creative Commons license.

Am I wrong, or is this "socialist" canard the Repubs are throwing at Obama a brand new tactic from the Rovian playbook? I don't remember Kerry or Gore or Dukakis being red-baited like this. And all because Obama wants to "spread the wealth around." The horror!

Anyone else notice that the "socialist" accusations have escalated just as the wealth is being spread around very generously indeed? Spread upward, that is?

Economist Dean Baker explains at TPMCafe how this works:

The public has a real interest in keeping the banking system functioning. It has zero interest in subsidized the pay checks of wealthy bank executives or enriching the bank's shareholders, which Secretary Paulson is now doing.

There is no question about what is going on here. The public is providing massive subsidies to the country's major banks. The terms of the bailout were far more generous than what the banks could get from the private market. As a result, banks that might not have survived otherwise, or at least would have been forced to make serious cutbacks, can now keep operating as they had been.

This means that their high level executives will continue to draw salaries in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. It also means that the shareholders will continue to receive dividends.

This was not inevitable. Paulson could have imposed serious pay caps on executive compensation. In Germany, the banks that are getting government money can't pay their executives more than 500,000 euros, about $680,000. The United Kingdom also limited executive compensation as part of its bailout.

(Read the rest here.)

Huh. I'm confused. If socialism with a Republican face means feathering the banker's nests, and if our European friends are refusing to spread the wealth to the bank execs, does that make them not socialists? But how can that be? Haven't we been taught that the French, especially, are socialists by definition?

Who wants to bet that by November 4, we'll hear the rumor that Obama is a French socialist?

(Apologies to Alexander Dubcek for warping his slogan unforgivably.)

Plumbing the Depths of Bullshit

"WTF Plumbing," photo taken in Sacramento, CA, by Flickr user timballas, used under a Creative Commons license. (Hey, I know that street!)

I'm heartily sick of candidates trying to manipulate us with stories they've gleaned from Ordinary Americans they've met on the campaign trail. These Ordinary Americans are invariably salt-of-the-earth figures who live in small towns and have been dealt an Injustice.

It's not that I don't care about injustice. In fact, I believe passionately in justice (the social kind, not the sort that's just thinly-veiled revenge). That's precisely why I resent politicians using such stories to circumvent reasoned thinking.

The Democrats are as guilty of this as the Republicans, by the way. This is an equal-opportunity, non-partisan beef of mine.

Nonetheless: By basically making "Joe the Plumber" a third participant in the final presidential debate, McCain carried this conceit further than I'd ever seen. And so I wallowed in schadenfreude when I read this in yesterday's Columbus Dispatch:

Joe the Plumber is not actually a licensed plumber.

Here's the scoop:

Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, the nickname Republican John McCain bestowed on him during Wednesday's presidential debate, said he works for a small plumbing company that does residential work. Because he works for someone else, he doesn't need a license, he said.

But the county Wurzelbacher and his employer live in, Lucas County, requires plumbers to have licenses. Neither Wurzelbacher nor his employer are licensed there, said Cheryl Schimming of Lucas County Building Regulations, which handles plumber licenses in parts of the county outside Toledo. ...

Wurzelbacher, 34, said he doesn't have a good plan put together on how he would buy Newell Plumbing and Heating in nearby Toledo.

He said the business consists of owner Al Newell and him. Wurzelbacher said he's worked there for six years and that the two have talked about his taking it over at some point.

"There's a lot I've got to learn," he said.

To quote Sarah Palin: "Say it ain't so, Joe!"

The amount of bullshit swirling around Joe the Plumber's fifteen minutes is pretty impressive. He's not legally licensed as a plumber. So even his folksy moniker is in doubt! Wurzelbacher is in no position to be hurt by Obama's tax plan; his plumbing business is merely hypothetical and far in the future. Honestly, it sounds like Wurzelbacher will be lucky if he makes it into the $250,000-plus bracket. Since he's not there yet, he'd most likely pay lower taxes under Obama's plan.

So how 'bout if the candidates cut the crap, stop trying to manipulate us with these tales of Ordinary Americans, and focus instead on how they would start to repair our broken economy.

Impressions from the Final Debate

First: I want to hear directly from Joe the Plumber. If he's making more than $250,000 per year, I don't have any problem with him paying higher taxes. If not, then John McCain was dishing out the same stuff Joe the Plumber deals with every day.

Second: I can't believe how McCain played the victim card tonight. He whined that the campaign has swerved negative because Barack Obama wouldn't play town hall with him. Then he got in a tizzy about John Lewis’ suggestion that associating Barack Obama with terrorism and questioning his loyalty to America might be invoking the spirit of George Wallace. Um, what's worse ... inciting violence, or getting slightly overwrought in denouncing such violence? You tell me, Senator McCain. (And frankly, I'm not convinced Lewis exaggerated overmuch.)

Finally: Does McCain still know how to smile without looking like he's about to snarl or explode? Yikes. Someone obviously coached him to look straight at Obama, this time, but it obviously pained him. For next time, someone needs to tell him that a frozen, deer-in-the-headlights stare, punctuated only by manic blinks and jaw clenches, won't make him look presidential.

Oh, wait, we're done with the debates. Yay! There won't be a next time. Me? I'm still voting for "that one."

What did y'all think?

------------

Coupla notes: I saw Joe Biden speak this morning, will blog on it tomorrow (I hope) when I've got a few minutes. And for some reason, today I got a bunch of hits on my old post on the right wing's attempt to smear Obama because no one can produce a copy of his undergraduate honors thesis. I guess Faux News or some other right-wing spin machine must have dredged up this rumor, which basically insinuated that in his senior year at Columbia, Obama wrote an anti-American thesis. But they couldn't even get the rumor straight! People were searching on "Obama's doctoral thesis." Hey, we should all get our Ph.D. so easily.

Oh, and I have a new yard sign. I'm really hoping this one won't walk away. Three's a charm?

Yes We Carve

If you're feeling parched for punkin-carving inspiration this year, here's a fun idea: Yes We Carve!

From Yes We Carve, by Matt King of Boston.

There are lots more clever pictures like this, plus handy stencils, here:



Undaunted by the serial disappearance of our yard signs, my husband is planning to carve one of these with the kids. And this in a town where drunken students have honed pumpkin smashing to an Olympic art form. I guess we'll have to think of it as ephemeral art, like dance or Christo's Wrapped Reichstag ...

Photo by Flickr user zug55, used under a Creative Commons license.

... or the Tiger's Chickety Poop song.

At any rate, it's gotta be way cuter than the Dick-Cheney-o-lantern we had a couple of years ago - the only carved pumpkin I've known to actually get better as it started to mold and sag.

Antidote to McCain's Toxic Campaign

I've always liked Donna Brazile's plainspoken, no-bullshit manner. I've known she's a smart strategist and analyst. I had no idea she could be this inspirational. These words of hers - her refusal to go to the back of the bus - moved me almost as much as Barack Obama's speech last March on race in America.

This is the perfect antidote to the hatefulness of the McCain-Palin campaign this past week: