My Place, Primary Night
It started the other night of the New Hampshire primary with the arrival of the boy and his girlfriend with a couple of their friends. They were all gaga over this Obama fellah. I have to admit, he certainly has the inspirational thing down pat. But a fellah who thinks he is going to cure the health care mess with a universal program that has no mandates because they might offend someone is whistling in a strong wind. He was against the war but he thinks we have the right to unilaterally go into Pakistan, a country we know has a nuclear weapon. He is going to sit down with a Republican coalition of the willing, the same crowd that has filibustered 63 good pieces of Democratic legislation in the past 12 months. I tell you this guy is either lieing to us or is naive to beat the band. He is going to sit down and negotiate stem cell research with creationists. He is going to protect a woman's reproductive rights with a gang who thinks a cell the size of a pin-prick is already a life. These folks are going to be eating his and, through his foolishness, our lunch. Partisanship is an evil thing in the presence of no real difference. It is an absolute necessity in the presence of no agreement. This guy has that most flattering and irrelevant of capacities: potential. Potential would not have gotten you an audition, let alone the job if Flo Zeigfeld or Edward Albee had anything to say about it. These folks wouldn't have paid spit for hope. You either had the goods or you were gone.
So we argued back and forth until my grandson came who was in Hillarly's camp. I was fairly neutral on the dear lady until she turned on the faucet because it was such a tough thing to be behind, and her rock star husband decided that Mister Obama was living in fantasy land. The combination struck me like these two thought they had some right to it and that we were nothing but a collection of buffoons for not seeing the obvious truth of it. Well, my grandson thought I was being sexist for making an issue out of that well controlled almost a tear that would have done a forties starlet proud, but I got all sorts of support from the Obama crowd who though not over the fact that I wasn't in their camp were pleased as punch to see that I wasn't a Clintonista either.
Now, everything was going fine until my daughter shows up who I knew was a McCain fan. One of the boy's friends started the critique out with that classic know-nothing fall back: facist. Everything was reasonably under control until my daughter admitted that their was a crack in her loyalty which was met with dropped jaws all around when it turns out she intended to spackle that crack with the Hucklwannabee. Now I think he is probably the most likable guy in the whole bunch, but this is not a popularity contest, but a guy who knew it was Elvis' birthday is one tough customer politically in my book.
I won't even begin to try and recall the twists and turns of this "discussion" but it was more fun than I've had in a while, and Harry the Frechman was beside himself with all the company. We got him a haircut the other day and he is definitely a Frenchman, though the tail is a strangly floppy thing.
I only met one president in my life: old silent Cal. His response to my father's attempts to humor him was to present my father with a puss that would have stopped your grandmother's clock, which led my father to explain that the only reason he was a Republican was the fact that the only thing worse than a Republican was a Democrat. My father was a Vaudevillian. The essense of being a vaudevilliam was to earn more money than God did while producing nothing that had any socially redeeming value. That is why my father was a Republican. The Democrats were beside the issue.
Finally it occurred to someone to ask me who I was going to vote for. Come February 5th, I am going to vote for John Edwards. My daughter thought I was a hopeless fool to still believe in any of it. Here I had the best spokesperson my cause would ever hope to have and he will never do any better than third. In other words, it wasn't Edwards; it was the message, which is of course why I am for Edwards. Her perspective on my man was the one thing they all agreed upon. They all thought that it was right and good to fight for it the way he does, but it was simply a lost cause. I have to admit it is hard to answer such an attack. Why if the cause it so right is he not taking hold when he seems so right for it. By that point I was tired. Hillary had squeaked out a win. The pundits who just a few hours before were telling us that we were at a transformative moment in political history were now falling all over themselves to convince you that the transformer was all done.
And that moron is still in the White House. What a mess.
Hi Frankie,
Sounds like you had a great night. My mother and I are the last holdout
Democrats in our family. Most of our relatives fled to the Republican
party during the Civil Rights Era, thus the demise of the Democratic South.
They go to church every Sunday but still hold fast to all of the
prejudices of the past (but they are inclusive - the list of people they
don't like has expanded!). I'm not sure what they think the Republican
party is doing for them, and I don't think they have yet figured out that K
Rove and W used and abused them, told them what they wanted to hear....and
laughed all the way to the bank. I'm stunned and amazed (and infuruated!)
at some of the emails I get...that they pass around to everyone they know.
I try to hold my tongue but at the same time I don't want to be thought to
"support" the things they espouse.
Donna, The thing I have found about politics is that in the end you have to
take care of your own first. Like mindedness can not be forced, though it
can be manipulated. The vaudevillian faced an audience that rarely cared
for or understood the person sitting next to them. Bert Williams became
famous singing his old minstrel song "Nobody." He was a black man from what
back then was called the West Indies and is now called Jamaica. He wore
black face so that he would look a little more white than he was. My father
always said that Bert's success was that he could talk to everybody only by
pretending he was nobody. In some way that I can't explain, I think we live
in that kind of time again. When I was three the Houlihan's played the
Zeigfeld Follies with Bert. I saw him perform in Detroit just a few weeks
before he died in 1922 when I was seven. I probably only saw him a half
dozen times in the years between those two events, but I remember that his
death was the first time I was affected by such a thing. Anyway, Politics,
like entertainment, will never be a clean sport, if there is such a thing.
Your relatives are who they are. Find a way to tell them what whats what
using their own language. It is not an easy thing to do, but its what made
Bert popular with both the whites and the blacks of his time by infusing
the nobody with dignity. Those who only wanted to see the nobody in the end
saw a somebody the longer they looked.
Hi Frankie,
A belated HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! I hope it was a good one and that you enjoyed
celebrating with your family. I don't know about you, but they seem to
roll around at record speed so we may as well do our best to make each
better than the last. I hope it's a very good year for you.
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