It’s been a hard couple of weeks, and I expect it will stay pretty hard for the next four. Ah, that is the beautiful Life I have chosen to live, and it is a blessing and an honor. I have not even had time to watch our glorious nation compete against other almost-as-glorious nations in the Olympics, although last night I did catch about an hour of men’s gymnastics. How do you become good at that? Does someone in your childhood say, “man, you’d be excellent at the uneven bars?” It doesn’t even bear thinking about, it’s so far from my own condition as a human.
The parade of nations with unspoken political issues simmering lustily beneath the surface was interrupted by a commercial for Pepsi or something that of course took place at an ANCIENT GREEK olympics! Oh, the Greeks, who brought us this wonderful celebration of the human form! “The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” At any rate, in the commercial olympics, a bronzed young man, wearing a hilarious sort of half-toga that looked like a skirt you’d wear in the 80’s, threw a discus while a crowd of appreciative onlookers clapped. Amongst these onlookers were several sexually attractive young women. “FOR SHAME!” I thought to myself. Everyone knows women are not allowed at the olympics, for their femaleness spoils the pure beauty of the masculine form. Also, as everyone knows, all athletes in the olympics compete stark naked, which is not for a woman’s eyes to behold. DOY!
I was reading some essay by Plato or somebody about women, and how his idea of the perfect society is one with no genders at all. Why should women not be allowed to compete in sports? Perhaps there IS something beautiful in the hideous female form, with its curves and roundnesses. Women and men will live in great communes where they will practice the sport of their choice, and they will be naked, and they will just have sex whenever they want to. And when a baby comes, it will be taken away to some other sort of place, and raised communally. This sounded disturbingly like “Brave New World,” but who am I to argue with the guy who invented Western Civilization? He also advocates beating unruly concert audience members with sticks.
We were talking about “democracy” the other day. It’s a system of government that clearly doesn’t work that well, but it’s also difficult to imagine a better one, unless there were like 99% fewer people in the world and we (or, rather, they) could all just live on little garden plots. Or if Jesus would finally return to earth and become president, which would make everyone ashamed to argue about the Alaskan pipeline. We were talking about the inevitable disappointment we must feel in any political candidate who makes it into the national election. Barack Obama has already started to disappoint us, and he will disappoint us further as the long months roll on to November. He won the nomination by being a relatively honest and passionate extremely-mild-liberal, but now he has to win the election by becoming a moderate Republican. This is what the Democratic party does, and they are all a bunch of j-holes, but you can see where the strategy comes from. Fair enough, but it doesn’t exactly stoke me up to put on a red white and blue hat and take to the streets with my “OBAMA MAMA” button. Go FISA! You know? Hooray for a 60% voting record on environmental issues! That’s only ten points away from being a C minus! There will be hedging on the environment, awkward silence on abortion and the gays, and probably the quiet permittance of a genocide or two in some loser country, but at least probably no more enormous wars for oil, and at least there will be someone other than an ancient white man going to meet the heads of other nations, and after 4 or 8 years that will be another democratic presidency down the tubes of history. “When we vote democratic, we’re not passionately voting for someone we think will be a great president,” said Andrew, “we’re just saying ‘this is pretty much as bad as it should be allowed to be.'”
I wonder what it feels like to passionately vote for a candidate? I’m sure people felt that way about FDR, and he did seem to do a pretty good job. Those work programs! The quiet dignity and humanity of World War II.* I have this weird bootlegged copy of some weird archival footage of jug bands in the 1930’s, and I was watching it trying to figure out which part to show my class, and suddenly there was FDR, just sitting there! Enjoying him some jug band music! “This is a great country,” I thought to myself.
*a joke
Y’know, that’s one thing I resent Howard Zinn for: ruining my image of FDR, and dispelling what little idealism about Presidents I was was still carrying. When I learned that the labor reforms of the New Deal weren’t so much about recognizing workers’ rights, but were more about co-opting the leadership of the AFL and CIO and persuading them to piss away the political power of unions, I died a little.
Still, I do know what it’s like to passionately vote for a candidate (sort of. You don’t really vote at a caucus). In 2004, I ran back and forth between the Kucinich and Dean camps: knowing Uncle Denny couldn’t possibly win our precinct, I wanted to make sure he had viability. Dean was supposed to walk away with it, but I wasn’t sure, especially when the Kerry people scooped up the supporters of each candidate that failed to get viability, one at a time: first Sharpton, then Moseley Braun, then Clark, then Lieberman, then Gephardt, and finally Edwards. Suddenly, it was pretty close between Kerry and Dean, and after making sure that Kucinich would get and keep his single delegate, I sat with the Dean camp. At the end of the night, we were relieved: Dean had a small delegate lead over Kerry at our precinct, but our caucus had lasted especially long, and by the time we got to the car, the state had already been called for Kerry. The next couple of weeks were awfully hard to take.
The lesson I took from that experience was to hate the boomers even more. The Dean people were almost all under 40, and the Kerry people were mostly over 50. As each candidate lost viability, you could be certain that the boomers would gravitate to Kerry. The Kerry camp had a very smug air about it, as if these people were gonna show those punk Dean kids who really runs things. And they sure did. And then, in November, they showed us all again. This, more than anything else, is why I still have some enthusiasm for Obama left: he was able to beat the boomer candidate, something nobody has managed to do for a very long time. And I think he’ll do it again in November.
Ah Gray… you forget that McCain is WAY too old to be a boomer. He’s of that generation before boomers that Clinton’s 92 victory was supposed to erase. I think the only boomer(s) in this election will be the VP nominee(s).
True, McCain’s no boomer himself (though, as a Vietnam vet, many would still claim him as one), but it seems pretty clear he’s the boomers’ candidate, at least spiritually (among the remaining candidates, that is). Of course, the only non-boomerish candidate the Republicans threw out there this year was Paul, and that’s just because he’s too crazy even for them.
I suppose I should explain that I don’t define “boomers” chronologically, but in terms of how they tend to react to things. It just so happens that the particular worldview for which “boomer” is now shorthand originated with and predominates in a particular chronological generation. But there are people far too old and far too young to be members of that generation who I would nonetheless categorize as boomers. Similarly, there are a lot of people the right age who don’t qualify as boomers, in my view. Howard Dean is one of them.
Obama is a very un-boomerish candidate, and his support reflects this. I think this is why so many Democratic boomers are having such a hard time with this election: they’re pissed off that their candidate was beaten by their children’s candidate, and they recognize that McCain is closer to them, worldview-wise, but that his policies are abhorrent to them. So, unable to decide which choice is more unappealing to them, they just sit back and gripe about Obama while playing various what-if games centered on Hillary Clinton, and McCain gets a free pass.
I’m going to stop watching MSNBC and just browse the comments of this blog. That last paragraph by gray pretty much is all you need to know about pre-convention election politics this year.