Time has this crazy way of being relative. You’re doing something enjoyable and your perception of the passage of time changes so that a minute doesn’t seem like a minute. If you’re doing something you loathe, every second seems to drag on and on and on. It’s called time dilation and it’s part the theory of relativity.
And while Einstein may have been the most brilliant man to ever walk the planet but I bet even he couldn’t figure out why the hell it takes 25 minutes to play :53 of football.
Back in the mists of antiquity, I lived in Sicily for two years. Because there was no housing on base, we lived at the beach in the upstairs apartment of a duplex. Our landlord sold baking supplies all over the eastern and near middle part of the island. But because we were off base there was travel time to and from every day and travel time for me because the working, Naval Air Station, part of the base was separated from the part that clustered together the more dependent oriented fascilities (school, commissary, exchange, rec center, library).
As a consequence we saw a lot of Fiat 500s – referred to locally as the cinquecento (Italian for 500) – on the road. They weighed virtually nothing, indeed, I once saw a 6’2″ tall, 225lb man lift a car with a driver in it by himself move it out of the way so traffic could get around (the driver was being a real jackass, honking, bumping, and in general acting pretty much like drivers would act now if they thought they could get away with it).
On Saturdays I’m usually out doing errands and today I had occasion to be at a local shopping mall when a 1970s era Fiat 500 in black with a big fat racing strip in the flag of Italy’s colors painted down the back over the engine cover (it is a rear engine car) pulled out into the lane in front of me. Seeing it lifted my mood and made me smile.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot…
– Rhyme taught to British children. Learn more about Guy Fawkes Day (Official UK government site; amateur historian site)
“So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.”
– Barack Obama’s election victory speech, November 4, 2008 (video + transcript; transcript only)
Believe it or not there were other important questions decided by voters on Tuesday besides who would be the next President of the United States. Voters in Washington state approved a measure to allow terminally ill patients to elect physician assisted suicide while voters in Maryland approved two Constitutional amendments, one allowing legalized slot machines and another mandating early voting. But the big news is California.
California voters went to the polls and approved the anti-factory farming initiative Proposition 2 and they also passed Proposition 8 which by Constitutional amendment will “eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California” and “provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” If you look at the election results you’ll see that the split in voting on Prop 8 was about the same as split in the presidential election: Yes on Prop 8 got 52.4% of the vote; Obama got 52.6% of the vote. Yet today The Washington Post is reporting (read it as a PDF or you’ll have to register to read it online) that 80% of black voters and 53% of hispanic voters (yes, I said “black” and “hispanic”; I am a child of the 1970s after all) supported Prop 8. Why? It’s a culture thing. From the Post article:
The Latino vote for the ban also appears rooted in culture.
“It’s our tradition,” said Flor Guardado, 38, who voted yes. “In Latino Central American culture, the gays aren’t accepted.”
Guardado said that in her native Honduras, she would not tell her mother if she had a lesbian friend. “If I had a lesbian friend, they’d think I was a lesbian, too,” she said.
But in Los Angeles, where she owns a hair salon, a different kind of diplomacy obtains. All eight of her employees are gay. When they asked how she voted, she tells them it’s a secret.
“I’m sorry for the gay people. They have feelings,” said the mother of two. “Legally, I don’t want that for the children. They will be confused and think it’s okay. They might think they’re gay, too.”
So…it’s OK to employ gay people but not OK for us to have full civil rights?
Now, I’ve never been a fan of marriage as an institution; mostly it has been used to establish lineage for inheritance purposes and until the last 45 years or so women usually ended up worse off when they were married in terms of their ability to get a job, earn money, get credit, and make decisions about their own lives, including how to spend money they’d earned if they already had a job, than women who stayed single. I also happen to think that using marriage as the primary venue for fighting for full civil rights for lesbian, gay, and transgendered people is just fuckdumb for two reasons: 1) as an institution marriage has deeply rooted religious connections and there’s very little more futile than trying to convince someone that their religion is wrong, and 2) there are more important things we should be worrying about, like the fact that in 31 states it is legal to fire someone on the basis of their sexual orientation and in 39 it is legal to do so based on their gender identity.
But regardless of my view of marriage personally or the political argument over whether we should be pushing for marriage, “settling” for civil unions, or using vast legal resources to force the government to make all legal partnerships civil unions regardless of whether they are same-sex or hetero-sex and letting churches perform “marriages” for whomever they see fit thereby taking religion out of the legal assignment of rights altogether is moot. What really concerns me is the idea that my rights and the rights of millions of Americans get to be decided by popularity contest.
According to Derek McCoy, African American outreach director for the Protect Marriage Campaign, again quoted in the Post article, it’s because “The gay community was never considered a third of a person.”
So let me get this right: the strategy used in the black community, which worked with 80% of black voters, was that because gay men and lesbians haven’t been as oppressed as black folk everyone gets the right to decide whether I can inherit property from my spouse or whether or not my spouse can be denied the right to sit by my hospital bed and hold my hand while I die?
And I’m supposed to be happy we now have a black president who, by the way, supports civil unions but not marriage?
Really?
It is also worth pointing out that in 1961 when Barack Obama’s parents were married in Hawaii almost half of U.S. states had miscegenation laws on the books.
The irony astounds.
And I want to ask that 80% all of whom likely voted for Obama how, exactly, does continuing to deny me my rights constitute all of us looking after not just ourselves but each other?
Now, I know it’s not fair to extrapolate the views of our newly elected president from the views of a bunch of judgemental hypocrites in California and it’s really not fair considering that as one of his stated civil rights agenda items Obama has pledged that his administration will work to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but it’s so hard despite the pretty words and the eloquent speeches to feel like yes, there is going to be a place for me and my kind at the table.
One of the hallmarks of the outgoing Administration and the cultural changes Bush and his cronies wrought on this country was the near destruction of the idea that it is not only the right of citizens but their absolute duty to question the policies of their government. It is not only our right but our duty as responsible citizens to hold Obama’s feet to the fire. We would be fools not to demand intensely and immediate the rights – whether those are the same rights and privileges guaranteed under the law to heterosex couples or the right not to be fired from our jobs or denied housing – we deserve.
Gunpowder, treason, and plot may be going a little overboard when it comes to trying to secure civil rights. Or maybe not.
Resources
Transcript of the Constitution of the United States. Please duly note that the 14th Amendment which canceled out that 3/5ths definition gave only men the right to vote.
For the folks who weren’t still wildly celebrating, I’m sure yesterday was like coming off a three-day bender. For most of us it was just another day.
See, the thing is that almost nothing’s really changed yet. All we have is the potential for change. Where we really are is in a supremely dangerous time when Dubya is going to do his damndest to codify into law via executive order as many perks and privileges, environmental degradations and civil rights violations as his lamest of lame duck status will allow him to codify. Pushing through regulations is what outgoing administrations do but unfortunately for us, and the rest of the world, with Bush it’s going to be like the frat boys trashing the apartment before they move out after graduation.
And while all the talking heads and columnists are prattling about how this is the start of a new era, about how politics as usual no longer exists, they are busy setting, whether they know it or not, new standards for how the coming presidency is going to be covered. Take this excerpt from a column in yesterday’s New York Times:
And it occurred to me that Obama’s core conviction about the American saga — his belief in the connectedness of all Americans — stemmed from his own unlikely experience of American transformation.
A Kenyan father passing briefly through these shores; a chance encounter with a young Kansan woman; a biracial boy handed off here and there but fortunate at least in the accident of Hawaiian birth.
Obama has spoken without cease about his conviction of American possibility born from this experience. He intuited that, after years of the debasement of so many core American ideas, a case for what the preamble to the U.S. Constitution calls “a more perfect union” would resonate.
He was rarely explicit about race, although he spoke of slavery as America’s “original sin.” He did not need to be. At a time of national soul-searching, what could better symbolize a “more perfect union” and the overcoming of the wounds of that original sin than the election to the White House of an African-American?
– “Perfecting the Union“, Roger Cohen, The New York Times, November 5, 2008
I hate to be a real drag but doesn’t concentrating on Obama’s race rather than on his stellar achievement – overcoming the politics of hate and divisiveness, concentrating on hope and possibility rather than on fear and contraction with the idea that Americans can live up to our centuries’ long PR – undercut the idea that “we’re all connected as a people?”
Or, to put it another way, could Obama have won using the same campaign with exactly the same speeches in exactly the same places if he were a white guy or did he need that extra bit of I-embody-my-principles to put him over the top?
Try not to throw bricks.
Make no mistake: this isn’t a question about whether or not he’s a token or a novelty; he wasn’t elected because he’s black nor was he elected in spite of it I think. Given that almost every pundit and political scholar will be studying this campaign, its framing and its policies, contrasting it with McCain’s scattershot tactics that sometimes modeled traditional campaigning and oftentimes slid into Bush-like smear tactics, it’s a valid intellectual and political communications question. I ask because other than his speech in Philly during the primaries I never heard the man explicitly use his race as justification. There’s never been any Jesse Jackson-like reference to the struggles of his people nor has there ever been any Al Sharpton-like pandering. Obama seems to take his race as a matter of fact; he is what he is and because of it he has had to struggle, yes, but those struggles have given him a unique perspective on his country and its people. So how much of his race was a factor in our perception rather than his presentation?
But given how CNN and other networks have been covering the aftermath – interviewing just black people as if this isn’t a significant day for every American and asking those individuals to sum up the thoughts of the entire black community; constantly referring to Obama as “the first black president” (which he both is and is not until he is actually sworn in) in such a way that implies that every single question that faces his administration will be prefaced either literally by “How will America’s first black president handle [crisis du jour here]?” or by the unspoken question “would he be handling this differently if he were white?” – why does it seem like it won’t be possible for us to treat Obama’s race the way he treats it, as a matter of fact rather than of curiosity?
One thing I’m waiting to see that won’t be available for days, possibly even weeks, is the true numbers on voter turnout. Pundits…OK, Keith Olberman and crew…pontificated Tuesday night that in order to win Obama’s political machine would have to turn out 80% of the registered democrats in the U.S. So, if race was such a big factor in this election why is it that DC, one of America’s top-five blackest cities and a city that has never in its history voted Republican, only had 53.44% voter turnout on election day?
Maybe one of the things we need to consider in this new era is feeding the mainstream media a giant quaalude so they simmer the hell down and stop taking every shred of information and pumping it full of gas to fill air time.
It’s not often that people, or my country which is really just made up of people, surprise me. They did last night.
I did not think I would see a black president in my lifetime. Part of me is glad I was wrong. Another part of me is angry, angry at how we got here, angry at the price that had to be paid to make this happen. I am angry that my fellow Americans’ short-sighted selfishness and apathy led us down the path we have been on, that their greed and closed-mindedness dug us into the dark hole we now find ourselves in, economy in a shambles, reputation in tatters around the world, and the scum of fear and divisiveness clinging to everything.
Does Obama’s election open the doors for real change in America, change that will finally begin to address the rampant sexism and institutionalized misogyny that are so much a part of our culture? Does his election mean that the black community in America will finally stand up and take responsibility for the state and shape of its own culture, that the ceaseless calls of “the community ought to provide” and “you’re only doing/saying/thinking like that because I’m black” will finally be silenced? I don’t know. Part of me wants to hope so: another part of me stands aloof.
My boss is not a very good communicator. This is more than marginally ironic given that his job title is Director of Communications. He’s not a flexible thinker; he gets mired in the details and has an inability to see aspects of a problem or ramifications of a proposed solution when the issue or the area in which we’re working isn’t in his direct experience. As a consequence, I find myself as the technically oriented person on the team, and the one with experience in Internet media, having to find simple ways to explain the most basic concepts – like the principle that you don’t want to link out from your site’s homepage; you want to provide context for something on your site before you send someone away to get more in depth information.
Because she is often able to find more easily a way to phrase things so that they make sense to our boss I have taken to sending a blind carbon copy of these exchanges to my fellow sufferer in our department and I did just that a couple of weeks ago when I had to explain that very linking-out concept. I was able to communicate the rationale to him concisely and in such a way that he did not fight it, did not try to find a way around it to a meet his short-term goal. When I wrote back to M. that I was surprised, half joking that I wondered if that was wrong her response was that we are a product of our experiences.
I watched Obama’s acceptance speech and I was struck by how genuinely humble the man seems. Part of me wants to believe that good intent will be enough, and that the good intent he evidences is true and not merely political cloaking. Part of me wants to believe that he will have the strength of will to make those in his administration manifest that same good intent, that the concept of a strong, benevolent leader could be actualized.
Another part of me is worried by this.
Historically when one party controls two of the three branches of government things have not gone well in this country. That it has usually been the Republican party likely has something to do with it but who is to say for sure.
Will all those volunteers, all the faithful who did all that door knocking and donating and phone calling be willing to work as hard without a concrete goal in sight? My experience tells me no.
My experience tells me that large groups of people, which is really all a country is, tend to slide toward complacency and literally work to find the path of least resistance, and, despite John McCain’s magnanimous concession speech, there will be resistance.
Maybe we can but me, I’m waiting to see some results before I believe.