Hit me with a double. Or a double-double.
Morning after the election and as an Ohio resident, I can’t escape the feeling in the pit of my stomach that Ohioans are going to get more blame for the re-election of Bush than anyone else, even though more than half the population was gullible enough, ignorant enough, blind enough to vote for the bastard. My apologies if you’re a Bush supporter, Kelley — I’m making the assumption that you’re not, based on what you’ve written here and in other spaces.
Sitting here trying to work, trying to silently talk myself out of falling into a deep depression (my therapist would tell me to allow myself to grieve, but I feel ridiculous grieving over a political race like this. I feel a little bit like Red Sox fans felt until a week ago. The grief is real, but I’m finding it hard to admit to myself that I was that emotionally invested in something guaranteed to disappoint me.), I find an old question floating back to the surface. Indulge me in a brief flashback…
In my senior year of college, I landed the weekly opinion column in the school paper. One week, I wrote a column about labeling people in which I talked about how fun and helpful labeling is. I thought I was being subtly ironic, but I was too subtle for at least one reader, who wrote an impassioned letter to the paper decrying my column. I was reminded at the time of Randy Newman, whose early and best songs took this same boldly ironic approach. And I felt better at the time, thinking that for every person or few people who didn’t get what I was trying to do, there would be someone who did.
But now Randy Newman makes money writing unsubtle pop songs for Disney (not that this takes away from what he has done in the past, but still…). If the results of the election yesterday show me anything, it’s that the voting public, in spite of turning out in record numbers, is the opposite of subtle. They’re boneheads, dumbasses who are content to be led around by their noses, lacking the interest to make even a cursory attempt to question what they’re told. It takes hardly any effort at all to see the lies and misleading statements that Bush and his administration make constantly. They don’t even try to be subtle about lying or misdirecting anymore because they know no one will question them, including those whose job it is to question.
So is subtlety a lost skill? Is it fading out of popular art because the mass audience is too stupid to get it and so won’t pay for it? Or is it still alive and I’m just myopic with grief at the moment? As I type that, I can think of examples I’ve seen recently — Tony Kushner, South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But is this enough? Is there hope? What keeps you going when you fall into moods like this?
Thanks for letting me vent. I’m sure I won’t be the only one venting today, but I hope I’ve done so here in a respectable way.
Stranded in Ohio ,
Adam Diamond
Hey Adam,
You know that I’m sorry for the delay in answering this, because I’ve already apologized in private and will do so now again. Many sorries. You get the Kelley Eskridge Big Patience Award (grin).
Nicola and I were entering the Hideous Time of Moving in the days before the election: we had seen the new house, made an offer, and gone into scramble mode about inspections and contractor estimates for remodeling. By election day we were stunned with the promise of debt and the enormity of having to clean up nine years’ of accumulated “well, we’ll get to this someday” junk so that we could put our house on the market…. I was so tired that all I could really feel was a faint, fatalistic sadness that so many people were so scared.
Because I do think that Bush’s re-election is a prime example of large-scale fear in action. I know I go on a lot about fear and love and joy in the virtual pub; give me a beer and I just seem to want to talk about the big stuff. From that perspective, I think that Bush lives in fear, leads from fear, and will do most anything to make the rest of us afraid so that we believe he’s right to do what he does. I think he surrounds himself with people who are well versed in the art of instilling and managing fear.
But I’m also thinking about something I read recently. I’m not sure who said, “we have met the enemy and he is partly right,” but it stopped me in my tracks. It is this “partly right” that can change the world, for better or worse. It’s the “partly right” that makes us wish to stamp out the opposition so the ambiguity no longer exists, or that allows us to suck it up and see other people as real, even if we think they are real assholes. I believe that people voted for Bush thinking he would make them feel safer, and for some of them, this will happen. I don’t think that’s about subtlety or its lack: I think it’s about fear of difference, fear of ambiguity, fear of annihilation. Fear of meeting the enemy and finding (all props to Pogo) that they are us.
I get that, you know? I have those fears too. I just hope they never get that kind of grip on me.
I don’t think subtlety is dead. I just don’t think it works on everyone. It’s about nuance, and the current cultural struggle is in a fairly bold-strokes phase. I’m doing that myself, in this post: I haven’t yet offered any consideration that Bush and his folks might be people with whom I could share a margarita and some chips and salsa and maybe even a joke or two. That they are people who love their families, who maybe enjoy a sunset or the smell of honeysuckle. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t make me like them or their choices any better. It just means that I know that in some ways, in the human spectrum, they are “partly right” (a concept which is a giant pain in the ass, you know? It is simpler to push people away).
I just reviewed a book for @U2 called Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (whom I also interviewed for the site). It includes a story that speaks to this. Bono relates a story told to him by Harry Belafonte. Belafonte met with Martin Luther King, Jr. just after John F. Kennedy made Bobby Kennedy the Attorney General. Belafonte tells Bono that it was “a very depressing moment, a very bad day for the Civil Rights movement.” Bono asks why, and Belafonte says:
Oh, you see, you forget. Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists, they didn’t like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were all the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis. Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the Civil Rights Movement…. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin’: “Enough of this!” he said. “Is there nobody here who’s got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?” We said, “Martin, that’s what we’re telling ya! There is no one… There is nothing good to say about him. The guy’s an Irish Catholic conservative bad ass, he’s bad news….” To which Martin replied: “Well, then, let’s call this meeting to a close. We will re-adjourn when somebody has found one redeeming thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass.”
— from Bono: In Conversation with Mischka Assayas
Talk about the long view. King was willing to allow that there was something about Kennedy that was partly right. It’s part of what made King such an amazing force. But it requires geologic patience and an ability to persevere in a constant state of ambiguity. To stay engaged on that level takes enormous energy. I think part of what’s happened in our country is that about 50 percent of us believe that we don’t have the energy for it right now; we’re too scared to find the redeeming thing.
I am trying not to join the 50% in this regard. Some days are better than others.
And sure, there’s hope (the day I cannot find a shred of hope in my soul will be a very, very bad day indeed). There are people of goodwill in all parts of the process who are trying to find the doors through which we can all pass. And at the risk of sounding all fluffy and dewy-eyed, I believe that whenever any of us does this in our everyday life, it ripples out in directions we might not imagine, it touches others in ways we don’t perceive, and it makes a difference. I believe this, and it helps me.
And here’s to Ohio, a fine state. Cheers.