Column: March 2008

“You eat, I'll just sit here in the dark.” Or, So Long Grandma, and Thanks For All the Guilt!
Volume 4: Temporarily Reconsidering My Pessimism. (Happy Now?)

Here I've been going on about my mother, my grandmothers, and everyone but my father. He has that hopeful and unwavering liberalism, which is especially admirable in older people: no bitching about young people, except perhaps that we don't do enough protesting, which we don't, and are too uncivilly obedient, which we are. When Bush took office in 2000, my folks called to console me. When he took office in 2004, I did the consoling, my father especially crestfallen, having spent 71 years trying to make things better only to see it all unravel in less than half a decade.

In 1968, he worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign in Washington, DC, in a largely African-American and solidly pro-Kennedy area that was pretty much ringing doorbells and shaking hands. One woman showed him a framed picture of Bobby. “I go to bed with him every night,” she said. He remembers an elderly woman who was concerned. JFK's assassination still felt raw. “I hope they don't kill Bobby, too,” she said. He assured her this was impossible, and in retrospect thinks her sadly prophetic. He remembers that night, going to headquarters to sit sadly and helplessly in folding chairs, and he tells me he remembers journalist Bill Moyers chiding him for being so emotional, adding something about how if it weren't for emotion, they might not be in this mess.

Forty years later, and there is fear and hope but too weighted in favour of the former. Doris Lessing, a boxer, and a rapper have all said publicly and with some terrifying certainty that Obama will be assassinated if he is elected. I can't remember who has said it, so I Google it and find I'm not the first. There are links to other links about increasing web searches for 'Obama assassinated'. I don't like this one bit. Some of them are suggesting America won't take to a black president, but it's more likely that they fear he's too emotional.

We don't really like proper ardour in our leaders, we like cool detachment, unless of course it's advocating hate-filled mob justice, which angry mobs seem to enjoy. Only sissies get uppity about human rights, catastrophic economic disparity, and corporate lobbying, and if you can't make your point without getting tetchy, you're too moody for politics. Unfortunately, while detached, aloof and cool make it easy to wreck lives with pen strokes, it's not so easy to be fair and human and do crazy things like listen and respond to real people's real needs unless you get a little emotional. Obama is all about hope, and even the hopeful are uncomfortable with it.

I'm kind of enjoying these throes of Obamamania, but what worries me is the discomfort at abandoning the confusion of passionless sociopathy for 'realism' or 'good leadership', the way the rhetoric at once sweeps us away while kindling the collective self-sabotage that keeps us from enjoying the optimistic buzz. Optimism and realism are not mutually exclusive. Even Vonnegut, whom we saw off as A Man Without a Country didn't give up hope for humans – just for 21st-century America. I am pleading here: could we be realistic about the optimism, and stop predicting even more doom?

The night before the Potomac Primaries, I email my parents: “Hi! Don't forget to vote tomorrow. And remember, if you ever want grandchildren, vote for Obama! My uterus is closed for business until we are no longer on the brink of apocalypse! Love, Your Daughter, who is not afraid to blackmail you emotionally.” And this is where it gets so I feel really shit: the Kennedys are practically wiped out and they still had me because there was work to be done. They both tell me this, but I suspect they're firing the blackmail back at me and really they're that desperate for grandkids. Gotta up my game.

(from Totally Dublin, March 2008)