Our President.
The presidential election feels too momentous and deserving of quality to quickly write anything about, and yet, it feels too momentous and deserving of attention to put off trumpeting. So, because I don’t have time to write more than quickly, a few elliptical thoughts about our new leader…the first in my adult life about whom I want to use that word, in the fullness of its meaning.
On Tuesday morning, I was at a work meeting and got into a water-cooler conversation with a colleague who is French. He was talking about the election. “It’s not black and white,” he said, about some issue or other, in his French accent, and then paused. “I mean…actually…he is kind of black and white.” He chuckled at his play on English words.
I was thinking about that on my way to the polls in Greenpoint, riding high on the fumes of the day and letting myself get a little carried away in thought. How mythically appropriate, I thought: a black-and-white man, coming to heal the nation’s racial wounds. Black AND white. Larger than life. Containing multitudes. These were the messianic thoughts I projected onto Obama, feeling bad for doing it (Tobias Wolff once wrote that it’s a morally crude imagination that makes a man into a symbol), but enjoying myself too much to stop, all the way to P.S. 110, where the line at 1 p.m. was much shorter than I’d been led to fear. I spent a long time in the booth with its short, strangely skewed curtain, puzzling over the levers and the big red handle—the other elections I’ve voted in have all been by mail, for one reason or another—until the sort-of-nice, sort-of-snippy blue-haired little old lady outside asked whether I needed any help in there. I finished and came out at that moment.
“Oh,” she said. “I just thought you might need some help.”
She cranked her own lever on the outside of the machine, and, ka-chung, that was my vote, my stone cast into the pile. It felt weird to walk out empty-handed, sans receipt, sans anything. Did it count? Was it real? Really?
I took a nap and did some work and conducted and interview and then I was at loose ends for a while until the election-night party at a loft in Chinatown. Chinatown: funny neighborhood to be in on election night. I was tired from teaching and stayed mostly glued to the two TV sets until the end. It was so smooth. They called Ohio, and it wasn’t too long after when we all realized that assuming California…and Oregon…and oh, my god.
“THAT WOMAN’S OUR FIRST LADY!,” screamed Jessica, when Michelle Obama took the stage after Barack’s acceptance speech, and it was that as much as anything that made it sink in. Michelle Obama and the Obama girls and the Biden girls and Barack’s comment about the puppy. They’re walking, talking, breathing people and they’re going to Washington and, yes, it’s real.
“If you want to know what something is like,” I’d said to myself under my breath that morning when I was walking to the subway to go teach class, “compare it to something else.” I was thinking about my students and how I’d explain or defend my choice to give them a compare-and-contrast essay for their final assignment in the course. I liked what I came up with. Right: that’s why we write compare and contrasts—because you can understand a thing by knowing what it’s not.
I’m thinking of it now because I think I may only eventually be able to grasp the Bush years in the light of contrast provided by what comes after.
One of the first thoughts that came to me after Obama’s election was, ‘we’re going to stop torturing people now.’ Knowing it would stop made the fact that it’s been happening vivid to me in a new way. We’ve been living in that moral shadow, to say nothing of our victims. It’s real.
Some people have criticized Obama for the lack of specific details in his overall message of hope and change. But it occurs to me that I trust deeply and intuitively in two things about him: I trust in his intelligence, and I trust in the sincerity of his idealism. In the abstract, those would seem to be qualities we’d look for and expect in every leader. But to encounter them here and now, and to find them rewarded with power, induces a state of joy and gratitude whose strength alone throws the heartsunk cynicism of the past eight years into relief.
(Image from a really great scrapbook in the Chicago Tribune)
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