Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety on Saturday. I always enjoy Hitchens though his book was weak; but I positively hated the Stegner, and read it in a sour mood the whole day through. But on some reflection I thought reading Mortality as a prelude to Crossing to Safety inspired. Both were portraits, unintended no doubt, of the great modern escapism, the wisdomless life of stimulus and success, which every unhappy person today is trying, either consciously or unconsciously, to find some way to rid himself of.
When I say “unhappy person” I do not mean to include everyone; and I think Hitchens and Stegner are examples of people quite satisfied with the current arrangement – with some qualification, I suppose, as both are dead. They were both successful, and both worked at so being; they lived very comfortable lives and didn’t need to get their hands dirty. They started with not very much but they had some talent, and they found life was a spout of oil, to be burned for warmth and entertainment, and there was enough of it that at the end when death came they almost didn’t have to notice their own mortality, which for them was I suppose the point.
For that is the thing that is really striking about the book Mortality: that the one thing which refuses to make an appearance in its pages is – mortality. I am a religious man, but I am aware that the God who gave me this mortal life is under no obligations to give me more. Life here can be eternity enough. I thought I might get from Hitchens some kind of noble affirmation of the dignity of mortality; sort of like the Brad Pitt movie Troy, where Mr. Pitt explains to the sex-slave he is boning at the time that “the gods envy us.” Hitchens could pull this off with a little more Oxonian flavor: Brad Pitt meets William Pitt: limitation is the source of meaning; human life is precious because it stares into an infinite nothing; hence are derived our duties to its continuation and cultivation; we have an obligation also to fight error, particularly religious error which cheapens the value of a human life by placing its worth on the wrong side of mortality; and the truth once known discloses our moral obligations to life all the more clearly. Mortality, therefore, is the source of our meaning and of our morality as well. I was expecting at least something of this sort; I felt I had been promised something similar by the publisher:
Mortality is the exemplary story of one man’s refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament… Hitchens’s testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.
But lies in the commercial art world are what cheap energy is to the modern economy: a foundation for nothing lasting, but profitable and a foundation nonetheless. In truth Mortality is a set of columns for Vanity Fair, crudely patched together into something like a book. Broad margins, fourteen-point type, eight pages of unworked notes left after Hitchens’ death, and a postscript by his wife round the tiny book out to 104 pages, $22.99. The book should really be called Chemotherapy, but I take it that was considered a less grandiose title. It is a suggestive metonymy, however: modern people of a certain sort cannot possibly contemplate death. It would be far too unsettling. What you must do is focus on the trappings of death: the loss of your hair (including your chest hair, which Hitchens notes “was the toast of two continents”), the difficulty getting blood taken (none left), the inability to speak. Even these things suggest death too much: better to describe hospital life. Hitchens even notes that he disliked having flowers sent to his room – it suggested he might be dying.
Of course when he wrote the columns, one might say, he did not know he was going to die – he might have beaten the cancer! But this is more modernism talking. Of course he knew he was going to die. So do you. We just don’t know when. The idea that mortality is something you confront on a hospital bed, and only at the last extremity, is itself indicative of the mindless distraction of twitter culture: the mere fact that you may not die within the next twitter cycle does not mean that you won’t soon enough.
As is usual with Hitchens, he spends a great deal of time – even on his deathbed – dealing with things that are really quite beneath him. He spends another chapter (column, really) talking about the inefficacy of intercessory prayer. The Christian world should have learned this lesson when the Visigoths made a habit of raping nuns during their devastation of Italy in 410. This didn’t happen to the nuns because they forgot to “pray on it.” If the Christians didn’t learn this then, they’ll never learn it. Jesus even tells people not to ask for anything: “Your heavenly father knows what you need before you ask.” “Do not babble on like the pagans.”
Hitchens gives another column to the dumb Nietzsche quote “that which does not kill me makes me stronger,” which is like looking for deathbed solace from a Carrie Underwood song. Hitchens points out the statement is untrue, which is obvious enough. It’s another artifact from a culture that hates uncomfortable truths. But you see the problem of “things that don’t kill you, but make you weaker” clearly enough in nature. I have been impressed how risk-averse animals are, particularly around each other. But you figure out why: of course a woodchuck can’t kill a fox, but a fox is afraid of him nevertheless, because all the woodchuck has to do is bite through a fox’s leg, which he is quite capable of doing. The fox can’t go to the doctor to fix a problem like that. Animals are not necessarily equipped to kill; to wound is good enough. What doesn’t kill you weakens you for the thing that will.
The illusion to be celebrated in both intercessory prayer and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is control: you can control Providence by giving God some timely guidance about what you want to happen, and the idea of the Nietzsche quotation is that even when you feel like you’re not in control you’re actually just building yourself up to have even more control later on. Hitchens describes this also in a chapter about the similarities between chemotherapy – give him as much radiation as the body can possibly take, but not more – and the torture he underwent for journalistic purposes. Modern medicine likes the doo-dads suggesting control over the situation, and over death ultimately. They work until the day they don’t, as the case of the late Mr. Hitchens proves. All white males become dead white males someday. This brings me to Crossing to Safety.
I don’t consider myself to be under any particular obligation to read novels which feature white people going sailing – or yachting, or whatever they call it, they were not out searching to smite the enigmatic malignancy of it all in the guise of a white whale, I promise you – or complaining about tenure requirements, or saying things like “Pritchard says the Hudson Bay York boats never carried coffee, only tea.” Novels which feature white people doing all these things had better be really extraordinary. They should not conclude scenes with sentences so stupid and weird they make you wonder if the author had written the book to parody the kind of writing you find in creative-writing classes: “I moved my foot between Sally’s legs and fitted it like a bicycle seat into her crotch.”
Unfortunately, Crossing to Safety is such a book, and since it is my fate to continue to take words seriously, let us see what the reviewers have to say about this one:
“A novel brimming with wisdom on subjects as diverse as writing for money, solid marriages, and academic promotion policies [are these really that diverse?] – with page after page of superb descriptive writing… [especially note the bicycle-seat-crotch simile… breathtaking]” – Howard Mosher
“A quiet reexamination of what, close to the end, seems to have made life not only worth living but happy and almost fulfilled. Mr. Stegner has built a convincing narrative, has made survival a grace rather than a grim necessity, and enduring, tried love the test and proof of a good life. Nothing in these lives is lost or wasted, suffering becomes an enriching benediction, and life itself a luminous experience.” – Doris Grumbach
I really don’t know what book Doris was reading, but I’ll be sure to look out for it at the Strand. I’m sure her review copy can be found there. As for Crossing to Safety, it is an account in the first person, by a writer whose awesome writing is attested to by literally every single literate person in the novel (“You could study for years and not learn how to do what you do. Right from the first paragraph of your first story, you know how. Now you’ve done it again. In a week. My God, it takes me a week to get my pencils sharpened and my rump comfortable in the chair. I envy you. You’re an instrument that blows no blue notes” (52), and on and on, really the sycophancy almost gains dignity by parodically being written entirely by himself), mostly about a pair of friends of the writer, a husband who is a disappointment to all and can never do any better than teach literature at Dartmouth, and a tyrannical wife, who believes she is in control of everything and dies at the end, intent on retaining control to the very last second. And even afterwards. In fact, the shadow of her insanity is to remain on the wall of the cave even after her death:
“Know what she’s done to guide me? You’ll never guess. Don’t even try. She’s made a list. Women here and in Hanover it would be okay for me to marry. Five names, listed in their order of suitability.”
The refrigerator came on with a behind-the-scenes whir. I felt the warm gush of its exhaust against my ankles. “You’re kidding,” I said.
“I am not kidding. Want to see the list?” (306)
I will add “white people thinking they are in control” to the list of non-obligatory novel subjects, along with white people yachting and discussing tenure. Unfortunately, this woman is really the subject of the novel, which starts and ends with her death. Reading her story, I waffled between a vague sadness – “Can it really be the case that there is no redemption at all for these rich people? That they go all the way to the end with their stupid schemes and formulae and never live even once?” – and utter frustration that no one ever sets this woman (and her husband) right – I mean, all the way to her god-damned deathbed, for real? Artistically, you can’t succeed in a format as massive as a novel with immature characters who never get any kind of correction, just as you can’t make an effective two-hour movie with a baby who never stops crying. After about the first half-hour, you’re ready to get up out of your seat and yell, “Is someone going to do something about that BABY?”
The focus on tenure, on writing for money, even on keeping marriages together at the cost of all spiritual integrity – keeping up appearances and knocking under to the pressure (“she’s the mistress of the implacable silence,” her husband says, explaining why he won’t confront her) – is, pace Mr. Mosher, the utter absence of wisdom, the horrid meaninglessness of bourgeois life, the frantic following of every social convention because there is nothing else. The book, all in all, is “The Death of Ivan Ilych” without the light. “The life of the Langs and Morgans had been most straightforward and most according to custom and therefore most terrible.” Page after page of Ivan Ilych could be used to describe the Langs and the Morgans. Ivan Ilych’s house is their life:
In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there were damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes – all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all seemed quite exceptional.
There is all kinds of terrible pretentious conversation, on the “theological meringue” of Dante’s Paradiso (I don’t even want to know what that means), on Satan really being the hero of Paradise Lost (wow, never heard that one before, brilliant. Mention it to your undergraduates next fall! They’ll be amazed!), things like that. I proffer the relevant passage, from Ivan Ilych’s deathbed:
Fedor Petrovich inquired of Ivan Ilych whether he had ever seen Sarah Bernhardt. Ivan Ilych did not at first catch the question, but then replied: “No, have you seen her before?”
“Yes, in Adrienne Lecouvreur.”
Praskovya Fedorovna mentioned some roles in which Sarah Bernhardt was particularly good. Her daughter disagreed. Conversation sprang up as to the elegance and realism of her acting – the sort of conversation that is always repeated and is always the same.
Stegner, on the other hand, seems to be mighty impressed that he became the sort of person to have such conversations, and so the book is littered with discussions of precisely this sort. Again, Tolstoy sums up the entire lifestyle of the Langs and Morgans with just contempt: “When they had gone it seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt better: the falsity had gone with them.”
The truly terrifying thing about Crossing to Safety is that it represents the disturbing possibility that modern people have found a way to make falsehood in its various forms – the avoidance of real emotions, the obsession with meaningless social trivia, the denial of mortality – last right up until the very moment of death. Charity Lang (the name of the wife) refuses to have her husband watch her die in the hospital – she doesn’t like dealing with his weakness:
“I want to go gradually, a step at a time, in some kind of decent order. Is that too much to ask? I’m trying to do it right, and you won’t help me. Oh, it was just to avoid scenes like this that I… I don’t want to bother anybody. I don’t want a lot of crying and breaking down! I hate it! All I want to do is go away quietly while the family is together and enjoying itself.” (316)
“Because I can’t stand it when you break down!” she said. “I haven’t the strength. I’m trying to do it right. If you’d just let me do it my way it’d be best for everybody, it’d be ever so much better.” (317)
You might expect this kind of behavior from a teenager – in an old woman it is positively disturbing. Did you learn nothing from being alive? Modern technology and American wealth help to create people like this – who think they can avoid anything unpleasant, like mortality and grief. They want to engineer things so they can just “go away quietly” in utter denial to the very end. And they have modern medicine to help them in this quest for pleasantness and control. Tolstoy, on the other hand, gives Ivan Ilych no place to go:
And his colleagues and subordinates would see with surprise and distress that he, the brilliant and subtle judge, was becoming confused and making mistakes. He would shake himself, try to pull himself together, manage somehow to bring the sitting to a close, and return home with the sorrowful consciousness that his judicial labors could not as formerly hide from him what he wanted them to hide, and could not deliver him from It. And what was worst was that It drew his attention to himself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at It, look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly.
This It of course is mortality, our final and utter submission to the fact that we are not the authors we think we are, but characters rather, in a larger story which is not the work of our hands. It is decisively absent as a topic of polite discussion in bourgeois society, and as Tolstoy shows, this is neither a new nor an American phenomenon. But the modern American threatens to bring ever more technological artillery to the cause of distracting us to the very end with a false sense of control. I fear that future generations may be worse, more distracted, more superficial, than even Stegner’s, which, please God, was bad enough. We would be better served with writers who offer us more than distraction and superficiality – ones who can look at It. To quote Stegner:
It was her death. She had a right to handle it her own way. [What individualistic nonsense, borrowed from a society obsessed with owning and possessing. “She was death’s” is more accurate.] But I felt sorry for Sid, a reluctant stoic, and I dreaded the coming hour or two when I would be alone with him. I was the person he was most likely to confide in, and I feared his confidence and had on tap no word of consolation or comfort. (297)
Their later conversation, recorded in the book, only proves his fears of his own inadequacy too true. As I have written before, I believe there is really only one religion, because there is only one truth. If you have something to say to a friend in such a situation – and not some canned blather about going to a better place, which dishonors our deeply human grief – then you have religion enough, regardless of your denomination. But to have nothing to say, after a lifetime of living and loving, in the face of great suffering brought on by obvious spiritual dishonesty with the most obvious facts of life – it is lameness in a friend, lameness in a man, and lameness in a writer. It is, to use Stegner’s lame phrasing, to be an instrument that blows only blue notes, or maybe even nothing at all.
Campaigning for Obama in Ohio.
15-Dec-12Keep your hand clean.
For a long time I was not sure if I would campaign for Obama this year. I was fairly complacent about the election; Romney was, I thought, a terrible candidate, and the Republicans had no ideas beyond giving further government assistance to an utterly unworthy investor class, which I felt could hardly be a winner at the ballot box. Obama had proven utterly useless on obvious issues such as the protection of citizens against the surveillance state – issues where he actually needed no congressional approval to act, and could not blame Republicans. On other issues, such as the increasing gap between rich and poor, he had achieved nothing at all, in large part due to an obstructionist Republican party that has no other principle than this, that those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away from them. But Obama hardly seemed to do congressional campaigning, so he was himself in large part to blame for a Republican congress. He didn’t seem to have the inner hatred of human greed that probably would be the only motive force capable of saving this country.
But if Obama did not hate greed enough, his opponent undoubtedly did not hate it at all, and would probably be hard-put to explain what in the world Paul meant when he said, “The love of profit is the source of all evil.” To such men the word “evil” there must be a Biblical typo for “good.” The closeness of the election made it clear that some action was advisable, for people like me who could, to support the man who was far and away the better candidate for the office of president. I was helped by a good friend who kept on me about it, and who felt passionately what I felt more generally, that to be neutral in this case was no virtue. He was working full-time, and decided to use his very limited vacation time to volunteer in the campaign. It turned out that two more friends were able to volunteer as well, and so off we went to Ohio the Friday before the election.
There was a friendly house putting us up in Shaker Heights, where we would be volunteering. I was curious to see the area. In college I quickly learned that members of the Ivy League overclass who said they were from “Cleveland” were actually from Shaker Heights. I thought it would be merely the rich suburb, but it was more complicated than that: it was more like Westchester, which combines fabulous wealth with occasional grit (Mount Vernon, in Westchester, produces rappers).
Shaker Heights sits on a ridge of land a few miles away from downtown Cleveland. As is typical in American residential geography, the low ground beneath Shaker Heights in the direction of downtown Cleveland is almost entirely black and poor.
Obama had several campaign offices in the area, the most important of which was in Shaker Square, a nice octagon of shops where the commuter rail stop was. It became our work headquarters for the next few days. There were also two satellite offices I spent time in down the hill in the black neighborhoods. In general, Shaker Square was the perfect location for an Obama campaign office, with access to both of the Democratic party’s bases: minorities and college-educated whites.
I had volunteered in 2008 in Pennsylvania, and been at the inauguration in 2009. As at those times, I was amazed at the diversity of Obama supporters: there were people of every race and financial profile. I was knocking on doors, doing grunt work – but so was a surgeon from Seattle. A lot of the volunteers were young, but almost as many were old. And besides the volunteers, some people in the office had apparently just come in to get warm, or to be around other people. They were allowed to sit there and munch on food people brought. They just needed someplace to go. They were part of the reason we were there, anyway.
Once upon a time in the land of Us...
The campaign office in Shaker Square was large, bright, and full of activity. There were nice posters on the walls, many of them handmade, but in general there wasn’t much attention paid to décor. Junk of various sorts had accumulated in the months since it had opened (there was a May 2012 calendar still on the wall). There was a table of food and drink brought in by people. The food appeared to be purely pot luck – there was no oversight as to what would be there, it was whatever came in the door. People were coming in and out all day long, to volunteer their time or bring food or visit. There would generally be at least twenty people in the office, half volunteers and half staff, and at times there must have been a hundred or more. There were a few campaign coordinators running the show, all women, and all incredibly competent and caring. They were constantly busy, but there was a good supply of volunteers, so they did not appear stressed, just busy. They gave out tasks and the tasks got done, more or less in accordance with instructions, it seemed. There was also a bank of computers and people working on them. I didn’t know quite what they were doing, but it all seemed to work very well.
When I volunteered in 2008, “hope” was one of the catchwords, and that feeling of hope had unfortunately mostly departed. This time around fear had become a strong motivating factor, the fear that a venture capitalist with venture capitalist values could really ascend to the White House. Buses driving around Cleveland said, ROMNEY ECONOMICS: WRONG FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS and DON’T LET THEM TAKE US BACK. Fear was particularly noticeable in the office several days before the election; in the day or two before the election people were too busy to be afraid. But it reminded me of one of my mother’s sayings, that we don’t work to make the world better: we work to keep it as good as it is. In other words, do good and don’t expect to turn the world on its head. Good isn’t necessarily transformative, it’s just good.
Forward, not back.
One thing counterbalanced the fearful and somewhat gloomy atmosphere, and that was the sense that for this week Cuyahoga County was the center of the entire nation. Almost all the prognosticators agreed that Ohio was the most important of the swing states, and Cuyahoga County was the single most important part of the state for Obama. Supposedly in 2008 Obama had lost the rest of Ohio, but his margin in Cuyahoga County had won the state for him. He absolutely needed Cuyahoga County to get to the polls.
The carnival atmosphere the celebrities brought to the office sometimes made me wish I could just stay at headquarters to see them all. But the work was fun in its own way. We were doing “get out the vote” work – not trying to persuade people to vote a certain way, but just trying to get them to vote. And the work had been prepped beautifully. We were given lists, in each area, of unlikely voters: people who were registered but who for various reasons the Obama campaign did not feel it could rely on. I don’t know how they figured out who the unlikely voters were, but frequently they were young and recently registered. They were not campaign contributors – you could rely on the campaign contributors to vote. So often we were walking past homes with Obama signs, but not knocking on their doors – we were headed for the homes with no political signs at all.
The level of political engagement, I have to say, was very impressive. I have never lived in a swing state, so really I had never seen anything quite like this. In presidential elections a few states become the focus of millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of attention, and it was visible there in Ohio. Added to this was the extraordinary power of identity politics. We all know that this is a major factor – almost the factor – in elections, and so we expect Giuliani to have powerful support in the New York Italian-American community, for instance. But here it was on a level I really had never seen before. Because blacks have been driven into ghettoes for all of American history, there are no neighborhoods as ethnically uniform as black communities, and since there is such a history of political exclusion and subjugation in the black community, nowhere in America does the chance to hold political power seem to have such meaning. And the Obama campaign had trained its laser beams on black neighborhoods in swing states for five years now. It seemed like we were knocking on every other door in every neighborhood – the only homes we were passing were the ones with Obama signs already there. And there was no question who the people were voting for. The only questions were the practical ones: how early voting worked, where the polls were, what to bring to the polls, what to do if you had moved, whether you had to register every year, how late the polls were open, whether there were rides for the sick and the old. And those were questions we could answer.
Down by the Board of Elections on Sunday.
People lined up to vote.
Of course most of the time people weren’t home, or maybe wouldn’t answer an unexpected knock at the door. But we left on unanswered doors literature which helped answer those questions, and so it seemed in general like significant work. And since we were armed with cars, on several occasions I personally drove people to the polls: due to early voting, I could do this before Election Day itself. This was encouraged because there were fears that lines would be long on Election Day, and if some problems arose – insufficient I.D., or a contested vote – there was still time in the subsequent days to solve the problem. (This was perhaps ill-advised, as there were not nearly the kind of facilities for early voting as there were for regular voting, but the early voting station down at the Board of Elections was an impressive scene: massive lines, political speeches, the giant mayor of Cleveland striding around in an expensive suit and overcoat presiding over everything, people giving out free coffee and barbecue). Driving people to the polls took a great deal of time, but it was fun and there were several instances when I was uncertain if the person would have gotten to the polls any other way. On Election Day I drove a mother with her young children who did not have a car, and seeing how far away her polling place was I was not at all certain she would have gotten there without someone driving her. My saintly politically engaged friend from New York found a black woman in her 70s who was registered but had never voted, so he gave her the limo treatment and brought her to the polls. I don’t think we were authorized to do the driving ourselves – maybe there are insurance problems with all this – but we didn’t care too much. It was fun talking to people on the drive, and it was fun seeing the deal closed this way. As a former teacher, I always get frustrated not knowing if anything good ever quite comes of what I do – in this instance, I was trying to get people to vote, and it was nice to see it actually happening. And I left with the sense that you could, in fact, if you invested the time, make votes happen which otherwise might not. This could be seen as a flaw in the system, but I didn’t feel that way: a conviction for which you are willing to give time and effort should be a multiplier.
Race was of course another element in the whole experience. The racial divide in this country is so strong, that I cannot deny that there is something strange and exciting about crossing it from time to time, and being with people on the other side. I could feel that it was strange and exciting for the people on the other side as well. I felt that most of the living rooms I visited hadn’t been visited too often by a bearded white guy who lives in the country, reads the Bible frequently, and drives a pickup. I couldn’t claim there was much deep connecting going on, but I think we were all aware that even superficial interaction across these lines didn’t happen often. In fact, the Obama campaign is one of the few places I’ve ever seen it happen with a real sense of equality on both sides. It feels different from the kind of racial “equality” you experience in educated circles, where it feels like an effort by whites in an unquestionably superior position to “include” and “tolerate” minorities. A voter is in some sense in the privileged position – he is the patron, and it takes some humility to come knocking on his door. And I was impressed, in general, how gracious people were to me: I was, in the end, a solicitor, but I was treated well everywhere except the last day, in one neighborhood near some public housing projects. There I had the familiar childhood feeling (from growing up in New York City in the 80s with all kinds of racial tension), that I was in some physical danger. There were some groups of young men hanging out by the corner store, and they wanted to hear nothing about voting. One man told me to forget about going on my round through the neighborhood: “You don’t need to worry about your papers. You need to worry about me. You hear me? You need to worry about me. Do you know what I’m saying?” This seemed like a situation I did not need to stay in, and I didn’t. Experience has told me that our instincts are good, but are only useful if we listen to them. Nearby I spoke with a woman who ran an “urban farm” in the neighborhood, where there had been fairly serious black/white friction. I felt it was pretty clear that the same animus against “urban farmers” – hipsters – was being directed my way.
Thank the Lord for Episcopalians and their churches.
There were so many volunteers beating the bushes that I could go at my usual slow pace without feeling any guilt. I had a fairly strong sense that I could be useful, but it really didn’t depend entirely on me. I walked a bit around Cleveland, saw some nice churches, marveled at the extraordinarily monumental downtown, tried to go to see a production of Moliere’s Misanthrope (it was sold out), and went to the gift shop of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (the place itself didn’t quite convince me to fork over the entrance fee). Saturday night the area celebrated Halloween, as the Hurricane had prevented many kids from going Trick-or-Treating, so I took some time to carve a Jack O’Lantern. Sometimes I just sat around the campaign office, enjoying being part of things.
The Kuhner 2012 Jack O'Lantern
We really did pound the pavement quite a bit on Election Day, making multiple passes through every neighborhood, and I went in to shops and told passersby to vote, and it was fun being intent on the goal. Indeed one of the great tasks in life is to create situations where only one thing matters; and Election Day was such a day. We had only one goal that day, and everything else simply dropped away. In life these are the notable hours. I have heard politicians talk warmly of campaigns, and when they reach their last campaign they speak sentimentally about them. This makes sense to me: in a campaign there is a single, simple purpose. For whatever reason, we are constituted to be energized by such a thing.
When the work was wrapping up around 7 p.m. we cleaned up the satellite office and then headed to an Election Night Party in someone’s house, where I did some damage to a bottle of good whiskey and watched the good news come in. When Ohio was called for Obama, and with it the election, we went out to the street and joined hands and danced in a circle, as if we were in the background of some Renaissance painting. We had worked for it, and it felt great. Some of the women glowed with all the inner satisfaction of revenge that the “legitimate rape” Senate candidates were defeated. I didn’t quite have the vindictiveness, but I will confess that I don’t have any particular sympathy for the “rape-is-God’s-will-but-progressive-taxation-is-not” Christians.
Some of the data I got later confirmed the sense of unanimity I had had on the beat: some of the black neighborhoods we had been working in did not cast a single vote for Romney. And why should they? Romney was not there to represent the needs and solve the problems of poor people. Any talk he might have about growing the economy was merely lies; by all data, economies with strong middle classes, progressive taxation, strong regulatory apparatus, and social safety nets do better than economies without all those things. Romney’s idea of a good economy is one where people like him make billions instead of mere hundreds of millions.
In the weeks following the election, I was surprised to hear from the media how much they thought this election was a repudiation of Republican policies, and how Republicans needed to change in order to win future elections. I thought Republicans did very well, considering how bad their candidates were. Romney was an unprincipled, lying, incompetent, awkward, one-term governor who stood for nothing except his own success: but he came within shouting distance of the presidency. The only thing I think his party learned was that they shouldn’t bother with candidates from the Northeast. And to shut up about requiring women to bear children for their rapists. As for talk about demographics, another way for the Republican Party to deal with this problem is simply to capture a larger percentage of white people’s votes. This is not an utterly implausible strategy, though as I cannot point to anything notably good the Republican Party has done for the country in the past twenty years, they will not have my vote anytime soon.
We drove home the day after the election, into a snowstorm which made driving quite difficult as we approached New York. It had been a great trip, really. Obama was the first candidate I ever campaigned for; I wonder if there will be another.