October 2008 Archives

I think a lot of people would view the election as a baseball game, with Obama ahead and pitching well to protect his lead, while McCain is desperately swinging at the fences, knowing he's got to hit a homer to win--and swinging so hard that he can't actually put any men on base first.

But I'm not really a baseball geek.  I'm a different kettle of geek altogether, as you may have realized by now, so I think there's a better metaphor for this election.  To wit:

You may have seen this picture of Barack Obama:





















You may also have heard his crack about being sent here by his father Jor-El to save the earth, but that's not the funny bit.  The funny bit is that the right wing of the country, despite all their sarcastic cracks about "Messiah" this and "Chosen One" that, are apparently convinced that he really IS Superman.  It's the only thing that explains their strategy.

Instead of challenging Obama directly, trying to stop him from doing what he's doing, one thing at a time, the right-wing smear machine is spending its time and energy desperately searching for some magical anti-Obama substance that will destroy him altogether.  Sometimes the substance is associated with Obama (Wright, Ayers, Khalidi), or sometimes with a semantic issue ("really proud of America," "spread the wealth," etc.), but it's never an attempt to stop what he's doing--it's just an attempt to say "A man who would associate with/say _____ is unfit for the White House!"  They don't want to BEAT Obama--they don't know how.  They just want to find his kryptonite.

And so far, I've got to say the continuing attempts to find Obama's kryptonite are getting pretty comical. They're SURE that if they can just find that one weakness, the one thing that will show everyone he's not the hero we imagine, he'll turn green and drop down dead in front of everybody.

Problem is, Obama is not the hero THEY imagine.  He's not Superman at all.

Obama is Batman.

Think about it.  He lost a parent early in life... he dedicated himself to serving the community and spent years in training... he relies on detective skills, superior planning, and quick thinking to gain advantage over his foes... and his appearance strikes terror into the hearts of criminals (a superstitious, cowardly lot.)

Oh, and let's not overlook the prominent ears.

Also, I'm pretty sure one classic Batman line applies pretty directly to his relationship with the RWSM:



He's their worst nightmare.


7:57 AM

Not an entirely accurate title--we're not really on a "break" in any meaningful sense of the word--but it's the title of one of my favorite Beach Boys tunes, an instrumental subtitled "The Woody Woodpecker Symphony" from their notoriously drug-addled follow-up to Pet Sounds, the semi-legendary Smiley Smile.

But it does signify an important moment in our mental calendar: Thing Two has returned from boarding school for the weekend.  Granted, that weekend didn't begin until 1:00 Saturday, after he'd gotten his tie cut off in the annual ceremony of pseudo-circumcision that turns New Boys into ordinary students, and it will end when we drop him off at his play rehearsal at 2:30 this afternoon, but we've had him in the house, with the dog, for the last twenty-odd hours, which has been a big relief to everyone.  WFS likes parents to give their sons a chance to achieve some self-reliance during the early days of Year One, so Kelly and I have tried hard--very hard--to provide him the necessary space.  We've talked with him via email and occasionally dropped off things for him in his room, but for the most part, we've tried to behave as though we weren't living a mere mile and a half from his dorm.

It wasn't terribly easy to do.

But now we don't have to do it any more.  We can take him off campus for a meal once in a while, get his laundry done from time to time, and chat with him in the hallways without embarrassment.  He can come home and visit the dog once in a while, which may keep him (the dog) from being quite so psychotic. Last night we went to Target to buy a new tie, and we ended up getting a new hat and a small stuffed animal "Grue" figure (the clerk called it "Domo," but he's calling it "Grue") as well.  We ate at Chick-Fil-A at his request, then came home and watched several episodes of Veronica Mars.  A nice, normal weekend, the first we've had in six weeks. That was a welcome break.

And today the air is crisp, the sky is a crystalline blue, the Norway maple in the back yard is waving yellow leaves in the breeze, and I've got a large mug of French vanilla coffee beside me as I type.  If it weren't for the enormous pile of papers burning a hole in my backpack, I'd feel almost relaxed again.


8:10 AM

*I've got a real fondness for Philip Glass's soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi, but whenever I play it with someone else in the room, I worry that I'm driving them bats.  To me the interplay of triplets and sixes is hypnotic and fascinating--I could literally listen to it for hours--but I know how bored I sometimes get with long repetitive tunes by other artists (example: Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street," which is a single lovely melodic line driven relentlessly into the ground), so surely there's no way a normal human being could handle all this three-against-two-into-six-against-four organ-choir-brass thing.  Right?

*I remain optimistic about an Obama victory in November.  My main hope, aside from that basic non-negotiable hope, is that the margin of victory is large enough to give the Republicans a Moment of Clarity.  That would force them to acknowledge that the neocons, greedheads, and religious extremists who seized control of the party some years back no longer provide viable options for governing.  I'm also hoping that the Democrats are inspired by this victory to work on governing the country, rather than on simply blaming the Republicans for their failure to do so.  And while I'm at it, I'd like a pony.

*Thing One's fall whirl continues unabated, much like my own.  Marching band is eating his afternoons and weekends, calculus is eating his brain, and he's left with little more to do than issue occasional book reviews (on Wuthering Heights: "It was really interesting, but really boring at the same time.") and power down frightening amounts of cereal.  (The current favorite: Honey Bunches of Oats Just Bunches!, which he seems unwilling to admit is really just granola.)

*The big dogwood in our back yard is kicking ASS in the berry production department this fall; yes, the leaves are turning red, but the majority of the scarlet out back is coming from berries.  If the damn things were edible, we'd be set for the entire winter.

*Word is that Berke Breathed is retiring his third and latest vehicle for his favorite penguin, the Sunday-only strip Opus.  I can't say I'll miss it, though it does appear in the WashPost.  But I'm sad to say that I'm not really following ANY comic strip in the newspaper at the moment--I'm not reading the newspaper.  I flirted with it for a while over the summer, but now that we've got broadband at the house, I'm back to getting most of my news online, and there are only three strips I feel the need to download regularly: Doonesbury, which I check out just about daily at www.slate.com ; This Modern World, created by the brilliantly snarky Tom Tomorrow, every week; and Tim Kreider's hilarious and inimitable weekly strip The Pain--When Will It End?, which is like a bracing dip in the river of pure bile spewing from the zombie-gnawed corpse of Jonathan Swift.  All in all, though, I don't really miss the gag-a-day strips on which I cut my cultural teeth.  Maybe it's age.  Maybe it's the general decline of the newspaper strip.  Maybe it's the fact that most papers print them at roughly the size of a fortune cookie slip.  But wherever Breathed goes with Opus now, I can't help but wish he'd been satisfied with the first ending he wrote for his strip: the lovely, haunting image of Opus walking into the emptiness of the comics page with the colors of Bloom County fading into nothingness.

*Speaking of Tim Kreider, I should note that, in addition to being a mean cross-hatching fool when it comes to the pen-and-ink marvels of his strip, he's also a ridiculously nice guy.  Last January, longtime fan Thing Two decided to write him an email praising his work, admitting in it that he was only fourteen, but that he still enjoyed Kreider's black humor and choice use of profanity; I believe his exact words were "You have fucked up my life in the greatest way possible." Kreider responded not only with a gracious note of encouragement (you can see it in the January letters archive at www.thepaincomics.com ) but with an original drawing--which I promise I will someday scan, once I learn how to use a scanner, so that the world can enjoy the hilarity.  Regardless, Tim K is proven thrice over to be one of the good ones.  Buy his stuff.

*We're going to a concert!  At least we're PLANNING to go to one, assuming we can get tickets to Billy Bragg's upcoming Charlottesville show.  I haven't seen BB since the Worker's Playtime tour back in '89, and it was a delightful experience.  The three highlights:  1) Billy calling his cohort Wiggy onto the stage by bashing out a huge G-major power chord and intoning a la Bowie: "Wiggy plaaaaaaayed... guiiiiiiii-taaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!" 2) Billy demonstrating how much wasteful packaging there was in the then-relatively-new CD longbox package by tearing one apart (first shrink wrap, then cardboard longbox, then shrink wrap around the jewel box, then the jewel box itself, and finally the actual disc on which the music was recorded) and leaving a small mountain of consumer waste at his feet, and 3) Billy reminiscing about a recent gig in West Virginia, when he'd played with Robyn Hitchcock and R.E.M. on the state's official "R.E.M. Day"; said Billy, "It's a good thing it wasn't Robyn Hitchcock Day, or there would probably have been a rain of lobsters or something."

*North Carolina's football team is ranked #22 and plays Notre Dame on Saturday.  I simply don't know how to handle these concepts.  Are the end times upon us?

*On Saturday morning, well before the crack of dawn, Thing Two will make his way south along with his entire high-school class for a four-day Outward Bound course in North Carolina's Linville Gorge.  He's got gloves, long underwear, a woolly hat, and a fleece jacket if the weather's cold, as well as a non-cotton t-shirt and shorts if the weather's warm.  And boots--broken in by hiking around campus and up Old Rag. I had a blast on my OB course back in the summer of '05--here's hoping his is half as good for him.


8:02 PM

OK, it was more like "When well-known people in suits recite talking points that vaguely disagree," but even so, I couldn't NOT watch the Biden vs. Palin debate tonight.  I'm a speech teacher, for pete's sake.

Palin did very well, I thought.  She looked composed and attractive, but the slightly severe black suit kept her from appearing too much like the "Caribou Barbie" she's been accused of being.  She looked at the camera a lot, which I would expect a former sports anchor to do. (I liked the shout-out to the third-grade class back home, but couldn't she have updated us on the score of the Phillies game?)

Somewhat disappointingly, there were none of the disastrous failures she's shown in her interviews--no awful admissions of ignorance, no problems with going blank on questions.  Of course, she didn't bother answering several questions, preferring instead to launch into comments about subjects she'd obviously prepared for, such as energy policy.  She did mangle a few lines:  "There's a toxic mess on Main Street affecting Wall Street," for example, or "I'm not one to attribute every man-made activity to climate change," which is almost exactly what she told Katie Couric, and it didn't make sense the first time, either.

Oh, and while "McLellan" is indeed the name of a general in the United States Army, as Palin noted, he is no longer on active dity, as he was fired by Abraham Lincoln for failing to assault the Confederate Army with sufficient vigor.  His statements on the current situation in Afghanistan (once they arrive via Ouija Board) should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

Especially in the early going, Palin looked almost unwilling to answer a question directly.  Later she was better about that, but her chirpy folksiness got a little twee at times; I was halfway expecting her to invite Biden over for some rhubarb pie and a tall glass of lemonade after he and the rest of the menfolk finished raising the barn.

I'm also still trying to figure out how the McCain-Palin ticket will be about change and reform without looking at the past.  Especially when she said several times that there have been blunders in the past and that they will learn from those blunders.  Especially when she kept referring to McCain's track record, which was established, I'm pretty sure, in the past.

Most alarming answer: that Palin would seek to expand the VP's power.  I think we're far enough down Dick Cheney Boulevard already, thanks.

Most pleasantly surprising answer: that Palin supports allowing equal visitation rights and contract protection for same-sex partners as well as opposite-sex partners.  It's not full recognition of gay marriage, but for someone on the religious right, it's at least a start.

Biden, meanwhile, was almost entirely playing defense here, trying to respond only to the more egregious falsehoods, otherwise sticking to the talking points.  He wouldn't let Palin out-middle-class him, that's for sure.  He got in one good dig--"the ultimate bridge to nowhere"--but was for the most part thinking strategically: it's our election to lose, he seemed to be repeating to himself, so let's not lose it tonight.

He didn't rise to the bait when Palin said the Obama plan for Iraq was "a white flag."  He rebutted the claim that Obama voted against funding the troops, but Biden showed admirable discipline on several occasions when I can only imagine a lot of pols--John McCain, for one--meeting perceived insults with anger or sarcasm.

As a result, he came off as a bit dull.  Interested in the details, professional, confident, and calm, but dull.  Then again, calm, confident detail-oriented professionalism has worked well for his running mate, so maybe it'll work for Biden, too.

He also carefully referred to Palin as "Governor" wherever possible, while calling McCain "John" wherever possible, avoiding the trap of seeming condescending to her, but also giving himself the appearance of having a strong disagreement with a dear friend on most policy.

All in all, I'd rate it as a solid base hit for Palin, as I thought last week's presidential debate was a hit for McCain.  Unfortunately, their campaign right now needs more than just hits--they need home runs, or egregious errors on the part of Obama and Biden, and so far, they're not getting what they need.  I'm satisfied with Biden's performance tonight; he did a very good job of maintaining plate discipline, and that may be what wins the game in the long run.

Final thoughts:

1) On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan said he thought Palin had "mopped the floor" with Biden, and that she was an exciting and attractive" candidate.  Rachel Maddows deadpanned, "So we have boring and right versus exciting and wrong."

2) Palin said "Ahmadenijad" repeatedly without any of the trouble her running mate had; is it so bad for me to want her to stop saying "nucular"?

8:57 PM