Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead

by Jim Washburn

I love local newspaper headlines. They double up on words major papers eschew, one of those words being eschew.

On election day, the lead headline in my local paper, the Daily Pilot, read, “Polling Places Gird for Droves.” At least they weren’t girding for droves of loins.

We voted early, the wife and I, as did many of our friends and relatives, wishing to both eschew the brunt of the droves and to avoid those precocious voting machines. For 120 years now, candy machines have generally given you the candy you chose, sometimes with ants. For three quarters of a century, jukeboxes have played the exact record you wanted, even the right side of it. ATMs dispense cash in the amount you desire, and create an accurate record. I can securely PayPal exact quantities of money to a twerp in Antwerp or e-mail a 5,000-word file with nary a comma dropped. Yet somehow in a country that prides itself on representative democracy and scientific innovation we can’t get a goddamned voting machine that works.

Given Florida eight years ago, Ohio four years ago, and the studies still finding how easily our voting machines might be hacked and votes flipped, our household voted by mail, on paper. Which is still no guarantee the votes won’t wind up in a dumpster, but at least you’re not stuck in line, with the droves.

I wouldn’t mind being in a crowd just now. Obama is victorious and friends are calling in from cities around the U.S. Some I can barely hear for the celebrating going on in the background. In Seattle, my friend Karl says thousands of people are dancing in the streets.

Here on my block in Costa McCaina, it looks like most folks have gone to bed, so they can get up early tomorrow and transfer their assets to a foreign account. But, flipping the dial on the TV, in other cities people are indeed partying in the streets, and hundreds of thousands gathered in Chicago to listen to one of the finest speeches to grace our time. People around the globe are celebrating, with such abandon that you’d think the Witch had ding-dong died, which in a sense she has.

Over the years, I’ve been accused of mawkishness and gross simplification for suggesting in columns that the crucial decision of our time—of any and all times, always this moment, right now—is whether we, in our society and our own minds, will be guided by love or by fear.

To me, that’s what decides everything: whether you embrace each unknown day as an adventure or as something to fear and contain; whether you see others as kin or adversaries; whether your religion liberates you or shuts your soul; whether you’ll share your talents or let them atrophy; whether you’ll feel each moment or just flinch your way through life.

Love is what everyone wants, but fear is such an easy sell. We’ve bought it in jumbo Costco sizes for seven years, but the old sales pitch just didn’t work this time. I used to like John McCain and hope to again in the very distant future, but he pushed every begrimed fear button he could reach in this election: Obama pals with terrorists and bookish Muslims; he endures teenaged girls reading pro-Palestinian poetry; he looks down on you; he’s fomenting class warfare; he’s listened to a reverend who’d dared suggest Americans are imperfect; he wants to force sex education on five-year-olds; he’ll take your guns, this Obama. He’s too radical, too risky, too we-can’t-say-the-word-but-it-rhymes-with-lack.

This past month, our political landscape suddenly seemed populated with characters out of a World Wrestling Federation tag-team grudge match. In this corner, wearing white and being white, the  Moose-shootin’ Beauty Queen and the All-American Grey-Market Plumber, while, wearing black in that corner, supporting That One: the Mad Bomber and Professor Palestinian.

Obama got as good a smear job as I’ve seen in my life, worse than the Democrats did to Goldwater in ’64; worse than Bush did to McCain in 2000. But it didn’t work.

I got a phone call from a 79-year-old friend, who grew up black in Kansas City, back when the movie theaters, schools, drinking fountains, and most everything else were segregated and unequal. Watching Obama’s victory speech, he said, “I felt like a little kid again, in a new world. Growing up black through all that, this really means something special, this day.”

Having grown up white, I told him I’m delighted for him, and just as happy for all of us that we got the best possible person for the job right when we need him most.

I was not always so keen on Obama. Back around the California primary I wrote here that the Democrats should angle for a Hillary/Obama ticket in that order, because I thought they needed the combined star power, that Hillary wouldn’t accept the back seat, and that Obama would benefit from becoming more experienced. He talked a good talk, but he did seem lacking in gravity and experience.

I sometimes delight in being wrong. Obama’s more than presidential now. It’s like he’s continually been inventing the person he aspires to be, and then grows into the role. It reminds me a bit of Bruce Springsteen back in 1975, when he and his band leapt from being a really, really good bar band into a fearless, epic band. It’s like they realized if they let go of music’s handrails, they could fly. I’m not talking about the Bruce Springsteen stadium rock juggernaut that within a few years would bludgeon stadium-loads with the same stick, but the period when you could see him three nights running and every instant was alive with possibility, each song changing and bursting its seams nightly.

That’s Obama. Earlier this year, you could see him testing himself, tentatively trying on the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s oratorical majesty. “Oh my, this is going to be awkward,” I thought, as he started working the music and resonance of King’s voice into his speeches. “There’s no way he isn’t going to look like a green kid trying on dad’s pants and shoes here.”

Wrong again. Using King’s cues, Obama grew into his own voice and cadence, until now it’s entirely his own cello he’s playing. It’s not forced, not self-conscious: it’s who he’s become. Conservative critics have claimed his speech is hypnotic, swaying audiences with its rhythms. Fifty years ago the same sort of guys were warning against the hypnotic “Negro jungle rhythms” of rock and roll brainwashing and perverting the morals of our white youths. How about just saying the guy’s a great orator, in the tradition of Lincoln, Churchill and King? It’s almost a lost art, as evidenced by our current president’s difficulties extracting a comprehensible sentence from his mouth. Christ, after Bush, electing Flower the Meerkat would have been an improvement.

As campaigns go, Obama’s was Hannibal crossing the Alps. It was bold, disciplined, effective. It was empowering, running on the donations of millions of modest-income folks. He went to places where people liked him least and won them over. No matter what his opponents flung at him or his family, he remained gracious and unflappable. Those are qualities one wants in a president, and those are among the qualities that made him one.

I am not the most demonstrative of persons. When I die, I’m pretty sure my Daily Pilot obit headline will have “phlegmatic” in it. So here’s something I hardly ever say:

I am happy. Giddy even.

When the election was called for Obama, my wife and I cried with joy, and, old babies that we are, wept throughout his beautiful speech, because this time love won. I think America’s just had its Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? moment, when the politician gibbering all the old fears and hatreds gets ridden out of town on a rail and the jubilation starts.

It’s also may be the time when, at long last, the nation gets back on the track it was blown off of on Nov. 22, 1963, and April 4 and June 5, 1968, before which the nation dared to hope and dream big. Since then, I think we’ve been literally gun-shy, avoiding electing great leaders because it hurts too damn much when their dreams and brains are blown apart by some asshole with a gun.

I can’t tell you how many times in recent days I’ve heard the same fear expressed regarding Obama. Some allegedly Obamacidal skinheads have already been apprehended, and it doesn’t help one bit that their ilk are being egged on by hate radio goons and religious wackos.

Even when conservatives had a lock on the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, they complained like aggrieved underdogs. Just wait for them to howl now. Meanwhile, Obama’s faced with the biggest mess any incoming president has had since Andrew Johnson in 1865. Bush’s policies have bled the economy dry and privatized our government into dysfunction. He still has two months to make things worse. It’s going to be a struggle for Obama to steer the nation toward change when it’s out of gas and hanging over a cliff. But for the first time in decades, I’m looking at the future and seeing hope.

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