Saxby’s Fifth Avenue

I suppose nothing about this election should phase any of us at this point, but I was really taken aback by David Gergen’s suggestion that Hillary Clinton should publicly renounce the votes of racists.  Has this woman really been dragged through so much mud that it can’t just go without saying that she isn’t reaching out to racists for support? 

As Gergen himself says, Hillary Clinton has been a strong supporter of civil rights her entire public life.  If we’re going to require Hillary to denounce the repugnant views of a small group of the millions who’ve cast votes for her, we’d also have to ask Obama to denounce those who voted for him because his opponent is a woman.    

How unnecessary either statement would be, and what undue relevance it would give the racist and/or sexist views unforutnately and inevitably held by a few in a sample of millions.  It’s clear that race and gender are still issues in this country, and it would have been nice if Hillary had been allowed to address sexism in a way Obama was allowed to address racism.  Yet, forcing statements near the end of a campaign that will only be seen as defensive is hardly the way to go about starting a national conversation on any social ill. 

Our candidate will either be an African American or a woman.  It’s possible our ticket will be comprised of an African American and a woman.  We’ve already illustrated that the Democratic Party really is the famed “big tent” of American politics and we need not have anyone making ”duh” statements expressing views that are perfectly clear to anyone with a brain.    

I stumbled across the original video for Madonna’s “American Life” single, which came out around the time we invaded Iraq.  Even after all her other “shocking” moments, this could have killed her career in 2003.  It also says a lot about what blind, flag-waving puppets people were at the time that not even Madonna was willing to ruffle any feathers.

Last summer, a month or so after I started working on the Hill, a colleague and I took an extended lunch and went to the big Campus Progress shindy at the Hyatt.   After a speech by Keith Ellison, the congressman who caused all the “controversy” when he wanted to be sworn in using a Koran (confused by some conservatives with Mein Kampf, apparently), we took in a few breakout sessions.

One of the sessions was led by the completely adorable fellow Hoya (and fellow Michiganian) Rob Anderson, then a Washington Post blogger and now a blogger for Campus Progress.

I haven’t done much blog reading (aside from the pure heroin masquerading as Perez Hilton) unrelated to class since spring semester started.  Catching up during my end-of-semester, pre-summer jobbing stretch of laziness, I came across Rob’s link to an Atlantic article titled “Caring for your Introvert.”

The article is written in a humorous tone, but it also struck a chord personally.  I can’t count the number of times since moving to DC I’ve been called a party-pooper because I didn’t want to spend yet another weekend in a series of hot, crowded, overpriced clubs, struggling to banter with strangers over awful house music.  Or how many times I’ve been called a desperate housewife because I live in Virginia rather than Dupont.

Maybe it’s just the metropolitan environment that convinces everyone they need to be seen and heard by as many people as possible in as many venues that can be fit into one night.  But even in “Sex and the City” reruns (I can think of no better reference) the girls seem to have so much more fun lunching at that little cafe or gathered around a TV with some biscotti in one of their apartments than they do when they force their way into the latest hot-spot (or that time Carrie made them all go to Atlantic City).

I dunno.  Perhaps I’m just a buzz-killing house-frau, boring beyond my years.  But I’m OK watching a movie with some close friends and a bunch of Chinese carry-out.  I don’t mind living across the river if I can park my car for less than the car itself would cost per month.  “Calvin and Hobbes” and Camus share space on my bookshelf.  Britney comes just after Beethoven on my MP3 player.  I once won a bike guessing how much a giant pumpkin weighed and have a scar on my abdomen from where I subsequently impaled myself upon that bike’s handlebar attempting to jump a curb.  I hold my pen incorrectly.  That makes me mildly interesting, doesn’t it?

I just think my words have more meaning when they address something or someone I have an actual fondness for and when they don’t pour forth as dialgoue in some “production” of life.  I think my actions carry more weight when I take them out of genuine desire and not to live up to someone else’s definition of amusement or fulfillment.

Being so “old,” I long for the days when MTV actually had something to do with music.  I guess I just don’t aspire to carry on as though I’m a Hills cast member.  Which is good, because if I had to date Spencer or Heidi I would kill myself.

*Another shameless “Golden Girls” reference…

OK, so it’s no secret I would prefer Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for president. I’ve already outlined the reasons for my preference so I won’t bore the…two, possibly three people who read this blog by rehashing them. Still, after taking in the media coverage of last night’s primaries and their aftermath, and listening to the opinions of my very dear friends who are supporters of Hillary’s opponent, I felt obligated to…defend her honor?

At this point, what’s most upsetting to me isn’t just my belief that Hillary would more handily defeat John McCain and would go on to be a better president than him or Barack Obama. It’s the joy which many Obama supporters (not all, certainly) I know personally or whose views I’ve become acquainted with in the past few months feel towards Hillary’s potential defeat.

I’m not talking about the more dramatic, less politically educated supporters I’ve run into around DC. Such as the young woman who declared, with a theatrical shake of her chest, that being a woman was much easier for her than being black and she thus didn’t think electing a white woman was as important as electing a black man (who, coincidentally, was raised by a white woman whose concept of being an American of the fairer sex was likely more informed).

It’s more those studied Democrats who, until Barack Obama proved more “exciting,” were not just happy to be nominating a woman who they fought alongside and supported for over a decade, but were proud to be nominating someone who could quite possibly be the first female leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. Fuck being president of the United States. The leader of the free world would be a woman, and Democrats would be responsible for putting her there.

How sad that the conversation has changed from that potential, or from admiration of what Hillary’s campaign has already accomplished, to ripping it apart for being a product of “ego,” “futile,” or “self serving.” And no, those feelings didn’t suddenly develop in the last two days, when Obama scored a completely unsurprising, albeit handy victory in North Carolina, a state either Democrat will lose in November.

I don’t understand how Hillary Clinton is somehow the “ego” candidate when her opponent has run a campaign of almost no substance, for the most important presidency in the world, after paying more dues on Oprah’s couch than on the Senate floor.

I don’t understand how Hillary’s campaign, after resonating with voters in California, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Florida is somehow “futile” in context of a primary election being necessary to selecting a candidate best prepared to deliver the White House in the electoral college system.

I don’t understand how anyone could think being kicked in the teeth for months on end, not by Republicans or conservatives, but frequently by people in one’s own party, is such a delightful, uplifting, cakewalk that Hillary’s campaign couldn’t possibly be fueled by anything but the “self-serving” nature of a woman whose ambition and quest for power are perhaps unsettling or unbecoming feminine traits to even those who consider their Obama support an outward symbol of their modernity.

Of the three major candidates, I feel that HIllary Clinton will make the best president of the United States. Her experience is greater than one of her opponents and more in touch with the needs of modern America than the others. She is fiercely intelligent and just as fierce when it comes to defending herself, her beliefs and what she feels is best for the country she clearly loves. Practically, she has shown a superior ability to connect with voters in states crucial to denying the Republican Party four more years of White House residency (OK, so I rehashed a little here).

She has shown more loyalty to Michigan voters like myself than has our shared Democratic Party, who after going apoplectic at the possibility of every vote not being counted in 2000, is shockingly and disturbingly willing to leave members in two states completely out of this nominating process because state party hacks didn’t follow (stupid) rules that voters themselves had absolutely no control over.

Hillary Clinton has my support because she has earned it. I know her. You know her. As well as any of us can know any public figure. She’s earned our support in principle even if not in practice. It’s about time we give this old friend the affection we’d accord any stranger not afraid to reach, even too high, or fight, even too hard, for ends most of us were only too excited to see her meet just a few months ago.

As excited as I get when school’s about to start up in the fall (although I got more excited when it actually started in the fall and not late summer) I also love when classes are out in the spring. It means I can start forming my summer reading list! I know what you’re thinking and yes, I proudly answer, I am indeed that big a dork.

I decided to start the season off with Mary, a historical novel about Mary Todd Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman (a podcast of Newman reading a selection from the novel can be found here).  I actually got the hardcover as a birthday gift last July, but in the midst of moving to DC, then starting work on the Hill and then starting grad school, I didn’t get a chance to open it until almost a year later.

USA Today’s review said Mary was the sort of book “you feel a compulsion to urge others to read…” I certainly had that reaction just a few pages in and its a compulsion that’s only grown halfway through the novel. I’ve never been much interested in the undoubted heroes of history. I’d much rather read a complex, contradictory, conflicted story than one in which a saint among men lives a noble life for a noble cause and leaves the world a nobler place than they themselves knew.

Who could possibly be more complex, contradictory and conflicted than Mary Todd Lincoln? She was an astutely political woman in a world where a wife who zealously supported her husband’s candidacy was considered to have “unsexed” herself with ambition.

She was an intensely passionate woman at a time when too much grief, joy or lust could well have one committed for lunacy (especially if one were of the fairer sex). She was the very definition of a Southern belle who happened to ardently support the Union and emancipation. She was the type of woman who could spend days on end comforting horrificly wounded soldiers, seeking no press attention for her actions and then sink her husband into great debt trying to impress Washington society with fancy fans and elaborate gowns.

For me, history has never been a series of facts, dates and obscure figures in black and white photographs. History, especially our history, is a dramatic, heroic, tragic, ironic and romantic epic of people and places thrown together by fate and the events that mixture produces.

Not to sound too much like a book reviewer, but Mary is the perfect book for someone wanting to be as excited as they are educated by even a fictional historical account. There is perhaps no event in American history as encapsulating of all the “ics” listed above than the Civil War. Mary Todd Lincoln’s story, her fierce, sensitive, sarcastic, intelligence juxtaposed against the War’s narrative, against the narrative of the American slave experience and with a healthy dose of fairly dirrty bedroom action (I love XTube as much as the next guy, but there were definitely times I blushed reading about Mary’s orgasmic fits watching Abe debate Stephen Dogulas) has so far made for an all-together pleasing waste of these oddly weathered late spring days.

I’m really confused as to why everyone is so upset about Miley Cyrus’s now infamous Vanity Fair photo.  I’m not surprised, seeing as Americans have become very good at overreacting to the meaningless and under-reacting to the important, at least until it’s too late to do anything about it. 

I suppose since Britney’s meltdown eventually became a cover story even for the Atlantic Monthly, we could stretch the definition of ”important” and at least consider what the Spears saga says about celebrity culture in general.  But, remember Janet’s boob?  The one we’d already pretty much seen all of in 1993, on the cover of Rolling Stone, and again on different RS cover a few years later? 

Janet later blamed the Bush Administration for using her to distract from what it was doing re: Iraq, which a lot of people thought was ridiculous.  Even if there was no concerted Bush-lead effort to keep Tittygate in the news, Janet’s statement does inadvertently pose an interesting question: Why do we care when there’s nothing to care about?

I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the Miley Cyrus picture.  To me, it’s an almost-weathered looking photograph of a girl who actually looks her age.  She’s not wearing any garish makeup.  Her hair isn’t filled with highlighted extensions.  Her gaze is relaxed.  

She’s stripped, it’s true, but not in an Xtina way.  This isn’t a photo dripping with sexuality.  Miley isn’t stretched out on satin sheets with a Teletubby pressed to her breast, ala 17-year-old Britney.  Annie Leibovitz, who around this time last year was photographing the Queen of England , succeeds in showing an over-hyped, over-idolized, overpaid, overworked young woman in her natural state.  In doing so, she puts less of Miley’s body on display than would a modest two-piece bathing suit any other 15-year-old could wear to the public swimming pool without even raising an eyebrow from the local PTA, much less the international media.     

If someone thinks sin when they look at the photo, it would seem they are projecting their own moral sensitivies (or maybe their inhibitions and hangups) on a young girl who hasn’t done anything to deserve being the target of their activism.  If someone thinks sex when they look at the photo, it would seem they were projecting their own perversions onto the image rather than having their depraved interpreation fulfilled by it in any obvious, immediate way. 

Either reaction says much more about the reactors than it does about their stimulus.     

My very last classmate response blog goes to Shari, who is no doubt about to pass out from the excitement of this great honor.  Since she was the first person in class I talked to, I figured it only appropriate to end this portion of my blog talking about hers.  I only wish there was some virtual way for the two of us to share an international flavored coffee as we celebrate this milestone.  Maybe in Web 3.0? 

I will admit that I’ve been a little conflicted about some of the things we’ve talked about in class.  Well, not conflicted, exactly, but hesitant to embrace Web 2.0 as fully as some others (Garrett) have.  I definitely understand the hugely important role the Internet and other “wired” applications play in everyone’s daily lives.  I also agreed with Garrett’s comment that those who refuse to embrace Web 2.0 will end up looking a lot like those who rejected electricity. 

Yet , something Shari wrote in her latest blog posting reminded me of my conflicted feelings, especially as our discussion grew more political.  Responding to a story about Hillary Clinton not following anyone on Twitter, compared to the 23,000 Barack Obama “follows,” Shari said “he must have a lot of time on his hands.”  In just one line, she managed to sum up my thoughts on Web 2.0 and political campaigns. 

It’s no secret that I’m a Hillary Clinton supporter.  I was either annoyingly precocious or amazingly nerdy as a child.  I was the only first grader with a Mike Dukakis pin stuck to the front of my jacket and four yeras later, during the ‘92 campaign, I begged my dad to take me to a Clinton rally.  I was 10-years-old and too big for piggy backs, but I somehow persuaded him to hoist me on his shoulders so I could better see Bill, Hillary, Al and Mario Cuomo, who reminded me a lot of my grandpa. 

Hillary, however, reminded me a lot of my mom.  When she later lashed out at Republicans who questioned the non-tradiational role she played in her husband’s campaign, I heard my mother talking.  Both were (and are) smart, fearless women with a feminist sensitivity so inate and so true to their character that it could never be confused with any sort of contrived activism.  

Looking back not at the 2004 campaign, but that 1992 campaign, and contrasting it with the one in which we are currently engaged, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve perhaps lost touch with certain sensabilities in our rush to embrace every new gadget, every new service, every better, faster stronger entity Web 2.0 can produce. 

Has the Internet made us so easily amused that we embrace or reject a political candidate based on the entertainment value of their YouTube video? 

Has the ability to share every last detail of our lives with a public we can only assume care made us so selfish we embrace or reject a political candidate becuase they don’t indulge that narcacisstic assumption?  

Has the almost infinite amount of information available to us at any moment we may want it made us so impatient that we simply want a Cliff Notes version of everything, packaged in the most exciting way possible? 

The power of the Dean campaign wasn’t just its online stylings, but the substance behind that online activity.  If we forget the two need to go together, we’re just squandering all the potential it provided. 

In another entry I said more people needed to view the world around them with a Technicolor lens.  That includes the onilne world.  I think Web 2.0 is far too immense an entity to say it’s either good or bad for us, or for politics.  I think it’s quite fine to just declare that it might be both and recognize that our task is an ongoing mission to adapt its use for the better and not for the worse.    

I love the Olive Garden.  I’m not sure why.  It isn’t really all that good.  There’s only one in the immediate area which is always crowded.  It’s also a little pricey for what is basically the Wal Mart of Italian cuisine.  As the product of a very Sicilian family who wouldn’t, as even the decidely non-Sicilian Roseanne Conner once remarked, “pay $12.95 for spaghetti if they had Mr. Chef Boyardee himself in the kitchen,” I should really run screaming from the Olive Garden. 

But no, there I was last Saturday, lunching alone (because the same friends who poke at my bourgie taste in clothes, cars and bottled water refuse to join me at the OG) but for the company of Garrett’s fine book, the thoughtful intellectualism of which lent a certain sophistication to a table that included a plastic basket of never-ending breadsticks. 

I remember our first class, when I finally figured out (I’m slow sometimes) that one of the required books was actually written by Garrett.  If I didn’t already feel unaccomplished, given that he’s just six days shy of being exactly a year older than me (Credit: Facebook) I surely did after some Googling revealed his book was reviewed in The New York Times.  Not just reviewed, but reviewed by the same woman who reviewed Carrie’s book on “Sex and the City!” 

I immeidately wondered if Garrett woke up earlier than he had for Princess Diana’s wedding on the day the review was printed, just like Carrie?  Then I thought two things: That Garrett was 18-days-old on Princess Diana’s wedding day (thanks, Windows calculator!) and that sometimes I am super gay.  Anyway, the reviewer must have also been intrigued by Garrett’s young age, since she declared our Mr. Graff ”astonishingly young.”  To me, though, that sort of proves the book’s point.  

This time in which we live, with the technology available to us, allowed a kid fresh out of college to play an enormously important role in shaping the campaign of a major presidential candidate.  While Dean (likely) had his own Carvilles and Deavers playing important advisory roles, I was struck in the opening pages to learn how close Dean kept his communication staff to his own office.  Then I reflected on how risky it all was, putting one’s presumably long-held dreams in the hands of some kids and a foul-mouthed know-it-all who planned to take those dreams online, then much more a novelty venue than we currently know it to be. 

Web 2.0 has given the astonishingly young a huge amount of responsibility.  Really, it’s given anyone ready to take it a huge amount of responsibility.  Matt Drudge isn’t particuarly young (or particularly worthy of oxygen), but the portion of TFC that addresses his role in breaking the Lewinsky story shows just how easy it is for one person to plunge the nation into a story, for better or worse. 

I don’t think my generation will engage in the sort of endeavors that produce the iconic images of Normandie or Iwo Jima.  Frankly, I hope we won’t be called upon to make the sort of sacrifices our grandparents made.  But it will be our challenge to navigate a wired world increasingly few of their generation are here to see.  We may not produce a Murrow or a Cronkite in a mold our parents knew, but we will produce countless Ted Sorensons and Peggy Noonans, who will make their political views known not from behind the scenes of power, but openly, in a way that demands attention from the powers-that-be in the way the originators of this long-running experiment in representative democracy intended. 

I’ve enjoyed reading PFB’s blog since we all started this little adventure back in January.  Not that I don’t enjoy reading other people’s blogs (I do, really!), but I especially enjoy PFB’s wit - So a big buzz blog going around currently (oh daaaaaamnnnn, did you feel that alliteration? Awwww yeah) - and his ability to get a whole post out of topics such as Ballston -In a year, I’ve seen a lot from my 6th-floor window and my conclusion is that Ballston is weird.  I was not surprised to find a recent post equally enjoyable (and relateable).  In it, PFB talks about how the Pope was in town (I hope I don’t have to link to this) and how even though he’s not the best Catholic, he still would have liked to have seen him ride by.

The post reminded me of a recent conversation I had with my friend, also not the best or most practicing of Catholics.  My mom told me that I should go see the Pope.  I explained that it was pretty hard to actually see the Pope, unless you stood in the street and caught a drive-by, and she seemed concerned I hadn’t put more effort into chasing him down.  It was a little surprising, considering she’s more liberal than I am (and I pretty much called the POTUS a draft-dodging cokemonkey in an earlier post) and wasn’t particularly pleased in Benedict’s succession because she thought it would delay the Church’s much-needed modernizing. 

Anyway, considering my friend was technically Catholic and was super excited to partake of the bizarre spectacles known that are Congressional Baseball games when I worked for the House, I thought that an equally bizarre chance to see an 80-year-old man in a big hat and red possibly-Prada loafers drive down the street in a modified Mercedes-Benz ML 350 would provide ample motivation for his accompaniment. 

Yet, he had no interest in seeing the Pope, who he said was a propagator of dangerous ideas (using less elegant language…this isn’t “Dawson’s Creek”).  I pointed out that despite the Church’s completely misguided positions on condoms in HIV-ravaged Africa and gay-marriage, and its complete bungling of the U.S. sexual abuse scandal, the Church still stood against the Iraq war, capital punishment  and was a general source of spiritual and material comfort for 1/6th of the World’s entire population.  His response was that while Hitler had some good ideas (Volkswagen, the Autobahn), he wouldn’t go to see him, either. 

Seeing the world in black-and-white is the hobby of people like Dick Cheney, people who decide an entire segment of the World’s population hates America “for its freedoms” and from there refuse to take into account any other thoughts or ideas that might lead to a more intelligent, appropriate and developed response to that population.   I personally think George W. Bush is dumber than a box of rocks and is quite possibly the worst president in American history, but I still shudder when someone compares the draft-dodging cokemonkey (there, I said it) to Hitler, and I likewise shudder when I hear someone compare the Pope to a madman who slaughtered six-million people. 

It is perfectly fine to disagree with some, most or all of a person’s positions.  It’s also perfectly fine to just plain dislike someone.  But in an information age such as this, it’s sort of dim to just dismiss someone with whom you disagree, someone who is likely, like all men, a mere combination of good and evil as just rotten.  

While my friend’s Hilter statement was mostly in jest, it still made me think.  First, about how great an idea Volkswagen really was (seriously, only Hitler could approve of charging $30,000 for a car with “leatherette” seats), but also about why in a world where modern technology makes so much information available to so many more people than at any other time in World history, we all, at some point, still come to black-and-white decisions about people or places or events that so beg to be seen through a Technicolor lens that’s now available to anyone who just cares to look through it.