THE HUCKSTERS! THE HUCKSTERS! Here's how hooked on MAD MEN I am. On the last episode, Roger makes a cryptic remark about the agency going to work for Dr. Lyle Evans. No one on the show ... and none of the millions of viewers who seem to have googled "Dr. Lyle Evans" seem to get the reference. But the reference is to the maniacal soap company executive played by Sydney Greenstreet in the movie THE HUCKSTERS ... which is about an ad agency. I don't think the guy's name is exactly Dr. Evans, but it's close, and I'm pretty sure that's the reference. Do I get a cigar? A glass of Scotch? A melon?
Marian accompanied me to the militia's Tax Blast two Saturdays ago. A militia guy was teaching everyone to make fires using two sticks. That was pretty hard, but Marian managed to get some smoke signals going using a flint and a piece of steel. Next, he's going to join up....
A few weeks ago, after nine members of the Hutaree militia were arrested in and around Ann Arbor, an editor at The Times asked me to follow up my series on the election by writing an op-ed piece about militia activities in Michigan. He wanted to know if the average person living in the state had any contact with the militia. Coincidentally, just a few days earlier my son Noah, who was home from college, informed me that he'd gone to school with the son of a couple that belonged not only to the militia, but to the Hutaree. I worked frantically to research and write an essay for The Times; as usual, they chopped it up and cut it by 2/3. But I was happy to see it finally run in the April 19th edition of the paper, on the same page as an essay by Bill Clinton about his memories of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Here's a link to the op-ed piece:
The Extremists Next Door
And here's the original essay, as I wrote it, followed by the photos Marian took of that militia event we attended:
The flags flapping above the picnic area warned “Liberty or Death” and “Do Not Tread on Me,” while the man behind the registration table sold bull’s eyes and IRS 1040 forms to be used as targets for the adult and youth shooting contests later in the day. But most of the action at last Saturday’s “Militia Field Day aka Tax Blast: Open Carry Family Picnic & Tea Party,” held at Island Lake Recreation Area in Brighton, Michigan, consisted of militia members and their families chowing down on pulled pork and kielbasa. One militia man squatted beneath a tree, giving lessons on how to start a fire using two sticks. Another played “Dixie” on his harmonica. A tiny girl in pink clutched a stuffed dinosaur with one hand and her father with the other; like most of the militia members, he wore army boots, fatigues, and a big black pistol on his hip.
Tax Blast is an annual event. But this year, the emphasis seemed less on riddling 1040 forms with bullets than demonstrating that the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia is in no way affiliated with the Hutarees, an apocalyptic Christian branch of the militia, nine of whose members recently were arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate police officers and kill any nonmilitia members who stumbled upon their reconnaissance operations in the woods.
Living in Ann Arbor, I don’t usually feel threatened by the militias. Most members are just indulging their fantasies of being warriors without having to sign up for the army and go to Afghanistan or Iraq. They want to be heroes and save their neighbors from disaster. Many of the guys in the yuppie southeast Michigan branch of the militia consider themselves to be socially progressive libertarians and welcome anyone, Jewish, black, or Muslim, who declares him or herself willing to defend Michigan from invasion, whether by the federal government or foreign terrorists. (The lid on one chafing dish at the picnic read “Kosher Meals Available,” while another dish proclaimed its contents to be suitable for vegans and vegetarians. The kosher dish stood empty until an exceedingly large armed man wearing a black T-shirt that read “When I Snap You’ll Be the First To Go” filled the tinfoil tray with Hebrew National hot dogs.) I even understand some militia members’ fears: I don’t like wiretaps or surveillance cameras, and, during the Bush administration, I often found myself frightened of my own government.
But I am chilled to think of thousands of armed militia members from all over the country marching on Washington, D.C., and Virginia this coming Monday to “celebrate” the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and “restore the Constitution.” “PATRIOTS WILL ASSEMBLE IN VIRGINIA AND MARCH ON WASHINGTON ON APRIL 19. THIS WILL BE AN ‘OPEN CARRY’ MARCH. BRING YOUR GUNS. PATRIOTS WILL TAKE BACK AMERICA FROM THE OBAMA OCCUPATIONAL GOVERNMENT,” reads a post to a Rush Limbaugh fan site on Google. “Civil war starts April 19, 2010? Nervous nation waits for armed march on Washington, DC (bang)” proclaims the website of a group called New World Order Fighters.
Many of the militia members at the Tax Blast told me they can’t take time off from their jobs to travel to Washington for the protest. But a rifle team leader named Solo, an IT specialist who lives in Troy, plans on attending. He worries that President Obama is going to make an end run around the Second Amendment by requiring every bullet in America to be inscribed with a traceable serial number, or by pricing ammo out of the reach of the common citizen, or by allowing Hillary Clinton to negotiate an international treaty that bides us to the same anti-gun laws that European nations must obey. “I want to let people on the east and west coasts know that people in the middle of the country want to keep their guns,” Solo told me. The timing of the event – April 19 – doesn’t bother him; what bothers him is that “that asshole” Timothy McVeigh “ruined a perfectly good holiday.”
Solo and most of the other militia members who intend to march on Washington aren’t planning on killing anyone. But I can’t help but wonder how can we distinguish those who are from those who aren’t? If I come upon a group of people dressed in fatigues, toting weapons, and ranting about the New World Order, how I am supposed to tell whether they belong to a slightly paranoid libertarian division of the militia, or a violently delusional, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic branch?
A few months before the Hutarees were arrested, the supervisor of a town not far from Ann Arbor called upon two brigades of the Michigan Militia, including the Hutarees, to help find two missing residents. When this story came to light, my son saw a photo of one of the Hutarees and said, “Hey, I know her.” As it turned out, the woman’s stepson was my son’s high school classmate, and my son, who considers himself a socialist, sometimes engaged the boy in friendly discussions of their opposing political beliefs. The boy’s stepmother and father live in Manchester, a town I visit to browse for antiques, attend the chicken broil, and enjoy ice cream at the Dairy Queen beside the river, although the woman apparently joined the Hutarees after meeting several members at a Ron Paul rally right here in Ann Arbor.
My son also knows the militia member who coordinated the search, having interviewed the man for an article he wrote for his school newspaper describing an event at which several hundred 9/11 Truthers gathered at the University of Michigan to publicize their theory that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job. I admire my son for engaging people so unlike himself in political discussions. But I hate to think of him getting in an argument with a rightwing extremist who is packing a weapon and believes that socialists are destroying our country and, as I heard on a podcast describing the reasons for the upcoming march, “the only way we can stop them is to make them stop.”
Any group that sees a reason to “celebrate” the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing terrifies me. I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building. Although McVeigh wasn’t a member of the Michigan Militia, he did attend one of their meetings and practiced building bombs at a farm 120 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. At the time, Mark Koernke, aka “Mark from Michigan, the Voice of the Militia,” worked as a janitor at the U of M, where I teach, and in his off hours hosted a vitriolic radio show, which he used as a forum to support McVeigh’s incendiary views. The radio show was broadcast from Koernke’s hometown of Dexter, a quaint village a few miles up the river from Ann Arbor, where my then-husband and I would take our son to buy cider and homemade donuts.
After the carnage in Oklahoma City and President Clinton’s exit from the White House, much of the militia activity in Michigan subsided. Koernke got sent to jail for fleeing the scene of a robbery he didn’t commit and resisting the efforts of police to question him. But the crazies still were out there. One afternoon in 2003, I was reading a book about a virulently racist and anti-Semitic hate group called the Christian Identity movement when I received a call from Zingerman’s Deli asking me to come downtown to finalize plans for my son’s bar mitzvah. I got in my car and, a few blocks from the restaurant, noticed Christian Identity bumper stickers on the truck in front of me.
Then came the 2008 presidential campaign and the near collapse of the American economy, and the militias regained support, not only in towns to the north and west, but in the southeast corner of the state, around Ann Arbor and Detroit. The SMVM was quick to distance itself from the Hutarees; their spokesperson even hinted to me at the Tax Blast that he and his guys had a hand in alerting the FBI to the Hutarees’ agenda. But the anger and paranoia that fueled the resurgence of the militias didn’t evaporate overnight because a few extremists were arrested. Not long after the FBI took the Hutarees into custody, I tuned my laptop to the Intelligence Report, once again being broadcast from Dexter by Mark Koernke, who had served his sentence and was treating his listeners to the ominous click of a bullet being loaded in the chamber of a gun and warnings about his perimeter being secured and the first nine people who breached that perimeter being doomed.
Libertarian militia members might welcome nonChristian members, but when I read on the Hutarees’ website that they were prepared to use the sword “to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t,” I wonder what they intended to “save” me and my Jewish and Muslim neighbors from. So, despite my desire to preserve the liberties granted by our Constitution, I can’t help but be grateful that the federal government does have the power to keep surveillance on extremists of all kinds and seems able to figure out which few members of which few militias are serious about wanting to assassinate police officers or shoot people like me who might wander into the woods while they are training for Armageddon.
This is the only known photo of my family's hotel, other than the photo of the dining room I uploaded to this blog last year. Amazing that in all the years we owned Pollack's, no one thought to take a picture. Then again, everyone was too busy working there!
Both photos, the main entrance and the dining room, came to me courtesy of Jeff Brown, who, in his youth, worked at Pollack's as a waiter.
Recently, I was pleased to learn that IN THE MOUTH was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, and last week I found out that the collection was awarded a silver medal in Foreword Magazine's Best Books of 2008 contest.
I hope you will pardon my immodesty, but I am going to post the text of the speech given by Mark Shechner, one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which I won this year for IN THE MOUTH. I read this whenever I get too depressed to sit down at the computer and write.
Presentation of Wallant Award for Eileen Pollack for In the Mouth.
In the sort of work that Thane and Vicki and I do in making these decisions on behalf of the Wallant Committee, there are no rules of reading and judgment. Yes, of course, the purpose of the prize is to promote the work and the name of a Jewish writer whose writing is either just getting underway or, for one reason or another, underappreciated. They haven’t achieved the national acclaim that in our estimation their writing deserves. So, the uncovery of the unknown or underappreciated is of course a ground rule. Apart from that, we have no guiding instructions, no shared principles, no dominant aesthetics, no imperatives of subject matter or cultural orientation. We don’t bring any fancy equipment or theories to our work. ... we apply the only test we permit ourselves: the reader’s test, which any of you might apply as well in our place. The book we are looking for is one that says to us: “Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” I suppose then that reading is not much different from falling in love or buying a car.
We settled by easy consent on Eileen Pollack’s collection of stories, In the Mouth. In it, Eileen Pollack has managed to take the lives of retired Jews and reveal the strangeness and desperation of aging. Yes, she writes of other things too, but the stories of aging Jewish men, usually dentists, leave indelible marks, like ornate tattoos, in the reader’s mind. She presents us, for example, with Milton Rothstein, a retired dentist dying of AIDS that he picked up from a Latina woman who had been at one time a hooker. Another Jewish man kills himself years after taking the life of a Chinese worker whom he had gotten pregnant in his work place. Both of these stories are set in Boca Raton, that mellifluous Spanish name for “Rat’s Mouth,” but which one of Pollack’s characters calls “Boca Loca.” And with good reason. Boca was never more loca than in Eileen Pollack’s stories.
In other stories, we discover Siamese twins who share a 3-chambered heart. We have a mother whose milk won’t come for her own baby but will come for the baby of another woman. (Is this the ultimate milchige story?) We have an old Jewish man who turns out to have lied about his past all his life and now wants his son to arrange a bris for him so that he can be buried in an orthodox graveyard next to his wife. (So, a fleishige story next.) Such situations reflect Milt Rothstein’s late life bitter observation: “I never read a single true word about getting old. Not in any book. Not in any newspaper. The truth about getting old is that every single person you’ve ever loved dies. And you’re not supposed to care. It’s the natural order of things. Well, let me tell you. When every person you’ve ever loved dies, you feel like dying with them.” Pollack’s characters are tormented by age and its losses and its strange turns. And along with those who are younger, they are tormented by sex: the sex they get, the sex they don’t get, the sex they no longer get, and the sex that kills them or drives them to kill. The body ages, but eros never dies.
However, Eileen Pollack doesn’t give us sociology-as-fiction, though there is plenty of that to be found. She gives us the world she knows – the world of aging Jews, and her Boca Loca is an imaginary condo with real Jews in it. So it is no surprise to find her blurbed at the back of the book by such a writer as Lorrie Moore, since Moore is one of the writers she reminds me of. But the writer she calls most to mind is Bernard Malamud, and I remember thinking to myself as I read “Bris,” “This is Malamud reborn. A true transmigration of souls, the soul of one leaping mystically into the body of the other, almost like the birth of a Dalai Lama. The voice is his, the rueful human predicaments are his, the tragic-absurd universe is his, the Catskill Kafka is his, the intimations of mortality are his, the gall bladder attacks of reality are his, as is the incurable heartburn of love, the fusion of the gemutlich and the meshugah is his, the ordinary world transfigured into something tabloid-strange is his, Pollack’s way of turning the plain borscht of experience into the Manischewitz Kosher Wine of art recalls him. The distant God who presides like a cosmic Sid Caesar over the great comedy special of piety and pratfall recalls him. Certainly the story “Bris” could be bootlegged into the next Malamud anthology and nobody – nobody but us – would know the difference.
And I find myself smitten by the voice: the intentionally style-less style. The utterly confident plain speech whose metaphors are so casually a part of the voice that they never have to announce themselves. A wholly self-assured writer, Eileen Pollack lets the situation do the work: she is a situation writer rather than either an action writer or a “slow-down-for-the-glorious-texture-of-life” writer. She can do the latter: there are plenty of fully-realized tableaux in the stories, and I particularly admire the way she handles the banter between old Jewish men. There is no corresponding banter among her women, and a woman has to join the company of men, as on a golf course, to enter into the charmed circle of joking, chiding, nudging, and kvetching. But Pollack doesn’t ply us with portentous descriptions that topple over into deep symbols. She simply writes with the human situation always in front of her and lets the human surprises do the work of astonishing us. Her motto could be the motto of Raymond Carver: no tricks. She has an easy way with the English vernacular, and I suspect that the pulse of her prose may owe everything to a childhood in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, where she was born, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist
.
Though she is a younger writer, Eileen Pollack is saturated in that world of older Jews, the generations of her parents and grandparents and, one senses, generations before. She presents us with something of an old world vision, a world conceived years and years ago in Yiddish and carried out in English In her writing one hears tales of love and duty and trouble and deep intimacy, of domesticity achieved and domesticity squandered. One hears generations of keening, grumpy, joking, lamenting Jews, the criers and the kibitzers, as the late, wonderful writer Stanley Elkin called them. Little wonder that In the Mouth spoke to the judges right away, saying ““Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” And we didn’t.
On behalf of Thane Rosenbaum and Victoria Aarons.
Mark Shechner
Marian took me to the auto show in Detroit, just as the show was closing, and as we wandered the gigantic convention floor full of gleaming sports cars, adorable electric putt-putts, and trucks whose tires stood taller than my head, I couldn't help but wonder why Americans are so angry at our state's autoworkers and the companies for which they work, or used to work, when they still had jobs.
Marian had warned me that this year's show wouldn't be as glitzy or impressive as auto shows used to be. But I have lived in Michigan for fifteen years, and I felt ashamed that I had never gotten around to attending one. I didn't mind that the crowds milling about the arena consisted not of sleek celebrities but overweight Michiganders attempting to squeeze in bucket seats too small to accommodate their bulk while their kids disappeared into Hummers, which, surprisingly, still took up a colossal expanse on the convention floor. And I enjoyed comparing the mpgs of the domestic hybrids I might buy when my trusty Corolla finally dies.
But I found myself disappointed that the auto show didn't provide a glimpse of cars that someday might run on sun or wind or water … and still be inexpensive enough to afford. As I laughed at my slightly unrealistic expectations, I realized many people’s impatience with the auto industry no doubt stems from similarly unrealistic expectations as to what technology might provide.
Of course, innovations simply may need more time to become reality than we first expect. Last week, as I talked to my brother via Skype, we reminisced about the last time we had communicated by videophone—at the 1964 World's Fair. But even if GM is working on a car that will run on air and simply didn't want to tip its hand to Ford (or vice versa), the problem is less that the auto companies haven't been innovative enough than that the rest of us have failed to change the way we think about getting from place to place.
Electric cars might free us from our dependence on foreign oil, but they require that we produce electricity using coal-fired plants, which, in their present state, are terrible for our environment, or nuclear energy, whose deadly waste we haven't yet figured out how to store. Not to mention that we would blow the fuse on our nation's grid every afternoon at 5 when millions of commuters pulled in their garages and plugged in their batteries.
A few weeks ago, Marian took me to see Grand Torino, a movie I never would have appreciated before I moved here. I would have dismissed a retired Polish autoworker like Walt Kowalski as an uneducated bigot who had worked with his body all his life because he was too thickheaded to get a better education and whose only method for solving problems was to curse people, beat them up, or shoot them.
But the neighborhood Marian grew up in isn’t far from the street where Walt Kowalski lives, and his father could have played the part. True, his father worked for the auto industry as an architect rather than on the line. But he abides by much the same code as Walt. At 86, he only recently gave up playing hockey. Like Walt, he’s obsessive about the appearance of his house and lawn; he used to mow his grass religiously … with a scythe. And given what I know about his resistance against the Nazis and Communists before he and Marian's mother walked out of Poland, even if he muttered beneath his breath about his neighbor's religion or ethnicity, he would probably risk his life to help the guy.
Before I moved to the Midwest, I wouldn't have understood an autoworker’s pride in the cars he made or why he might have wanted to toss a rock at the Corolla I was driving. I grew up in New York and couldn't have found Michigan on a map. My uncle owned a Pontiac dealership in Queens, and, like a teenager who still believes the stork brings babies, I assumed that automobiles came from Long Island.
I also was brought up to think that anyone with ambition or smarts would acquire an education so he or she could sit behind a desk rather than stand on an assembly line. What kind of parent would discourage his kids from attending college on the grounds that if a factory job was good enough for him, it was good enough for them?
Such an ethos seemed nonsensical until I met people who believed they deserved respect for being tough enough to withstand a grueling day of labor and whose joy in life derived from spending time with their families or sipping beer and barbecuing sausages with their friends in their well-maintained back yards. Why spend all those years in college learning things you might never use if you could earn a better wage making cars?
Bad enough that people who like to buy nicely packaged steaks and boneless, skinless chicken don't want to know who slaughtered those cows or skinned those chickens. How can consumers denounce the workers who manufacture the products they want or need for demanding to be paid not only a subsistence wage, but enough to be able to afford a decent house and medical care?
Easterners tend to think they know the Midwest better than Midwesterners know it. I once sent a novel to an editor in New York and was amazed when she circled a passage in which the characters huddled in their basement to avoid a tornado, as my son and I used to huddle in our basement when the sirens blared. "THERE ARE NO TORNADOES IN THE MIDWEST!" the editor scrawled in red.
I find it difficult to sit still while people back east quote erroneous statistics about how much auto workers supposedly make per hour or Southern politicians brag about how they don't need to ask for handouts because their factories produce automobiles more cheaply than ours, as if one reason for that disparity weren’t that Southern factories get their electricity at a cheaper rate because it derives from government-financed TVA projects.
Anyone who lives here knows there's plenty of blame to go around. When Marian and I drove to Chicago a few weeks ago, we left his Explorer home because my Toyota gets so much better mileage. When we hit a pothole and got a flat, we changed the tire much more easily than the owners of the American-built SUVs that hit that same pothole because their spares were located underneath their vehicles and had rusted in place.
But before you hold autoworkers responsible for the unavailability of a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon without contributing to global warming, before you fault them for thinking that Americans might still take pride in working with their bodies, before you deny them government support to enable them to train for jobs in an economy yet to come, maybe you ought to slip behind the steering wheel of their lives, take a test drive
And another nice piece of news... In the Mouth has just been selected as a finalist for the Sophy Brodie Medal, awarded by the American Library Association to an author whose work represents "the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature for adults" that year. The winner will be announced in another few weeks. In the meantime, here's a link to the website:
I'm very happy to announce that IN THE MOUTH has just been selected to receive the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for a significant contribution to Jewish literature. I'm especially proud to join a list of winners that includes some of the writers I most respect--Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, and Steve Stern among them. The award ceremony will take place on Monday, April 13, 2009, at the University of Hartford's Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, which administers the award. The website hasn't yet been updated (last year's winner was my Iowa classmate, Ehud Havazelet), but here's the link:
Here's a photo of the dining room at my family's hotel, sent to me by Jeff Brown, who used to work as a waiter at Pollack's (he now sells real estate in southern Florida). You can just hear Elvis on the record player that Jeff and his brother played while clearing away the remains of breakfast and setting up for lunch. (Additional facts that might interest a few former Pollack's guests and employees: Gary Norkin was the headwaiter; Jeff Brown and his brother went on to form a rock band and perform at the Pines and Eldorado, as well as the semi-famous Battle of the Bands that took place in Ellenville, NY, in 1967.) Despite owning this hotel from 1918 to 1969, my family has virtually no photos of the place, so if anyone else does, I'd love if you could send them!
Dear Barry,
I know, your name is Barack. It's just a bad habit. I love the name Barack! And I didn't need Sarah S. to remind me that it means lightning in Hebrew. (That slut. She thought she was so hilarious with that "funny" proposition she tossed off at the water cooler—I hate that fakey little-girl "innocence" she puts on—all about how you and her could schlep off to Hawaii and you could teach her your favorite pastime, body surfing, and she could teach you her favorite pastime, shtupping.) As if I need Ms. I'm-So-Hip-Even-Though-I'm-Jewish to explain the meaning of your name. Excuse me, I was just as smart as she was in Hebrew School, even if I wasn't the class clown, or should I say, trying very hard to be the class clown. I didn't need Sarah to explain why, when you and I got introduced, that name of yours zapped me with an electric thrill and I knew that even though on the outside we don't look much alike, inside we have so much in common. I just got in the habit of calling you "Barry" in case my officemate, Shira, glanced over and caught me writing you another message, back in the old days, when she and the other girls were backing Hillary and would have called me a traitor for preferring that a man (even a black man!) get promoted over our heads (again).
Now they understand why I loaned you so much money, even though you earn way more than I do, or why I devoted so much time and passion to a married man who will never leave his wife. If anything, my girlfriends were jealous that I was the one you were sending five, six, sometimes seven (!) messages in a day. (Ha! Take that, Joanie! Now do you still think he "just wasn't that into me"?) It killed them that I was the one getting a constant stream of email saying how grateful you were that I'd been there for you from the start and in just a few more dollars (I think you meant "days," Barry!) you could make me an honest woman and set me up, if not in the fancy mansion that goes with your new job, then a little house of my own, without that mortgage guy from the bank breathing down my neck, and you could list me as a dependent on that gold-Cadillac-plated insurance of yours, and throw me a few extra bucks a month so I could pick out something classier than the usual TJ Maxx and I won't need to feel like a complete loser when that JAP Sarah prances in to the next goodbye party at the office and starts batting her fake eyelashes (oh please, don't tell me you thought those things were real?) and stands on the tippy-tippy toes of those eight-hundred-dollar Manolos and whispers her dirty little nothings (and I do mean nothing!) into your adorably too-big ears (we should only be saying goodbye to her!).
Admit it, I've been patient. Haven't I been content to sleep with that T-shirt you sent, the one with your picture on the front, instead of with you? I don't mean to sound all weird or stalky, but there were times when I googled you every few days (okay, every few minutes) to make sure you were still ahead in the office betting pool, and you were taking care of your health, and you hadn't gone back to smoking, and you were eating enough (but not too much … you promised at the Fourth of July picnic that you wouldn't give in to the pressure to scarf down donuts and pork rinds and too much beer to please our redneck clients out there in the boonies). For a while, I even took to checking your grandma's health a few times a day, and I sent you and Toot my very best vibes (sorry, Jews don't do prayers, but vibes are the next best thing!) when the poor, sweet lady was on her deathbed. (I never met her, of course, but I loved her the way I loved my own Nana, whom my family and I used to visit every Christmas and Pesach in Miami, to which my parents chose not to retire when their own time came, although the reason was not, as a certain bigoted liar we both know would lead you to believe, because they thought there were too many black people and Latinos down there.)
Nor, as you may have noticed, have I outed you to your wife. I know you could never leave Michelle, let alone those two outrageously precious girls (whose hair I could totally take care of, if it ever did come to that, since it's so much like my own hair, only the teensiest bit curlier). I could never hurt Michelle! She's cute as a button! And so smart! And she dances so much better than I do! I mean, if I could imagine Michelle getting into threesomes, I would have suggested it long ago. Although if Michelle were that type (which I'm not saying I am, unless you say you are first), you wouldn't have married her, now would you.
Although let's face it, if your marriage were everything it's cracked up to be, why would you have sent me all those messages? I know you act all straight-arrow, but maybe, when you visited all those swing states "on business," you did some swinging on the side?
Which reminds me, boyfriend, you better 'fess up about that jones you have for Rachel! Don't you deny it! I heard it from Keith, who heard it from Chris, who heard it from the jones herself. That's okay. I'm jonesed out on Rachel, too. Not that I'm, well, you know. Although I would be fine with it if I were. It's more, like, she's so liberal! And so Jewish! Just like me! If Rachel were into threesomes (or foursomes, or anysomes!) I would be so right there in the sheets jonesing with however many of you were in there!
: )
Maybe I shouldn't say this, seeing as you might someday be part of my family (I love Michelle, but someone that cute and smart might get snatched up by some guy with better moves than you!), but I got in this really nasty argument with my sister the other day about whether a Jewish girl like me could ever really find happiness with a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan goy, even if he does have a law degree from Harvard. Not only did I convince her I was right, you so won over my parents on that last visit you made to Boca. They couldn't stop talking about how polite you are, how intelligent, how well- spoken (not that they don't expect black people to be polite! or intelligent! or well-spoken!), how much they love your smile (not that they think black people have brighter smiles than white people!), and how much they love that suit you had on (my dad says he can get that label for you wholesale, from his brother, you shouldn't drop a bundle at Neiman Marcus or Armani like that other Sarah, the one who went on a spree with the company plastic, which just goes to prove you cannot trust anyone with that name). Not only that, you totally blew Dad away with that dirty joke in Yiddish! You were such a hit, kidding with them about how they should tell their friends at the club to please vote for the shvartzeh, my mom said to make sure you knew that in our family, we never, ever used that word, and you shouldn't use it about yourself, the word you should use is mensch, although if my sister blabs about what's been going on between us, my mom most definitely will take that back.
So, I know you know how much you owe me. Despite what some people in this office think, you're not the type to forget everything I did for you just because you finally got what you wanted. You're not the type to refuse to buy the cow because you can keep milking it for free. When I show up at your big inaugural bash and sashay past those Secret Service guys and tap Michelle on the back and demand the one dance that will have to substitute for the wedding waltz you and I will never have (sob!), I'm sure you won't deny me.
No, the real reason I'm writing is because I'm afraid that once you get that damn promotion and you're even busier than you are today, when you're off flying here and there, getting our company back on track and rebuilding our good relationships with all the important clients who dropped us because the last guy was such a dolt, or you're working late, going through the books (which I happen to know are a mess, not to mention they don't show the ridiculous amount your predecessors spent on their fancy-schmancy lunches while the rest of us got by bringing bagels and yogurt from home), well, you certainly won't have time to be sending me so much mail. And even though I'll have that nice new house to live in, and that fancy insurance, and those extra dollars in my pocket, life will be a whole lot less exciting than it's been for these past two wonderful years, when it's only been you and me.
The company won't be so dysfunctional. My job will get back to normal. Instead of worrying about what's going on with the NASDAQ, or Putin and Saakashvili, or the nukes in Iran, the surge in Iraq, or the torture at Guantanamo, instead of worrying about education reform, infrastructure repair, renewable energy, global warming, or the appropriate tax bracket for guys like that unlicensed plumber we call in when certain people whose initials are SS insist on flushing their tampons down the toilet (I forget the guy's name … big bald dude who keeps asking what it is about black guys that makes white chicks get hot and bothered, seeing as he happens to know, from his line of work, that the myth about black guys being supercircumcised isn't true), I'm going to be reduced to worrying about this mole on my upper lip, or playing computer solitaire, or googling the guy I dated for a few months back in '03, when I was working in the Atlanta office, or trying to decide if that chicken parm dinner I bought at Trader Joe's a few weeks ago is still okay to eat, or—despite my vows not to—logging on to J-date yet again to see if anyone with a college degree and uncrossed eyes and something resembling a chin has posted his profile since the last time I logged in and checked.
When John Kerry lost in 2004, people left up their signs to signal that they were angry. They hadn't voted for Bush and Cheney. They wouldn't be responsible for whatever disaster happened next.
This time, people kept Obama their signs on their lawns as a symbol of their joy. They wanted to show the world that they had been a part of a historic moment. As in: Our guy finally won.
And now, as the cold, gray Michigan winter descends upon us and everyone braces for the shock of General Motors going bankrupt, we're keeping out our signs as a sort of a plea or prayer. Obama, don't forget us. We're out here in the dark. Please visit us, come down our chimneys, and bring us what we need.
I seem to recall that Condi Rice occasionally used to slip and call George W. "my husband." That's one slip that Hillary will never make. Even though I supported Obama in the primaries and was furious at the Clintons for hinting that Hillary should stay in the race because who knew, Obama might get assassinated, I've never doubted her competence and I think she will make a terrific Secretary of State. Everyone keeps talking about whether Hillary will be able to suck up her pride and subordinate herself to her boss. But who wants a Secretary of State who's so chummy with her president that she swoons in his presence and dreams about becoming his wife? Obama has repeatedly said that he doesn't want to be surrounded by yes-men, so why should he surround himself by yes-women? Even if Hillary went rogue and ran around the world following her own agenda, how bad could that be? She knows the three members of the North America Trade Agreement, she doesn't think that Africa is a country. What's she going to do that her boss doesn't approve of, make peace in the Middle East?
I also think that the only reason Hillary was so hawkish in the Senate, voting to invade Iraq, was that she assumed a woman could never get elected president unless she proved that she was tough enough to take this country to war, an assumption that probably is still correct. She exaggerated her heroism under fire at that airport in Bosnia because she needed to appear brave enough to be commander in chief. My friend Marian complains that she's an awful manager, which she probably is (witness the campaign she ran). But I know people who have worked on her staff who love her. And running an office in the cabinet has to be easier than running a fifty-state campaign. She's vibrant, tireless, brilliant, well versed in foreign policy ... what more could we want in a Secretary of State?
And for once, I don't mind that Bill comes as part of her baggage. He knows a thing or two about foreign policy. He has political connections with every head of state in the universe. The man has been raising money not only for himself but to combat AIDS. What's the worst that could happen? Would we really complain if Bill were to use his influence to help Hillary gain access to some prime minister, king, or ruthless dictator and promise to screw him (or her) over if he doesn't do what Hillary wants him (or her) to do?
And I love the idea of Larry Summers heading up the White House team of economic advisors for the next year or two, giving everyone the benefit of his brilliance behind the scenes without risking the possibility that he'll say something Larryesque (by which I mean trying to see all sides in a debate without considering the moral or political implications of even mentioning certain sides of the debate out loud). Then, two years from now, he can take over the Fed and use that same brilliance
(again, behind the scenes) to run the nation's economy ... if all goes well, forever.
Over the weekend, my nephew forwarded me an email that listed several lesser-known facts about Obama, one of which is that his favorite TV show is The Wire. I couldn't have been happier, because any president whose favorite show is The Wire has to be planning to do something drastic to improve the lives of young people in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. My bet is that Obama chooses Colin Powell to head the Department of Education, and that Powell will love the job and advocate approaches that no one has tried before. Wire fans, doesn't Colin Powell remind you of Bunny? Can you imagine how much better the schools in Baltimore and Detroit--and everywhere else--would be if Bunny were in charge?
Finally, I suggest that Obama continue his attempts at reconciliation with his former enemies by appointing Sarah Palin as his administration's Bounty Hunter in Chief. After providing her with the weapons of her choice and a full wardrobe of the most up-to-date, James Bondish camouflage outfits and gear on the market, President Obama should send her on a mission to seek out and destroy a real terrorist ... Osama bin Laden. Just think of Osama as a moose, Sarah. Or a wolf. Or a turkey. And do whatever it takes to bag your game. A grateful nation will await your return. But here's the part we're not quite sure you can handle. First, you will need to be able to find Afghanistan on a map.
Here are some photos that Marian took on election night at Lola's restaurant in Detroit, along with some photos the other customers took of us. Marian is the guy in the white shirt and black leather blazer. Gerald is the handsome dude in the white apron ... he's the headwaiter and host at Lola's. The man in the blue and white striped shirt is the person I quote in my op-ed piece for The Times as saying that Obama's election made him want to have a child because he finally believed that it was possible for an African American to grow up and lead not just a black American life, but a normal American life. His father is George, also known as the man in the porkpie hat, whom I quote as saying that Obama's election might give Detroit the psychological uplift it needs. (George ought to know. In addition to running a string of art galleries in Detroit, Chicago and NYC, he holds a PhD in psychology from U of M.) That's his family you'll see in one of the photos. And the guy in the Obama/MLK/Mandela/Malcolm t-shirt is Reggie, who was our waiter on election night. Anyone I haven't identified is someone whose name we didn't get, caught up as we were in the spirit of the celebration.
For months before the election, I kept experiencing these Larry David moments in which I would catch myself angling my Obama button so my fellow (black) passengers on the bus could see it, or hoping that a deliveryman or one of my African-American neighbors would notice the Obama sign in my window and flash me a thumbs-up sign (and maybe notice that the sign had been up so long the ink was faded), or restraining myself from high-fiving every black person I passed on the street and saying, "Isn't he terrific?" When Marian and I parked his Explorer in Detroit on election night, I couldn't help but joke that the Obama sticker on the bumper might protect it from the sort of vandalism that white suburbanites tend to fear when they leave their cars in Motown (the irony being that someone punched out a taillight on the Explorer right here in Ann Arbor, for no reason we could guess except that same Obama sticker).
Now, post-election, I find myself smiling at every black person I see, every black person in every elevator I get into, all my black students. Whether this makes them feel loved I can't quite say. My guess is they find my behavior a bit wearing and condescending. On the other hand, if you're a black person in America, especially a black man, having white people smile at you as they pass you on the street or get into the elevator with you has to be a pretty nice change of pace.
***
I'm thrilled to find out that fewer people in America than I thought are bigoted, or that more people than I predicted were able to overcome their bigotry long enough to vote for a black man. The first time I thought Obama might actually win this election was when I read George Packard's article in The New Yorker about how the campaign was going in rural Ohio and ran across a quote from a man who said that he was "voting for the nigger." Suddenly, I realized that a person could be a bigot and still vote for a black man. Of course! Hadn't I grown up hearing my father's patients say that they preferred going to "the Jew dentist" because he was a nice man and didn't hurt them when he filled their cavities? Many people still seem to require that their president be a practicing Christian, but I'm now convinced that a Jew could win a plurality of the vote.
And I'm ready to admit that some portion of the population who voted for McCain and Palin did so not because they couldn't bring themselves to vote for a black man but because they sincerely believe in Republican economic policies or sincerely oppose abortion or truly consider Obama too inexperienced to lead the land or serve as commander in chief.
That said, what about the other 15 or 20 percent of the population that would never vote for a black person or a Jew?
I can't forget Sarah Palin's rallies, the videos on YouTube of all those people whose faces were so distorted by hate. Apparently, even her own Secret Service guards, many of whom were black, were frightened for their safety. Never mind Palin's super-expensive red leather jacket from Neiman Marcus, I was more concerned that her garment of choice might soon become a well-tailored brown silk shirt, which her followers would then adopt.
Does anyone really think all those angry white men (and women), some of whom believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ, are just going to shrug and say, "Oh well, we lost, let's give the black guy a chance"? When I moved to Michigan in the early nineties, just before the bombing in Oklahoma City, I became interested in the militia movement, in part because the Michigan Militia had an active chapter in the town next door. Most of the guys in the militia seem to be harmless good old boys who like to get out in the woods on a Sunday, pretend there's a threat to our nation, and practice surviving on roots and berries and defending their loved ones from the blacks and Jews and Communists who someday are going to swoop down in black helicopters and try to round them up in concentration camps. But there also are some very dangerous dudes out there. Have you ever read The Turner Diaries? Browse through it if you dare. I would also recommend a book called The Terrorist Next Door by Daniel Levitas. It's easy to dismiss the author's claims that rightwing domestic terrorists are everywhere, especially since most of these groups' activities died down or went underground when George W. came into office. But I remember reading a section of Levitas's book about a virulently racist and anti-Semitic group called the Christian Identity Movement (sadly, it was started by a Jewish convert to Christianity), a group so hateful that one of its mottoes is something like: If you're standing close enough to a Jew to run him through with a sword, go ahead and do it. The group has these weird ideas about white Christian Americans being the true sons and daughters of Adam and Eve and Jews and blacks being insidious pretenders. Anyway, I put down the book and drove to Zingerman's, our local deli, to discuss the catering for my son's bar mitzvah, and while I was idling at a light, I read the bumper stickers on the car in front of me. And what do you know, the stickers were all about how the owner of the car was a true son of Adam and Eve, with other slogans that identified him as a member of the Christian Identity Movement.
I'm not saying there are thousands of these hateful kooks out there planning an attack on the White House. But with the economy in the state it's in, and the perception that Jewish bankers in New York (and the new black president's Jewish advisors in Washington) are responsible for the pain that ordinary white Christians in the heartland are suffering… All it takes is one Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Federal building, or two white supremacists in Tennessee plotting to decapitate dozens of black schoolchildren and take out the president in a drive-by shooting. I just hope the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service are paying attention to those sorts of terrorists and letting poor Bill Ayers resume a normal life, helping underprivileged schoolchildren in Chicago.
***
Speaking of Bill Ayers … is it safe for me to confess that nearly everyone I know in Ann Arbor knows—or is related to—the man? My eighteen-year-old son actually has been in the same room with Bill Ayers, not once but twice, and now lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood as Ayers (and the president-elect).
For that matter, is it now safe to say that my son is not only in favor of sharing the wealth, he is proud to call himself a socialist? Is it safe to say that I'm proud that he cares enough about working people and poor people to want to devote his life to helping them gain their share of our nation's wealth? I'm embarrassed to say that before I knew which way this election might go, I asked him not to write or sign anything that might come back to haunt him later, whether by preventing him from passing through security at an airport or finding a job during a McCain and Palin administration.
Sure, as a mother, I probably overreacted. But watching those rallies on YouTube and hearing that idiot Michele Bachmann call for a committee to investigate members of Congress, I wasn't about to take a chance that my son's career—and life—would be ruined by his good heart and youthful idealism.
***
Do you know what else upset me? I couldn't believe that John McCain could spend the day snarling at Obama for being a socialist and a terrorist, and then, in the evening, appear on Saturday Night Live or stand up at that benefit Al Smith dinner in New York and make fun of himself for disparaging Obama as a socialist and a terrorist. If you noticed, in similar circumstances, Obama made fun of himself. ("I wasn't born in a manger.") He didn't make fun of his attacks on John McCain. On the one hand, seeing the funny, kind, personable John McCain we used to know reappear in a tux softened me towards the man. On the other hand, I was furious to find out that he knew that what he was saying was a lie and said it anyway, then laughed about how outrageous such statements were. I said this at a dinner party one night, and my host, a lawyer, laughed and said, "Oh, they're all lawyers, they're used to ripping each other apart in court, then going out for a drinking afterward and laughing about what they said." I hate to admit, but this statement upset me even more.
Once, when I was in graduate school, my workshop leader not only ripped apart my novel, she said, "Eileen, you're not only too naïve to be a writer, you're too naïve to exist." As crazy and evil as that writer is, she was right about my novel, and at times like this, I wonder if she was right about me as well. (Well, I'm not too naïve to exist, but maybe I'm too naïve to write a blog about elections.)
Now that the election is over, I want to apologize to my Muslim and Arab-American friends, colleagues, and fellow-citizens for not publicly expressing my outrage at the virulent Arab- and Muslim-bashing in which the Republicans were engaged. When The Times contacted me to ask if I would write a series of three "postcards" about how the election was progressing in my then-swing-stage, Michigan, my first thought was to drive to Dearborn to see how the visitors and staff at the new Arab-American National Museum might feel about the possibility of a man named Barack Hussein Obama becoming our next president.
I had been meaning to visit the museum anyway, and I wasn't disappointed. The exhibits are welcoming and inclusive, the blue-tiled space peaceful and refreshing, with the whisper of a fountain murmuring in the background, ghostly voices describing their experiences at Ellis Island, and the beneficent visage of Danny Thomas smiling down on everyone.
Sadly, I had forgotten that we were still in the month of Ramadan, and the only Arab-American I could find to ask about the election was the beautiful sloe-eyed teen girl behind the front desk. Oh, she said, everyone was excited about Obama. It was just that people were afraid to say so.
Sure enough, when the museum closed and Marian and I got back in his Explorer and drove around Dearborn, we didn't see a single Obama sign. The neighborhood, which sits almost literally in the shadow of the towers of River Rouge, used to be mostly Polish. Now, little girls in headscarves play on the tiny lawns of the well-kept cottages, and the names of the real estate brokers on the For Sale signs are as likely to imply Arab ancestry as to end in "ski." But the neighborhood would have resembled any middle-class neighborhood in America … if not for the complete absence of signs expressing the political preferences of the people who lived there.
After parking beside a Dodge dealership with a giant sculpture of ram bursting through its walls like the bizarre idol of some pre-Mosaic sect, we walked to the Middle Eastern restaurant the girl behind the desk at the museum had recommended. We felt guilty to be ordering food from a waitress who hadn't eaten a thing all day (she laughed and said she was so far beyond hunger that food didn't even tempt her), but the lack of a crowd enabled us to ask the owner what he thought about the campaign.
Here's what I originally wrote for my second op-ed piece in The Times, the one about the Banana Festival at that Polish church on the east side of Detroit. The editor needed to cut it for reasons of space, but I could have chosen to focus the entire piece about the Arab-American vote in Dearborn instead of the Polish-American vote in the suburbs.
"Most people also underestimate Obama's support among the 400,000 Arab-American voters in the Detroit area. A few weeks ago, my friend Marian and I stopped to eat in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Dearborn. The owner, a short, slight man with a demeanor as sweet as baklava, took a break from preparing for the post-Ramadan rush to tell me that his community has lived in fear since 9/11, a fear that prevents them from putting posters in their windows or expressing their views to pollsters.
"'Even if you do the right thing, it might be the wrong thing. If one of those guys running for office is even the slightest bit associated with the wrong group …' He turned his thumb down and frowned. He was going to vote, though, wasn't he? 'Oh, yes!' he said, pulling himself to full height. 'I have lived in this country more than thirty years! I always, always vote!'"
Hearing what the restaurant owner said, I felt horrified and ashamed that I lived in a country where many of my fellow citizens felt too frightened to tell a reporter how they might vote in an upcoming election for fear of retaliation to themselves and retribution to their candidate. It was as if I were listening to a broadcast from a country so backward that the BBC reporter needed to disguise his subjects' identities to protect them from their neighbors or government-sponsored thugs. And that was before Sarah Palin's rallies started getting so out-of-hand, with angry, ugly mobs shouting about "dirty Arabs" on YouTube vidoes that made me understand how the fascists had gained their foothold in Nazi Germany.
Later, as the sun began to set and the restaurant filled up with women stopping by to pick up take-out for their families, or the families themselves, moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, babies, teenagers, uncles, aunts, and cousins, the television in the dining room was switched to an Arab-speaking station. I'm sure I could have found something to argue about with the patrons. But the truth is, I've never had an argument about Middle-Eastern politics with any of my Muslim or Arab-American students, colleagues, or friends in Ann Arbor.
Maybe we're all just so polite we avoid revealing our true feelings on the subject. But most people I know think that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have at least some right on their side, if in differing proportions, and we agree that both sides often act against their own interests, or the interests of a lasting and equitable peace. I teach stories, novels, and essays that are written by Arabs, Arab Americans, American Jews, and Israelis in classes where the students are Arabs, Arab Americans, American Jews, and Israelis (mixed with plenty of other nationalities and ethnicities). Just last semester, I taught a seminar in which an Israeli-born poet put up for workshop an essay about the complexities of her Zionist past and a fiction writer of Palestinian descent wrote about everything her family had lost when Israel was created and the terrors her family had experienced in America when her brother got picked up and jailed and threatened with deportation over a stupid bureaucratic error.
I might have said that in The Times, but I could already hear the sneering readers who would label me a goo-goo far-left idealist living in my PC college town. How could I be a real Jew, belonging as I do to a temple so reform it shares its premises with a church? I wanted to publish a conversation I'd had with my rabbi a few weeks earlier about the reasons an Obama presidency would be good for the Jews and Israel. (In Israel, he said, the two-state solution is the moderate, centrist view; only in America is advocacy of a Palestinian state a radical position.) But my rabbi is the kind of religious leader who has been known to dress up in a bathing suit and floaties to read the Megillah on Purim, and I was afraid that his opinions would carry less weight than the angry denunciations of all those taller, heftier, more portentous and pretentious suit-and-tie rabbis who profess to represent Jewish interests in America.
In truth, the people I tend to fight with in Ann Arbor aren't Muslims or Arabs but Jews and Christians on the far left, who picket the conservative synagogue in our town (that's right, Jews picketing other Jews as they go in to their house of worship to pray or celebrate a wedding or bar mitzvah) or who show up at rallies whose purpose is to protest the war in Iraq and wave signs that say WHAT HAS ISRAEL DONE FOR PEACE, a question that might not drive me crazy if it were accompanied by signs that asked: WHAT HAS RUSSIA DONE FOR PEACE, WHAT HAS NORTH KOREA DONE FOR PEACE, or WHAT HAS IRAN/SOMALIA/SYRIA/THE CONGO DONE FOR PEACE, and Jews on the far right, who can't seem to accept that Palestinians have also gotten screwed by history and deserve to live normal lives in a state of their own governance.
My worst experience as regards the recent presidential campaign was receiving a call from an organization that purported to be conducting an objective poll and then gradually realizing that the "pollster" wasn't interested in anything except insinuating poisonous lies about Barack Obama in my ear. My antennae should have gone up when the pollster asked if I identified myself as Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform (those antennae being lodged right beside the horns that a charming young man from Tennessee once asked if he could see, now that we'd progressed from a first date to a second). How did the caller even know that I was a Jew? And why did she care?
Still, I went on answering questions until the "pollster" asked if I would change my opinion of Barack Obama if I learned that he was affiliated with Hamas, if I knew that he had worked closely with terrorists in Chicago, and so on. I felt the way a person feels if she has been lured into talking to a caller whose intentions turn out to be obscene. At first, I assumed that conservative Christian Republicans were conducting these crude and offensive "push polls" to persuade naïve Jewish voters not to vote for Obama. But when I called Obama headquarters to report the tactic, I was told that these "push polls" were being conducted by a conservative Jewish group in New York. It was like finding out that the obscene phone call you'd just received had been placed by a member of your own family.
So why didn't I write an op-ed piece in which I denounced the scare tactics of rightwing Jews and urged everyone to stop bashing Muslims and Arab-Americans? The safe answer is that the need to convince Jews and Christian moderates to vote for Obama became less urgent when McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, dooming the ticket with Jews who otherwise might have voted for McCain based solely on their (mis)perception that the Republicans were stronger in their support for Israel. My neighbors' parents in the middle-class Jewish suburbs of Detroit told me that they were even more afraid of Palin than Obama, that her far-right fundamentalism would be "bad news" for the Jews. And the Episcopalian priest whose congregation shares the churchagogue with my temple assured me that even the Republican members of his congregation, many of whom admired John McCain, were "repelled" by Sarah Palin and her "harsh anti-gay and lesbian and anti-environmental stances" and by the "scapegoating of vulnerable minorities in the US or abroad," most especially "Muslims Americans in Michigan and elsewhere."
But I also allowed myself to be silenced by the voices in my head that kept whispering that even to raise the specter of Arab and Muslim support for Obama would be to create problems for his candidacy, or that if I wrote an op-ed piece supporting the rights of Arab and Muslim voters, I was sure to get mail from fellow Jews, demanding to know if I was really so naïve as to think that those same Arabs and Muslims would ever denounce the violence on the part of the Palestinians (which many of my friends and colleagues have done) or, if the positions were reversed, would speak up on our behalf (as if our speaking up for others doesn't create a climate in which everyone speaks up for everyone else). Looking back, I can't believe that I let those insidious voices in my head prevent me from standing up for my friends and fellow-citizens, and for that, I ask forgiveness.
One other apology, this one to my lesbian and gay relatives and friends. I didn't pay enough attention to gay rights in this campaign. I kept thinking that gays and lesbians should hold their peace until after the election, not ask for too much (for now), just be happy that we might finally end up with a president who isn’t hateful toward homosexuals, who advocates same-sex civil unions. But asking people to wait to achieve their civil rights and be recognized as fully human is never fair. I remember the time a friend who’s disabled told me that many people think she should be happy to be alive and not agitate for the right to gain access to restaurants or hotels or to receive the medical and social support she might need to be able to bear and raise a child. I didn’t tell her that before I’d become her friend, I might have thought the same thing. In fact, none of us should be content unless everyone in the country has the right to go out to a restaurant for a meal, to marry the person he or she loves, to bear or adopt a child, to be covered by his or her partner's insurance or to visit him or her in the hospital.
When my clock radio switches on in the morning and I hear the newscaster on NPR talking about President-elect Obama, I smile and get out of bed in a blissed-out mood. Reading The Times with breakfast, I enjoy tracking the cabinet appointments, the Great Puppy Debate, the transition from the Bush to Obama White House (I admit I'm going to be a sucker for any and every detail I can find about Michelle and those two adorable girls moving in).
But then, when I sit down to my computer, the letdown descends. No updates on Sarah Palin's latest shopping sprees or bloopers. No Sarah Silver videos or YouTube replays from SNL. Worst of all, my boyfriend Barack has stopped writing! I admit it, I'm totally crushed out on the guy. He's articulate and smart and has a killer smile and looks terrific in jeans and that black jacket. And for a while there, I thought he had a thing for me, too. All those emails and letters! What, now that he's gotten what he wanted, he's going to just move on and move up? Does anyone else feel this way, as if you actually know the guy, he was your roommate's best friend in college, but now he's moving on to better things and you're never going to get to hang out with him again?
On the other hand, I love knowing that I have a friend in high places. I can't remember ever feeling as if the country were being run by someone like me, as if, instead of being some misfit outsider, I'm actually represented by the person in the White House. (Maybe this isn't that much different from the way conservative voters felt voting for George W. because they could imagine inviting him to a barbecue or sharing a beer with him at their favorite bar, or, God help us, voting for Sarah Palin because they could imagine standing next to her at the rink as they cheered on their hockey-playing sons.) Not that I'm anywhere near as smart or talented or photogenic as Barack Obama. Not that I could ever work as hard as he worked to organize and run such a powerful campaign. But as Nicholas Kristof said in his column in The Times a few days ago, Obama is our first openly intellectual president. Although he got labeled as an elitist early in the campaign, he managed to pull off his election anyway, in part because most voters couldn't imagine that such a cool black guy could also be an egghead. Of course, most of us who are eggheads know that unless you were born into a family of intellectuals and were aware from an early age that once you got to college, you would never need to get along with regular people but could hang out with other geeks and intellectuals, you worked hard to develop camouflage, such as an ability to play hoop with the other guys.
At any rate, even if I don't really know Barack, I know a lot of people who do (he lives only six blocks from my son, who's a freshman at University of Chicago), and I'm hoping that Barack will continue to use his address book to keep us informed as to what's going on in his administration, to ask us for our opinions and support. How cool would that be, getting an email from the President of the United States and writing him back? Months and months ago, I was eating dinner with a college student in Gainesville, Florida, and she told me that she was voting for Obama rather than Hillary in the primaries because Hillary made her feel as if she (Hillary) could take care of everything on her own while Barack seemed to be saying that he needed her, the student, to help him fix the country and improve everyone's lives. She said that if Obama won, she would try to find a way to volunteer, to do something to help America. That's how I'm feeling, too. All I need is to get another few emails, giving me a push and telling me what to do.
For my third and final postcard in The Times, I spent election night in Lola's Restaurant in Detroit. Here's a link to the version that appeared in the paper, Morning in Detroit, followed by a more complete description of one of the most moving evenings of my life.
DETROIT--As excited as we were to watch the hordes of students voting in Ann Arbor, my friend Marian and I decided there was no place we would rather spend election night than Detroit. And so, as the sun set in the west on a perfect autumn day, we headed east to Motown, passing the landmark Uniroyal tire, as gigantic as the Ferris wheel inside that holds it up. With the auto industry in the shape it's in, we always half-expect the tire to be flat.
Like most Michiganders, we worry about the devastation to our state if the Big Three go belly up. But we are tired of everyone treating “Detroit” as a synonym for the auto industry rather than the name of a once-vibrant American city whose population is now largely black and poor (not middle-class but poor), with woefully crowded schools, an electrical utility system that often fails, and a bureaucracy that can barely remove the trash and snow.
During the campaign, we stifled the urge to ask what Barack Obama might do to help Detroit. Why stir up voters’ suspicions that the country’s first black president might “share the wealth” with his own people or behave like the city’s recently deposed black mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who held wild parties at his mansion and squandered millions of his constituents’ tax dollars trying to hush up his extramarital affairs.
But as we drove past the city jail, where the former mayor no doubt was monitoring the election from his cell, we couldn’t help but wonder if it was finally safe to ask what an Obama administration might be willing and able to do to save this battered city that so many of us—don’t ask us why—still love.
We dropped Marian’s Explorer at our hotel on Brush, then walked the few blocks to Harmonie Park, a small, recently gentrified, triangular neighborhood near the baseball stadium. On the way, we ran into friends from Ann Arbor, an Israeli therapist and a black professor at the law school, who had also come in to Detroit to watch the returns. “My parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents are all happy tonight," the professor said. "No matter who wins, America has redeemed its promise at last.”
At Lola’s, our favorite restaurant in Detroit, the headwaiter, Gerald, greeted us with a hug and said he felt like a kid on Christmas Eve, giddy with anticipation but afraid that he might wake up and be disappointed. Lola’s was still quiet, so he had the time to deliver an eloquent disquisition on the possibility that Barack Obama might allocate more resources to southeast Michigan and help unify Detroit with the largely white counties that surround it, as well as Windsor, Ontario, across the bridge.
Tonia and Michelle, who were eating at the bar, said they were on pins and needles, hoping an Obama presidency would improve the country’s image abroad and “not just help the rich but the people who are really struggling.” George, a distinguished older man in gold hoop earrings and a porkpie hat, opined that Barack Obama would be “sensitive to the auto industry, not punishing it or bailing it out, but providing, you know, a corrective.” More than that, George felt confident that an Obama presidency would give Detroit “a psychological uplift.” (The man ought to know. Not only does he own art galleries in Detroit, Chicago, and New York, he holds a PhD in psychology.)
Reggie, our waiter, brought the spinach-stuffed chicken that Marian and I like to order whenever we come here before a game. (Marian, who grew up in Detroit, has been a Tigers’ fan for more than fifty years.) Everyone seemed to be one-upping each other with the originality and flair of their Obama T-shirts, but Reggie had the house beat, with huge images of Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, and an American flag emblazoned across his chest.
By then, a hundred and fifty customers, all but six of us black, had crowded into Lola’s. We nibbled our food and sipped our drinks as the map guy on CNN chalked up the obvious wins for Mr. Obama and John McCain and a female vocalist belted out a jazzy tune about all the emotion she could feel inside. Then someone switched the channel to MSNBC, where the numbers showed that Michigan had gone for Barack Obama, and everyone broke out in cheers.
The giant bald black man behind me—he seemed to be ten times my size—told me how thrilled he was that his daughter had gotten so involved in the campaign this year. Then Barack Obama was declared the winner in Pennsylvania, and then in Ohio, and we all jumped up and screamed and hugged, except the giant bald man, who sat a while longer weeping giant tears, after which he climbed on his chair and waved his napkin, smiling and crying and swaying to the beat of “Obama ’08, Obama ’08.”
All of us took pictures of one another, and Marian and I were happy to think we would end up in photos that people we didn’t even know would be showing to their grandkids years and years from now. “It don’t get no better than this,” George told me, closing his eyes, shaking his head, and smiling, after which his son announced that he and his wife had just decided to have a baby because they finally believed it was possible for a black child “to grow up in an America that chooses the best person for a job, a country where black people can lead not just black lives but normal American lives.”
The DJ drowned out Mr. McCain’s concession speech with chants of “One America!” But when Mr. Obama took the stage in Grant Park, everyone at Lola’s stood in silence and faced the TV with arms raised, nodding and crying and murmuring “amen, amen.” After the speech, the DJ began to chant, “We all need to come together and heal and set that race thing apart. We need to come together and heal, one nation, one Michigan, one Detroit.” Marian and I danced for another hour, then wandered outside, where steam rose from the manholes in that eerie way steam rises in Detroit and a drunken panhandler hit us up for a dollar, then stumbled away mumbling something that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.
The next morning, as the sun came up, we drove west along the river, past the enormous sculpture of Joe Louis’s forearm and fist. The sculpture usually creeps me out, reminding me as it does of a black man’s shackled, severed arm, or the fists of all those militants in the sixties who lashed out at their city and knocked it down. But this time, I asked Marian to pull over and let me out so I could stand on my toes and raise my arm and bump Joe the Boxer’s giant black fist with my own.
For my second election postcard from Michigan, I visited the Banana Festival at St. Hyacinth Church in what remains of Polish Detroit. Here's a link to the version of the op-ed piece that ran in The Times:
And here's the (longer) version I originally wrote. (Note my prediction that the reverse Bradley effect would be as important as the Bradley effect, not to mention the prediction that Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama would be important. Too bad I cut the part about Powell, whose endorsement came out the same day as my op-ed piece. I kicked myself for days.)
Our swing state suddenly swung, and no one was more surprised than we were.
We knew that African-Americans in Detroit and college students in Ann Arbor would rally around Obama. But the fervor of the volunteers who went door to door signing up voters in both groups produced far more registered Democrats than any of us had predicted.
And we were pleasantly shocked to note a sort of reverse Bradley effect by which white Michiganders who until recently couldn't admit to themselves, let alone to their neighbors, that they actually might vote for a Democratic half-black senator named Barack Hussein Obama not only made up their minds to do so but put Obama signs on their lawns. One of my neighbor's customers told her that when her father, a lifelong conservative who lives in the Upper Peninsula, revealed that he was voting for Obama, she became so dizzy she needed to sit down.
When my friend Marian visited his parents in Troy, a suburb of Detroit that typically votes Republican, he was stunned to see so many Obama signs. Marian runs an institute that studies the Michigan economy, and he said that if the auto companies weren't staggering on the brink of financial collapse and if John McCain hadn't told Michiganders that manufacturing jobs here were never coming back, you would see few, if any, Obama signs in Troy.
Marian, who is Polish, has long been my guide to the complexities of his people's voting patterns in his state. There are die-hard union Democrats in Hamtramck, Poles who still blame FDR for handing their homeland to Stalin at Yalta, and Poles who fled Detroit in the seventies and eighties and would never vote for a black man because they blame a string of African-American mayors, including the recently deposed Kwame Kilpatrick, for their city's devastation.
Many of the older Polish Catholics of Macomb and Oakland counties fall in this latter category, and Marian was so intrigued by the possibility that they might be voting for Obama that he took me to the Banana Festival at St. Hyacinth Church, in the blasted eastside Detroit neighborhood where all of them grew up, to hear what parishioners there were saying.
Poletown was once a vibrant, relatively harmonious district of blacks and Poles who could walk to their jobs at factories like Dodge Main and Packard. Then the factories closed—the hulking ruins still brood ominously above the landscape—and the city used eminent domain to seize the neighborhood and give the land to GM for a Cadillac plant. (One of the only remnants of Poletown, a Jewish cemetery, still lies within the factory's sprawling grounds.)
The copses of trees and unmown fields in the sparsely populated parish that surrounds St. Hyacinth could fool you into thinking you were in rural Appalachia. The cars in the fenced-in lot behind the church belong to parishioners who live in the suburbs but flock back to their former neighborhood for weekly mass and yearly fundraisers like the Banana Festival. (Why bananas? Well, in the old days, every parish put on a festival, and by the time St. Hyacinth got into the act, all the other fruits were taken.)
After that morning's Polka Mass, with three musicians in shiny red jackets playing beside the priests, everyone trooped next door to eat pork chops and banana bread and buy raffle tickets to support the church. The parishioners seemed warm and kind, but Marian and I didn't exactly unearth a cabal of Obama supporters.
The woman selling ice cream in the room with the face-painting clowns didn't approve of the way Obama tries to pass himself off as black despite being raised by a white mother and white grandparents. Another woman was willing to admit that she is the only pro-choice member of her parish, but even she refused—reverse Bradley effect—to say that she might vote for Obama.
Our friend Tom, who was selling tokens from a booth, believes that John McCain is "too old" and "he isn't nice." But he called Sarah Palin "a breath of fresh air," a phrase echoed by so many parishioners that you could almost feel the wind whooshing through the basement.
Then again, the last Democrat Tom voted for was John F. Kennedy. (Tom said Joe Biden reminded him of a slick salesman, but he softened when he found out that Biden is Catholic.) Mostly, he votes Republican because he objects to the government taking his money and giving it to people who haven't worked as hard to succeed as he did, "except for, you know, a widow who lost her husband." He admires Colin Powell and would love to vote for a black Republican like Condi Rice, but he is suspicious of Obama. "Isn't he a Muslim? And I don't like that church he belonged to." Frankly, he's surprised that half his neighbors in Sterling Heights put Obama signs on their lawns, especially since "they're voting for a man I happen to know they wouldn't sit down to lunch with."
That might be true, but Marian and I agreed that voting for a black man for president seems a pretty important first step toward sitting down with a black man for lunch. And even if most parishioners at St. Hyacinth won't be swinging for Obama, we couldn't help but think that if he were to drop by St. Hyacinth some afternoon and offer to treat everyone to pierogies, kielbasa, and a draft of Stroh's at the Polish Yacht Club (no lake, no yachts, just the lone restaurant and bar that remains in Poletown, with flowered vinyl tablecloths, Red Wing memorabilia, and photographs of the pope—the Polish one—beaming down from the walls), few, if any, parishioners would refuse.
I seem to have entered the world of blogging, almost by accident, and now I'm hooked. I'm not sure how this enterprise will evolve, but my sense is that a blogger is just supposed to jump in and see what happens. So I'll start with the three brief op-ed "postcards" that I was asked to contribute to The New York Times, describing how the presidential election was progressing in my swing state, Michigan.
As some of you know, I can barely write my name in the 600 words I was allotted for each postcard. Each time, I thought, Well, this is so interesting, I'm sure they'll find the space for 1200 words! And each time, the editor nicely explained that he was going to have to chop my piece in half.
For my first postcard, I described a trip I had made with my faithful sidekick Marian to the town of Howell, northwest of Ann Arbor, to see how the residents of that area, which until the 1990s had tolerated a significant KKK presence, were responding to the candidacy of an African American named Barack Hussein Obama. In the original version of the article, I tried to convey that Howell had changed and gone upscale. Imagine, Obama signs in Howell! But Marian and I also saw a large number of Ron Paul signs ... and when we asked the farmers at the farmers' market how they felt about the election, we got blasted by their fury at both political parties.
It struck me that my friends and I in Ann Arbor were furious with the government, at least as it had been run by the past eight years by George W. Bush, and the farmers at the market were furious at the government, but that each groups was furious at the government for completely opposite reasons. I tried to convey this in my essay, but most of the explanations got cut. As a result, I got a lot of angry mail from residents of Howell who felt that I had unfairly tarnished their city's good name. And I do think that in condensing the original essay, I left the impression that more people in Howell supported Ron Paul than was in fact the case. (I also unfairly linked everyone in the Thumb to Timothy McVeigh.) But I stand by the basic thrust of both pieces. The day after my visit, the Obama office in Livingston County (where Howell is located) received ugly threats against the candidate. (To be fair, even in Ann Arbor, an Obama sign got spray painted with swastikas.) I've done a lot of research on the Michigan Militia, and even though I was pleasantly surprised by how many people in traditionally conservative sections of the state (Howell included) did vote for Barack Obama, I worry that an Obama presidency is going to lead to a resurgence of right wing militias, in Michigan and elsewhere.
Here's a link to the version of the essay that ran in The Times:
President Ron Paul of Michigan
And here's the essay as I wrote it:
Game day, the Wolverines vs. Miami of Ohio. A few maples have already burst out red, the first kernels of popcorn exploding in the bag. The university is adding skyboxes to the stadium, which rises ever higher. Biplanes circle overhead, and the announcer’s voice hovers above my house like God mumbling some new commandments.
I don’t have much use for college football – too many of my students have been too badly hurt – but even a transplanted New York Jew like me feels comfortable in Ann Arbor. The OBAMA (and IMPEACH BUSH) signs have been up so long they’re faded. When my friends and I walk around our neighborhood, we burn off extra calories by yelling at the occasional McCain sign. “Never mind the surge, the war was a mistake to start with!” “Palin wants to teach creationism in the schools!” One friend, a librarian, wants the government to make sure our meat is safe but not tell her what books she can put on the shelves. The mother of a former army pilot, she takes McCain to task for repeatedly voting against equipping the troops properly or providing his fellow vets with better health care.
But a liberal judging the political climate in Michigan by walking around Ann Arbor is like a polar bear judging global warming by staring straight down at the ice cube beneath her feet. Except for the Upper Peninsula and a few isolated towns, the western and northern regions of the state are overwhelmingly Christian and Republican. And so, the morning after the game, I drive forty miles northwest to Howell, a town that is still trying to live down its reputation as the home of a KKK grand dragon.
In the past ten years, many of the cities along our ride have become bedroom communities for Ann Arbor, but none of my black or Jewish friends would dream of moving to Howell. On the one hand, I firmly believe that most rural Michiganders would donate an organ to save my life. On the other hand, the last time I drove to Howell – to pick up my son from a school trip to see the raptors and coyotes at the wildlife center – I passed two teenagers along the road with swastikas on their backpacks.
At first glance, Howell has gone upscale. Except for a notice offering deals on foreclosed homes, I see little evidence of the dismal Michigan economy. A few storefronts stand empty, but the Uptown Coffeehouse is bustling. Most of the customers are out-of-towners (a young woman from Brighton, a few miles south, complains that her neighbors there tend to rail at her, unbidden, about people who aren't white), but ten years ago, you wouldn't have found a coffeehouse in Howell … or seen a mixed-race family crossing the street to the farmers' market.
How deep have the changes filtered? I stop at a table arrayed with shining round beets like the heads of ruddy cherubs, peppers in every hue, and scallions so beautiful they seem like works of art. The kindly woman behind the stand tells me that her husband grew these vegetables on their farm near Bad Axe, "in the Thumb," which I know to be the section of the state where Timothy McVeigh's compatriot, Terry Nichols, had his farm. She lives part of the week in Howell and drives to her job at U of M, then telecommutes another day a week from Bad Axe, a web of connection that used to be unthinkable. When I ask her about the election, she says that until recently she wasn't sure whom to vote for, but she is excited about Sarah Palin, who is "focused," "a real firecracker," with the experience in foreign affairs to team with McCain to "unify all the nations and bring peace to the world." Asked about the economy, worry clouds her face. The pain the rest of the country is feeling now hit Michigan first, she says. But as farmers, she and her husband have always figured "we need to do it ourselves, no one else is accountable."
At another table, when I ask about the election, what bursts out isn't just confusion but anger. "Both sides stink!" the woman says. Her friends aren't going to vote for anyone, but she tells them if they don't vote, they can't complain. "They've taken away all my other rights," she says, "but I still have my right to vote!"
The man beside her – he wears an identical orange T-shirt, but they seem to share a booth only to cut their costs – bursts out that "John McCain is a war hero and the only candidate who's fit to be president!" But when I ask if he'll be voting for McCain, his rage could boil his vegetables. "No! I'm not voting for any of them!" He says he resents paying taxes on all three of his properties, then mutters that "something went wrong in this country" and "what gives them the right, I'd like to know."
Thinking my sample might be skewed because the McCain supporters are still in church, I drive around Howell to see who's supporting whom. Every second or third house flies an American flag, but I find only one lawn with a (crumpled) McCain sign. Miraculously, the owners of one car and one house proclaim their support for Obama, and one bumper sticker still says "Hillary."
The person who's really racking up the votes here is Ron Paul. The residents of Howell sport RON PAUL signs on their lawns; they've painted RON PAUL in big letters on their cars; they've hung RON PAUL signs in the windows of their businesses (including Mama Gaia's, which specializes in "Living, Parenting and Healing Naturally").
The farmers I met at the market in Howell not only distrust the Democrats; they feel betrayed by the Republicans for whom they voted in the past two elections. They want the government to leave them alone, except when they don't. Which, come to think of it, is what my friends in Ann Arbor want. Except that our ideas about when the government should butt in or butt out are opposite to the farmers'. McCain and Obama can talk about unifying the country, but there still are two Americas, and no matter who wins this election, one America is going to be very angry at the other.