We watched the inauguration today with some of our new international friends, and one of them surprised us all — he had never heard of Aretha Franklin.
It was a good lesson. Our country is so important, and our culture pushes so deep into every corner of the world, that we forget not everyone knows everything about us. There are lots of people around the globe who live rich and fulfilling lives despite never having heard of the Dallas Cowboys or “30 Rock” or Stephen King.
Having said that, our lives would all be richer with more Aretha in them.
As soon as CNN called the election for Obama, I suspect Aretha started expecting the call from the White House. She was the only possible choice to sing at the inauguration for the first black president. If Ray Charles had been alive, maybe. James Brown… too many troubles there at the end. Al Green… almost, but not quite.
I could write a million words about Aretha, but all I’ll say for now is that no one has ever been better at making music that stayed out all Saturday night and still went to church on Sunday morning.
It’s going to be an interesting four years. A new president, and a country that just elected a new president, both need a lot of strong character traits. It probably doesn’t hurt if one of them is soul.
God bless America and let the Queen of Soul take us home.
The good news: My post-election Obama post has been the biggest thing ever on this little blog, with 459 views as of this morning (four times as many as any of my other posts), and 30 comments (23 more than any other post).
The bad news: Some of y’all took issue with it, and after giving the piece another hard look, I understand why.
Here’s the sentence that most folks had problems with — it’s the next-to-last sentence in the essay:
Obama means that our country is founded not on myths and legends, not on frilly phrases jotted down by old white men two centuries ago, but on fundamental truths that we can still make real.
Upon further review, as they say in the NFL, I didn’t do a good job here. I didn’t intend to denigrate the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or the Founding Fathers — in fact, my feelings are just the opposite — but that’s the way some people read that sentence, and it’s easy to see why.
My point was (is) that those documents aren’t just words, and the story of the Founding Fathers isn’t just a tale we tell so we can swell up with pride on Independence Day. What’s important is the truth behind those words, the values and ideals brought to the birth of America… values and ideals that were denied to a lot of people in this country for a long time.
Obama’s election doesn’t mean the bad parts of our history are wiped away. But it does mean that one of our country’s fundamental ideas — that even the highest office in this land is open to anyone — has some new and refreshing evidence to back it up.
That’s what I was trying to say and didn’t say very well.
Back at the beginning I put all this under the heading of “the bad news,” but of course it’s not bad news at all — this is the virtue of blogging, and commenting, and the conversation that (I hope) continues.
So thanks to all the commenters — even the ones who found me through e-mail and taught me a couple of new profanities. The highlight was the guy who called me a “vomitous, racist mass,” which I recognized immediately as a takeoff on “The Princess Bride.” If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
Obama means a dream deferred is not always a dream denied.
Obama means the road to the promised land is a public highway.
Obama means that today a teacher in a crumbling classroom of free-lunch kids can tell them they can be anything, and today maybe they will believe.
Obama means there is no more waiting for the first.
Obama means that people can look beyond a name.
Obama means that words still matter, that a speech can be both politics and poetry, that ideas carried inside the beauty of language can still inspire.
Obama means that skinny guys do not always get picked last.
Obama means that we never like one bunch to hold power too long.
Obama means that John McCain can go back to the decent, funny, admirable man he was before the campaign.
Obama means that maybe candidates will decide the best strategy is to be themselves.
Obama means that appealing to the worst in us is not always the winning play.
Obama means it doesn’t matter if you can trace your family tree to the Mayflower.
Obama means the one phrase that is never true in America is that could never happen.
Obama means our impatient citizens will stand in line for hours if they think it’s important enough.
Obama means the rest of the world looks at us in a new way.
Obama means maybe we look at ourselves in a new way.
Obama means that growing up poor or growing up biracial or growing up in a broken home might close doors around you, but those doors are not locked.
Obama means the rest of us have no excuses.
Obama means that our country is founded not on myths and legends, not on frilly phrases jotted down by old white men two centuries ago, but on fundamental truths that we can still make real.
Obama means that when we say all men and women are created equal, we might finally be ready to put a period at the end.
I have a point I want to make but I’m not sure how I’m going to get there — in case you want to go ahead and get out of the car now, I’m going to try to connect the concert I saw Monday night to the reasons Barack Obama is going to be president. It’s possible that we’ll scrape the guardrails one or two times along the way. Just so you know.
The band above is called TV on the Radio. They’re the kind of band I should keep up with if I want to pretend to be up on music today, but the fact is I knew exactly one of their songs (“Wolf Like Me”) because I watched them do it on YouTube. Still, my friend Vognar had tickets to the show and so we went to see them at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston.
(I’m thinking of adding this to my list of life truths: “There is no such thing as bad live music.” I’d go see pretty much any professional or even semi-professional musician if the price was right — I’d see Barry Manilow if he was in Vegas and somebody comped us the tickets. I’d head for the restroom during “Copacabana,” but still.)
Despite the interesting hair (the dude on the left has cut his shorter — he looks less like Jerry Garcia now, although he sounds like David Bowie), TV on the Radio is your basic ordinary rock band, and I mean that in the best possible way. They’re tight live, the main lead singer (the guy in the middle) knows how to get the crowd moving, they understand the dynamics of a show — here’s a couple of fast ones, now a couple of slow ones, here’s our best stuff at the end.
I’ll admit that I don’t know their lyrics — they could be advocating overthrow of the government in their big power ballad. But I doubt it. They’re a good, solid American band, well worth the price of the ticket. They are also one white guy and four black guys.
In pro sports we’ve had black quarterbacks win the Super Bowl and black coaches win NBA titles, and the three most popular athletes of all time are black (Ali, Jordan, Tiger). But that’s not the revolution — at some point, overwhelming talent is impossible to ignore. The revolution came when black QBs could be the third-stringer or black point guards could come in for garbage time or black pitchers could be 10th-best on a 10-man staff. They could be just OK — no different than anyone else — and they could still make the team.
((Those of you who are from soccer-friendly parts of the world might want to add Pele or Maradona to the Ali/Jordan/Tiger pantheon… what can I say, it’s my list and soccer doesn’t make it.))
Barack Obama is by no means ordinary. No matter what you think of his politics, he’s clearly a smart politician and a gifted speaker. But despite all his talk about change — you might have heard once or twice that he is in favor of change — the fundamental thing that has taken him to the White House door is that he does not seem like all that big a change.
I don’t mean that people don’t want a change in the direction of the country — the biggest thing Obama has going for him is that he’s running against eight years of Bush. But he’s not running a campaign all that different from a generic Candidate X that the Democrats might have run out there. In both debates he has been the calm one, the one whose smile seems less forced, the one who (sorry, Mr. McCain, and thank you for your service) acts more normal. In no way whatsoever is he running as the black candidate, the man who would change history, although of course just by being president he would.
People who know Obama say he’s brilliant. Maybe. The vibe he gives off more than anything is that he doesn’t need to PROVE that he’s brilliant, that just being who he is and putting that in front of the voters is enough to make the team.
There are polls that slice the voting public every which way, and there’s definitely a division on Obama among white voters, but I think the pollsters are missing the key question. I don’t think the split is between Northern whites and Southern whites, or rich whites vs. poor whites, or white-collar whites vs. blue-collar whites. The split is between whites who know a lot of minorities — as neighbors, co-workers, classmates — and those who don’t.
Voters who never spend time with people who aren’t like them are scared of Barack Obama. Voters who spend time with lots of different people think of Obama as the guy from down the street who made good. That Obama-is-The-One thing is long gone, if it ever existed much. I think he’s seen now as just the right guy for the job. And that, by itself, makes history.
(Just in case you haven’t seen the ticker… watch the bottom of the screen.)
After tonight’s presidential debate it is more clear to me than ever what Americans really need, and what we need is for every American to have one of those tickers they run underneath the debate on CNN.
They put these remote-control thingies in the hands of undecided voters and tell them to dial up or down depending on what they think of what the candidates are saying. So you can follow along on TV and watch Obama’s ticker rise when he talks about Iraq, or McCain’s ticker dip when he talks about needing a hair transplant or whatever. It’s like a running EKG of their political success.
(How can there be any undecided voters at this point? Obama and McCain have been running for TWO YEARS, they’ve been on the news every single day, they’ve visited every town in America with a red light, they debated other candidates in the primaries, they’ve debated each other twice now… unless you just this week emerged from a coal mine, how can you not have picked one or the other? These are the same people who get to the front of the line at McDonald’s and stand there scratching their chins because it’s just too hard to decide between the Quarter Pounder and the chicken strips.)
((Memo to CNN: At one point in the debate coverage, the camera backed up for a long shot and I counted THIRTEEN talking heads on the set, including poor Wolf Blitzer, who stood in the back like the last kid to get picked for kickball. This is not Monopoly. You don’t win by accumulating pundits like houses on Boardwalk. Put three people out there and maybe let them speak for more than eight seconds at a time.))
(((This also, it goes without saying, applies to every NFL pregame show.)))
((((Because we are fair and balanced, we even switched to Fox News after the debate. Sean Hannity was yapping about why Obama once served on a board with former bomber/current college professor William Ayers — because, as you know, if you serve on a board with somebody you believe in exactly the same things they believe in. “He blurbed his book! He blurbed his book!” Hannity kept shouting at some poor guest — honest to God, I don’t know if he was an Obama guy or a McCain guy or the guy who showed up to fix the Coke machine. It was clear he was NEVER going to get a chance to speak. That was it for us and Fox News.))))
Anyway: the ticker. How great would this be on a job interview? “Well, sir, I’d bring lots of experience to the job” (ticker goes up)… “which means I’d of course want a decent salary” (ticker goes down)… “and I played baseball in college so I could hit cleanup for the company softball team” (ticker goes way up).
And of course you would immediately see where you stand on a date: “Maybe you’d like to come over to my place” (ticker goes up)… “to see my comic book collection” (ticker goes down)… “but of course you can’t actually read them, I’ve got them individually sealed in acid-free sleeves” (ticker plummets off screen, date gets up and leaves).
The debates would be so much better if the candidates could see the ticker in real time like the audience does. “Wait! When I said that Americans would have to pay higher taxes, what I MEANT to say, of course, was: I like puppies.”
I’ve spent 570 words so far not actually talking about the debate itself, because the outcome is pretty clear at this point: If nothing truly weird happens in the next four weeks, Barack Obama is going to be the next president.
And if you didn’t know anything about the candidates, and you didn’t know anything about race in America, if all you did was watch the debate and ask yourself: “Which one of these guys is going to be the next president?”, you’d say the same thing.
But of course truly weird things happen in politics all the time. And Barack Obama is a black man and that still matters. And trashing your opponent is sometimes the winning play.
I’ll just add this: When you watched the ticker, and the two candidates talked about their actual ideas — to fix the economy, to cut back on foreign oil, to deal with Iraq — the tickers always went up.
When either candidate started to rip the other, the tickers always went down.
