We Didn't Ask For This

What was our local ObamaNation cell up to?

This in from a reader:


Buried among the usual emails and exploitative notices waiting for me last week was an invitation to rejoin my local ObamaNation neighborhood watch. The sender was new, but the message was clear: we’re still here, a team of nation changers!

Well, ok. There’s a good chance I would have ignored it if I was still working. But I’m realizing, here in my very first go at a recession, that the randomest things leap out at you with a semiphoric wave to your hopes and ambitions. I had a perfessor who liked reducing all human activity to the behavior of bronze age humans. He loved hunter-gatherers especially. He would have said that with my continued survival at risk, my eye-brain activity is especially ramped up, observing and processing anything that could lead to foodclothingshelter. He was my American History professor.

Any way.

I worked on the Obama campaign since about the primaries. I started out volunteering not at the headquarters downtown but in a satellite shop near where I worked. I just walked right in. Actually I was drawn in, heart first, mind second, still holding the cup of coffee I left the office to get. I was a temp at some brainless brokerage firm, surrounded by people high on the economy who couldn’t give a ratsass to the sorry state of our union, our very reason for existence as a people. I’m still amazed at my instincts, bailing before that slaveship took on more water.

Any way.

I signed up for a few days at ObamaNation but got sucked right in. I took the snappy “thanks for coming in” by Cute Office Manager Becca home with me like a parting gift, keeping it close, opening and reopening it that night whenever the slacker agonies of my roommates punctured the drywall of my room. Alone with my own tv, watching the news and its hesitant projections of Obama taking Iowa, I not only felt like I accomplished something. I let that feeling speed into extra-metaphoric overdrive: I was grabbing oars with fellow rowers who were as demonic as I was about steering this country in another direction.

I worked the phones obsessively through the primaries - and goddamn if he didn't win! When they needed Converses on the ground in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio during the general election, you bet I went. Anything to put, at last, a man (could've been a woman, just want to say) who might once have been a debating team nerd, who never fit anywhere he went, who was a constitutional professor and a community organizer - or would he be a community organizer and then a constitutional professor - the binary possibilities of such a president made my heart sing - at the head of a country badly in need of literate and judicial governance.

And I wasn’t alone. Everyone around me felt the same, we committed activists. Mort, who made a living trading credits on Second Life; Laila who I hung out with the most and her friend Natasha, who liked to keep score on rochambeau while we dialed for votes; Keller and Guy who shared their cigarettes; and Justine and Ousmene who were already dating when they came in. We, sitting at plastic fold out tables gladly donating our cellphone minutes to call fencesitters in Missouri, to take on South Carolina haters or hold trembling but ultimately willing hands in southern Indiana. By the sound of reason in our voices and a transmitted tinge of hope, we were able each week to move names from the red column into the blue.

Any way.

For awhile we all kept in touch. But we trickled back into our lives so that by March our own facebook group Obaminators was sitting in suspended animation. The last entry came from Ousemene, about Obama expanding stem cell research: "You get into office and hit on stem cells? At this rate we'll be stopping torture when Melia {sic} is in college." Justine attempted to comment: "Please, 1) learn how to spell her name and 2) you're complaining about items on page 1 of a 200 page to do list." And the conversation ended there.

Depending how you see it, the last year is either a presidency impeded by insurgent dead-enders (didn't Rumsfeld call these types "no-hopers?") operating as if the campaign weren’t over, or a presidency compelled by politesse to use handshovels instead a frontloader to do the work in front of them. Bank bailouts and GM, closing and then not closing Guantanamo, embarrassing lack of gay rights agenda, a half-measure stimulus bill, short sheeting the Dalai Lama, and more .... these were the torments everyone around me were going through. But I liked - well, I grabbed onto - Michael Moore's belief that through it all, Obama's basketball instincts were guiding him: he was feinting right to go left. Such a simple metaphor made an effective palliative.

When “JOIN LOCAL GROUPS TO WATCH OBAMA RECIEVE NOBEL PRIZE - FIND OUT HOW!” appeared in my email, I wasn’t sure what I thought. Except that when it found me I was a demographic primed for nostalgia: mid-twenties, overeducated, unemployed. What was our local ObamaNation cell up to? Where are we now, one year older?

So -

Next morning, I got on my bike and rode against the rush hour traffic. I knocked on the door, a walkup Victorian. Guy answered, smartphone pushed against his ear. He made a circling motion with his finger, pointed to the phone, rolled his eyes, and led me inside his new railroad flat. So he was the new ringleader. I wondered if Laila was inside, or Gen, or Keller, or Mort. Weird Mort. If just Laila was there, then I was meant to come. We’d hook up at last, long after we should have in a quiet post election aftermath.

Guy pointed into a room and I walked in while he wandered down the hall into his kitchen. A girl with curly blonde sat in one of Guy’s black custom made highback chairs he bought at an auction from a bankrupt webvideo company noted for the ice sculptures in its lobby. The offices are still empty and from the sidewalk the little blue and gold basin that hosted the sculptures is left chipped and empty like an abandoned municipal kiddy pool in the middle of the bare lobby. I rode past it the other day.

“Hi,” I said, and the girl turned around. I didn’t recognize her. She smiled and turned back around. She was texting calmly, waiting for the Nobel ceremony streamcast. There were other chairs scattered around so I made a point of not sitting next to her. Guy’s voice echoed faintly from the kitchen. We were always pointedly friendly - it was the easiest thing in the world to meet people at the old ObamaNation meetings. I didn’t recognize her but kept the spirit alive and told her my name. She looked up and smiled again.

“I’m Kelsie. Just a minute.” She was finishing, supposedly, a critical task. “Sorry.” Her face crinkled as she typed, like a trapeze artist.

“That’s ok.” I waited. So this is where Guy lives, I thought. Nice. He does something in marketing, branding. I looked around for tell tale examples of his work, swag doodads. Sure enought, a superball of the universe with a bright red and yellow logo in the middle sat beneath his monitor, poised to roll off the desk any second now.

“It’s really weird we’re here today watching this,” Kelsie announced. “I mean, we put him into office really for our own reasons. It’s a little embarassing, don’t you think? That the rest of the world thinks he’s the bomb and he hasn’t really done anything?”

“He’s anyone but Bush. That’s what they care about.”

“I guess. Like we should be up there too?” She smiled to herself. “But what was the choice? It sort of seems obvious now that he was bound to win. I’m sort of seeing what he must have seen two years ago - it was his to lose, considering the field. And now he has a Nobel, too. Just for showing up. I even found myself agreeing with my dad, that this is kinda dumb. I mean, what were they thinking? It’s like your sister deciding that your new boyfriend is her new BFF. I should lay off the coffee.”

Guy wandered in and placed the phone against his chest. “Singapore,” he winced but jiggled his mouse and the screen saver disappeared. He slapped the space bar with his finger and stepped back quickly as if he’d lit a firecracker. The speech had just started. Kelsie and I watched wordlessly. Guy stood behind us whsipering on the phone in the doorway, neither in nor out, attuned equally to business and world politics.

The speech lasted forty minutes. Rather than the artfully nuanced thank you speech everyone expected, each sentence he layed down began to form the parapets of doctrine. Another American doctrine. Elsewhere in the country conservatives danced with leprechaunic glee. Even I spitefully started to assign invisible thought balloons to the politely attuned but internally squirming faces of modern Europe. No, we, who put him in this position, didn’t ask for this either.

We three didn’t talk much after it was done. We didn't really know what to make of why we got together in the first place. We all had stuff to do, bid goodbye, and left. Actually, I had nowhere to go really. I peddled home slowly, weaving along the street then riding on the sidewalk then back onto the street again.

What had we done? We worked ad delerium to put BHO into office because if we didn’t the world would be worse. He had been the first to reach the high ground and he stayed there pretty much throughout the campaign. And by his own physical example and rhetorical meter, he shattered the appalling foolishness of what came before him.

But what had we done? We wanted change and we had a fervent, if vague, hope “things” could change for the better because so many of us were revolted by the way “things” were. We decided time was right for a thoughtful man in the White House - a writer even - which was radical enough to bring strangers together, man the phones and call other strangers, other citizens, to get over their fears just this once. And we put him into office. The entire world was so relieved they wanted to elect him too.

But what had we done? When the entire world figured out a way to elect him too, there was our boy from Hawaii, our A student from Harvard, our pick-up game, basketball-shooting community leader with white oxford sleeves aquarely folded past his elbows. There he was, matching the Nobel hall’s mid-century cool sobriety and for all our efforts and expectations we had the opportunity to watch him tell the world that he would fight wars against evil.

What is this “evil”? Why is the most sophisticated military and diplomatic apparatus the world has ever seen marshalled to fight evil? There is no such thing as evil. Evil is a quality bestowed upon a thing or a person or an action to describe the ultimate in aversion. You apply it to something not understood. In a rational world it is, at worst, a dismissive put down. But for the second time in a row now, we are telling people that we will point the barrel of our weaponry at ephemera, at a non-existent quality. We will form even more queasy alliances, burn countless billions of money, expend human life like a child gone mad, make craven decisions and drive our national karma further into darkness.

I got down off my bike and started walking, thinking loudly. Wars are fought by humans, with human goals in mind, I told myself. Sometimes it’s just politics, sometimes it’s for survival. Sometimes it’s a pathological mishandling of the two. It might be handy to call the enemy “evil” so that there’s no mistaking among the populace that a given threat is serious. But that’s not how you wage your war. You don’t wage your war against something you don’t understand. Especially if the very man you wanted to replace wasted time and resources with that same mistake.

I sat down on the sidewalk against a wire fence that gave a little behind my back. I knew it was an empty lot behind me, complete with a shopping cart dangling enormous plastic bags stuffed with clothes listing to its side with a broken wheel, pushed no more. It didn't matter.

Evil, I thought. My country wages war against evil. Great. A piece of something was resting on my lip and I spat it out. Why do I care? I asked myself. I was all agitated.

It was November and the wind pushed some leaves past me. My butt was getting cold on the sidewalk. A school bus crunched through guttered leaves and stopped in front of me. A couple of mothers appeared with their kids and nudged them on board. One of them kept an eye on me. How would I know this is a bus stop?

I was agitated, I decided, not just because of my president’s galling use of the word “evil” but because of something else he said, another little plank of his argument that was wrong too. First he referred to himself as Head of State. Ok, that’s right. And then he went further and reminded everyone he was commander-in-chief which, sure, that he is. We hear that all the time. And lately he’s been referring to said obligations as commander-in-chief to first and foremost protect his country. Well, that’s not right. He was sworn in to protect the Constitution. He is commander-in-chief because we are not led by a junta. He is not a general, a Big Man, a Potentate. His job is not to protect me. He's commander-in-chief because the military is answerable to him and he is answerable to us citizens ....

“He’s a professor in constitutional law, for godssakes - ”

Fortunately, I suppose, there wasn’t anyone around. The bus was gone, the mothers had walked off. There was just me and my disillusionment. A car drove solemnly by.

Why can’t anyone get this right?