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All you need in the world is love and laughter. That’s all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.

–August Wilson

_____

 

I’ve decided to avoid competing with the party season. Jazz at the Bungalow will start up again in January. Don Corey has agreed to play the January show with Flatland; Christopher Woitach will be playing for sure in February, in a band yet to be determined. Thanks to David Valdez and friends for playing in October. Check out the recording:

 

http://citizenproductions.com/music/102508.html

_____

 

Obama’s victory speech was really, really great. He covered a huge array of topics, praised his fallen foe graciously, and managed to put his election in a truly historic light. He finally convinced me that he really will listen to all of us, friends and enemies, and really will bolster this democracy, and really will lead us in the directions WE want to go. He is a true orator, is extremely presidential without being holier than thou (the way, say, McCain is), and is a man whose intelligence shines as gently and brightly as he himself does.

 

Go to http://change.gov , the official homepage of our new president, to begin participating in our new government, and keep an eye on the move away from Bush. The simple fact of this web site’s existence is a really good sign of things to come, a world-changing venture I would say. You can apply for a job in the new administration, read the presidential blog, post your opinions about what’s important, send emails detailing your vision for America, monitor the agenda and transition, and more. Obama’s already opening the doors.

_____

 

In about 1995, I coordinated outreach for Sustainable Seattle in south Seattle, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the country. I succeeded in bringing folks to the same table, to discuss the elusive meaning of sustainability, who would never have otherwise looked twice at each other, and many of whom, being from different ethnic groups, lived right near each other but had never met. The most startling thing for me was my interview with the principal of a high school in the neighborhood, a school riddled with gang violence, black on Mexican, Mexican on Laotian, Laotian on Samoan, and on and on. I asked this large, well-spoken black man what action he had taken that had made the biggest difference; without skipping a beat, without flinching, without a moment’s thought, he said it was putting in a garden and greenhouse. I was stunned; a garden is all it takes to quell the violence. This critical lesson should go national; please support gardening in schools.

 

*Errata*

 

I wrote:

 

“The magnitude of this transformation cannot be underestimated.”

 

The point is it would be impossible to OVERestimate the magnitude, importance, and broad reach of this transformation. One couldn’t possibly make it out to be bigger than it will be in fact.

 

*Grammar*

 

My brother, who speaks French as a second language, tells me the generalized word for ten in French is “dizaine,” pronounced (I think) “dih zen.” I think that’s perfect, if only because it is so reminiscent of dozen. I’m not quite sure _how_ to use it though. Starting from, “I’ve been here a dozen times,” would one say,

 

“I’ve been here dizaine times,”

 

OR

 

“I’ve been here A dizaine times,”

 

OR

 

“I’ve been here A dizaine OF times”?

 

He also suggested doxen, which has good merit. Both doxen and ‘dih zen’ would work; the trouble is how to use such words without calling attention to them.

_____

 

In his first press conference, Obama made a major grammatical gaffe. I discussed it with my mother and I think I agree with her that it was a conscious decision on his part. In talking about being invited by Bush to the White House, he said, “Yes, he very kindly invited Michelle and I….” He should properly have said “Michelle and ME” but he knows that’s not what _most people_ say. He knew he couldn’t alienate anyone in his very first press conference. As a lawyer, he most certainly knows the difference between I and me; as a politician, he knows that sometimes you have to go out of your way to be an everyman. As a black man in a white system, he’s learned, to be sure, how to choose his words very carefully. Maybe we need to change the name now from the White House to the House of the President (the HP) or something. Maybe that’s a little too PC by anyone’s standards.

 

*Language*

 

Global Survival Guide:

 

If you speak Chinese and Spanish, you can communicate with the majority of the world. Here are some tips to help you get by (the Chinese should be arriving any day in force, and I think the Mexicans are just waiting for the right moment; lord knows both of them have veritable armies already on US soil):

 

I love you.

Wo ai ni.

Te amo.

 

Water please.

Ma fa ni, kai shui. [Could I trouble you for some water? roughly; trouble you, boiled water, literally.]

Agua por favor.

 

Thank you.

Xie xie.

Gracias.

 

You’re welcome.

Bu ke chi. [Don't be polite, roughly; don't have the air of a visitor, literally]

De nada. [It was nothing, roughly; of nothing, literally]

 

I wish you well.

Ju ni jian kang, kwai le. [I wish you health and happiness.]

Ojala que lo pase bien [I hope all goes well.] (to which the polite and sincerely appreciative respondent will say, “Igualmente, señor/a”).

 

That should keep you alive for a little while anyway. If we are in fact overtaken, I highly recommend that you find someone who’ll believe you when you say that first one. Why fight it? Miscegenate (I do realize there is no actual word “miscegenate,” but going from miscegenation, that’s what it _would_ be if there were one). Believe it or not, that sentiment is 100% Catholic, in addition to being catholic. When the conquistadors arrived, they were under explicit instructions from the Pope to intermarry with natives, and in so doing, to spread the Christian faith; they surely succeeded.

 

*ErosAromatics*

 

Everything I tried to do this week failed. Two attempts at solid perfume both failed. The problem here is acquiring materials that are soluble in fixed oils or at least not antagonistic to them. In some cases that may be CO2 extracts; in others it might be aromatics pre-diluted in oil (fractionated coconut oil, with its imperviousness to rancidity and low-temperature liquid characteristics, is quite common). The problem is that I’m faced with acquiring a whole new set of extracts for solids and oils (pomades are big on my list) and we’re talking about materials that are quite expensive. I have a nice spicy air freshener and I want to make a citrusy one; my first attempt totally failed. Instead of things _like_ citrus, it needs things to contrast with the citrus, such as sandalwood or rosemary, patchouli or black pepper, for example. It’s all about alchemy, so combining apparent opposites is sometimes the best bet.

 

I made a moisturizing oil which doesn’t absorb into the skin enough (though I’m sure it moisturizes just fine); it leaves the skin a little too oily for my liking (the oiliness does quickly disappear however, so it might be good for some things), so I need to tweak the recipe–but this is the closest I came to a success this week! I tried to make an olive-oil infusion of herbs and flowers (for pomade which I am anticipating highly)–and totally forgot to GRIND said ingredients before doing it. I added the specified amount of oil and sat there for a minute thinking, “Gee, it needs like four times as much,” before realizing my silly mistake. What a waste. I did receive a gallon of 190-proof _grain_ alcohol in the mail; considering this week seems to be hexed as far as perfume stuff goes, I will wait until next week to make my first grain-alcohol perfume. I’m gleefully looking forward to it.

 

*Poem*

 

Ariell

 

Not long after my ex walked out

I met a young woman; she was 19

and I was 32. She was on the road

and I met her at a poetry reading.

That very night I invited her

to stay at my house; I remember

telling her that what I sorely

missed was simply company, was

knowing my house was not

interminably empty, was the simple

kindness we all take for granted.

One night I took her out to

dinner at a romantic Italian place.

What strikes me most when I

think back on that time is

the blind hope I had that I’ve

not had again. What strikes me

is that my reaction to being

deserted was to be thankful

and hopeful. But what I also

remember with no small amount

of discomfort is that we,

that I, walked most of the way

to the restaurant, without

even thinking about it.

I was hopeful once after being

abandoned but now I can’t walk

to romantic restaurants so

where does that leave me?

 

*Nonfiction*

 

God in the Details, excerpt 3 of 3, by me, footnotes removed:

 

In the brief mention of John Farmer at the end of “Higher Laws” is a very rich metaphor, or rather, a series of them. Really, a singular image is presented of a farmer sitting on his porch in the autumn, with a frost coming on and wisps of flute music on the wind; he contemplates the flux between the dirt of the fields and the yearnings of his heart and mind. The tale seems altogether simple at first, but Pickard enlightens the reader as to what lies between the cracks. He notes, for example, that the protagonist is placed near his threshold (pregnant detail that it is), that the season is clearly changing, nigh on a cold indoor one after a sunny outdoor one, that there and then placed, washed and somewhat restful, the man is “ready to retire within himself, to endure a temporary death of the senses in order to discover spiritual reality.” Pickard also notes that the beguiling flute music begins only as the farmer is engrossed in thoughts of the day, implying that the emotions and questions it engenders are part and parcel with the experiences of the day, and are only consciously brought out to a limited extent, “Beauty and spiritual insight are not divorced from the mundane, nor are they obtained by conscious effort.” In sum (and at length), Pickard says:

 

“With poetic intensity Thoreau restates the essential religious meaning of his Walden experience, that man is both natural and divine and that he must discover the spiritual laws which are a part of nature and yet beyond it. John Farmer must pursue his farming, for the flute’s tonal vision cannot be permanently grasped or even readily duplicated again. He must return to his labor and through it seek the higher laws. Redemption or a state of blessedness results from a close working with the material at hand instead of a romantic pursuit of a distant music. As an extension of the higher law, the mind must descend and redeem the body, transmuting the “grossest sensuality into purity and devotion.” The evident religious implications of Christ’s incarnation and redemption of mankind in “descent” and “redeem” serve here as an eternal emblem of ultimate rebirth. Purposefully undogmatic and limited by no sectarian creed, “Higher Laws” contains the essentials of all religious experience and affirms the validity of man’s spiritual quest.”

 

So Walden is here construed as essentially a religious book, and the chapter “Higher Laws” is at the center of the book’s purpose. Thoreau’s latter-day efforts at ecological cataloging can be seen properly through the lens of the following statement by Larry Rasmussen:

 

“The religious consciousness and dream that generates hope and a zest and energy for life is tapped in life itself. The finite bears the infinite, the transcendent is as close as the neighbor, soil, air, and sunshine itself. God, like the devil and life itself, is in the details. A turn to earth is thus also a turn to those sources that enable what has not yet come to pass to do so.”

 

Thoreau did turn to earth, and was paying exhaustive attention, in the latter part of his life, to details of the untamed and unaltered world he found (or dreamed of finding); he turned to earth with hope of witnessing God in the meta-pattern he thought he might uncover. But neither Thoreau’s science on the one hand nor his spiritual pursuit on the other is extremely remarkable in its own right; his powerful legacy is constituted by his attempts to reconcile and unite the two. That legacy, while as stubborn and misunderstood as the man himself, is, thankfully, rediscovered all the time and admired by those who want badly not to believe what they’ve been told about human cussedness, puniness, and shallowness, or what they’ve been told about this world as a purgatory in which we should not place too much love. The continued appreciation of Thoreau’s work is evidence of the strong faith that the natural world, the physical world, the one we see even while failing to comprehend it fully, is part of the principle, original core of the gift of life. The rest is imagination for now, but sacred–imagination to be revered no less, it’s true, but no more either, than the neighbor, soil, air, and sunshine in the first place.

 

Bellingham 1999

 

*Quotations*

 

I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.

–Barack Obama

 

There are greater pursuits than self-seeking. Glory is not a conceit. It is not a prize for being the most clever, the strongest, or the boldest. Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself.

–John McCain

 

I would never write a pessimistic book. I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.

–Michael Cunningham

 

I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that to be a playwright you had to write plays. I thought you could be a playwright and sulk.

–Terrence McNally

 

If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

–James Thurber

 

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.

–Arthur Miller

 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

If you treat an individual as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

–Goethe

 

All you need in the world is love and laughter. That’s all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.

–August Wilson

 

I feel like I’ve never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don’t know exactly where I fit in. There’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

–Sam Shepard

 

*Synesthesia*

 

I fault my grammar school, St Bernard’s, terribly for making me think I’m slow in math and science. I went my whole life thinking I couldn’t do them. When I got to college, I was scared of math and science and put myself in slow classes; I was never good about seeking out an advisor, so I was surprised when speaking to a teacher one day she said, “Sweetheart, you won’t know how good you are until you take a placement test.” That statement changed my life. I tested in math to a level just below calculus, which was saying a lot for a first-term student. Unfortunately, I didn’t get hip to my math aptitude until it was too late; physics would have to wait for my upper-division studies. I was the bane of my calculus class at community college; I asked an absurd number of questions, which pissed my classmates off. They never asked anything and acted like they understood it all. When I checked my grades on exams, which were posted on our teacher’s window, I was stunned to see that I was way ahead of the others; you see, once a concept sticks, it sticks for good.

 

At university, I studied physics and engineering. I asked many questions, always, and so was mostly reviled by other students again; only one person, an older woman, my whole career was bold enough to thank me for asking the questions others were afraid to. For physics one term I had a teacher who would hand back exams and say, “Those of you who are happy with your score may leave; the rest of you should stay so we can go over the questions.” I will never forget the looks I got as I promptly left (I aced my exams); to me it was simple: ask enough questions to understand deeply and ace the work; no one else had the courage to let themselves look a little foolish. It was the same in auto engineering, _especially_ in auto engineering; car jocks don’t like to admit to not knowing things. Calculus, physics, and engineering, and economics to a great extent, which I also excelled in, really do show the same patterns and formulae: the essence of them all is to monitor the value of something as it changes quantitatively and qualitatively in time and space.

 

Physics exams were the pinnacle of a multi-sensory experience for me. When first looking at the questions, my heart would quicken and I would think, “How in the hell am I supposed to know the value in question with only the given information?” Then after some kneading of the ideas, clarity would set in; suddenly I would be able to make connections I didn’t know I had inside of me, and colors would fly, literally. By the time I’d finished, I’d created what was to me a perfect musical composition; I’ve always said science is easier than humanities if only because in science one always knows for sure if one got a given question right or not. There are hardly any certainties in the humanities, and it takes a great deal more brain power to handle uncertainty than certainty. So I would finish my exams, adding some embellishments, and leave the room, my head filled with orchestrations, lyrical and musical manifestations of the formulae I’d just straightened out.

 

I’d never had physics before college, where my colleagues all studied physics in high school. Here I was thinking I was dumb at math and science and I got all A’s in the various math-based disciplines. Whatever tests they’d given me in grammar school obviously couldn’t measure the particular nature of my math aptitude. That aptitude is highly multi sensory; when I went to college finally at 24, I’d had enough life experience that I was open to letting my mind work whatever way it wanted to. I found great satisfaction in the perfection inherent to math and science. These days my mind is all about humanities, and I would say I’m constantly unsettled because of it–there are no perfect, harmonious, naturally-colored answers in humanities, in play writing, in philosophy, in environmental social science. While I miss what I consider the simplicity of math and science, I feel it’s important for me to use my mind to focus on the more intangible areas of our lives.

 

*Physics*

 

Why refrigerators with the freezer on the bottom are much more efficient than refrigerators with the freezer on top: cold air sinks

 

Why refrigerators with the freezer on the bottom are much more efficient than refrigerators with the freezer on top: hot air rises

 

Why instant gas water heaters are much more efficient than old-school boilers: heat only the water needed without keeping 60 gallons ready at all times, sitting there useless

 

Why harvesting methane from landfills and waste piles makes sense as an interim solution: like solar rays, methane is a gift from the cosmos, a gift which needs to be used instead of ignored

 

Why no burning of anything will be allowed in the future energy economy: burning always produces carbon pollution and carbon pollution is the cause of global warming

_____

 

I once spoke to a family member about electric cars. She said, “Oh, I need to pull my horses so electric cars don’t work.” I don’t fault her for that misunderstanding; the oil/auto industry would have us believe exactly that. But the facts are exactly the opposite. The weakness of an electric motor comes in at high RPMs, which is when a typical internal-combustion engine finally begins to perform decently.

 

Amount of torque an electric motor has at stall (that is, at a dead stop): 100%

 

Amount of torque a gas engine has at stall: 0

 

Type of motor/engine in every single fork lift on the planet: electric

 

What this fact means about electric motors: they can carry and lift FAR more than gasoline engines

 

The real problem with electric motors and cars: BATTERY technology; sure it’s great that you can burn rubber from a red light or stop sign in an electric car (I did so many times), and can tow an insane number of pounds, but that doesn’t help much if you can only go 20 miles; the real bottleneck is that the oil/auto industry has actively suppressed research and development of new battery technology, which would enable batteries with a longer-lasting charge. They’re certainly out there already (zinc-air, and others) and ready for use in vehicles, but the massive moneyed interests of the oil/auto industry have made sure such things are shelved and kept secret.

 

The first vehicle ever to receive a speeding ticket in New York City was an electric car in 1899. Imagine if we’d been developing electric cars ever since then! Instead, the industry saw how many more trillions of dollars there was to be made by pushing comparatively inefficient internal-combustion-engine cars. Otherwise, we’d have electric cars which could not only burn rubber, but could also travel many hundreds of miles on a single charge. Instead, pioneers in battery technology (which industry has a vested interest in covering up) have seen their life’s work go down the drain. And we’re left with dirty (whether it’s gasoline, bio-diesel, or compressed natural gas), inefficient, and inferior vehicles. Please push for investment in battery research and development.

 

*Economics*

 

I wrote:

 

“My best advice is this: get used to tea. Tea can be grown anywhere in the United States; coffee cannot be, not even close.”

 

For many years, I wanted nothing more from life than to create and live on a self-sufficient homestead. I studied every single aspect of such an endeavor in depth, wrung each part if it dry. So it is that I can say I have successfully grown camellia sinensis, the plant from which all tea comes (if it doesn’t come from  this plant, it is properly called a tisane) in both Bellingham Washington and also Land o Lakes Florida. You see, to be self sufficient, you would certainly need to grow your own caffeine. That used to be the way I thought of everything, in terms of its use for self sufficiency. I have a book called One Circle from Ecology Action which describes in detail (with slide rules!) how to grow everything necessary to stay alive on the smallest amount of land possible, from calories, to vitamins, to micrograms of tryptophan. I once aimed to live from that book, and dutifully grew millet, barley, and enough potatoes to last through winter.

 

Needless to say, I gave up on that dream years ago. While such a thing would be physically impossible for me now, I do see clearly that this way of living, simply, independently, hand to mouth, is exactly the direction we must head. Like it or not. We’ve ignored the signs for so long, we no longer will have any choice in the matter. Within our lifetimes, China (or SOMEbody) WILL out compete us for oil, and banks, and wheat. Though they don’t eat all that much wheat in China, for China, a little is all it takes to make A LOT. But my main point is that I know from experience that tea, and wheat, and potatoes couldn’t be easier to grow. The most important thing we’re in danger of losing is the KNOWLEDGE of how to do such things. Knowledge of self sufficiency may indeed already be lost to the masses. Please do what you can to keep it alive; it will be our lifeline once the shit hits the fan and I can hardly walk anymore.

 

Yes indeed I need to rejoin my food co-op!

 

*Politics*

 

I distinctly remember writing these words a couple of years ago, at the mid-term elections: WE WON! And we won in so many ways it’s impossible to count them all. American faith in its democracy is restored; and the world’s faith in the good intentions of American democracy are too. When children are told in school, “You can grow up to be president if you want,” it now actually means something. We won in both houses of congress; we scored for women’s reproductive rights; we scored for sane environmental policies; we scored for blue-collar America. We scored for ending a war WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN IN IN THE FIRST PLACE. I know I don’t need to remind readers that the reasons citizens were given for the invasion and occupation of Iraq were all lies: NO weapons of mass destruction, NO connection to 9/11, NO connection to Osama Bin Laden. We need to leave now and minimize the damage (hard to do when a million innocent men, women, and children have been killed); we do not need to and we should not “win.”

 

We even made great steps toward ending marijuana prohibition, which is much more costly, destructive, and senseless than the prohibition on alcohol was–and who doesn’t know what a horrible affair that was! There will come a day when we look back on marijuana prohibition as if it were left over from the stone ages. Massachusetts became the first state in the union to decriminalize pot across the board (possession of less than an ounce incurs only a fine, payable by mail). In the last part, you see that the powers that be are getting hip to just how much money can be made from regulation of this ancient material rather than prohibition, and the huge costs of keeping it illegal. We also won a number of more medical-marijuana initiatives, with Michigan becoming the first mid-western medical-marijuana state.

 

All in all, I’m proud again to be an American. I didn’t realize just how UN-proud I had become after eight years of hell with Bush. My whole life feels better; I’m deeply happy in a way I haven’t been for far too long. I have faith again that what citizens want and believe in can, with effort, become reality. I have faith that our good standing around the world will be restored. All this because electing the first black president is a monumental act; we did in fact change the course of history. Poor Obama may have inherited a bigger mess, of greater magnitude and import, than any president before in history. I know we all wish him the best of luck; he’s going to need it. Isn’t it something that a black man has inherited such a mess? One wonders if the judgement placed on his head will reflect the real tumult of the times.

 

Clearly, though, we all believe President-elect Obama when he talks about his plans to get us out of these hellacious quagmires, from the wars, to oil dependence and pollution, to the plights of the weak and poor; he’ll need an awful lot of help behind the scenes, and I’m only too sure he’ll get it. When the Obama camp says WE did this they’re not lying: 136 million of us voted, the highest turnout since 1908. And the outpouring of energy and support was astounding; every single person or organization that could have done reminded me to vote, from the Decemberists, to Facebook, to grocery stores; on election day volunteers were about in my neighborhood offering the drive people to the polling station. All that and we still only got 67% of eligible voters! What an outrage that even with what we’re calling massive turnouts, it’s still barely more than half. Two things Americans take for granted: the right and duty to vote and clean drinking water. Inattention to both is what stands between us and a better world.

 

You know something that strikes me as miraculous is this: the secret service will now be putting their lives on the line for a black family. Afforded the highest level of protection in the entire nation, FINALLY. How perfect is that! A black family will finally be living in a building originally built by slaves. I’m sure Chuck D, KRS One, and Ice T are all very happy right now. As well they should be.

_____

 

Excerpt from a letter from Michael Moore to his fans:

 

“Today we celebrate the triumph of decency over personal attack, of peace over war, of intelligence over the belief that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs just 6000 years ago. What will it be like to have a smart president? Science, banished for eight years, will return. Imagine supporting our country’s greatest minds as they seek to cure illness, discover new forms of energy, and work to save the planet. I know, pinch me.

 

“We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment, and creativity. The arts and artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woodie Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “Gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding?

 

“What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything is Possible.”

 

We natural perfumers are planning to make collectively a scent to mark this momentous occasion in history. My vote for a name and slogan is “O: Anything is Possible.”

_____

 

I watched Tuesday’s returns exclusively on the BBC, and I will do so from now on. The English have much deeper understandings of America and Americans, and more extensive knowledge of the contemporary details and history of our country, than most of us give them credit for. The high intellectual character of the show was only marred by a few American guests. Seriously. They did have some good guests, including Matt Frei himself, Jesse Jackson, and Earl Blumenauer, democratic congressman from Oregon, in addition to numerous others from both sides of the pond; they also set up shop in some great places, like Times Square, Republican headquarters in Colorado, and Grant Park _before_ the rally. I get all my news from the BBC anyway, but I’d never thought of watching presidential-election returns on it. It was not on cable, but they’ve recently upgraded their multimedia on news.bbc.co.uk and I was able to watch it full screen via the web.

 

By Matt Frei for the BBC:

 

“On 21 January 2009, a residence that was built by African slaves more than two centuries ago will be inhabited by an African-American, his wife and their two young children. They will move in not as builders, cleaners or aides but as the nation’s First Family. A 47-year-old junior senator called Barack Hussein Obama, whose father grew up herding goats in Kenya and whose wife is descended from African slaves will reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Some 147 years after the end of the official end of the Civil War and 44 years after the Civil Rights Act, America has finally exorcised its most stubborn ghost of the past: the original sin of slavery.

 

“Despite all the milestones of the recent past, including two African-American Secretaries of State under George W Bush, the legacy of shame lingered on quietly. Frequently it was met with a wall of silence or a welter of euphemisms. Racial prejudice will not end tomorrow. But the debate about it will surely become more honest. We can finally bury the Bradley effect, which had been analysed ad nauseam on cable TV and the web. Americans voted for Barack Obama for a variety of reasons. Some because he was an African-American. Others because he was young, cool and clever. But almost everyone who did vote for him surely came to the conclusion that this was a man with sober judgement.

 

“Tuesday’s vote was also a vehement rejection of the Bush legacy and the candidate who had become attached to it. From the moment it became obvious that John McCain was going to be the Republican nominee, both Hillary Clinton and Mr Obama, who were still busy slugging it out in the primaries, hung the albatross of the Bush years around the former Navy pilot’s neck. They tried to make Mr McCain’s first term look like President Bush’s third. It worked because the Vietnam vet had sided with Bush on the Iraq war. In an election in which change had become the resounding mantra, any Republican, even the erstwhile maverick McCain, was swimming against the tide.

 

“But it would be wrong to think of this as a tidal wave in favour of the Democrats. Their grandees on Capitol Hill are almost as unpopular as their counterparts from the Grand Old Party. The 2008 race was a people’s revolt against America’s political Establishment. Yes, even Sarah Palin, the moose slayer, shared the revulsion at the smug politics of dynastic entitlement. This was the lesson that Hillary Clinton had learned far too late in the primaries. The former First Lady argued that she could handle the top job from day one, because she had seen how it’s done at close quarters. Why, in a gene pool of 300 million people, must the presidential ticket include someone called Clinton or Bush?

 

“Mr Obama’s genius was to understand this yearning for change, give it a blindingly obvious name and then plan for it meticulously. The “skinny kid with a funny name”, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and came of age in Harvard and Chicago embodied the uprooted, multicultural, messy reality of modern America and made no excuses about it. As he put it once, mocking the hypocrisy of Bill Clinton: “I smoked dope and, yes, I inhaled. Wasn’t that the point?”

 

“But Barack Obama is more Tiger Woods than Jimmy Hendrix. He is the first candidate to seize on the insurrectionist power of the internet. Mr McCain prided himself on being a stranger to the web. The Clintons thought they had harnessed its powers because they were friends with the people who owned large chunks of it. But Mr Obama went straight from the service providers to the individual users. At one of his first rallies in Washington DC, I was struck by the dozens of students who had turned up with their own laptop computers to process the new arrivals. They collected the $15 (£9.40) entry fee and, more importantly, they harvested e-mail addresses. In one afternoon, Mr Obama had managed to raise $150,000 and recruit thousands of footsoldiers, who would be sent personal e-mails, instructions and reminders throughout the long campaign.

 

“Mr Obama raised more than $600m. Half of it came from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood. But the other half came from two million first-time donors, many of whom were also first-time voters. As the president-elect used to put it: “It’s all about YOU!” The first time I heard it, in the frozen landscape of New Hampshire, it made me cringe. But then I looked around and noticed that the audience was lapping it up. And the only black face in this vast and shivering crowd belonged to Obama himself. He may have started his campaign as an insurgent. But he ran it like a field marshal. He didn’t just receive Colin Powell’s cherished endorsement, he also used his strategy of overwhelming force to win one battle after another.

 

“In the ground war, he established field offices in states where no Democrat had won in a generation. In Virginia and Indiana, which had last voted for a Democrat in 1964, he established at least 50 such local operations, used the money collected over the internet to employ hundreds of paid staff and then used the e-mail addresses of the “citizen fundraisers” to recruit thousands of volunteers. In the air war, Obama bombarded the average household with five times as many TV ads as his opponent. John McCain, the veteran flyboy from the Vietnam War, was like the Red Baron taking on a B52 bomber. On Tuesday it all came together. There was the message of hope and change. Yes, this is dangerously open to wishful thinking, it raises expectations that the new president may never be able to meet, but it has been music to American ears, tired of the cacophony of fear and resentment.

 

“Then there was the meticulous planning of a disciplined campaign that didn’t leak, didn’t quarrel, kept wedded to one central theme and, crucially, didn’t panic when the American economy was having a nervous breakdown. Mr Obama’s cool judgement during the financial meltdown was the crucial turning point: it made the impetuous McCain seem reckless. It allowed Americans to imagine the younger man as the sober, designated driver of this country. Tuesday showed us once again that history travels in packs. The 4 November was the day the internet triumphed over television as the prime medium of politics.

 

“The Starbucks generation overtook the Dunkin’ Donuts generation. The baby boomers–now in their sixties–bowed to a tribe of politicians so fresh they’re still looking for a cliche. It was the day that politics caught up with demographics, that multi-cultural America gave voice to African-Americans as never before, but also to Asian-Americans and Hispanics. You would expect Louise Roberts, the black hairstylist in Culpeper, Virginia, to cry and “praise the lord for this gift”. Her mother and father couldn’t even sit in the front of the bus or share a cheese sandwich with white Americans 45 years ago.

 

“But I never expected to see my neighbour Dave, a staunch Republican and a partner in a Washington law firm, pin an Obama-Biden poster into his immaculate front lawn on the night of Halloween. Moderate Republicans–call them Obama Republicans after Reagan Democrats–will be a tempering influence on the new president and his Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. He will ignore them at his peril. But Obama the silver-tongued lawyer has always preferred consensus to conflict. Like most of his predecessors in the White House, he will move to the centre and realise that this is the only place from which to govern a country that loves ideas but distrusts ideology.”

 

*Music*

 

I would like to highlight here Kurt Elling’s phenomenal work on Moonlight Serenade. This is a jazz standard which everyone’s done; Charlie Haden, a bassist, recorded it on Haunted Heart, a terrific record with his Quartet West. Elling listened to that record, as all of us jazzoids did, and liked Haden’s solo on the tune–a bass solo–so much that he wrote a vocalese to go with it. That means he wrote words to go with every note of Haden’s solo; his performance on it is miraculous–here he took a bass solo and he he uses his voice in the upper registers, gliding into and out of falsetto.

 

The words themselves are quite remarkable, as Elling’s vocalese always is (check out Tanya Jean from The Messenger); a big reason for Elling’s  way with words is that he dropped out of divinity school to become a jazz singer. He is the best male jazz singer in the business, hands down. I saw Elling once up in Vancouver; he started the show with this tune, which had just been released (on Flirting with Twilight). I was stunned that he would start things off with such a tremendous piece of work; the second this vocalese was finished, I was the lone person in the audience, standing room only in a large theater, who went nuts. Elling smiled to himself; I reckon he was thinking, “At least SOMEbody got it.”

 

“Understand, the night,

when she flashes her sparkling eyes

at dusk,

she flirts with twilight.

When the noise of day dies away

the night and twilight stay and stay,

making quiet love up high over the town.

And the gentle twilight gives his light,

making a queen of night.

‘If I could I would write a sonnet

of the night as a remembrance of your eyes.

And if you promise not to tell I could

whisper the words

in the dark

like a lover.

We could count the stars,

the shooting stars,

and talk of lovers through the ages

who had lived out of their dreams.’

Such will and spirit, courage,

they needed to live in a dream,

to burn with every breath so serene,

as if they had been the first

to find love at all,

like night and twilight.

They were the first of lovers ever.

Could we be like them?

Hold onto one another

until dawn comes;

then we’ll  fly off

and dream until

night and twilight kiss again.”

_____

 

Citizen mix, November Changed Everything 08

 

1. Une Annee Sans Lumiere, Arcade Fire

2. Not Fade Away (Buddy Holly/Norman Petty), James Taylor

3. Measuring Cups, Andrew Bird

4. Holding Back the Years (Hucknall/Moss), Erin Bode

5. Mercy of the Fallen, Dar Williams

6. Independence, Nicolai Dunger

7. Failure, Martin Sexton

8. Cut Me in Two, Rocky Votolato

9. The Place, Mirah

10. My People, Angie Stone

11. Suzanne (Leonard Cohen), James Taylor

12. Skin is My, Andrew Bird

13. Rebellion (Lies), Arcade Fire

14. Easy Street, Josh Rouse

15. If I were a Little Star, Nicolai Dunger

16. Holiday (Maness), Erin Bode

17. Treepeople, Rocky Votolato

18. Haiti, Arcade Fire

19. On Broadway (Leiber/Mann/Stoller/Weil), James Taylor

20. A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left, Andrew Bird

21. Slighted, Mirah

 

Peace, love, and ATOM jazz