Belligerent Rednecks and No-Good Muslins (and Xmas with family and friends)

I had a lovely Christmas dinner at a family friend's place in our neighborhood in Brooklyn. The main sources of entertainment for the occasion were a Hollywood writer, his 3 year-old daughter and Max the cat. The hostess, who I've known since I can remember knowing people who are my parents' age, explained how the cat had come to its comfortable existence in Brooklyn Heights after growing up on the streets of Islamabad (I would explain, but I think that story will be better in your imagination). She finished the story with "and that's how we ended up with an Islamo-terrorist cat." I feel awkward printing that in a public forum on flat text, because it looks bad, but in the context of friendship and mutually understood liberal leanings, it was nothing more than a throwaway joke (she later backed up her claim with the evidence that Max had torn up a feather boa that very morning).

Later, I got to thinking about why that joke makes any sense at all. If the cat had been from Britain, maybe be would be a "stuffy intellectual" or maybe if Max was Hawaiian, he would be a "surfer cat." He could have been an Indian yogi cat or a Japanese robot cat. As it was, he had immigrated from Islamabad, so he was an "Islamo-terrorist." I want to make clear, in case it's not already, that the jokemaker does not think that the Middle East is packed to the brim with terrorists, and that if there's any commentary in the backdrop, it has to do with the loose usage of that sort of term that's infected too many conversations, both public and private.

It made me think about the rumors about Obama and his background that penetrated into some corners that not a lot of information reaches. "He's the antichrist" said a student from the community college. "You're voting for a Muslim," said a guy in a Walmart parking lot. My favorite was the secondhand story I heard of an old man holding up a sign that read "Obama is a no-good muslin." That's right, folks. Our next president is secretly one of these:

And a no-good one at that.

Over the course of the campaign I sometimes thought about why the muslim rumor took hold. For instance, I don't think it would have worked to call him a Soviet spy. I bet you could have made (certain) people believe that he's plotting something with Robert Mugabe, but I don't think that story would have gone viral. No, a totally false rumor of that kind needs to play off associations that have been pounded into the zeitgeist. The same connection of ideas that allows my liberal friend to make a joke about her Islamo-terrorist cat allows others to make people actually believe that we have an Islamo-terrorist president. The string of logic, as I understand it, goes something like this:
1) He's a black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama.
2) He spent part of his upbringing in Indonesia
3) He's a muslim
3b) He's a terrorist
Optional- 4) He's the antichrist

If you want the more fleshed out version you have to throw in a few details and a picture in between 2 and 3, and a Bible passage or two between 3 and 4, but I think the bare bones picture is more interesting and descriptive, because for so many people, the whole picture clicks into place very easily, especially the step from 3 to 3b. Some of them had details, and some of them didn't, but the basic picture was what mattered.

I came across the full range of beliefs and opinions over the course of my 3 months in Richmond County. There were two people that stick out in my memory. One was a man I spoke to going door to door on a beautiful late afternoon in September. He seemed reasonable, and at least somewhat informed on the campaigns and the issues. He liked Obama better on the economy, healthcare, education, foreign policy... and yet he was leaning toward McCain. Why? Well, he'd been getting these emails from friends and family, about how Obama was a muslim and a terrorist with a purely anti-American agenda. He wasn't sure if they were true, but what if they were? Could we really risk having such a radical as our president? Obama was potentially better, but McCain was safer. I chatted with him for a while, and maybe brought him back toward the middle, if not all the way to my side (I, to my surprise, really took to the persuasion part of the job). He was fascinating to me, because he seemed perfectly reasonable and informed, and yet he had been roped in by the extremist noise. Before him, my concept of people who believed those rumors could more or less be summed up as "belligerent redneck." He forced my ideas about that to become more amorphous and open-ended.

The other opinion that comes quickly to my mind was from a conversation that I overheard in a diner. I was waiting for my food while a family next to me discussed the election. Father, mother, parents' friend and older brother were all solidly for McCain. The one holdout was younger brother who I silently cheered on while he held his ground despite attacks from all sides. The quote that forced me to stifle a response and a lot of laughter came from older brother. They were discussing Mr. Obama's shady past when he said something that proved to me that whatever these ideas require to take hold, clear definition of terms is not on the list:
"I don't think Obama is a terrorist, but I think he's maybe a little more of a terrorist than McCain."

Fish Out of Water

On a sunny day in Durham, I learned unexpectedly (and not the hard way) about what happens when a plane crashes in the ocean. It was during my six-week campaign fellowship that preceded my hiring as a paid staff member. Being a fellow was different from being a staffer in that I 1) wasn't paid, 2) was in Durham, not Richmond County, 3) would not necessarily continue on to the election as a staffer, and 4) did not feel the psychotic pressure of being a staffer. As a fellow, I hustled more and was better at voter registration than most of the fellows I was working with, so I got high marks from the higher-ups, and I could relax when I felt like it. As a staffer, I was expected to kick ass everyday, I was rarely the most competent person in the room, and I got daily reminders that if we screw this up, the world is fucked.

So anyway, one Sunday afternoon, two fellows and myself were running our first door-to-door canvass. Once we got our volunteers trained and mobile, I went out with another fellow to do some canvassing ourselves. Along the way, we met an old white guy in this mostly black neighborhood who asked me for change, and, I think, registered to vote. Later, when we were gathering our things once the canvass had finished, he wandered over to where we were and started chatting with me.

One situation that occurred a lot with this job is the one where someone you don't know well decides to talk to you forever and ever. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this happens a lot more in the South. Sometimes it was really excruciating, especially when I had things to do, but this guy was interesting, and I felt like I could make myself useful by listening to him so that everyone else didn't have to, and could get other things done. He talked to me for about ten minutes, and he was, to say the least, an open book.

He was a broken-hearted fish washed too far inland, but he had stories to tell from it. He was divorced, and his wife wanted him back, but he had caught her with another man, and he couldn't risk being so badly hurt again. From what I could tell, the girl could only temporarily satiate him anyway. The only thing that would truly heal him is water.

The person who comes to my mind when I think of that man is the father character in Big Fish. I feel a strong personal connection to that character, because he had a deep need for water and telling stories, and the two seemed connected in an abstract but meaningful way. This guy was similar, except that i bet if he was back in the water, he wouldn't feel the need to tell his stories.

We happened to be by a public pool while we talked. He was surprised that there could be a pool in the area without him knowing about it. He would have preferred an ocean, but he had no means to travel, and a pool in the neighborhood was worth knowing about.

When I spoke to him, he was without money or employment, but in his past he had had possibly the most adventerous real-life job I have ever heard of. He was a rescue scubadiver for the navy. Meaning, among other things, when a boat sank or a plane crashed in the ocean, he would dive after it to try and save people. He told tales of rescuing people and sharing on an oxygen tank so that they could both make it back. He once won a bet by staying underwater for two minutes. He showed me two different scars from shark attacks. They were marks of achievement. Those wounds may have been the only physical thing he had remaining from his previous life.

Some stories, maybe even most, are best when we stop telling them. I don't mean the zingers we bring up for laughs at parties, I just mean the echoes of the past that play out in our bodies and minds. This guy was different. He practically was his story. His tales of who he was gave his existence a skeletal framework. Still, I can imagine him diving off of a helicopter, plunging into the ocean and all the dust accumulated in the wrinkles of his skin washing away.

Wake up Song

I have a bunch of posts at least half way done for this blog, but for some reason they haven't made it up yet. There's one about the guy I was staying with, another about a guy I met in Durham, and another on church. Those will show up eventually, but I was inspired to put down a few words about something that happened tonight.

In the first post on this blog, I wrote about how I'm not sure how to handle all the thanks and praise I've been getting from friends and strangers for my work on the campaign. At the time, it made me feel awkward, because I wanted to respond with something like, "Honestly, I was just doing my job, and probably a lot of other people would have done it better." That's not what I would say of course, but it was always lingering behind my words. I've gotten better at taking in the thanks of others, but there was still something external about it. The praise only affected me to a point, and my responses came from that amount of depth, and no further.

Tonight all that was nowhere on my mind when I went to see a friend's episodic, gay soap opera. Every week they perform at a bar that has an upstairs part with a stage. I'd been there once before for karaoke night when I delivered a stirring rendition of Sweet Jane. The show follows the drama and exploits of a bunch of gay folk in Chicago. I was lucky enough to see the musical episode. Toward the end, completely unrelated to the plot, a character ran on stage and said "I've been living under a rock for the last month, who won the presidential election?" At that moment the cast broke into an ode to Obama. It was funny and silly like most of the rest of the show, but in those 20 seconds of song I found myself feeling unexpectedly proud. When Obama won I was happy that he would be the next president, and that the journey was over. When he started naming cabinet positions, I got excited because it made the idea of him being president more real to me. When the gay musical interrupted itself to be happy about his victory, it hit me in the chest. No one (that I know of) has ever felt the need to write and perform a song in celebration of something I was a part of.

My mind is satisfied knowing that we have a president who may just be able to steer this country through the layered, textured mess we find ourselves in, but my body doesn't know so much about that. It can't taste the recession. It can't see the wars. It can't touch the issues around where we get our energy. It heard the song though. It heard it and it liked it. Feelings source from our bodies and while the rules of bodies are logical, they are often hidden from our conscious minds. I could tell other people that I prefer that they thank me in song, but it might make more sense to tell myself that a lot of people are really happy about this, and some of them are just going to read the New York Times and thank the Obama staffers they happen to come across.

The Lyon King

If you are ever driving south on highway 177 in North Carolina, and you pass the border into South Carolina, use the driveway of the closed down gambling house* to turn around, and drive back to the last driveway in North Carolina. You'll see a house with a vegetable garden, a few horses milling around and maybe a truck parked on one side of the house. Knock on the door, and say you're my friend. You might want to time this so that you show up around dinner, but don't tell Lyon I said that.

*Right across the N.C./S.C. border are a million little casinos and gaming houses that sprung up when South Carolina made them legal about ten years ago, and then illegal about five years after that. The end result is a whole bunch of very colorful abandoned buildings that once provided gambling at a minimal distance for N.C. residents. Lyon could have walked to them.

Lyon and Christian Bell opened their home to me from the middle of August through the election. I had room, board and much appreciated company for that entire time. Lyon often said that he wished he could have done for the campaign, but he probably did more than anyone in Richmond.

Before I moved in with Lyon, I was living on the outskirts of Fayetteville with a charming Honduran family. I would have stayed there through the election if it didn't take me an hour and a half to get to Richmond County. That family had hosted other staffers and was a known commodity. Unfortunately, the campaign hadn't identified any potential hosts in Richmond County, so I had to find one on my own. I wasn't really sure how I was going to do this, but I figured I should host a couple of volunteer events and get to know people before saying, "By the way, mind if I crash at your place for the next 3 months?" I was going to have to ask that question to someone, but cold calling for voter registration drives was hard enough.

Then, one night during call time at the Fayetteville office, "Bell, Lyon" came up on my list, and my practiced thumbs entered his number. I soon realized that I had the volunteer you fantasize about during call time but almost never get. He had helped during the primary and was willing to do whatever he could from now until the election. We chatted for a bit, and eventually he asked me where I was staying. I said Fayetteville, but I was looking for a place more in his area. "We have a spare room," he said. He had known me for ten minutes.

His generosity didn't end there, and I can probably thank him for whatever scraps of sanity I had as the campaign dragged on. No matter how strange and crazy my day was, no matter how many strangers had yelled at me, or how much my numbers fell short, I had Lyon and Christian and Lyon's cooking to come home to.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that they were probably the most cultured people I met in my three months in Richmond. They had traveled all over the world, worked (as producers, designers, creative consultants) with a zillion music celebrities (the Jacksons, Mama Cass, many more that I can't remember). Lyon had met three sitting presidents and sometimes talked about Bill Clinton's charisma. They had lived in L.A., Paris, Japan, toured Europe... and yet, there they were on the same plot of land that they grew up on.

Lyon, after leaving Richmond County as soon as he could, swore he'd never go back. There was a big world waiting for him, and for a number of reasons he needed to move on. It took him decades before he had to retract that statement, but his mother was ailing, and of his many siblings, Lyon was the one to leave what he was doing and return to take care of her. Mrs. Bell passed some years ago, but Lyon stuck around. Now he's taking care of Christian who suffered a brain aneurysm in Japan, and hasn't been able to live alone since. If it sounds like he is trapped at home, just as he was at the beginning of life, know that deep down, Lyon is a caretaker. He takes care of people, not because he is trapped by his circumstances, but because he is obligated by his own soul.

There's more to say about him, he's a fascinating man, but that's enough for now, and perhaps you'll hear some of his stories if you ever find yourself driving south on NC 177.

Land of Few Cafes

Here I sit in the essence of what I lacked in Richmond County. It was for the best really. If the RC had coffee shops, I might have been sucked by the chance to spend hours with hot beverages, my thoughts, tasty pastries, a book, a refill, the internet, my thoughts….

I really like coffee shops. I like coffee and things that go with coffee. I like reading among other people. I can internet schmooze with the best of em. More than all that I like the culture that coffee shops create. They're as much about sitting and thinking as they are about purchasing a particular product. I am a ruminator, a probosculator, a dreamer, a wonderer. It's nice that there are places where people gather to do those things.

And in Richmond county there was none of that. I knew of two cafes in my area. They were both closed by 3pm. In fact, I'm not sure I ever saw either of them open. Even if they were, I expect they weren't really what I was looking for. There was a place named "Fatz' Cafe," which sounded promising. I gave them a call, and asked if they had a wireless internet connection, to which I got this reply: "No, but the wife has it at home."

That was one of my first big, "Oh wow, I am in the South" moments. That was a line you simply would not hear in the worlds am I used to. One thing I'm trying to get a handle on, and give others a sense of, with this blog is the South. The South is real, I can tell you that much, and it plays by different rules. There's a different vibe down there, and it manifests a different world. I was very interested in the lack of coffee shops in Richmond, because it seemed to capture something fundamental about the difference between where I come from and where I was. It wasn't just the lack of cafes, it was the absence of the sort of culture that would support a cafe. The environment is less academic, less contemplative, less symbolic, less abstract. Minds are mostly occupied by one's family, friends and job. Concerns were 99% local and tangible. In some ways it's bad- people generally didn't have much mental space for issues that they couldn't see with their own eyes. In some ways it's good- without those concerns, people couldn't use them, to quote the late Elliot Smith, to "fight problems with bigger problems."

At Oberlin, where I went to college, we would sometimes refer to the "Oberlin bubble," the mental outline around the campus that made us go for weeks or months with scarcely a thought to the outside world. The Oberlin bubble was a fascinating place to live. It was a co-creation of some 2800+ vivacious, angsty, arty, emotional, funny, active, stressed, hormonal and busy college students. When the outside world pierced through into your mind, it was usually because it demanded to, not because there was a lack of action within the bubble.

Richmond had a similar thing, but it wasn't a bubble. For most people, the world simply ended somewhere in or around the neighboring counties. People were concerned with the places and people that they had physical contact with. There wasn't much interest in travel. There were exceptions of course, and I was fortunate enough to live with two of them, but many people had been in the area their whole lives, and weren't about to leave.

I was a yankee (I didn't realize people still used that word to mean something other than someone who plays professional baseball in the Bronx) but I was also halfway to an alien. I was from the lands beyond. I don't go to church or eat meat. I like to write and watch absurd internet videos. I'm friendly in my way, but not in their way. "There's sumptin sumptin sumptin sumptin weird about you. Sumptin different." That's from a guy in Billy's Chop Shop. He spoke for many down there. He spoke for the majority who would be just as out of place in this Logan Square coffee shop as I was down there.

NC as Waking Dream

Last night I had a strange and wonderful dream. I'm afraid many of the details are hidden just on the other side of a veil in my memory. What I do remember is being with a group of people. My relationship to them felt like we had been on a sort of retreat together, but we had grown close very quickly. The most peculiar and wonderful thing was that we all had an animal familiar sort of thing with us. I had a seagull (perhaps Jonathan Livingston Seagull) who followed me everywhere I went and represented some part of my soul like a daimon in the Golden Compass books (read immediately). Everyone, or at least everyone on the retreat had one of those in my dream. We played and learned tricks with other people's daimons. It was a time of elation and discovery removed from the usual rhythms of daily life (even within the context of the dream).

The strangest thing that I remember now is that when I woke up from that dream I wanted to cry with joy. I wasn't quite at tears, but I remember letting out a few dry sobs. They felt audible, but I can't honestly say if they were or not. Looking back on it now, those sobs of joy may have been a dream too, but the emotion was perfectly real. The reality of emotions exists in the strength with which they affect your mind and body, not what they are in response to. Really, neither waking or dreaming seems an accurate description. Perhaps it was the state described by the Spanish word fiaca- between waking and sleep.

I remember my dreams sometimes, but I usually don't feel obligated them to write them down. The ones with a big feeling attached to them I usually try to at least tell someone about if not write it down. I had one in NC about leaving a bar with my friends and going to this weird, underground hospital for deformed children. They may have been offering me a job, or I was supposed to help or something. I think that place was acknowledged in a later dream. It stuck with me for whatever reason.

I've had big dreams about watching shimmering golden eagles fly over a convertible I was riding in with a couple of friends. I got ice cream with my friends, then they left and I talked with one of the golden eagles about love.

Another time I had a dream about running around a giant hotel with long, wide hallways filled with fascinating things (don't you hate it when you're describing a fairly innocuous sounding dream, and all of a sudden it sounds extremely Freudian?) and anyway at the end of the dream I was getting ready to turn into a phoenix, and that was cool. That was years ago, but it stuck with me too.

The whole NC experience was kind of like one of those dreams. Different in form, and definitely content, but similar in weight. I was somewhere different, and big things that involved me were happening. One day I knew I would wake up in Chicago and be laughing with my friends about the crazy experience I just had, but for the time being the days were long, and my job was taxing on every level. Things would go wrong, things would go well. This thing was missing. That thing was printed for no reason. This volunteer wasn't helping. That one was generally very helpful, but not today. The fate of the world depended on us. The impressiveness of our numbers depended on us. Would we succeed in stretching McCain thinner? Yes. Would we succeed in winning NC? No idea. I followed the polls on fivethirtyeight.com and electoral-vote.com daily and I never had any idea if we were actually going to pull out the state. I would come home late to Lyon's delicious cooking and the therapy of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow.

The whole experience had a different color tingeing it- A different rhythm guiding the clunky dance of my days and weeks. The people had a different way to them as well. The thing had the weight of real life, but a different form, and certainly different content. If felt like a rite of passage or a powerful dream.

Chum

Nothing caused more misery in my 3 months in Richmond county than yard signs. I'm not joking. The very first volunteer meeting I held had a whopping three attendees. One was a solid volunteer, willing to do what he could once or twice a week. The second had heard that something involving Obama was happening at Billy's Chop Shop, but wasn't all that interested in volunteering. The third wasn't there to volunteer either. She wanted to know why there weren't very many yard signs in Richmond county, and when we would be getting more. This was a sign of things to come. I would be dealing with those questions every day, usually many times a day, from then through election day (yes, including election day itself).

So why didn't we have many yard signs? Well, despite having a fundraising operation of absurd proportions, the Obama camp was often very stingy with its cash. Maybe not when it came to advertising, but they didn't want to spend on things that would add up to a significant cost when multiplied by the amount of ground they were trying to cover if those things... um... didn't help win the election. Yard signs and other "chum" might break even moneywise, but they require time, energy and coordination that could be used toward more constructive purposes. From my own assessment, yard signs do two main things:
1) Provide (very) passive advertising and
2) Get stolen
Oh, and 3) Improve name recognition.
Item 3 would be useful to exactly one person I came across in my 3 months in the RC. I was still getting to know my county and I was wandering around the lovely hamlet of Hamlet, chatting with people on their porches and registering a few voters. I came across a couple on their porch who looked like if not for basic bodily needs, could stay on their porch until a tornado or chemical entropy got the best of them. I approached with a Hi, how are you... Are you registered to vote? Blah, blah, Obama, blah.
Woman: Who?
Me: Barack Obama.
Woman: What?
Man: The black guy running for president.
Woman: For real?

Other than her, everyone seemed to know who Obama was.

This is not to say that yard signs are 100% useless, but I did pretty much buy into the idea that they didn't produce many actual votes, and that other forms of campaigning were much more effective. Sadly I was completely unable to convince my local constituents of any of this. Every day, while I tried, often in vain, to cobble together a volunteer base, people would come into my office asking for yard signs. This might not sound all that bad, so, just for a second imagine that Starbucks stopped selling cappuccinos. Most customers wouldn't care, many would be ordering something else anyway, some would be happy to substitute with a mocha or something that costs at least $4 and involves words that did not exist until a few years ago. There would be some people, however, who would come in expecting a cappuccino, and some of them would be angry about not getting one. Disgusted, infuriated even. They would relentlessly point out that this is STARBUCKS and you don't even have CAPPUCCINNO. You might notice them carrying a subconscious belief, perhaps set in by childhood experience, that if they complain enough, the cappuccino will magically appear in front of them, possibly for free. Now imagine that you worked at Starbucks and this happened several times a day. That's what the yard sign thing felt like. Many people expected the Obama office to basically be an Obama store, and when I had nothing for them, they were somewhere between a little disappointed and pissed off. One lady yelled at me and stormed out before I could respond.

That was bad, but the worst were these words from a man I only saw once: "I guess you don't want our candidate to win." That's right sir, I'll leave you to guess why I left a cozy situation in a vibrant metropolis to come work 100 hour weeks in the middle of nowhere, but trust me, it's not because I want him to win.

Sorry, I'm not sure I'll ever be done venting about this.

The thingiest thing about this is that many people understood that this was a perception issue, but it didn't really matter. Even if I could successfully convince someone that yard signs didn't actually get votes, there was a deeper itch to be scratched. There was a warm feeling associated with hammering your Obama sign into your yard. On top of that, people had an expectation about political campaigns in general, and I couldn't do much to fight it. The expectation was that when someone runs for president, they run a few ads and distribute yard signs. If I didn't have yard signs, I or someone I knew wasn't doing their job.

Obama defied expectations every step of the way. It's what made his campaign successful. It also had the occasional side effect of making people think I was running a shoe store where nothing was for sale, and the only thing you could do was call strangers and tell them how great shoes are.