Notes from the Basement

The devoted reader of this blog will remember that its proprietor voted for Hillary Clinton in the DC primary. What the reader could not know (unless you know me personally) is that I declared Hillary Clinton toast soon after Super Tuesday in a private family discussion board where I dump the bulk of my political musings. There I said I had wanted to give Sen. Clinton the chance to make her case to the American people—a chance to overcome the slime she has been slipping and sliding in for over a decade, dished out by real slime professionals (and by that I mean well-paid folks). But she failed to make her case with enough people, in my estimation, and that was that. I settled back to watch the endgame.

Now that the Rev. Wright has started to mouth off on the national stage, some folks seem to think he has done mortal damage to Barack Obama, his parishioner. But Obama and his campaign must have known that Wright would eventually become an issue. Obama has written about him. Even the notoriously lazy national press could be expected to read some of that stuff eventually, and other stuff right under their very noses, and think: “This would make a good story—a new story to tear down the old story we worked up among ourselves.” And eventually the American public would be induced to convulse about what this crazy man is saying about them and their beloved country. Wright will be painted as an old-style black separationist—the very antithesis of the miraculous melding promised by—no, personified by—Sen. Barack Obama.

The funny thing about the melding is that it’s happening no matter what. At the end of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! the scion of the Old South, Quentin Compson, is having a nervous breakdown trying to explain his family history to his roommate, a Canadian named Shreve, at Harvard in 1910. And the locus of his feverish despair seems to be the idea that there is a relative, Jim Bond, running around somewhere in the world with some black blood in him.

“You still hear him at night sometimes. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Quentin said.

“And so do you know what I think?” Now he did expect an answer, and now he got one:

“No,” Quentin said.

“Do you want to know what I think?”

“No,” Quentin said.

“Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it won’t quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won’t show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?”

“I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

The point is this: race, as the term continues to be used, is an idiotic concept. I don’t need to produce a list “mixed race” celebrities—just look around you. More and more people have come to understand this, but there seems to be a generational divide. I would wager it’s mostly folks over fifty who still think there is such a thing as “black” or “white”—or slightly younger folks if they happen to be prominent in the mainstream media and are therefore governed by the most banal, outdated and therefore “safe” assumptions and mental framework about contemporary life (i.e., the old “conventional wisdom”).

The comic strip author Berkeley Breathed has his characters wrestle with a tough question this week: “Is Barack Obama a black man with a white mom … or a white man with a black dad?” You tell me. (The kids in the strip were stumped.) If you manage to pick one or the other, it serves as a short of shorthand for what you take Obama to “be,” and almost invariably makes him out to be a phony when he acts in a way you ascribe to the opposite. “Both” and “neither” are both good answers. Give yourself an B+ if you blurted either one. The best answer, of course, is: “Who the hell made up this test?”

But I digress. I said there is a fun part. It is simply this: Barack Obama today has announced he finds some of the notions expressed by his pastor “appalling.” Pow! That’s the stuff! That’s how we do it in this country. Right in the chops. He threw in some “outrage” for good measure. So, at just the right point in his campaign, Obama gets to show he’s capable of kicking an old friend in the head for the sake of an idea (his presidency). He demonstrates that he is about “transcending race.” In case you missed it, I think he’s merely holding the tail of this particular historical tiger, but it’s better than the fools still yapping about it. Yet why do I say “merely”? Let’s give him credit for hitching a ride rather than getting his ass chewed off like the others.

Which brings me to the point of all this rambling: Barack Obama is a very sharp guy. Even as I was voting for Hillary Clinton in February, I said to anyone who would listen: this guy’s timing is impeccable. I fully expect that, when the time comes, he’ll make mincemeat of John McCain. All in good time, all in good time.

And to anyone who accuses me of “flip-flopping” about Obama:

1. I’m not head-over-heels gaga about him.
2. I said all along I could support any of the Democrats who threw their hat in the ring—yes, even that “loon,” Mike Gravel; even that hopeless idealist, Dennis Kucinich.
3. The notion of “flip-flopping” is a Republican meme that implies you must be a perfectly consistent fool your whole life.

Now pardon me while I reread my previous post.