Election Day 2008: The Writer's Journal

Voting in Onancock: Small-town Virginia

Here's my journal for today, November 4th, 2008: Election Day

7:00--Open my eyes after a cat walks across my neck and then I hear rain pattering down on a skylight above my head. Terry is still pretending to be asleep depite cats and rain. I smell the coffee and get up, shower.

7:30--Turn on the tv. The pundits are at it, looking for voting problems around the nation.

8:10--Call my boat captain-fisherman-carpenter-stone mason brother in the Florida Keys who is a rabid liberal. He had already voted. We've been enjoying following the election for the past year including a month together last February, watching Obama beat Hilliary in the primaries on a laptop in front of a fire in snowy Massachusetts.

8:30--News Item: Dixville Notch, N.H. went big time for Obama: A landslide at 15 to 4.

10:00--Friend came over and we talked about the yard work he's going to do for me. Terry getting ready to walk over to vote. Watching the pundits/reporters kill time until the first results start to come in.

10:15--NEWS ITEM: Long, long voting lines in Virginia Beach. It's raining.

10:30--I VOTE! I walked around the corner from our house to the town offices pictured above and, for the second time in 62 years, I cast a ballot in a presidential election (I've been overseas for the past 25 years and the absentee ballots always arrived the day after the election was over). I admit to being very excited about being a part of this in this small, small town. Terry's vote is rejected. She had not registered in time. She sat in a corner like a school girl being disciplined until the verdict was delivered. Was not pleased. Hell hath no fury.....

11:00--I drive to the county dump and drop off a truckload of bagged lawn rakings. The gathered garbage-eating seagulls are not impressed by my presence or by election day. It's still raining. Hard.

12:00--Lunch, more rain. I make this blog entry while I keep and eye on the coverage.

12:30--News item on FOX: Men dressed as Black Panthers (remember them?) allegedly intimidated voters in one Philadelphia voting center. The cops were called and all is well. Will FOX blame a McCain defeat on this incident? You betcha.

5:22--Have a fat scotch in hand and watching the pundits as we come down to the last minutes of suspense. Senator Bird, at least, thinks McCain will win, thinks a huge voter turnout favors Republicans. Flys in face of common wisdom. Pundit: Bird's roll is not to tell the truth. His job is to keep morale up.

5:36--First exit polls: Overwhelming numbers say economy tops the list of concerns but no vote count. What's that all about? I thought exit polls were polls. I'm supposed to get dinner together, but have little interest in eating. Republic pundits say that in the last three days, the McCain campaign finally got it together and if we only had three weeks left to campaign, we'd have it in the bag!

8:15--Returns starting to come in. Obama looking good. Fox news is started to talk about what a failure a Democratic administration is going to be. We'll be, they say, looking back at the Republican years as the good old days.

8:31--Electoral vote count: Obama 81, McCain 34. Obama takes New Hampshire, is ahead in Florida, and, my goodness, is projected to win PA.

10:11--Barack has won Ohio and Pennsylvania.

News item: McCain can't catch up. Let's wrap this up. Our man is projected to take it and the Dems will have Congress, too.
Time to sleep.

Wandering the Nations Capitol--Yet Again

Franklin D. Roosevelt: Could he be Barack's Template?

Last week I was free to wander the nation's capitol. All alone, I set forth from my hotel near Dupont Circle, catch the metro, and in a heartbeat, I'm dumped off in the land of tourists, museums, marble Federal buildings, and, presumably, the inner workings of our government.

While I was witness to precious little government doings (as noted in a previous blog, the public is barricaded out of the serious business), the weather was cool, crisp, and clear and I had a pretty good day walking around the great monuments to the men and women who founded/defended/died for our country. I found the names of some friends of mine who died in Viet Nam and it caused me to wonder, all over again, about all that. To be truthful, it wasn't the names of the dead stretching out on that black marble wall that got to me--it was the phone book-thick directory of their names that made those painful old echoes in my mind return. It was as heavy as a local telephone book--58,000 names--on and on, and , as I leafed through the plastic-covered pages looking for just three names, it struck me that, in that too-heavy book, I was holding the names of dead men that should have been living like I have been living--raising children, having grandchildren, traveling, eating, drinking, making love.....

But what's 58,000 dead when you when you can see 6,000,0000 dead? Before I reached the Viet Nam War memorial, I walked through the Holocaust Museum. That gets the human-beings-are-really-savage-beasts juices flowing--and then, with visions of unspeakable horror floating in my brain, I passed through the FDR memorial that was all about war and how bad it is and how it really never should happen again. Then, there I was, in the midst of my generation's war and all its dead and then on the way back to the hotel the news stands were full of papers with headlines about this generation's war. The Mall at our nation's capitol is dignified and haunted and very sad; it's all a very fine and ongoing madness and very old news, and I'm sure, hardly worth mentioning.

What is worth mentioning, at least in passing, is his observation: while I was studying the barbaric madness in the Holocaust Museum, I was mingling with hundreds of middle schoolers on class field trips. When a group of us looked down into a pit filled with photographs of naked women's bodies that had been cut up and pickled by the Nazi doctors for "research purposes," I heard nary an adolescent snicker.

I had a great deal of trouble sleeping that night. The next day, I avoided dead old friends and monsters wearing swastikas and spent the day hanging tough in the National Gallery of Art, the intent being to balance the human genius for murder with the one it has for creating things profoundly beautiful. Watch this space.

The Final Days: The Right Digs Down Deep

I'm in D.C. keeping my wife company while she attends to business. Great fun having the time to wander freely about this great city taking in the sights. I've become pretty good at handling what Europeans call "the underground," whizzing under the city on the subway to get from one place to another.

Going underground is an apt metaphor for this, the final two weeks in the presidential campaign. With all the polls showing a pretty decent margin for an Obama win, the Right is digging down deeper and deeper into the mud trying to come up with something that will scare the bejesus out of the undecided voters. In the past week, they dug up the scary old term "socialist." I'm old enough to remember what they want us to remember--some vision of the Soviet Gulag and goose-stepping Russian soldiers marching through Red Square, or some welfare state where the government controls our lives and where all the lazy bums have cradle-to-grave security.

On the contrary, having lived in Europe for fourteen years, when I think of socialism as a real, working form of government, I see not the disaster and horrors of the Soviet system, but rather the stable, happy Scandinavian countries.

But forget the Swedes. For various reasons the Scandinavian system wouldn't work in the United States, and, in any event, I'm no Socialist. No, better here the rough and tumble, hurly-burly of capitalism with its, as my grandfather used to say, cycles of "boom and bust." The capitalist roller coaster is a better fit with the American personality. We are capitalism and capitalism is us. We just got busted, though, and, if we're going to continue to embrace the heady joy ride that is true capitalism, we're going to have to be willing to ride it out. So, my advice to the Right is to come up from underground, clean the mud from your slings, and get back on the roller coaster. Obama is no socialist, he just wants to install some safety features on the great ride that is America.

In Praise of English Majors and Sailboats

See this beautiful lady? Her name is Seawind and last weekend she became ours. The invention of the sailboat was, without a doubt, one of mankind's most profound insights into tool making. The simple idea of putting sails in the wind did nothing less than allow mankind to populate the world. But never mind that--just look at her. Few things are more beautiful (she's an Alberg 30 for those interested) and we'll be sailing her on the Chesapeake as soon as we can sail her down from her present home in Cutchogue, L.I.

Next, the election. Less than three weeks left to go and Obama is pulling ahead in all the polls. This is causing much teeth gnashing and hopeless squeaking by the conservative pundits/press. Despite all their efforts to sink the Democratic boat with gales of negative rhetoric, the lovely vessel of liberalism floats proud.

It is wonderful to note that the Liberal media get much of the blame. Imagine, a bunch of English majors tilting the most important election in the Free World. And everyone decries our lack of leadership in science and math. I say, if we are to defend our basic human freedoms, we need a whole lot more people with good backgrounds in Shakespeare.

By the way, I was very pleased to see that Chris Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review, was fired from his job as one of their writers after he came out in support of Obama (see: Dailybeast.com). Apparently he pointed out that conservatives/Republicans have done a fine job of trashing our country at home and abroad. Now why can't more (very) intelligent people on the Right see the light? I suspect Christopher Buckley was an English major. I know his father was a sailor. He would have appreciated Seawind.

Spinning Punditry into the Sticky Web of Deception

When, after a summer of dealing with hectic and exhausting family matters I finally had a few days to do nothing (what I thought retirement was really like), I found myself, between naps in this Peachtree City hotel room, glued to the pundits on the tube. I should know better.

It's not as if what Chris Matthews says holds any water, or that Bill O'Riley's leaking gibberish matters a whit. Nonetheless, I find the swirling, muddy rapids of the American political scene fascinating. Perhaps that's what can be expected after spending a quarter of a century living overseas.

And then, the debates. If you were among the undecided voters before the three encounters between Barack and John (unimaginable to me), then you probably still are. Nothing new was said, no new ground broken, no egregious gaffs were made, but we did get a chance to see them together (even though they were loathe to look at each other--a sign of weakness, no doubt). After the face-to-face encounters, Barack's lead in the polls has only increased due, no doubt, to some bubbling, convecting stew of the flushable economy, the lingering wars, and Mr. McCain's own close-to-meltdown strategies. Add to it the lovely Ms. Moose Killer's coming face to face with big-time, prime-time political hardball. We can be certain of only one thing: No matter how she struggled to slog through the melting permafrost of her inexperience and lack of knowledge, the pundits on the Right worked desperately to spin an impermeable, glowing web of support from half-truths and rationalizations. My guess is they were all, way down deep in their growly little souls, horrified.

Mother and Baby Doing Fine, Thank You.

Beautiful daughter, beautiful grandson: Such a rich and fine thing. After the usual nine months of wondering, Konrad Douglas Scarborough arrived in perfect form after just six hours of labor. 9 lbs. 4 oz and 22.5 in. long. How about them apples? We will be celebrating for a long time.

One of the best perks of retirement was being able to spend a wonderful week with Jenny at her home in the beautiful horse country just north of Atlanta waiting for Konrad's arrival. We walked and talked, played Scrabble, read, watched re-runs of M.A.S.H., made two, 45-min. practice runs to the hospital birthing center just in case Daddy was not home from work when she reached critical mass. As it turned out, Rob had been home only an hour last Friday when labor started and I didn't have to drive after all. It fell to me to sit in the back and keep a stopwatch on the contractions. We made it with time to spare and he was born at 16 minutes after midnight on the morning of 20 September 2008. Mother and baby doing fine, thank you.

News Item: Man Loses Artificial Eye

After I had finished pouring over the political punditry in the local paper while eating my lunch today, I came across this:

Last night police were called to investigate a man swinging a Star Wars-style light saber outside a local apartment complex. He turned out to be a migrant worker who said he was searching for his lost artificial eye. Police suggested he suspend his search until the next day when the light would be better.

Because the taste of politics was still in my mouth (along with the fried clams and slaw) and echoing in my brain, I had to relate this wonderful back-page trifle to the current campaign. To wit: One can assume this man's political sympathies would lie with the Democrats. Think about it--an immigrant, an artificial eye, a light saber, and a night-time setting. So, the guy is in this country to do jobs the average American is loathe to do, he has no health insurance, hence the desperate, midnight search, and with, of all things, a child's toy--a dimly glowing plastic "saber" which indicates he might be too poor to buy a real flashlight.



The typical Republican view might be this: He/She is an immigrant and hence, somehow, at some basic level, is undesirable for one or more of the following reasons: He/She probably has an odd-sounding, un-American name. He/She probably speaks English with an undesirable accent. There is a very good chance his/her skin shade is a bit too dark and his/her features a bit to bold for Red-Blooded Right Wing American tastes nor does he/she hunt or even own a firearm. And the looking-for-my-artificial-eye alibi is obviously a phony one. This foreigner was no doubt a opportunist looking for a chance to score.

Ah, but I'm cynical when it comes to the Right Wingers among us. It's difficulty for me to take seriously those who think the Earth is 6,000 years old, who deny evolution, and who, despite the vast amount of daily evidence to the contrary, think an all-powerful, all all seeing, all forgiving, infinitely merciful God is up there loving and protecting us.

As for the migrant worker looking for his eye, I feel some empathy. It's hard enough to see the world clearly with two eyes, never mind with just one. Maybe that's the problem with the Right Wing extremist element--they've only got one eye and the other one is lost in the grass somewhere.