One Point for Intellectuals

Thanks to Katie for directing me to this op-ed in the Times. As an intellectual snob, all I can say is: אמן, כן יהי רצון.

I'll let a rant on anti-intellectualism wait 'til later.

One of the Great First Paragraphs of All-Time

One of my favorite parts of Albert Camus's The Plague (which I haven't read since high school so forgive me if I'm messing this up) is one character's obsession with writing the best first sentence that has ever been written for a novel. We (and by we I mean I) all long to be Dickens or Ginsberg on this front, so I appreciate it when a zinger like the paragraph below starts what may otherwise be a mediocre article (I'll finish reading it when I'm done posting). Enjoy.

At long last, my people have an answer to the question "When will we have a Jewish president?" The answer, it turns out, is "Not before we have a black president." I imagine that all ethnic groups play this game of "when will one of ours get there?" (The question is especially common among Jews, since we're sort of white and used to success at other jobs—law, medicine, swimming.) But now that a half-African man with Muslim ancestors has defeated, for the presidency, an Episcopalian with a Roman numeral after his name, the bookmakers have to move the odds for all of us.

Realignment? I Think Not

The wave of love that has cascaded over the internet (at least) since Obama's election is warm and cuddly. So are predictions that reek of the Republicans not-so-long-ago predictions of a permanent majority in their favor. The question of whether this past election was a "realignment" or not won't be known for, well, at least four years (and probably quite longer than that) but the data does not look good. A great study of the realignment phenomenon and its historical relevance can be found here. Note, for example, the flip-flopping of New York State as shifting the power balance for Grover Cleveland in 1884, 1888, and 1892, and the fundamentally massive shifts (fueled by ideological distinctions) that took place in these pivot-point elections that appear to be nowhere to be seen today.

Even so, the closeness of the Bush victories means that a relatively minor shift could have lasting import for national politics. For example, if North Carolina and Virginia are bellweathers of a long-term shift in the South back towards Democrats, then that would be significant (though I'm not sure what, exactly, that would say about the Democratic party). But remember that Clinton won Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Georgia - and of such victories did not a permanent majority make.

It seems, in this age, that electoral decisions are made more on the basis of personality and the national mood (and, therefore, how each candidate becomes stereotyped through a not-too-complicated dance between the media and their campaign) than on the types of issues that divided the nation during the realignment elections. Such might be, as it were, the difference between living in Rome during its ascent (i.e., the tale-end of the Republic and the beginning of the Pax Romana - c. 133 BCE-106 CE), as opposed to its long and glorious heyday (c. 106 CE - 376). Maybe when those distinctions return, we shall truly know we are living in the twilight of the American Empire. I severely doubt I will live to see the setting of the American sun, however; and until then, though "the dawning of a new day for America" is a (drawn out) circumlocution for hope, it need not actually indicate anything substantial. We ride a pendulum back and forth, back and forth.

And on that pendulum, we hope for continued demographic gains and stability in states with large blocs in the electoral college. Yet as we do so, I also fear the excess baggage of those who join us on our team, like the Obama bumpers who also seemed to effect the passing of Proposition 8 in California.

The Future of Fox News - a Positive Spin

Check out the following "he said what?!?!" post from Diane Werts, one of David Bianculli's co-writers for his website TV Worth Watching.com. David (known to me from his great work on NPR's Fresh Air) is a phenomenal reviewer, and the site is quite worthwhile, especially if it keeps producing these doozies that should cause Ralph Nader to be banned from the game of life.

"Timeless Truth" Upturned?

One of the tried and true pride-points of living in America is that we are a nation that has only expanded rights over the course of our history, never having moved backwards to limit individual rights more than they were before.

In the light of our good friends in California, now bringing the passed-Proposition 8 to court, I ask the following questions:

1. Is the "tried and true pride-point" actually historically correct?

2. Does the passing of Proposition 8 and other similar measures in other states disrupt the pride-point, or are we just referring to the liberal move of the federal government, not individual states?

My our children have the pleasure of laughing in our generation's collective face by overturning blow-harded attempts to "protect the institution of marriage."

Shout Out and Alaskan Absurdity Analysis

Especially since leaving for Israel (though I think also before) I became obsessively interested in the election, most likely I imagine as a way of not feeling like I'm "missing" a lot by spending the year away from the US. (More on this in another post.) The last time I was here for a year, I definitely felt that, perhaps only highlighted by the then necessary tactics of my father sending me massive shipments of VHS tapes with our favorite television shows (including a brand new show that had caught his attention, The West Wing) and me watching the Rams' improbably playoff triumphs via a slowly connected desktop in the basement of the old Beit Nativ (זצ"ל).

This obsession has picked up over the last few weeks, and did not disappear in spite of the formidable lead Obama had in the polls. In fact, I had profound fears that the polls would be wrong, that the Bradley effect might actually exist (more on this in a second), and that the right-wing anti-science base would now be able to include statistician/pollsters in with evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and astrophysicists as practitioners of, as it were, patently false crafts. Nothing has been a greater relief to me (and will, hopefully, assuage future fears or disillusioned hopes, depending on polls' predictions in future elections) than to see that the polls were, with almost no exceptions, pretty dead-on.

So I wanted to take a moment to "publically" thank the website that (in partnership with Slate) brought me through the last few months, Pollster.com, and two other sites I became aware of (thanks to JAR and Jason Rubinstein, respectively) only in the last ten days before the election: realclearpolitics.com (claimed by JAR to be even-keeled but revealed by another site to be oddly in favor of polls that showed McCain was doing better, not worse) and fivethirtyeight.com. I will check them all regularly in the future and look forward to continuing to benefit from their insightful reporting and statistical awesomeness.

On that note, 538 reports today about one of the only polls that did not match up with the outcome, in Alaska, and sheds fascinating light on a variety of things, including the likely 10s of 1000s of outstanding ballots, McCain dominance far outside how he was polling, the strange (and, possibly and hopefully, soon to be rectified) lead by the incumbent convicted felon in the state Senate race, a suggestion that "convicted felons are the new Black" vis-a-vis a possible converse-Bradley effect, and the quite real ramifications of Alaska being so far away from the rest of the country. Great website; great post.

Historical Coincidences

Because I never got that blog up and running (still a project for the future, like compiling my poetry and trying to publish it, and reviewing those end-of-summer evaluations our two-hundred staff members filled out, and more), and I actually felt overwhelmed enough to write something, we'll call you my audience.

Sarah forwarded to me a comment by Av Sinenski (sp?), suggesting something that my breakfast-date this morning, an Israeli, found particularly fascinating: less than fifty years after Jim Crow found himself lynched (unceremoniously), there are many African Americans alive today who have just seen something that they literally (and figuratively) thought impossible - if not yesterday, then two years ago, or when the NFL instituted the Rooney Rule, or when Rodney King found himself beaten senseless, or when Strom Thurmond made news for fathering children with a Black woman (he, of course, was 'treading' in the previously tilled-fields of the father of all belief vs. behavior contradictions, Jefferson), or one of the other obvious, blatant moments that demonstrated how the American world sees blacks not as invisible (we reserve that for women, as the feminist movement claims) but as unlikely to be positively visible. Av suggested that, what that 106-year-old Atlanta woman is experiencing right now, having been born into a world where women did not have the vote and where Democrats were the party that would yet give birth to a post-Reconstruction backlash, is likely the best stand-in, for our generation (and our parents generation), for what the Jewish community worldwide (and especially in Israel) must have experienced in 1947, 1948, if not also in 1967.

There is more to this connection, however - at least in my little intellectual-cultural bubble, there is a rebirth of hope.

We have not yet entered a world where contemporary events have effectively entered the world of ritual (we may never), and there are challenges to the observance of even the politicized, conflicting commemorations that exist. But I'd like to suggest that there are now three events in my life with classic historical significance which I will not only never forget, but that reach the "Kennedy assasination" threshold of large chunks of our generation knowing precisely where they were when they first heard (please excuse the definitely grammatically incorrect use of verb tense in the previous sentence). The two obvious ones are tonight's historical step into a new future and that morning I woke up to Besty Chanales informing me that "a plane hit the World Trade Center." The third creates a wonderful bookend, having occured thirteen years ago yesterday; putting 9/11 in a virtual center-point; and having been experienced - by me, at least - as far away from the event itself as Obama's victory last night. (Brief aside: It is a powerful statement of the victory of individualization that we now remember events of global significance not because of the events themselves [which modern communication and post-modern hermeneutics of information problematize profoundly] but on my own individual experience of learning of the event. Since November 22, 1963, where I was when I learned that the world changed is much more important than the fact that the world changed; the alteration of my experience, rooted in the context at which the paradigm shift began to affect me, is essential, while the paradigm shift itself is relegated to a distant second place.)

On November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was killed. I will call that date an inflection point at which hope began to slow, though it did not began to diminish, perhaps, until 9/11. Yesterday was a double inflection point: hope began to rise, and quickly. (Calculus implications of the previous sentence, if obvious to you, should be appreciated; if not obvious, I'd suggest not worrying about it.)

But there's more.

For though we do not yet (though I believe we will) possess texts that will come to be associated with Obama's rise in the cultural way that we have a rich library to describe Rabin's life, tragedy, and legacy, note the following textual similarities:

Some of Rabin's last words:
תנו לשמש לחזור, מבעד לפרחים,
אל תביטו לאחור, הניחו להולכים,
שעו עיניים בתקווה, לא דרך כוונות, וכו'

Rabin, who must have looked up at Yigal Amir - and at the barrel of the handgun - before or after he was shot, demanded that, in the face of war and violence (the theme of the rally that night was די לאלימות), we insist on hoping; we be audacious (as it were) enough to hope.

The song continues:
אל תגידו יום יבוא, הביאו את היום,
כי לא חלום הוא

Or, in the words and theme of Obama's rally tonight (and oh how I longed to be a Chicago resident), "yes we can," must become "yes we did;" that which was potential must be realized - such is the fuel of hope.

Pessimism is a de facto state for much of the Jewish community. Note my grandmother's question after Lieberman was selected as Vice Presidential candidate: "But is it good for the Jews?" Note the lack of belief in much of Israel for a better future - with either our external neighbors or our internal (Jewish) ones. And so I understand, perhaps, what is so scary about Obama's optimism. But isn't that also the absurdity of the Israelis' (and some Jews, though not as many as we - or Sarah Silverman - might have feared) fear of Obama? He is not (at least not yet) a fear-mongerer or a blamer. He is not motivated by spreading people apart, by inciting one against the other (the prerequisites, as far as I can tell, for genocide). He is a hoper, and he understands its power. The application of the tune we sing to HaTikvah (just as absurdly Polish as charedi outfits) to the end of the last ברכה before קריאת שמע is an actual theological statement about its meaning. A religious tradition that nursed itself for two millennia on the idea of והביאנו לשלום מארבע כנפות הארץ ותוליכינו קוממיות לארצינו is a nation that should better understand hope's underlying power over us, over the world, and over any struggle for survival. (Perhaps the social and security difficulties of the last sixty years have dampened that hope, more than the Crusades, Inquisition, Blood Libels, Pogroms, or Holocaust could.) For me, at least, Obama could not be more in-line with my Judaism - or with Rabin's (not that Rabin would serve as any type of role model to those who do not support Obama); he embodies the central tenet of (my) post-modern Judaism: עוד לא אבדה תקוותנו.

And so, the gargantuan task that faces Obama and his team in the days and weeks to come, the likelihood that he cannot live up to our expectations for him, and the lingering question of even the possibility of fundamentally altering the habits of a ship as old as the United States (not to mention the elevation to נביא בישראל of the writers of the West Wing, and oh how I wish a Josh Lyman had found me and taken me to this higher calling), we shall leave for another day. For today, in the world that exists inside my head, that which was lost thirteen years ago yesterday was redeemed, somehow, last night. And I do mean redeemed - brought back to what it was - for the time being, at least, no more. Hope has returned. And the symbolic exorcism of that old ship's greatest sin includes the assumption of a mantle once held by Lincoln (who began the ראשית צמיחה of that exorcism) and Roosevelt by someone who has dared us to hope. Which is a reminder that, in our darkest moments (and only history will tell us, when we are old and gray, if this is indeed one of them), our ship of a nation has found the best captain to navigate the choppiest of seas. JAR's tongue-in-cheek hope-poem of this summer, placing Obama in the captain's chair from which Booth forcefully removed Lincoln, is an opening foray into the writing of cultural artifacts to represent this new age. At least, I hope it is an opening foray, though less than I hope that it is a new age.

Maybe I'll start that blog now.
מערי יהודה וחוצות ירושלים,