POLITICS – Page 34 – Don't Gel Too Soon

DID I HAVE A BRAIN TRANSPLANT?

So I’ve been reading around the blogs I love — Mom 101, Been There, Time Goes By and others and they’re full of election news and celebrating both the outcome and the Speakership of Nancy Pelosi. And I realize that I – former political producer of the TODAY SHOW and general political junkie – have barely mentioned the election here. What’s THAT about?

I DID mention the growing youth turnout – but that makes sense – I care so much about younger people – both how they see the world and how the world sees them — and about my old friend Jane Harman.

I just wasn’t as jazzed as everyone else about this victory. So very much that I believe in has been undone in these years and so much that I worked for is gone. I think the next two years will be about maintaining as much as remains of the progressive perspective and pushing through little advances since more than that will bring about a Bush veto and we have nowhere near the votes to beat that. SO. It was a start – but we have a long way to go and still haven’t come up with a perspective that’s a compelling alternative when there isn’t a war and a pedophile to help us over the hump. We need not to fight with each other – the NYT today talks about the pragmatic nature of current Dem victors compared to some of the ideological leanings of the establishment. It will be interesting to watch but call me crazy — I’m not ready to party yet.

OH GROW UP! (ARE YOU SURE?)

I remember when Jerry Rubin said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Of course as all of us aged, that went out of fashion fairly quickly. But maybe we should all reconsider. Look at what Rolling Stone quotes from Rock the Vote:

The Youth Vote: Kingmakers in the Senate

“Young voters increased their turnout over 2002 and favored Democrats by large margins,” said Hans Riemer, Rock the Vote’s political director. “They played a major role in the Democratic victory.”

A sample of exit polling from close Senate races around the country shows that the youth vote was key to the Democratic victory.
US Senate 18-29 yrs

Dem. Rep.

Virginia          52%    48%
Rhode Island 65% 35%
Pennsylvania 68% 32%
Ohio             57%    43%
Missouri       49%    48%
Montana       56%    44%

Let’s give them a call-out and stop acting like we’re the only ones who care!

VOTING — VICTORIES AND A MISTAKE – REMOVING JANE HARMAN

OK. These results are pretty exciting. But even as we are pleased to see change, ugliness emerges. I admit it. I went to college with Jane Harman. But I never see her; we don’t go to lunch – we don’t even go to the same fundraisers. In fact, I see her sometimes at college events and that’s it. But I’ve been very proud of her.

She has been honorable, smart and fierce in protecting the US through her work on the House Intelligence Committee as its Ranking Member and now, as the Democrats emerge as a majority, the FIRST WOMAN SPEAKER wants to dump her from her chance to Chair of the entire committee. This is a critical job – not a "woman" or "minority" opportunity but, if anywhere in the House, a place for the best possible PERSON to hold the job. And she’s going to be pushed aside because of a falling-out with Nancy Pelosi and because of her ability to work across the aisle on the issue where it’s most important to do so. Am I crazy? I don’t know the subtleties of this but in my bones it feels wrong. Speak up please. I need to know why this is OK if it happens. It just seems so wrong to me – not only for Jane but for — to be corny — the country.

WONDERFUL WILLIAM STYRON

In 1968 I was a volunteer in the Eugene McCarthy anti-war presidential campaign. Most of the time I took care of the press, riding on the press bus and handling logistics for filing stories and getting to the plane on time. Frequently, when celebrities were campaigning with the Senator they’d ride for a while on the press bus, so I got to meet some pretty amazing people, from Robert Lowell to Tony Randall to William Styron, who died this week.

I had just read The Confessions of Nat Turner, his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, which I had loved. I knew of his close friendship with James Baldwin, whom I really admired, and imagined that the book was written partly as a cry for justice for his friend and other black Americans. (OK I was 20, what do you want?) I sat down beside him on the bus and was able to let him know how much I admired him and his work.

The next day, literally, there was a horrible piece about the book and Styron’s “racism” in some lefty publication (can’t remember which one) He walked down the aisle of the bus and dropped it in my lap – “see — see what they’re doing to me?” he said sadly. I have never forgotten that day – the punishment he took for imagining the rage and longing for justice on the part of a charismatic slave — and the sweetness of the man himself. Only later did I learn of his battles with depression. I don’t know if it’s true that one must suffer for one’s art, but he certainly did.

Of course, people know him better for Sophie’s Choice and the Meryl Streep film — again about the unimaginable persecution of a minority. I guess it’s no accident that his wife Rose was so closely tied to Amnesty International for so long.

Anyway I am thinking of him today — of his deep moral sense so well communicated in his work – and of the amazing privilege of knowing him, if only for a little while.

9/11 AND ART

One of my favorite books is William Gibson’s PATTERN RECOGNITION. It’s the story of a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard . Her job is to help worldwide companies evaluate their logos and design for "coolness ." She’s a gypsy, finding Pilates studios in the cities she visits and completely engaging the reader (at least this one.) Behind her quite remarkable self, however, lies her grief of the loss of her father in lower Manhattan on September 11. It’s a shadow that haunts all the elegant activity, spectacular writing and remarkable plot lines that are part of any Gibson work. Published in 2003, it was one of the early novels dealing with the horrors of that day in 2001.

There have been several since then, as well as, in the past year, three movies including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. IMDB lists 11 altogether, not counting Stone’s new film. Apparently, at least to those I know who’ve seen them, several of these films are pretty good.

Last night I finished a book saved, in its last chapters, by that terrible time. THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN, by Claire Messud, got spectacular reviews — front page in the Sunday Times Book Review — and sounded great. What it is is a kind of lesser BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES about lefties living on the West Side (the Beresford is on the cover — not too subtle, right?), their offspring and several other 30-somethings who went to Brown. The whole point of its 431 pages is to reveal the phony side of the lives of the politically correct with their Central Park West apartments, their kids – haunted by parental successes they can’t match, and the rest of the crew ten years out of college and aimless. It’s all OK – but not great. Then, in the middle of a serious act of betrayal by Grand Old Man liberal and a friend of his daughter, two planes hit the World Trade Center — right outside the window of her apartment. Everything that felt so false for all those pages is rendered just as superficial as we thought it was.

I’m not sure it’s enough for me – maybe if I hadn’t lived 20 years on that very West Side and admired many of those people myself – all the while realizing that maybe many of them weren’t who I wanted them to be, it would make more sense. I’m not sure why the book irritated me so and maybe that makes it better than I’m telling you it is – but it’s in my head and it’s making me mad. Can someone else can help me figure out why?