For months before the election, I kept experiencing these Larry David moments in which I would catch myself angling my Obama button so my fellow (black) passengers on the bus could see it, or hoping that a deliveryman or one of my African-American neighbors would notice the Obama sign in my window and flash me a thumbs-up sign (and maybe notice that the sign had been up so long the ink was faded), or restraining myself from high-fiving every black person I passed on the street and saying, “Isn’t he terrific?” When Marian and I parked his Explorer in Detroit on election night, I couldn’t help but joke that the Obama sticker on the bumper might protect it from the sort of vandalism that white suburbanites tend to fear when they leave their cars in Motown (the irony being that someone punched out a taillight on the Explorer right here in Ann Arbor, for no reason we could guess except that same Obama sticker).
Now, post-election, I find myself smiling at every black person I see, every black person in every elevator I get into, all my black students. Whether this makes them feel loved I can’t quite say. My guess is they find my behavior a bit wearing and condescending. On the other hand, if you’re a black person in America, especially a black man, having white people smile at you as they pass you on the street or get into the elevator with you has to be a pretty nice change of pace.
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I’m thrilled to find out that fewer people in America than I thought are bigoted, or that more people than I predicted were able to overcome their bigotry long enough to vote for a black man. The first time I thought Obama might actually win this election was when I read George Packard’s article in The New Yorker about how the campaign was going in rural Ohio and ran across a quote from a man who said that he was “voting for the nigger.” Suddenly, I realized that a person could be a bigot and still vote for a black man. Of course! Hadn’t I grown up hearing my father’s patients say that they preferred going to “the Jew dentist” because he was a nice man and didn’t hurt them when he filled their cavities? Many people still seem to require that their president be a practicing Christian, but I’m now convinced that a Jew could win a plurality of the vote.
And I’m ready to admit that some portion of the population who voted for McCain and Palin did so not because they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black man but because they sincerely believe in Republican economic policies or sincerely oppose abortion or truly consider Obama too inexperienced to lead the land or serve as commander in chief.
That said, what about the other 15 or 20 percent of the population that would never vote for a black person or a Jew?
I can’t forget Sarah Palin’s rallies, the videos on YouTube of all those people whose faces were so distorted by hate. Apparently, even her own Secret Service guards, many of whom were black, were frightened for their safety. Never mind Palin’s super-expensive red leather jacket from Neiman Marcus, I was more concerned that her garment of choice might soon become a well-tailored brown silk shirt, which her followers would then adopt.
Does anyone really think all those angry white men (and women), some of whom believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ, are just going to shrug and say, “Oh well, we lost, let’s give the black guy a chance”? When I moved to Michigan in the early nineties, just before the bombing in Oklahoma City, I became interested in the militia movement, in part because the Michigan Militia had an active chapter in the town next door. Most of the guys in the militia seem to be harmless good old boys who like to get out in the woods on a Sunday, pretend there’s a threat to our nation, and practice surviving on roots and berries and defending their loved ones from the blacks and Jews and Communists who someday are going to swoop down in black helicopters and try to round them up in concentration camps. But there also are some very dangerous dudes out there. Have you ever read The Turner Diaries? Browse through it if you dare. I would also recommend a book called The Terrorist Next Door by Daniel Levitas. It’s easy to dismiss the author’s claims that rightwing domestic terrorists are everywhere, especially since most of these groups’ activities died down or went underground when George W. came into office. But I remember reading a section of Levitas’s book about a virulently racist and anti-Semitic group called the Christian Identity Movement (sadly, it was started by a Jewish convert to Christianity), a group so hateful that one of its mottoes is something like: If you’re standing close enough to a Jew to run him through with a sword, go ahead and do it. The group has these weird ideas about white Christian Americans being the true sons and daughters of Adam and Eve and Jews and blacks being insidious pretenders. Anyway, I put down the book and drove to Zingerman’s, our local deli, to discuss the catering for my son’s bar mitzvah, and while I was idling at a light, I read the bumper stickers on the car in front of me. And what do you know, the stickers were all about how the owner of the car was a true son of Adam and Eve, with other slogans that identified him as a member of the Christian Identity Movement.
I’m not saying there are thousands of these hateful kooks out there planning an attack on the White House. But with the economy in the state it’s in, and the perception that Jewish bankers in New York (and the new black president’s Jewish advisors in Washington) are responsible for the pain that ordinary white Christians in the heartland are suffering… All it takes is one Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Federal building, or two white supremacists in Tennessee plotting to decapitate dozens of black schoolchildren and take out the president in a drive-by shooting. I just hope the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service are paying attention to those sorts of terrorists and letting poor Bill Ayers resume a normal life, helping underprivileged schoolchildren in Chicago.
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Speaking of Bill Ayers … is it safe for me to confess that nearly everyone I know in Ann Arbor knows—or is related to—the man? My eighteen-year-old son actually has been in the same room with Bill Ayers, not once but twice, and now lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood as Ayers (and the president-elect).
For that matter, is it now safe to say that my son is not only in favor of sharing the wealth, he is proud to call himself a socialist? Is it safe to say that I’m proud that he cares enough about working people and poor people to want to devote his life to helping them gain their share of our nation’s wealth? I’m embarrassed to say that before I knew which way this election might go, I asked him not to write or sign anything that might come back to haunt him later, whether by preventing him from passing through security at an airport or finding a job during a McCain and Palin administration.
Sure, as a mother, I probably overreacted. But watching those rallies on YouTube and hearing that idiot Michele Bachmann call for a committee to investigate members of Congress, I wasn’t about to take a chance that my son’s career—and life—would be ruined by his good heart and youthful idealism.
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Do you know what else upset me? I couldn’t believe that John McCain could spend the day snarling at Obama for being a socialist and a terrorist, and then, in the evening, appear on Saturday Night Live or stand up at that benefit Al Smith dinner in New York and make fun of himself for disparaging Obama as a socialist and a terrorist. If you noticed, in similar circumstances, Obama made fun of himself. (“I wasn’t born in a manger.”) He didn’t make fun of his attacks on John McCain. On the one hand, seeing the funny, kind, personable John McCain we used to know reappear in a tux softened me towards the man. On the other hand, I was furious to find out that he knew that what he was saying was a lie and said it anyway, then laughed about how outrageous such statements were. I said this at a dinner party one night, and my host, a lawyer, laughed and said, “Oh, they’re all lawyers, they’re used to ripping each other apart in court, then going out for a drinking afterward and laughing about what they said.” I hate to admit, but this statement upset me even more.
Once, when I was in graduate school, my workshop leader not only ripped apart my novel, she said, “Eileen, you’re not only too naïve to be a writer, you’re too naïve to exist.” As crazy and evil as that writer is, she was right about my novel, and at times like this, I wonder if she was right about me as well. (Well, I’m not too naïve to exist, but maybe I’m too naïve to write a blog about elections.)
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