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fictionalI am sick today. Really, I have been for several weeks now, though I try not to talk about it in this forum. (Or really any forum; I tend to be ostrich-like as regards my health - if I ignore it, it'll go away; this system has been epically failing me now for fourteen years; you'd think I'd learn, but you'd be wrong.)
So last night, I stayed up to watch the election anyway. Because I had to. It was impossible to do otherwise.
I'm still feeling ill; my stomach bruised and sore, my skin grey when I look in the mirror. I'm tired. Very tired, even though I've been doing nothing much but sleep since I got back from Chicago. It is raining. It is November, an ugly month, here in New York. Dim. Overcast. Too crammed with too much to do, and not enough time or money to do it with.
And yet.
I think the thing about this election -- and indeed, the last two as well -- was that it was so personal. It's a truism that the personal is political, but it has seemed especially true of late.
In 2004, I remember saying that what frightened me the most was knowing that social issues trumped pragmatic ones. This year, it was different. This year, America said it was more important that people were out of work or were working under increasingly terrible conditions because who knew when another job could be found, that gas prices had risen to an alarming sum, that the dollar had plummeted into an international joke, that they couldn't afford to go to the doctor, or pay for the prescriptions that were issued if they even managed to get there. That they cared more, just a little more about their futures, their pocketbooks, their everyday, ordinary lives than they did about electing a black man to the highest office in the country. Not everyone, of course, but enough.
I am grateful. Not just because my candidate won but because this is a decision I can understand, a universe that makes sense. For I can understand hating me and mine. What I can't understand is robbing yourself in order to do it.
I am grateful too, for the moment when the election had been called, the moment when hair rose up on the backs of my arms, and I glimpsed for a second, the promise of magic that seduces so many children into the ideal of nationhood. I'd never seen or felt it before, but I did then, and for a brief space of time, I felt like I understood.
And then our next president, a man of whom I need not be ashamed, came forward and made his speech. In all its brilliance, it was small things about it that I treasured the most. The ordinariness of inclusion: "It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled -" or even the simple acknowledgement that "this victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change."
Through the ugliness of hearing about Prop 8, about the other terrible anti-gay legislation that was passed last night, when with one hand, America voted with their own self-interest in this single national issue, but withheld the greater promise of civil rights with the other - these are the words I thought of, words that describe a world where we are not outsiders ('gay and lesbian brothers and sisters'), but where we are you.
What we won last night was not a victory; it was possibility. It was work. It was the chance to do better, to be our better selves.
Fiction is my life. It is my vocation and my avocation. So it is perhaps unsurprising that I am unable to look at these events without the lens of narrative. Our next president is a great story-teller. "A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination." What must we do to continue it? For this is a story that must be continued.
I am not sanguine about the road ahead. Far from it. I am not a patriot. I am not a nationalist. I do not trust government or politicians.
But I believe in the power of a great story, the ability of a spectacular narrative to inspire and create. We all heard one last night. I hope we can use it to tell our own.
So last night, I stayed up to watch the election anyway. Because I had to. It was impossible to do otherwise.
I'm still feeling ill; my stomach bruised and sore, my skin grey when I look in the mirror. I'm tired. Very tired, even though I've been doing nothing much but sleep since I got back from Chicago. It is raining. It is November, an ugly month, here in New York. Dim. Overcast. Too crammed with too much to do, and not enough time or money to do it with.
And yet.
I think the thing about this election -- and indeed, the last two as well -- was that it was so personal. It's a truism that the personal is political, but it has seemed especially true of late.
In 2004, I remember saying that what frightened me the most was knowing that social issues trumped pragmatic ones. This year, it was different. This year, America said it was more important that people were out of work or were working under increasingly terrible conditions because who knew when another job could be found, that gas prices had risen to an alarming sum, that the dollar had plummeted into an international joke, that they couldn't afford to go to the doctor, or pay for the prescriptions that were issued if they even managed to get there. That they cared more, just a little more about their futures, their pocketbooks, their everyday, ordinary lives than they did about electing a black man to the highest office in the country. Not everyone, of course, but enough.
I am grateful. Not just because my candidate won but because this is a decision I can understand, a universe that makes sense. For I can understand hating me and mine. What I can't understand is robbing yourself in order to do it.
I am grateful too, for the moment when the election had been called, the moment when hair rose up on the backs of my arms, and I glimpsed for a second, the promise of magic that seduces so many children into the ideal of nationhood. I'd never seen or felt it before, but I did then, and for a brief space of time, I felt like I understood.
And then our next president, a man of whom I need not be ashamed, came forward and made his speech. In all its brilliance, it was small things about it that I treasured the most. The ordinariness of inclusion: "It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled -" or even the simple acknowledgement that "this victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change."
Through the ugliness of hearing about Prop 8, about the other terrible anti-gay legislation that was passed last night, when with one hand, America voted with their own self-interest in this single national issue, but withheld the greater promise of civil rights with the other - these are the words I thought of, words that describe a world where we are not outsiders ('gay and lesbian brothers and sisters'), but where we are you.
What we won last night was not a victory; it was possibility. It was work. It was the chance to do better, to be our better selves.
Fiction is my life. It is my vocation and my avocation. So it is perhaps unsurprising that I am unable to look at these events without the lens of narrative. Our next president is a great story-teller. "A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination." What must we do to continue it? For this is a story that must be continued.
I am not sanguine about the road ahead. Far from it. I am not a patriot. I am not a nationalist. I do not trust government or politicians.
But I believe in the power of a great story, the ability of a spectacular narrative to inspire and create. We all heard one last night. I hope we can use it to tell our own.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-06 09:02 pm (UTC)they have livers and kidneys too
i liver you
i kidney, i kidney
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-06 09:08 pm (UTC)but do they have brains? nice tasty zombie brains? I hunger!!!
Braaains...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-06 09:15 pm (UTC)my brain's got the blues