She Always Was An Allegory of America

On VH1, they’re currently showing a special about Britney Spears.

It’s one of many to be found in this, The Britney Decade, but there’s been a particular glut of TV specials in the last few months, when the Spears shitstorm hit the harsh fan of institutional psychiatry.

The show’s called “Britney’s Secret Childhood.” To save you the suspense: nothing secret. Same sequence of white trashy escapades and child star exploitation we’ve always heard about, the circle of a dumb life.

But they’ve acquired some of her letters from youth — she drew hearts over her Is, of course — and have hired a girl with a cheerful Southern twang to approximate her voice, and voice-over their cursive content.

I would shoot myself in the fucking face before allowing anyone to read anything I drafted privately in middle school. Out loud. To an audience. In my fake voice. I would shoot them in the face, first, for trying.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s here is that the last time they did a Britney letter segment, they made the picture go all fuzzy and old-fashioned at the sides, and there was music in the background, the Civil War documentary fiddle kind.

They read a letter from Britney Spears to her teenage boyfriend with the exact investigatory gravitas and slavish attention to detail that the History Channel would give to an exchange between Lee and Grant.

Fuckitall, if we’re being honest, with the production values History Channel v.2008 would give to the hidden alien conspirators who ruled the Ancient World of sex and magic from tunnels and kept correspondence with da Vinci concerning the superweapon that Nostradamus predicted would finally help reveal Winston Churchill’s secret descent from Mary Magdalene.

They’re taking up all our time and energy and brainwaves and attention with the minute dissection of a misguided girl who turned us on once, but now that she doesn’t, we can look at her constantly failing and fucking up and feel better about our own miserable condition. This is the Britney Spears phenomenon. That’s all she ever did, unless someone would like to make a case for her musicianship.

None of this matters. That’s pretty much the point.

Kind of staggering, though, that Iraq has been happening for so long, that when Britney was first asked about it, she was at the peak of her career. She’d just come off of her “scandalous” kiss with Madonna in 2003 — remember that, and remember when a little peck on television could be a scandal? — and Tucker “Bow Tie” Carlson asked whether she would come out against the war, like other, traitorous stars had done. Would she support our fearless leader? Would she believe that a war already increasingly unpopular in 2003 for its lies and mismanagement and general savage fuckuppery would still be chugging along 5 years later?

Britney told her adoring public then: “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens. “

I don’t think I’ll ever have a sounder argument against faith and the faithful laid out so naturally, so I’m a gonna quit while ahead, and go sleep the sleep of the paparazziless.

The House Goes Out To The Ballgame

 

 

I’ve had the television on as background music all day, and these trials, these trials about Major League baseball, surely have to be one of biggest farcical distractions this government has ever made to keep itself from the navel-gazing it so desperately deserves.

Baseball?

I like baseball as much as the next red-blooded American, which means I appreciate it with a sort of passive patriotism and a mild desire for crackerjacks. “Casey At The Bat” is a really great poem.

But in the middle of everything we’re in the middle of, the United States House of Representatives — and, by extension, the TV news media, because their audience could be made to care about this, of all things — is conducting extensive, grueling, pathetically, ridiculously stupid investigations into the use of steroids in baseball games around this great nation.

Obama is surging, capturing votes in every conceivable demographic, the people are up and out without arms in America, forgoing to care about categories. People are dying right now as you read this and other people are grieving over those they have lost to the Bush Administration’s policies, but the most important thing we have decided to pursue today are allegations that on occasion athletes subject to enormous pressure and ridiculous physical standards might sometimes be taking performance enhancers.

That’s…it. A few unauthorized muscles, a little bit of poor sportmanship, a coupla needles, and the Representatives of the People are fucking all the fuck over it. They’re still talking, and have been all day. If this media attention were given for fifteen minutes to any one of our Presidential or Vice-Presidential scandals, there would be riots in the streets. Sometimes that’s why I think they don’t do it.

It leads me to wonder how many congressmen took their Adderall this morning, or blew a line off of a hooker’s ass on their way to the little congressional train that ferries them underground to their buildings where they dictate the rule of law. How many of them fear and feel their own coming trials?

Late into the night, John Conyers, Jr., Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wakes up in a cold sweat. He remembers that he’s supposed to be wielding the will of the American people, remembers that he swore in solemn oaths to uphold the Constitution, that little thing. He thinks about all the times they’ve tabled and turned away from impeachment. Sweating, in the quiet of his bed, John Conyers chokes and chuckles over the circus that he’ll see the next day: gargantuan hunks of roided ex-baseball stars will stammer and whine next to slick expensive lawyers wearing makeup for the cameras. A good day at the office, a fun one, distracting. If only he had some balls for the players to sign afterward!

Bush will be watching with a bowl of pretzels, feet up on the desk in the Oval Office, more interested in these governmental proceedings than anything that’s happened in a long time. He misses the baseball days, and the drugged ones, too.

Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and ringleader at this legislative Big Top, ought to be ashamed of himself as well. His neat little media/bored America clusterfuck trials with a moralizing witchhunt aftertaste is just what we need, only pointed in other, more life-threatening directions. He tried for a tiny bit at the beginning, like a small distracted nod to the election mandate that got him his fancy title in the first place — but it was scary out there amongst the big bad wolves, and safer in the stadium.

If we ever needed a Committee in action right now, it’s his, for God’s sake. Also, his stupid little mustache needs to go, because he looks like Charlie Chaplin tried to fuck Magnum P.I. and lost all his hair in the attempt.

John Conyers turns over and goes back to sleep.

Looking At John McCain Looking At Us

John McCain has a totally bizarre way of delivering a line. This time it’s something about how we dare not let them [the Democrats, Obama/Clinton, ruin our way of life, surrender, etc.], and for some reason he repeats it twice, “dare not let them,” with a little smile and coquetteish tilt of his head.

He’s really missing the cadences of the speech, one of his many assured victory ones. He’s pompous and painfully parroting, yet strangely off on the speech’s rhythms. He’s probably unsure which state it is he’s won. CNN keeps doing this insane blurry flash-forward graphic on him, cutting to another part and point in the speech, cutting short his senile crazy old man ramblings. It’s really not fair for them to do that — give the audience the CliffsNotes John McCain, truncating his awful incomprehensible speech after the fact.

Since it’s so clear that McCain is the frontrunner, you’d think they’d have brought in someone to teach him elocution by now, or at least more than I learned in my ninth-grade speech class.

McCain’s dead-eyed stare is starting to frighten me more than Romney’s ever did. He was once an animated man, John McCain. They called him maverick. But now, like another famous man to wear that moniker, John McCain has totally lost his grip on reality, and we can see it in his wary prehensile grin. Like Tom Cruise, he’s losing his shit for us all to watch and re-watch forever on YouTube.

It’s so evident, watching him talk, watching him move, that he sold his soul for this. It’s hard, sometimes, to even look at him, as he seems to struggle to get out these words that aren’t his; this hard, hard party line. He doesn’t seem to have prepared much, or thought much about his words or the speech. Doesn’t matter, does it? Got the nomination locked up, out of right field, for his soul, because he was the only one whose name could have been held up versus Obama’s without being laughed at.

McCain turned on the creepy campaigning Republican grin when they came to fish him from the gutter, and then he tuned out. He’s a talking point full of the best pollsters and speechwriters and snakeoil salesmen leaping off the Bushwagon and onto McCain’s (admittedly, broad) shoulders full of their messages of fear and their terrifying war.

That John McCain doesn’t seem to care much himself about what he’s droning is almost more scary than really believing the rhetoric: shows how deeply, how fully, how utterly this man thinks he deserves to be President, and how he no longer cares how he gets there.

I miss the time when you could think of John McCain with a latent fondness, respect him for being a tough old coot, though I do not think that he necessarily fought in a good fight when he fought. You and I wanted to go on thinking about John McCain like the cranky-but-respectable-so-watch-your-manners-mister uncle who shouts too much at Thanksgiving and makes you help clean the guns twice, but now he’s trying to become much more than that.

Of course, we wouldn’t be having to have this conversation about McCain at all, if Bush/Cheney had come toppling down when it should have, a hundred different times over. If we were lining up now to pin liberation flowers on the noses of the officials responsible for Iraq and Katrina and Guantanamo and two stolen elections through their prison-cell bars, none of us would ever have had to think about John McCain very much at all.

Election Coverage Channelsurf

In the just future, there will be a special hell-prison where cable news anchors and their guests go to have their heads cryogenically frozen for “retroactive” crimes.

The head-farm will be presided over by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in immortal robotic form.

In the just future, there will be no cable news.

It’s A Big Job, But Irony’s Got To Do It

I too enjoy the following ironies:

I finally set up a site of My Very Own Special Self after almost two years of working literally in the blogosphere, of breakfasting, lunching, and dining off of the word “blog.”

Following infinite half-baked starts in my head, I made this place and started putting words on the goddamned screen, instead of grousing about other people’s. Shop’s been set up for more than a week. Yet I’ve hardly to mention impeaching the President, which was the motivating force that first pushed this baby through the WordPress themey birth canal.

It’s ironic, too, that the task of where to begin talking about the reasons to impeach George W. Bush from Presidential office is so monumental, with such staggering amounts of evidence and argument, that a starting point can barely be found.

That’s part of the reason I wanted this space, anyway: the world, the media, and our slow-to-reality country have all finally reached the agreement that the United States government is broken. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen that exact adjective applied: Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang — those who haven’t been arraigned, resigned, or fled — have literally caused us to stop functioning as a country in the way we’re supposed to.

Now that it’s finally OK to critique the President without being called Osama Bin Laden’s buddy, we’re seeing a lot of it. Endless articles abound, charting our disaster in so many spheres. Politicians — even the ones from Bush’s party, which has fractured under the obscene weight of its own self-produced shit — won’t let a soundbite go by without drilling home how soundly we need “change.” Change change change, change from what is now currently awful and unbelievably fucked up and broken beyond repair.

But it’s a relatively low murmur, you see, to have any follow-up buzz about impeachment, despite all those things that we can say now without fear need to be fixed. We’ve been scared, wearied and confused by nearly eight years of the tragic farce that is the Bush Administration, and these days, we’re so desensitized to its crimes we accept them with the same regularity and soul-tired shrug we take in news of another death in Iraq.

Do you remember a time when a death there on any “side” meant something, got ink and attention at least? Now, if we’re being honest with each other, Iraq is synonymous with death and destruction, and we’re only happy with the days without awful inky headlines that might make us remember that it’s our fault.

Impeachment. It’s writ large practically only on the Internet, spoken out by honest politicians like Dennis Kucinich who will forever be remembered more for elfin facial features than for being a warrior of civil and human rights, because in America we don’t value honesty that’s not presented in reality TV confessional form.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why IMPEACHMENT PIE is here. Not to furnish statistics or legal arguments: there are other and very accomplished blogs that do that, thank god, whole books that exist with watertight cases for the Administration’s dismissal. No, we’re here for the gut reactions, the good and the bad, the things we know are true and that we aren’t talking about.

We need to talk about why these people are still running the country you and I call our own. Was my three minutes in the voting booth, turning old knobs and pulling a lever — with always, now, the lingering question of whether I was even counted — all that’s really given to me as an American to decide what is done in my name? Somehow, I don’t think this was the way participatory citizenship was initially envisioned.

You might not have heard about it in between Britney Spears’ constant threats to national security, but a good number of our congressmen have even made excellent stabs at the impeachment issue — to be thwarted no longer just by Bush’s corruptly lumbering elephantine masses, but by the new, self-important Donkeys in the room.

When a country divided by fear and duplicity and twelve fronts of turmoil elects the defeatist, terrorist-loving, Karl Marx’s cock-sucking party over the one in power because the one in power has performed just that fucking badly, that’s called sending a fucking message to Washington. That’s called America wants some fucking change. Now. Not for campaign signs.

But somehow, perhaps dazzled by the overwhelming sensation of actually winning an election, the Democrats allowed their victory march into D.C. to become a study in How to Roll Over for the Darth Vaders In Charge 101. We just got here, and, man, the view is nice. Don’t want to lose a good thing with too much shake-up. Don’t want to cause a rift in the Dark Side. Or attention to how we all let the bad things happen.

To which I say: you were elected, you monumental pussies, you incredible cowards, not out of good will for your party, which is simply the lesser of two evils that are uniquely and politically American. You were elected because you were not what we currently had, because you swore to mandate a shift in policy and to hold criminals accountable. But mostly you were elected to not roll over, to thwart this president and his handmaidens. You’ve failed at that quite spectacularly, so much so that Tony Blair is on the line, praising your pet poodle impersonation.

No, I’m here, this blog is here, because for every person I’ve talked to who says but they’re on their way out anyway, I want you to be reminded that they are still there.

For every person who says but Pelosi took the option off the table, I want you to stop and sometimes think about that, and think why. And sometimes think: is that really okay? And maybe, sometimes, who the hell does she think she is?

This is here because I’ve seen the soul-defeated shrug come off of too many good people. I’ve given it myself, a hundred thousand times. We’ve forgotten that we have an option. We’ve forgotten that without the option to protest and critique and most especially hold authority accountable when it’s gone wrong, we wouldn’t have had this country to kill for anyway.

I’m also here about Vietnam, and about Richard Milhous Nixon, but there’s time enough for that. We go way back.

Pop Culture Insert

Live, from unending Grammy performances:

How much did Beyonce fucking hate Rihanna in that moment where she grabbed Jay-Z’s hand and led him, triumphant, to the stage?

That was all about follow me, Rihanna-anna-anna, bask in the wake of me. Beyonce had just rolled down the freaking river with Tina Turner, likely the pinnacle of both their careers. But it’s the even younger, brighter thing who got to strut there as the winner, hotter than anyone there, stopping to pick up Beyonce’s boyfriend…

Somewhere in a dark room, Britney Spears is representing Beyonce’s momentary mindset. She’s taking the handful of pills handed to her by some hand and crying with a British accent. She thinks about the alternate world where she accepted Umbrella when it was first offered and that’s her up there with Jay-Z and Justin is in the audience so proud of her with the kids, their adopted kids from Africa and also from the same Asian country as Angelina’s. She thanks her chihuahua, London, the Academy, and Jesus, for her first-ever Oscar.

A night of weirdly meta performance — only appropriate, I guess, to encapsulate the most navel-gazing, sensationalized year in media/music clusterfuck history. Kanye West’s tribute to his mother was moving and tasteful: the way her loss can make a crowd tear up is testament to how keenly we all feel an unexpected death.

Yet few ever mention that she died at least partially from trying to attain the sort of beauty found in music videos. She died not from overdose or exposure or insurgent incursion, but because there is something in the air and water out there the says to famous people change your selves, change your bodies, you are not okay the way you are.

But maybe you could go into treatment?

Because then there’s Amy Winehouse, of course, all toothy grins for the camera when they zoom in for a close-up every time she says the word “rehab.” In a way, she legitimized this whole crazy trend for substance/psychiatric/”issues” internment, and her own telling swan dive and current actual status in rehab only adds an irony music critics will be salivating over for years. My old professors are probably already showing clips of her in classes.

I’d like to think that by anointing her, even after everything, the cracked-out concerts and the crack, the shady jailed husband, the fights and the attacks on the paparazzi and the dabbling in rehab, the industry and the public were really giving a big fuck you to the moral thought police. Unfortunately, knowing this Hollywood, they were begrudgingly recognizing talent where it was due and also wanted to see what Amy’d do — secretly hoped she’d fail and fall apart like at her concerts and bust a Britney VMA move, but that moment can never come again.

In my college class “The Literature of Addiction,” the Professor showed us a clip of a famous jazz singer strung up on heroin, alive and electrified with the music. They definitely had Amy on something tonight, something stronger than motherly love, as she was a whole lot sharper than we’ve seen her perform or interact in ages. Someone finally grabbed the bull by the fucking beehive and made her aware that she couldn’t fuckover the Grammys like some shit club, not if she wanted to be praised for smoking crack in this town again.

I’m not surprised she won, and applaud the artistry she showed in shouting out to her douchebag incarcerated husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. Changing a bunch of lyrics to Blake pleas is probably right now going a long way towards helping his hearings in the British trial system. Their judges seem partial to rock.

Time to retire with the Italian tenors. What will we honor next?!

Why Obama Can Win

I feel like I’ve already written this post a million times over in my head since volunteering, and again and again in the heated conversations I keep having with so many people today. Add to that my one-sided, cursing salvos with the talking heads on the TV, who are still talking about absolutely nothing at all, as I watch shocky over their callous treatment of Obama’s results.

But being out to experience the city’s reception of the Democratic candidates (I never once saw sign of a Republican, or a shred of their brochures) taught me more about the dynamics of the election than the news has yet projected.

This is how Obama will do it:

What was absolutely the most remarkable thing about standing on a streetcorner reminding — telling, asking, cajoling, debating, urging people to vote for Barack Obama — was that you never knew, you could never, ever guess who would be the most receptive to his name. It was impossible to profile Obama’s audience from afar. It was impossible to tell from the number of years a person had or their sex or their shoes who would stop and say that they had voted for him already.

Those who did seemed to share the flurry of the moment with me. They took the big bright rectangle signs, took them so fast after one train I had to make a third trip uptown for more materials. We fielded endless requests for stickers and buttons: supplies had run out near us long ago by the evening. I turned down countless disappointed faces keen on having their very own blue Vote Obama sticker. It’s hard to explain how much that sticker served as an identifier and a signifier and a badge of honor that day.

My sister’s worked on and helped run her fair share of campaigns, and she said the stickers are inevitably the first to go, and that nevermind the campaign, no one’s ever figured to order enough of them beforehand.

I had people in every age group take the fliers, with every race represented. I wasn’t being shy about what I was representing. For every person who took the flier on reflex, there were ten more who took it with interest. Some shared eager talk with me; others still wanted stickers. Some had voted and some were planning to. I caught a surprising amount of excitement from the senior citizen community, but I shouldn’t have doubted them: our well-seasoned elders know by comparison when we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle, which has been our only surety for a long time.

They also often have earned the comfort to be progressive, the room to think. Like me in a strange inverse, these people who could be my grandparents said that no one had moved them so profoundly to political action in years. Spend their twilight days in a sinking America, wallowing in the fearful suggestion that their retirement home’s a terrorist draw? Sometimes I worry the media doesn’t know my hypothetical grandparents at all.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses out there. The Upper West Side is traditionally Hillary Country, though I’m happy to point out that Obama gave her a real run for her money in our district, as well as for New York and the City. No mean feat, there at the heart of the Clinton machine. We were positioned in the thick of pedestrian rush-hour traffic at the polling station and the subways. That morning when I’d passed through Hillary had been represented by a shouting, cheerful girl around my age, who gamely offered the Vice Presidency when she spotted my Obama badge.

To which I’d shown teeth and returned a rather spirited “Hooray, Democrats.” We smiled at each other, but I didn’t offer Hillary the Office of Cheney in roundabout. We don’t need her settling into string-pulling and plotting in the black hole they’ve made of the Vice Presidency, either. Have you heard about how they say it’s not really regulated by any particular branch of government? At all? And so it can do what it wants? OK?

After work Hillary’s man at the subway is a Ken Doll Barbieman, blandly and properly attractive. His dark black suit is so pressed and so incongruous I suspect he thinks he’s kinda important in the campaign and he’s doing this intern-level shouting out for Clinton just for right now because they’re low on people in this not-high-risk-neighborhood but he has to come through again of course and he’s getting to go straight from doing this to the party if he can catch a cab before the rain starts again and man is he going to get drunk while they watch the numbers pour in.

Some girls on the far side had a huge Obama picture and had been singing “Yes we can!” off and on in gutsy bursts for hours, edging onto Hillary Ken(tm)’s turf. It had been raining randomly all day, but still warm for February, so we couldn’t really complain. If Bush had been better about climate change, I have no doubt we would have seen many politically motivated snowball fights. When a couple people on the street told me they didn’t feel like voting at all, I had to not drag them through the mud to the polling station, muttering about the early British borough suffrage system. I had to not do that and smile at them and then I would tell them about Barack Obama.

I did have several people offer that they were voting, but voting for Hillary. In the morning, on 137th Street, it had been quite evident to me that her campaign had done some excellent work in securing the Latino vote — busy middle-aged ladies told me “Clinton!,” almost offended, when they saw that I’d given them Obama. But at 96th Street & Broadway, with its apex of subway and launching buses, it was impossible to tell who were his. Obama’s supporters turned out to be as varied as the occupants of this city.

There’s no way to fit Obama’s voters into the media’s pie charts. This is one of the most exciting things about him, and this is one of the most important. Obama’s voters are a group never seen before, disparate but all restless and glad to be united.

Super Tuesday proved that, and it proved a lot more too about the power of momentum and the eagerness for something new and different and entirely untainted by this terrible history we’ve made for ourselves. My own street sample was just a slice of how many people across America, forgoing superfluous categories, are not begrudgingly casting their ballot along party lines but lining up to vote to Barack Obama. They come out from polling, and want to wear his name in a blue circle on their coat.

He’s helped make voting something to be priviledged and pursued again. Something you don’t just do but are glad to do, certain about after doing it. He’s brought so many different kinds and types together that we shouldn’t be talking about divisions at all, but rather the quite awesome evolution of America that’s showing itself right now.

Super Tuesday demonstrated that no one knows less about this nation’s electoral wants and needs than its mainstream media. I don’t blame them now, though, when they’re surprised by who’s going for Obama. I was surprised, too, when I first started meeting them, but they were always quick to explain: they had stopped by for the stickers.

The Media Cares About Latinos, Today

“Prayers can help and so can the government,” Bush says. He’s mealy-mouthed and looking tired, even more bored than usual. He’s actually shifting his weight from side to side like an incontinent kindergartner. Another fucking national disaster. Can’t he get in a nice bike ride and a decent night’s rest while the country decides the President thing?

No, no. There have to be more damned cheap buildings collapsing under weather in the south.

They cut into a congressman arguing vehemently for Obama’s victories last night to show the President making a two-minute sneer about prayers helping the storm-victims best of all.

Sometimes they break to the breaking new not-so-surprising news about Heath Ledger, and I watch him and Michelle Williams walk across red carpets in love with each other.

I’m sorry about the storms, and it is big news. But the fetishistic coverage as compared to what happened on Super Tuesday is astonishing, echoed on two different channels. The election spin, when they remember to cover it, is so obvious and aching in contrast to what the internet is saying and the nation had to say that I almost have to admire their balls. Almost.

It’s the same blather from last night, about the big states, and Clinton’s dominance of the Latino vote. Every now and then they’ll flash up that Obama won a lot of states, highlighting boring ones like Illinois instead of discussing his incredible, wide-margin wins in so many disparate states. They don’t talk about his winning of Missouri and Colorado, traditional bellweathers and battlegrounds. They don’t talk about Obama’s “white vote” the way they wave around Clinton and the Latinos. They don’t say that it’s at all exceptional that some of the most white-bred and whitebread states came out for Obama because the country refuses to vote down the race and gender lines the media draws for us.

It comes down to Hillary scooping up a bunch of states that go Democratic anyway, while Obama excited in places distant and impassioned across this country. But by all means, let’s discuss how surprising it is she commanded loyalty from long-time party loyalists.

Super Tuesday Morning

Got up at an ungodly hour because even I was sick of hearing myself spout off about politics without doing much about it. The least I could do at this point was donate my morning’s sleep in the service of Barack Obama. I don’t need to sleep, anyway. I don’t feel sleep.

Somehow made it onto the 3 train to 125 Street, up to Obama’s Harlem office on 130 & Malcolm X Blvd. With brisk, kindly efficiency, the staff assigned me to a location based on the hours I could work and loaded me up with literature (shiny Vote for Obama and delegates reminders). I got a bright blue Obama sticker for prominent display on my coat, and throughout the morning other Obama volunteers would identify me immediately by it.

I ended up getting a ride to my spot by Lieutenant Governor David Paterson’s sister-in-law. My own sister, who’s neckdeep in New York City politics, says he’s one of the good ones; his awesome sister-in-law, a lawyer, confirmed this. But there was some civil war in the family, as she’d gone out so strongly for Obama. I expect that this is happening in a lot of families. It’s also really hard for anyone attached to politics not to have to stand by the Clintons, who’ve collected too many favors to count. That’s one of the main reasons I can’t abide by them — the sense of a sort of forced Old School Democrat hegemony. A lot of people and politicians weren’t given a choice in who to endorse: they were told that it would be Hillary a long time ago. And while we all know that she would be better than Bush, we don’t need to start another Presidency through the tyranny of opinion.

Back to Barack. Armed with my shiny paper-stack, I stood by the entrance to the downtown 1 train on 137 Street & Broadway. Two blocks down was a massive apartment building that doubled as a polling place. I fought for the attention of the people coming to and from the train in the early morning work hours.

The first few times, my hand and voice shook. I think that’s an inevitable reaction, because we’re taught and socialized so deeply about the rules of interacting with strangers. I was not only approaching to interact with many people, I was asking them to take something from my hand, to engage with me about politics. I was terrified and exhilarated at once. The young guy perched expertly giving out amNew Yorks was bemused by me at first, but took to giving helpful tips as the hours passed. He’d alert me to a train’s arrival, show that to approach with more confidence and physical proximity actually works much better (at first, I’d been more timid, polite). People took the fliers.

It was amazing to be doing it, after a while, because I was really proud of what I was handing out and saying. I’m not sure I could ever force advertisements into people’s hands. But I was thrilled to be standing there with my blue sticker and the words I gave them that said Vote Obama. If I reminded even a few people that the primary vote was today and that they could vote and that Barack Obama was an option, that’s enough. That’s the best exchange I’ll ever have for a morning’s sleep.

I can’t wait for after work.

Blah Obligatory Declaratory Manifesto Blah Blah

I’m going to write on this here blog until we impeach the President.

Also there will be other stuff, and things.