Pause for a moment

Pause for a moment and reflect on what is happening. If you are my age you probably never even imagined that an African-American would be the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Certainly I would not have believed this fifty or sixty years ago, but I also wouldn’t have believed it even ten years ago. This is not because I was or am prejudiced, it just would not have seemed possible. It would not have even occurred to me. Similarly, although I suppose somewhere buried in the depths of my subconscious there might have been the notion that someday a woman would become President, I would not have thought it would happen quite so soon that a woman would have mounted a serious campaign for President. What is perhaps most interesting about this is that we don’t appear at the moment to think that it is particularly unusual. We seem to have just accepted it as part of the normal course of events (at least it seems that way to me). That is, we do not perceive it as exceptional.

I find this most interesting because we have always had rare exceptions to the norms of our society. For example, in the small mining town where I was raised people sort of boasted about the fact that “the sun will never set on a black person here.” But there was a curious exception, a black man and his wife who lived and worked there, and even played bridge with the white families that indulged in that activity. Somehow their presence was just not acknowledged as unusual or exceptional or even undesirable. There was also a considerable anti-semitic attitude in our town, but, again, there were one or two Jewish families who lived there and they, too, were somehow considered normal (it was as if their Jewishness was just simply denied). And we also know now there were strange and seemingly aberrant presences throughout our history. There was, for example, a black man who accompanied Lewis and Clark. There were black cowboys and mountain men. And there were women like Annie Oakley and Poker Alice who made it in the so-called men’s world. But we do not think of Obama and Clinton in those terms. In this sense I think we have, indeed, come a long way (but obviously racism and sexism are still present in some corners of our society). If Obama goes on to become President, as it looks like he will, I think it will be a very proud moment in our history. And even in losing out Clinton will have, as Obama put it, shattered myths and created new conditions for women in our country. Perhaps she will become our first female Vice-President (and conceivably our first female President). These are not developments in our history to be taken lightly.

What I do think is unusual is what has happened to the Brafia candidate. John McCain has been transformed into John McBush and his Straight talk Express has become the Forked Tongue Wagon Train. It is said that he wants the Presidency so bad he has engaged in this strange transformation. But I for one find it strange that a man who wants the Presidency so bad would employ a strategy so unlikely to succeed. That is, why would he believe that promoting another term of the dismal Bush/Cheney disaster would be the road to the White House? Either he truly believes in these failed and discredited policies or he is too stupid to realize what he is doing. In some ways he seems to be just lost in the past, a past when the solution to every foreign problem was military force. Or a past in which marriage was the exclusive provenience of heterosexuals and abortions were performed in alleys with bent coat hangers. He is, after all, 72 years of age, and seems to have to have his minders with him at all times. So take your pick, an African-American, a woman, or an old guy tied to the presumed glories of the past and a somewhat jaundiced view of the present.

It is surely going to be Obama versus McCain. Now the interest will shift to the VP picks. Rest assured, we’ll hear about little else for probably weeks. Will it be x? Will it be y? Will it be vegetable, mineral, or animal? Will it be of this gender or that? I will predict only that if Obama picks a woman it will have to be Hillary. McCain will pick a younger, healthier, family man, not a woman. So how does the old poem go: “gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a flyin, and this fair flower that blooms today, tomorrow will be dyin”” or something like that.

LKBIQ”
“don’t take me
into your old age
with you, mother—
even the waning moon
keeps its distance”

Jeanne Emrick