culture

And Again….

“Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight, the turn to individual conscience lay ahead.  To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”  Barbara Tuchman

“…a total of 15 certificates of achievement and decoration verified his integrity and competence for all the world to see.  On some days he would haze at the rows of his awards in smug satisfaction.  On others, he would search within the frames for some proof that he was a good man.”  Michael D. Weaver, Mercedes Nights

“Somewhere in somebody’s sacred scripture it says: ‘And there shall be caused to be built dark alleys wherein the mockers and the unrighteous shall in their turn have their heads laid open and in likewise their fat lips busted; and even this shall be pleasing in the sight of Heaven.'”  George Alec Effinger, Marid Audran When Gravity Fails

culture

Today’s Quotes

In a way, doing these are a way to not have to think of something original to write.  On the other hand, some of these I made up to begin with, so originality isn’t the problem.  Anyway, a few more.

Most correlations are noncausal; when correlations are causal, the fact and the strength of the correlation rarely specify the nature of the cause.

“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own.  And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.”  John Stuart Mill

“Apart from logical agency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H-Bomb.”  Betrand Russell

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Little Lost Book

We returned home one year from a worldcon (world science fiction convention, for those who may not know the nomenclature)—I forget which year—and promptly I lost a book. Or a box of books. You see, we’d early on gotten into the habit of mailing our purchases home rather than try to take boxes of books on the plane. (The first worldcon we went to in 1984 resulted in about three hefty boxes going back, all of which cost around a hundred and fifty dollars. Today that much would fit in one (small) box.) This system worked pretty well until this time. I think it must have been Chicago in 2000.

We—I—misplaced a box. So I thought. We were rearranging the house once again, moving things from one place another, and along the way I thought this one box of books had disappeared. Oh, it was in the house, certainly, buried inadvertently, and one year it would reappear. But it never did, not even through subsequent house cleanings.

Over time the contents of this box took on mythic status. I only recalled one title that was in it, Dan Simmons’ Crook Factory, but I knew there must be others in there from maybe George R.R. Martin or Greg Bear or Emma Bull or a collectible hardcover by some SF luminary. It was a small box that acquired supreme status.

Well, this morning I found it. Or, rather, I found the one title I specifically remembered, the Dan Simmons. Not in a box with other books from a worldcon, but in a plastic file box filled with old Scientific Americans. One book.

As soon as I saw it I realized that the rest of the box did not exist. I’d put this book in with these magazines to get it out of the way while I did…something. It then ended up at the bottom of one of the closets in my office, and would have remained there had I not got it in my head a few weeks ago to completely purge this space.

The bubble burst, all those other volumes—which, tellingly, I could not recall—have vanished in memory. They never existed.

Now, I have lost stories of my own before, put somewhere to wait until I got back to them…those are not mythical, and some of them were masterpieces which may never see the light of day again.

culture

Pack Ratting

Apropos of nothing, I have just finished putting (in order) all my LOCUS Magazines.  I have nearly a complete run from 1982 to the present.  They all but this current year fit in three 38 qt. Rubbermaid storage containers.  Did I say I put them in order?

I’m keeping my LOCUS collection.  I also have two other magazine collections I’m thinking of keeping (though I have no idea why, really).  I have a nearly complete run of OMNIs from Issue One to about 1989, when the magazine got really too stupid.  I also have a set of a magazine called GEO, which originally belonged to Earline, the woman who trained my as a photofinisher.  They’re handsome editions, like a real high-end National Geographic.

Anyway, pack ratting is a disease which so many of us share that it is not considered a disease.  I’m trying to get over it.  It may sound morbid, but at 53 I’m beginning to ask myself just how much of this crap I’m ever going to actually use before I die.

culture

More Quotes

I should point out that some of the quotes I’m putting up are my own thoughts, based on something I read. So anything unattributed is probably mine. With that in mind, here are a few more.

Numbers suggest, constrain, and refute; they do not, by themselves, specify the content of scientific theories.

H.H. Goddard and Robert Yerkes and Lewis Teman managed to supply the U.S. Government with a supposedly scientific basis for passing the strict immigration laws of 1924 that effectively kept millions of Europeans from coming here where Hitler was coming to power. They had nowhere to flee, since American I.Q. tests indicated they were of inferior racial stock and could not be allowed into America to “dilute” our native intelligence.

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Oliver Wendell Homes, jr., Buck vs. Bell Supreme Court 1927

Alfred Binet destroyed Broca’s process of division by craniometric study, determined his own predilection toward subjective bias, and formulated the first crude I.Q. tests (1905). “The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” Nevertheless, his work, misunderstood and coopted, was used to create the Standford-Binet I.Q. test, which held sway over the educational destinies of American children for decades, even though misapplied.

“A society defines what is normal and what is crazy—and then says anyone who challenges the definition is crazy.” Elizabeth Butler from “The Falling Woman” by Pat Murphy

culture

Quotes and Musings

As salve for the more astringent posts preceding, I thought I’d start putting up a series of some of my favorite quotes.  I began keeping these on a pad of legal paper years ago, anytime I came across something I really liked, thinking maybe one day I could use them as epigrams.  Well, the pages are starting to tear and I need to put them in some more permanent form.  So I’m going to put them here.  And continue the practice online.  Some days I may just put up one, others I’ll do a few.

Bear in mind that in many instances I do not necessarily agree with the sentiments expressed.  Often I disagree strongly, but the quote is fertile ground for debate, and that I welcome.

I put one up a few posts back, the one about equality from Roberto Calasso.  So now, here are a few more.  Enjoy.

“All great efforts to improve human beings by way of training are thwarted through the apathy of those who hold the sole feasible road to be that of stricter breeding.”  Charles Spearman, 1927

“Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”  Frankie Mouse, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.” Roland Barthes

“Persistence of the normal is strong.”  Barbara Tuchman

culture

Georgia On My Mind

Just when we thought it was a good time to buy one of those magnificent, Soviet-era dachas in Georgia, this happens.

We’re getting the updates on the most spectacular round of this event, but the fact is this has been brewing since the break up of the Soviet Union. Georgia couldn’t wait to get out from under Russia’s thumb, where it had been for two centuries at least. That they could not understand the desire on the part of the Ossetians and Abkhazzians to get out from under their thumb is proof that willful blindness, when politically inspired, is alive in all parts of the world. Georgia has been conducting low-level warfare in these two regions since 1993 at least. What has prompted this present crisis is Georgia’s president’s decision—due to a promise he made in his election campaign—to settle the issue once and for all and bloody well take the two provinces in question. In anyone’s lexicon of who to blame, Georgia is here the equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its decision to annex Kuwait (or China in its decision to annex Tibet—but for diplomatic reasons we don’t wish to draw such comparisons).

By that calculus, Russia has acted the part of the United States by invading Georgia and beating it about the head and shoulders until leaves Ossetia and Abkhazzia alone.

So why are we condemning Russia?

Because Georgia is the poster-child for America’s post-Soviet ambitions to see democracies spring up and flourish all over the former superpower. Saakhashvilli won a more or less open election with a staggering landslide (something the Republicans claim often but never achieve for themselves) and Georgia has every appearance of becoming a successful democracy.

We’ve made commitments, at least verbally. We told Georgia we’d back them. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Just what does that mean, though? Back them how? Cheer? Send money? Troops?

We are organizing humanitarian aid. We want to use our military to deliver it (though that’s still tentative). This would put U.S. troop in Georgia, sort of a glove on the ground in front of Russia, a school yard dare. If Bush plays this right, we may be in a shooting conflict with Russia before he leaves office. McCain’s rhetoric seems to support the idea that we should push Russia out. Diplomatically, of course (if possible).

But the fact remains that Georgia was the bad guy first. We should have told Saakhashvilli to leave those two little breakaway states alone*. Democracy being our religion, our missionary zeal should have inspired us to take the side of the underdog. Or in this case the under-underdog.

I am not so naive as to believe that the reasons for saying this and not saying that in a political situation are not complex. But the consequences of policy can often surprise and embarrass us. Damnit, why can’t the allies we back just behave?

Saakhashvilli and Vladimir Putin have also had a running cut fight going on since they got in each others’ faces. There is no love lost between these two. At times it has been juvenile, with references to height or brains. Doubtless Putin welcomed an opportunity to humiliate Saakhashvilli and that, too, is bad public policy. As I say, juvenile.

Doesn’t this all remind us of someone else, though?

The real tragedy is that here we have a president who has squandered whatever moral authority he had by essentially behaving in more or less the same way—naked aggression, overt regime change, nation building, using any excuse to send in troops, a snide remark about not needing a permission slip from the U.N. etc etc—trying to shake his finger, school-principle-wise, in Russia’s face, scolding them in a classic “Do what I say, not what I do” moment.

Now, for their part, Russia has a problem it will need to get over. What Putin really doesn’t want is for Georgia to become a member of NATO. Bad enough to have all the former Eastern Bloc countries signing up in what Russia can only perceive as a competitor organization—not necessarily the enemy, but surely we can understand their sentiment in feeling that Europe, not to mention the United States, may still feel a bit of concern over Russia’s ambitions and the bases of her fears? So it is reasonable to see Russia’s attack on Georgia as—also—a warning. Russia is saying, “Look, we can overrun this pissant democracy whenever we want, so have a care what kind of deals you make with them.” This is a form of gunboat diplomacy. Russia is probably saying more to us than to Georgia, which they consider a nuisance more than a threat. But they would like to keep it a nuisance. By joining NATO and allying itself with the West in such an overt way, Georgia does become a threat.

So what? If Georgia wants to join NATO and we want them, so be it. But we really ought to be more careful what kind of commitments we make to what kind of leaders and we ought to be willing publicly to chastise such leaders when they become antithetical to the stated goals of American policy.

*Because in point of fact, the state department told Saakhashvilli not to go into Osettia. We knew he was about to do it. We suggested in very strong terms that this would not be a very good idea. He ignored it. We’re downplaying that now. Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we should let some of these sorts hang out to dry when they go against what we not only believe but in fact told them about.

It all goes back to what kind of promises got made. And man we need to be more careful with those.

I’ve heard mention of Teddy Roosevelt with regards to Bush’s ideas on foreign policy. Bush seems to like the Big Stick approach. But take note—Teddy said “Speak softly” first. He rarely used the Stick. It was a warning as much as a prescription. For all his bombast, Teddy Roosevelt was a cautious diplomatist. He had a grasp, as they say.

This guy doesn’t.

Apparently neither do many of his allies.

culture

Equality and History

This will be brief.  Going along with my last couple of quotes concerning the election and all that it implies this year, I thought I’d post one of my very favorite quotes.  This comes from a wonderful book about the Heroic Myths of the Greeks, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso.  I recommend this to anyone struggling with mythology and origin motifs and the history of so many things Hellenic we take for granted.  Anyway, this quote is one of those “obvious” things we usually forget about when dealing at a fever pitch with, you know, equality.

Equality only comes into being through initiation.  It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation.  Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it—and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite.

culture

Elitism

In a previous post I talked about merit. It seems this election ability and expertise are hot topics. McCain has decided to attack Obama as Elitist. One wonders if he has any idea what that means.

To be utterly dismissive about it, it seems to mean that Obama speaks with an educated accent, uses words precisely, and refrains from talking to his audience as though they had only an eighth-grade education.

Unfortunately, we can’t be dismissive about it, because this sort of attack has historically played well in this country, and not always for the same reason.

Let’s start with Websters, though:

Elite: Those who are choice or select; the best; a kind of typewriter having twelve characters to the linear inch.

Elitism: The practice of rule by the elite class; the belief that this practice should prevail; a pride in belonging to an elite class.

Aside from the typewriter, what we have in those definitions is a mix of something being described as the best and an implied structure that separates members of a class from everyone else. In latter case, we tend to be suspicious of such folks because, as we all know, membership in a group does not automatically equate to possession of all the traits of that group. Meaning simply that just because everyone else is competent, brilliant, talented, good-looking, and popular doesn’t mean junior will be. But the group will defend junior’s privilege to pretend to be all those things, unto the detriment of the group. Often. This leads to potential disaster, as we have seen time after time.

As for members of an elite being the best, well, the way that should work is from the outside in—the best become part of the elite rather than being presumed to be the best because they were born into it.

This comes up strikingly in the current campaign. Garrison Keillor recently weighed in on McCain’s tactics over at Salon.com

And it’s an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.

Good luck with that, sir.

The elite to which McCain belongs seems to be of the born-into variety, at least under the terms of his attack on Obama. We can take nothing away from the man based on his war record, nor should we even attempt it. Personally, I’ve never put much stock in the whole “mediocre student” argument, even in the case of Bush. I was a mediocre student. If people choose to judge me on that basis, well, as far as I’m concerned they have a very narrow scope. But that’s personal anecdote, which is always dangerous. Nevertheless, McCain became a fighter pilot, and one does not get to do that if one is in general mediocre. In spite of the family managing to get him into Annapolis (which only goes so far—getting junior into Annapolis does not mean the family can keep him there, nor does it mean that, because daddy was an admiral that the Navy would let junior go through fighter training if he displayed indifference to training).

We do, in this country, make the mistake often of assuming skills in one area translate automatically to skills in another. It does happen. Many people are multi-talented. Ability is somehow raw and polymaths do exist.

But it’s not automatic. You have to work at it.

Obama has a demonstrated willingness to work at things. He’s had to. The question is, does this make him an elitist?

Taking Bush as an example, the claim he makes (or has had made for him) is that he is not an elitist. The logic may be something like the following:

“Just ’cause we got a lot of money and influence and can buy our way into positions designed to move us along the path toward power (and you don’t) doesn’t mean we’re elitist ’cause, really, look at me—I’m just as dumb as you are.”

This is the argument from the “I’m one of you” column of political tactics.

On the other hand…

“I came from a modest background, without the money to buy my way into anything, but I applied myself to my studies, I strove to shape myself into a capable person with certain skills, and earned my way into the positions I’ve had. Despite my more commonplace background, though, because I use my intellect I’m not one of you because I’ve made myself smarter than you. I am an elitist.”

Pause. Consider these two arguments. Which seems to be the truer description?

It is an interesting paradox in this country that parents charge their children to do well in school, get good grades, go to college, all so they can do well in life. It would seem that there is some grasp as to the value of learning. But we can also make the argument that learning is utterly beside the point, that the only thing of value in getting the good grades etc is the Good Housekeeping Seal one receives at the end and it has less to do with what junior ends up knowing and everything to do with the fact that junior was able to make the right associations.

Associations. Isn’t that the basis for an elite?

So if the latter reason for good grades is in fact the case—and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t—doesn’t that mean parents are trying to lever their kids into an elite?

Which, if this is the common understanding of the process, means that, really, the kid whose folks can buy his or her way through everything, regardless of ability, really isn’t one of “us” but part of a different elite and the kid whose parents urged, encouraged, and abetted an earned degree really is one of us (whoever the Us in that instance may be, but definitely common).

Which would kind of make McCain’s charge of elitism true—but it is an elitism of ambition and application, something we should all recognize as part of who we are.

Here’s the problem with all of this, though. It reduces the equation to one of Sets—which Set does the person in question belong to—and this threatens to render any personal qualities irrelevant. In this game the only thing that matters is the appearance of belonging. It doesn’t matter who or what the person is, only the characteristics of the group to which they ostensibly belong. It takes the individual out of the equation.

We have a history in this country of distrusting people not of Our Group, and for a long time that applied to intellectuals.  Adlai Stevenson is a famous victim of the kind of reduction to moronism national politics likes to play.  He was erudite, gifted, profoundly intelligent, and refused to pretend to be something he wasn’t.  According to the Republicans, he was an “egghead”—a label that seems to have lost currency in recent years, which makes me hopeful.  At the time, a college education was rare, certainly rarer than it is now.  The great wave produced by the G.I. Bill and the subsequent embrace of higher education as the mark of social status that came with the Sixties had not yet occurred.  People didn’t like being made to feel ignorant—not that they were, but in the hands of a virulent breed of politico they were told that people like Stevenson thought they were too stupid of comprehend their own interests.

But you can see it on a basic level, socially.  I don’t know how many conversations at parties I’ve shut down cold by contradicting a cherished myth with solid information or addressing an issue from a position of knowledge.  Party conversation, of course, is more ritual than actual discourse, so maybe that’s not fair, but if you go on up the continuum you find that certain myths never get debunked.  You can poke a hole is them all you want, wait a week, and the same people are repeating the same canards.

McCain understands this about people.  At least certain people.  That’s why, foolish as some of his assertions are, he knows those folks will respond.

What he has miscalculated, perhaps, is the effect this will have when it comes to the public apprehension of his opponent.  Because Obama is so clearly not the traditional target of such barbs.  People are having to do double-takes, rethinks, and self-examinations this time, because, while McCain’s tactics would probably work perfectly well against someone like John Kerry, they possess a patina of patronization about them when  aimed at Obama.

If Obama plays this carefully, he may succeed in making the voting public feel that McCain is impugning its intelligence by casting aspersions of elitism on someone who by every cultural metric of the last century cannot possibly be an elitist.  Obama may along the way instill a notion, finally, that being competent is not a bad thing, that knowing something and being unafraid (or unashamed) to say it, clearly, and not dumb it down is better in the long run for the country than pretending to some agrarian myth of American yeomanry, uneducated but instinctively intelligent, the model of Jeffersonian Arcadia.

That person doesn’t exist, not in any numbers that matter.  McCain is playing to something that faded out of existence as a national constituency half a century ago.  Obama is talking to the Americans that replaced that model, but who may only now be realizing it for themselves.

That’s an elite I wouldn’t mind being counted among.

culture

The Election

Superlatives aside, I think everyone can agree that we have one those Major Elections coming up that are purported to mark Turning Points in History. We’ve seen many so touted that weren’t. It may be that the presidents involved in those Non Major Elections went on to be remarkable due to what transpired under their administrations, but that doesn’t turn their elections into something that could have been recognized as Turning Points. In a smaller sense, all presidential elections are turning points, because by the nature of our system we can mark shifts in historical currents handily under the heading of who is in the White House when the hairpin switchback came on us. But the fact that a given president was elected as major turning point? You have to look at what was actually at stake before the vote was cast and ask, in the context of the times, how much change was actually anticipated that would not occur had anyone else run and been elected.

That narrows it somewhat. By that definition, JFK qualifies—based on his youth and Catholicism, and one can debate which was more telling—as does Carter, based on a rejection of Nixon’s Imperial Presidency, since people stated clearly that an appointed Vice President represented too big a shift in our perception of acceptable politics to be tolerated.

Before that? Hayes, because of the national jerrymandering that resulted in his ascendancy. Lincoln certainly, since his election split the Union, and everyone knew that was in the cards. Jefferson because of his repudiation of Washington/Adams national policy.
In my opinion, most elections, in spite of the rhetoric, do not hinge on epoch-making change. Finer points can be argued, but the perceived good or bad of the candidates usually hinge on personal views of which of two roads leading in much the same direction is the better. The direction is not that different. FDR picked up and enlarged policies Hoover had already begun—recovery from the Depression was the issue and both candidates agreed. Distinctions of method did not inform the electorate, only matters of which candidate the people trusted to Do Something. As it turned out, FDR’s presidency did alter the national landscape, but the promise of such alterations did not inform the election. And in the case of Kennedy, people expected the country to change profoundly—positively or negatively—because of his election, but in fact it really didn’t change that much. Not due to the president, at any rate.

What we have before us now, though, is such a pivotal election, and one that has its roots in ideological perceptions ranging across the spectrum.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the divide has grown clearer by the decade between two camps that seem more and more irreconcilable. They differ profoundly over basic ideological concepts concerning economy, religion, foreign policy, science, and civil liberties. Not that the presidential candidates have differed all that much—both parties have striven to nominate candidates acceptable to the broad middle ground that exists between these camps—but the ideals and interests that drive people to the polls are more and more extreme, both sides struggling to find a candidate who will embody some kind of overwhelming choice, a fulcrum that will lever the country onto one path or the other, and in this debate those paths diverge profoundly.

Until Hilary Clinton lost finally to Barack Obama, it appeared that the race would be between candidates who pretty well embraced that ethic. Oh, certainly the fact that Hilary is a woman would have made this a Major Election, but her politics conform to the “least offense to the greatest number” ideal that has been informing party choices for a long time. Obama is arguably not in that mold. Agree or disagree with his stated ideas, he does not really fit that description. He’s young enough to believe differences can be made, basic changes can occur, and a better road can be built. Whether he’s ultimately allowed to do that is another question. But people perceive him to be an agent of change that is legitimate and sincere and potentially effective.

I don’t actually believe John McCain is his equivalent, but the fact is he is perceived by his supporters as such. It doesn’t matter. He embodies 20th century policy programs. He is of That Era. Maverick or not, his “independence” serves a vision of the United States that would be recognizable to someone facing the Kennedy-Nixon contest. He’s still arguing over the New Deal and the Great Society and whether or not it’s in our best long term interests to “give money to people who don’t work for it.” He probably still has some vague attachment to what has become a cliched envisioning of an Arcadian America, Traditional Family Values, and that while he wouldn’t himself advocate stripping women of their current rights and freedoms, maybe he believes it wouldn’t be so bad if women stopped “trying to be men” and went back to being wives and mothers and give up the struggle for equality. (Why else would he, the Maverick, embrace a Pro-Life policy, which if fully implemented by those who push it most fervently would lead to a regress to exactly that, overturning not only Roe v Wade but also Griswold?) Maybe he has some vague understanding that the future belongs to a changed global interaction and energy will have to come in new forms, but he stills understands such things in terms of oil and corporate hegemony.

His selection as the Republican candidate is a lukewarm repudiation of Bush, not because Bush was ideologically wrong, but because Bush failed. The reasons for his failure do not seem well understood by the Right. Talk of tactics and strategy avoid the harder analysis of basic direction. But McCain looks new, at least to Republicans, and I’m not sure why.

Obama, whether his ideas would work or not, is new. Not, perhaps, as radically as his detractors suggest, but…

Even so, the election itself will not hinge on that. What it hinges on is what we as a polity will find it acceptable to conceive in political terms. It makes comparisons to Kennedy all the more telling and relevant. What Kennedy’s election said was that this country, after 180 years of anti-Catholic sentiment, could conceive of the notion that all the horror stories about papists and religion were wrong, and that is would be possible to trust a Catholic to set his Catholicism aside and be a secular leader. It said that we as a country could embrace a new perception at the highest level.

I think this boldness on the part of the electorate carried us through the Sixties, changing one damn thing after another, until, exhausted at the terminus of the Vietnam War we faltered and found ourselves persuaded that all that change might have been in error, and at the end of the confused Seventies we embraced someone who suggested we could have The Good Old Days back. It was this shift in national mindset that Kennedy embodied that was important and made his election a Major One—a paradigm shift that we still carry with us. In the end it didn’t matter what Kennedy did, it mattered what we did.

So it will be in this election. Obama represents a paradigm shift—not that he would in any way be sure of fulfilling it, but insofar as we as a nation would elect him. It suggests that we are about to make a bold statement as a people about the 20th century and the Olde Time Crap that is currently crippling the Republicans.

But it is also the first election in a long, long time that cannot be predicted. Until the votes are in, there is no basis for making predictions.

What has been happening in many districts on the local level for years now is a curious malaise setting in among Republican voters. They are experiencing what Democrats were up till now—if asked, they state their support for this candidate or that, but on the day it seems in many places they’re just staying home. The majority of Democrats now in congress can be to some degree attributed to this. The Republicans are exhausted. I think many of them are also disgusted. I think many of them are just as weary of the right wing jeremiad as the Left is. The trouble is, it makes polling totally irrelevant.

As does Obama’s race. Odious as it may sound, it’s possible many people are telling pollsters that they support him, but on the day, standing in that booth, the decision before them, many of those same people may decide that they really aren’t ready to have a black man as president.

I would like to think I’m wrong. I hope so. But it renders all polls problematic.

We won’t know till the count is in.

It may also be that the paradigm shift I mentioned has already occurred, and that just the fact that Obama is taken seriously and there has been as little racial flavor to this election as there would have been in, say, 1984 (and yes, the New Yorker notwithstanding, there really has been damn little race-baiting so far) means we’ve already moved past something we’ve been struggling to get over since Brown v the Board of Education. (Yes, the same can be said of Hilary being taken so seriously.)

The vote in November may well be a turning point, not because Barack Obama might win, but because by winning we will have made a statement about which road to take. That makes it a Major Election. Obama therefore doesn’t have to be the equivalent of past great presidents—he doesn’t have to be Kennedy (who wasn’t all that great) or FDR or Teddy. All he has to be is a clear signpost at the fork in the road.