A time for change

The circumstances were unusual, to say the least. Because the university scheduled the departmental review for election day, I was hosting a dinner for five visitors, each of whom had given up the opportunity to be with friends and family on this historic night. And because of the bad timing coinciding with equally bad timing of a conference, Rus was in Santa Fe.

So beginning with the first results coming in from the east coast as polls closed, we received a series of text messages, phone calls, and even reports via the waiter from the kitchen, where the staff in the almost-deserted restaurant were apparently listening to the election results on the radio. One of my visitors had his iphone tracking results via the CNN website.

It made for an incoherent discussion, but paradoxically, may have been a very good way for me to pass this night. When George W. Bush won in 2004, my pottery teacher could not imagine why, because no one she knew voted for him. So despite the fact that here in California I have not heard anyone arguing against Obama since-- well, I don't know when-- I have been brittle and on edge, sure that somehow there would be a flood of losses and this election would go, not just towards a ticket that is profoundly unqualified (McCain for his judgment in selecting Palin, and Palin, well, for general ignorance and divisiveness), but away from historical change.

When the text messages started coming-- CBS called it for Obama, then a steady string-- culminating in the news that McCain was conceding (so early! the one thing I expected was a long night...) we erupted, and I knew that no one wanted to stay in the restaurant. So I sent my committee off to the bar of their hotel while I paid, then joined them, and a crowd of university students, including some I have taught, all listening to the speeches, many of us weeping.

I cannot remember the last time I have listened to a political speech and heard the kind of inspiration we had last night. The echoes, deliberate echoes, of great speakers and figures in our history. Last year, the university sent all of the freshman and faculty Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg, and I read it-- an entire book about a single short speech. So I really heard those echoes, but I also heard Wills' comments about how the speech was transformative. I think we heard the same last night.

Operatic times

Yesterday afternoon, in the middle of an astonishing performance of "Boris Godunov", I realized that this was the second opera this season that concerned an illegitimate ruler and his fate. In the earlier part of the season in "Simon Bocanegra" the ruler was a tragic figure and the end of his reign and life led to renewal through a rediscovered daughter.

But Russian opera is not, in general, optimistic. So Boris Godunov ended with a tableau: the young son of Boris, who was elected when the previous Tsar's 10-year-old son was murdered, sits on the throne, his father dead in front of him, and the menacing figure of one of the senior lords approaching. What happens next?

In this political season, of course, everything seems to resonate. So I was left wondering, "What happens next?" not just in the safety of the stage, but in our own places? I particularly wonder how whoever we elect can possibly govern, given the ways that political campaigns seek, not just to offer clear alternatives, but to delegitimate the opposition. Electoral systems actually rest on the trust that people have that those elected have majority support, and the last two presidential elections here damaged that, if not destroyed it. Beyond that, those elected have to be seen as competent and capable of governing even if policy differences mean we would like a different set of actors. Where legitimacy is lost, globally, violence is a common reaction to the election of those with whom you do not agree. In my worst moments, I worry whether the exceptionalism of the United States-- which is not, pace Sarah Palin, that God loves the US more than other countries-- can survive.

The friend who accompanied us to the opera, also an anthropologist, observed that when Barack Obama made his famous comments in Marin County about some people in the US clinging to guns and religion, she thought "you can see he is the son of an anthropologist". What she meant is that this was not a judgement or even a negative characterization-- quite the contrary, it was the product of the kind of empathy ethnographers develop from familiarity, while ideally retaining enough distance to comment on the people they want to understand. His comment was analytic, perhaps subject to the critique of being too "professorial" (I wince every time being "professorial" is offered as a clear liability in public life). Even at the time, I thought it was in fact correct: when people are not offered the support they need by their government, they hold firmly to the things of value in their life that they can control.

There are many dimensions of this election that are historic, that already have been historic: the first serious female candidate for the presidency; the first candidate of diverse racial background (and can we have that conversation about race, sometime? why is Barack Obama black? what does happen in this country as it moves more toward what I already see here commonly in California, which is an uncategorizable mixture of social, ethnic, and racial positioning?).

I do not accept the argument that the nomination of Sarah Palin is a first-- we already had the first token nomination of a woman as Vice President, and so it should have been an avoidable error this campaign season, and if the Republican party was serious about women in politics, they had an amazing group of qualified and experienced Republican women politicians to nominate. But it is worth noting that, after two or three weeks of silliness --is it sexist to question the qualifications of a woman with less than two years of relevant experience? no-- nor, in my opinion, would it be sexist to hold her and her party accountable for the contradiction between their policies on sex education and the outcomes in their own families, or between their policies towards working mothers and the exceptional support given this one working mother-- it became possible to discuss Palin's unbelievable lack of basic knowledge, naive understandings of global politics, and total ideological commitment untempered by any evidence of policy expertise or interest.

So, there are many historic dimensions to this election. But I wonder if the most historic may be what happens after the election, regardless of who wins: have we reached a point where our national government has been so damaged that it no longer seems able to exercise legitimate leadership?

In my own good time,

it has finally seemed to me that this new medium might be someplace to be.

So, welcome. Is there anyone listening? there was a time when email was green and rare that the lines of words that glowed across the screen were a promise that at the other end of the machine there was another human presence. I am not nostalgic for unmediated presence; no one who spends their days studying the depth of time and the ways that humans always have deferred meaning through representation could be. But this will be the experiment here: is this medium public, a form of personal newsletter, an electronic broadsheet? or private, a diary without a key, open to anyone passing by?

I promise opinions, notes on travel, notes on books. The kind of things that we would say to each other face to face if we were characters in a particular kind of book or play.

Today here in northern California, where I once claimed "the streets are paved in gold", the rainy season has finally begun. This other form of seasons seems so foreign cast against the four seasons of the northeast, this oscillation between drought-striken grass full of flowers and rain-soaked leaves surrounded by green. It is a time for nostalgia, no matter what I claim, but perhaps also a time to connect. So welcome.