Second Act Intermission

I'm shutting this blog down for a while so I can focus on the blog I'm actually keeping up to date, The Undressing of America, and the assorted online humor books I'm writing with Will Jacobs: My Pal Splendid Man, Million Dollar Ideas, and The Burly Boys. Once I get those books done and get my mind back onto screenplays and whatever else, I'm sure I'll be back here. Thanks for looking in!

New Day

A year ago I wrote about how dearly I wished I could enjoy a Presidents' Day with a President I was actually proud, and how long it had been since I'd felt that, and how it looked as though I might actually get my wish this year. My success records on predictions like that isn't especially impressive: just a few months before that I'd ventured that it looked as though my screenplay might actually go into production in 2008, and almost immediately afterward I got the notice that my producer had gone into Chapter 11. But this time, this time, I was right.

I wrote about how I'd grown up on my father's reminiscences of FDR, how wonderful and impossible it seemed that a President could have such power to inspire his people. I wish my father could see and comprehend that we finally, again, have a president with at least a portion of that power, that we may be entering another time of national reimagining like the one Roosevelt led my dad's country through when he was twelve years old. My dad's still here: he turned eighty-eight just eleven days ago. There just isn't enough left of his cognitive powers for him to grasp what I'm saying about that handsome black man on the TV. Sometimes I think he's got it for an instant, although maybe that's just my wishful thinking.

Also a year ago I wrote about how I wished my mother could have lived to see this election. She loved Hillary Clinton, and I know she would have loved Barack Obama too, and I wish I'd had the chance to talk to her about the process of decision she would have to go through. My mother was a feminist and a civil rights activist, and as painful as the choices of February would have been, I know the triumph of November would have been one of the great moments of her life. Her birthday is in five days. She would have been eighty-four. Her mother, her many aunts, and her brother all outlived that by a decade or more. But my mom was the one cancer chose to visit. She died in March, 2001, and so she didn't have to pass through the long valley of the last seven years, but she also missed this climb up the peak.

The augury of the future is already beginning. Obama has clocked twenty-seven days and we're already hearing assessments of his presidency. His Guantanamo decision was stunning. Daschle was crushing. The economic and finance advisors he's assembling are worrisome. There's no way to know yet whether these next four or eight years will be a great upswing, a great struggle, a great disappointment. But I treasure this moment, this Presidents' Day, so filled with hope and passionate engagement. This alone is a gift, and nothing can ever entirely take it away.

God Bless America

Okay, I didn't like the poem much, and the music was pretty dull, and I really didn't like Rick Warren's oily sobs and chuckles, and it wasn't even one of Obama's best speeches. But do I care? It felt like a different country, a false America, flying away in that helicopter past the Washington Monument. And it felt like the real America stepping back to the podium at least. This is a great nation and we are a great people, and it's such a relief not to have my own government trying so hard to make me forget it. I feel like we've come home today.

Oh, and I loved Aretha's hat.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas?

My son made this movie as a Chrismas present for his mom and me. In less than half the length of a Vince Guaraldi tune it captures just about everything I like about this time of year. The performers are Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Gigan, and "Toho King Kong," who isn't really King Kong but has his own charms.

The Secret of Catman

The one dark cloud over the election turned out to be the victory of Proposition 8, stripping equal marriage rights from millions of Californians. But we will win this fight, if not in the courts then at the polls in two or four years. The tide is rising, and the old dirt levees of fear about to break.

Meanwhile, I guess it's sort of fitting that I've just uploaded the seventh installment of My Pal Splendid Man, that sort-of novel, sort-of short story collection that Will Jacobs and I have been trying out on line, about a would-be writer who befriends a superhero. We're very happy with this story: this is when some of the themes that we'd been just touching on or deep-backgrounding came together, and we really started standing some pop-culture hero-icons on their heads. This one brings Splendid Man and his old chum Catman together, and forces our protagonist, Will Jones, to confront a new side to his hero...either that, or resolutely refuse to confront it. I think it's a fun one to read even if you haven't read the first six, and it's relevant to our moment in a screwy sort of way, so please do check it out if you get a chance and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Yes we can

Yes.

Yes we did.

Coming Home

It was a tough time to be out of the country, October 24th through November 2nd. Missing Halloween wasn't such a big deal--this was the first year my son was too old to care much. The hard part was the election, being gone for nine of the last eleven days of the campaign. It was a free trip, though, a conference I wanted to attend and a chance to fill in some research on The Undressing of America, so I decided to cross my fingers that Obama could somehow prevail without my phone calling skills. It's looking as though he probably will. Sure, McCain's closed the gap a bit in my absence. But not enough for me to think I'll have to blame myself for the death of the Republic.

One fear I needn't have had: that I wouldn't have anyone to talk about the election with. Sometimes all it took was hearing my accent to start people asking whether I thought Obama was going to win. There were geeks, too, Londoners who knew how well Obama was doing in the coal country of Appalachian Ohio and the alte-kocker counties of south Florida. I did a BBC interview in Nottingham, ostensibly about kids and video games, except that the presenter spent half the time asking me about Obama and McCain and "the pit bull with lipstick." That was about the most fun I've had in this whole ten-month march, and surely no American radio host would have used me as an election pundit. We just have too damned many of them over here.

British nerves are as wracked as ours about tomorrow's results. As one of their comedians said recently, "The American election is too important to entrust to Americans." My friend Rachel, a 15-year-old Londoner, talks and IMs about it with her friends, and in a moment of anxiety she sent me a Facebook message: "As an underage brit i feel really powerless right now..." Unlike us, though, the British do not seem divided in their opinions. I heard not a whisper of support for McCain. Only the urgent hope of an Obama victory and the terror that we Americans would snatch that hope from them.

I made sure to come home in time for some last-day campaigning. In time to spend tomorrow at San Franciscans for Obama making get-out-the-vote calls with my son. In time to stand in line at my local polling place and cast the vote that I've been looking forward to casting for a year. In time to be part of America's homecoming. Because tomorrow America has a chance to come home to the community of nations. To its own truest self as a symbol of hope and progress. To a destiny that it has ignored for too long in pursuit of empire.

Tomorrow let's bring this thing home.

Man bites dog

The new Associated Press poll is getting a lot of play in the news. That's the one that shows a virtual tie in the presidential race, 44% Obama to 43% McCain. Getting a lot less play are the new Fox poll (Obama up 49-40%) and the Reuters/Zogby (52-42%) and the Gallup (52-44%). Real Clear Politics averages the current major polls to a 7% Obama lead. The other favorite wonk-site, FiveThirtyEight, finds Obama up an average of 5.1%. But the press likes a horse race, because it helps ratings and sales. That's the real bias of the mainstream media, not toward liberals or conservatives, but toward suspense. Which, I guess, isn't such a bad thing for those of us invested in the race. Keeps us from getting complacent.

Burnt toast

Have Republicans en masse gone insane? Or is it only that the sane ones are keeping very quiet, hoping not to be noticed while those who are cracking up dominate the news? A Republican Congresswoman in Minnesota suggested on national television that Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi harbor "anti-American" views and called for an expose of the entire Democratic contingent in the House of Representatives. (Now she keeps saying that her words have been "misinterpreted," but...well...she's all over YouTube, and it's pretty clear what she said.) In North Carolina, a Congressman declared that "liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God." (For a while he categorically denied saying it. Then the audio tapes began to surface.) Then there was the McCain advisor who announced that the northern part of Virginia was not "the real Virginia," which dovetailed nicely with John McCain's brother referring to the same area as "communist country." Of course there was the Republican vice-presidential nominee describing small towns as "these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America...very patriotic, very pro-American areas of this great nation." And the presidential nominee himself, the man who always used to be known as a smart pragmatist who saw beyond party cant, calling Barack Obama's economic policies "socialism" and telling us we risk nuclear war if we vote Democratic.

These, of course, are politicians in the heat of battle, trying to fire up their true believers. Things get said. But a similar madness has gripped the conservative analysts and journalists who have always asked us to believe that, though they have their strong political beliefs, they will ultimately choose intellectual honesty over partisan rhetoric. There was John Podhoretz, next editor of Commentary and a veritable mascot of neoconservative intellectualism, claiming that criticisms of Sarah Palin's lack of experience were "un-American." Un-American! I thought the right wing had learned to lay off that word around the time Joe McCarthy was censured by the Senate. Just a couple of days ago Thomas Sowell, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and an award-winning economist, compared Barack Obama to Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and Jim Jones. When Christopher Buckley, one of the most popular and persuasive conservative columnists out there, responded to this increasing madness by endorsing Obama, The National Review basically fired him. That's the magazine that Christopher's father, William F. Buckley, founded. William F. Buckley, who once described his career with, "I've spent my life trying to separate the right from the kooks."

I'm kind of glad old Bill didn't live to see this election, because the kooks have surely taken over the party. And since the polls now show Obama widening his lead again and the Democrats with an ever-more-realistic shot at a "perfect 60" in the Senate, I'm expecting the next two weeks to get even kookier.