Train Keep a Rolling

I knew I needed a break from thinking about this election when I went onto one of my favorite left-leaning blog sites this afternoon and found myself reading a furious discussion of the fact that the MSM (that's "mainstream media," the bane of political bloggers) has been reporting Clinton's Pennsylvania victory margin as 10% when in mathematical fact it was only 9.2%! The argument centered mainly on whether this was more evidence of an anti-Obama media conspiracy or just of the criminal sloppiness of modern reporting, followed by many suggestions on how to get the word out to the public that Clinton didn't really win by "double digits" after all.

     Personally, I'm going to get the word out that I'd rather watch old movies for a week or two. Barack Obama's train ride to victory is clearly going to be a local, not an express, stopping everywhere from Kokomo to Raleigh to San Juan...or maybe the problem is that Hillary keeps tying herself to the tracks whenever it starts to pick up speed...pick your own metaphor...and we have plenty of time to think about other things.

      (But no, I'm not just going to "sit there and let Clinton steal Barack's momentum," to quote another blog thread. I'll be making calls to Indiana. I refuse to read any op-eds telling me that Indiana is now a must-win state for Obama, but I'll be making calls.)

      First of all, anyone who is or can soon be anywhere near the San Francisco Bay Area should check out a couple of local film festivals. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto—a graceful, perfectly restored, Moorish Deco movie house from 1925, complete with live organ music between shows (with Richard Rodgers's heartrending Isn't It Romantic? for a theme song)—is running an unprecedented tribute to Bette Davis on her 100th birthday, showing every one of her first 36 movies, from her first supporting appearance in The Bad Sister in 1931 (in which she was cast as the good sister—talk about not knowing what they had!) to Jezebel from 1938. Unfortunately, now that I look at the schedule, I see that Jezebel is already past, as is the gloriously twisted Of Human Bondage, but there's some fascinating stuff still to come, many views of Davis as a skinny blonde playing a wide range of good girls and bad. So Big, tonight and tomorrow, is a Wild Bill Wellman movie from 1934 that has her backing up Barbara Stanwyck. Bette is out-acted—no one could touch Stanwyck in the crackling, rackety days of early-'30s shoestring soundies—which is a fascinating thing to watch by itself.

      Coming up are The Rich Are Always with Us (with Ruth Chatterton, always fun to watch do her self-conscious theatrical razzle-dazzle), Jimmy the Gent (Cagney being Cagney), Three on a Match (much of the great Warners' stock company—Joan Blondell, Warren William, Bogart, Lyle Talbot, Ann Dvorak—playing off each other), Fashions of 1934 (a Busby Berkeley musical starring William Powell, with Bette appearing weirdly where you'd expect Ruby Keeler), Dangerous (Davis's truly unsettling embodiment of an alcoholic), Satan Met a Lady (a pre-Bogart, pre-Huston adaptation of The Maltese Falcon), and a bunch more. Then in June, running through the summer, the Stanford is going to show "many but not all" of her movies from 1939 on.

      Oh, and I just looked it up: Jezebel and Of Human Bondage are both on DVD. I'll watch them both soon (and try not to think about the Kentucky primary as I listen to Bette's Southern accent in Jezebel).

      Meanwhile, at the Castro Theatre, right over the hill from my house, the San Francisco International Film Festival is opening tonight with Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress. The program describes the star as "the alluringly vulpine Asia Argento," which is probably exactly how Vin Diesel thought of her in XXX. A lot of very intriguing sounding new movies will follow, but there'll also be some great old stuff mixed in during the two weeks of the festival: tomorrow The Golem from 1920, with funky new music by a guy from the Pixies; later The Sweet Smell of Success, Some Like It Hot, and others; and this Saturday a new 35-millimeter print of Leave Her to Heaven, a most idiosyncratic psychological suspense movie scripted by Jo Swerling (one of my heroes) and also one of the most gorgeous movies you'll ever see, partly because of the throbbing Technicolor and Southwestern locations but mostly because of Gene Tierney.

      Tierney is not an actress I've taken very seriously until quite recently. I knew she was ethereally, almost mystically beautiful, at least when 20th Century Fox wanted her to be. I've loved Laura for decades and couldn't imagine any other actress bringing to life that ghost of everything men imagine women to be. But in Night and the City I thought she was just fine, and in The Shanghai Gesture almost dorky. I lumped her in with Linda Darnell and Hedy Lamarr as just one of those faces that clever cinematographers and erotically complicated directors could play wonderful tricks with. Then a friend of mine told me she was his favorite "screen goddess of yore," and coincidentally I had a chance to catch one of her early comedies, Rings on her Fingers (and she was pretty funny, too), and that got me to rent Leave Her to Heaven, and all of a sudden I saw something opening up behind her otherworldly gaze: she plays a cruel, dissociated bitch posing as a sweet girl next door, and she brings up something truly spooky from her depths in doing so. (And is she ever fascinating to look at.)

      A lot of awful things happened to Gene in her life, including a first child born severely retarded and a decades-long journey through major depression, probably bipolar disorder. She came of age when the mental health establishment was determined to "conquer" depression, but the drugs that might have helped hadn't been found yet. So she spent years in and out of institutions, getting her brains scrambled by electroshock. But she did her best to get through, and to take care of the people in her life as well as she could. Late in her life she wrote a book about it all, Self-Portrait, that I've seen praised for its candor and humanity. I'll be at the Castro on Saturday the 26th to see her on the big screen.

      Meanwhile, Turner Classic Movies, my favorite place to hide when I just can't handle the real world, is showing some fun stuff as usual. Some Hedy Lamarr movies tonight—and after the wonderful essay about Hedy and John Garfield on Self-Styled Siren's blog, I realize I've been probably been too quick to dismiss her, too. And Saturday morning Detour, one of the great, weird, punch-drunk, low-budget noir quickies, starring yet another inconsistent but fascinating actress of the '40s, Ann Savage (whom my pal Will Jacobs and I find so compelling that we're going to be using her in our new novel, Million Dollar Ideas.)

      So there you go. Lots of ways not only to avoid worrying about the election, but to avoid engaging with the present altogether.

Jules Dassin

No politics this time, except a retelling of a political life. Jules Dassin, the director, died last week, and I keep thinking about him. Although it's only been recently that I've really begun to notice or understand him, he's been a presence in my imaginative life since I was a kid.

      My parents loved his movies. My dad especially liked Rififi—nothing gratified him more than a finely wrought heist movie—and explained to me what was great about Topkapi when he took me to see it when I was seven or so. For my mother, the great Dassin movie was Never on Sunday. I had no idea then, but now I understand how that sentimental comedy about a scholar in love with a whore gave voice and image to everything she wanted to believe about her own sexuality and passion for life and hunger for self-acceptance. She would speak Dassin's name with something between a sob and a sigh; although that was partly, I think, because she (like most of the art-house audience) assumed he was French, and so invested his name with wet flourish: Zhool Dah-SANH. She didn't know he was really just Julie Dassin from Morris High in the Bronx—"DASS'n"—son of a Jewish immigrant barber.

      Dassin's journey to the movies was a fairly standard one for a New York Jew of his generation: Yiddish Theater, Group Theater, radio, Broadway, then the invitation from RKO to learn directing by assisting a master (Hitchcock in this case). And like most of the creative kids who came up through that world he got involved in left-wing politics, joining the Communist Party during the "Popular Front" days and leaving it when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in 1939. If you were a son of Yiddish immigrants in the Depression, that was how you expressed your humanity, your civic responsibility, your essential patriotism. It showed in his movies, too. They were never overtly political, but his inclinations and talents led him to stories of exploitation, alienation, and crime—Brute Force, Naked City, Thieves' Highway—and his brutal focus on the agony of individuals struggling against an indifferent environment turned those stories into indictments of the culture of money and what it did to people.
      He was just becoming an important American artist when America turned on him, as it turned on so many of the idealists who had held up the progressive pillar of our national coalition through the Depression and the War. In the late 1940s the House of Representatives and the mavens of the movie industry teamed up to destroy the careers of left-leaning filmmakers, and the great mass of those filmmakers' coworkers and fellow citizens, even their own labor unions, sat by nervously and let it happen. Never mind that Americans of all political stripes had eaten up the dark images of corruption and conflict that left-wing moviemakers had perfected. Never mind that stories of the little guy battling plutocracy were a staple of the American imagination on the right wing as well as the left. We were in one of our fits of ideological madness when any call to change is heard as a threat to our identity, and the word went out to sacrifice the "Communists" to our terror.

      When Dassin took on Night and the City, he knew he was about to be blacklisted, that it would be his last movie for an American studio, and it showed in the nausea and hysteria, the mad persistence of dreams in the face of hopelessness that shaped every scene. With a good crew, a strong script and one brilliant actor—Richard Widmark, who also just died—he crafted a whole vision of a fear-driven world with its soul out of joint. There was not an explicitly political line in the entire thing, no angry laborers or cruel bosses, only touts and conmen and B-girls and cabbies and wrestlers, and yet without a moment of posturing or cant he made it one of the cinema's most relentless critiques of capitalism, its psychological, spiritual, and social costs, like Brecht without the speeches or surrealism. And then his American career and life were over.

      The blacklisters weren't just cowardly or conciliatory, they were petty and mean-spirited, too: American film distributors passed the word among their European counterparts that no movie in which Jules Dassin was involved would ever be exhibited in the United States. That kept him from landing a movie job even in France for five years, and when one came to him it was nothing special: a low-budget crime flick called Du rififi chez les hommes. But his loving attention to the mechanics of theft made it a nasty delight. It was a huge hit in Europe, and American distributors wanted a piece of that cash. So money became Dassin's savior and the blacklist began to crack. But Dassin never wanted to be an American again. He directed a movie with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, fell in love with her, fell in love with her country, and became a "first-generation Greek."

      Even in Europe his work was rarely political on the surface. His best movies were sentimental comedies and ingenious crime capers. And yet, through his amused fascination with thieves, prostitutes, and fly-by-nighters he continued to make brisk points about the effect of cash on morality and law. He cast himself in his most personal movie, Never on Sunday, as an American intellectual named Homer who is disappointed when Greece will not reflect back to him his own fantasies of its cultural purity. He falls in love with a Greek prostitute but cannot accept her for what she is, trying to reform her through education until he finds himself sinking into the muck of the modern Greek underworld. In the end he arrives at the essential Dassin understanding: that we and the world are painfully flawed and money is stronger than any of us, that we can save ourselves only through honest acceptance of what we are. Dassin wasn't a very good actor, and that's part of the reason the movie doesn't hold up as well as his Hollywood work, but in his fragility and eagerness to please and sometimes too self-conscious effort we can see his journey out of pain and into love.

      (And it launched my mother on her own version of Homer's journey. For years after seeing that movie she was desperate to see Greece, but when she got there she found no sign of the singing, stomping, glass-tossing gaiety Dassin had promised. My father took her to a taberna to hear bouzouki music, but the music was overamplified and everyone smoked. She hated it.)

      Dassin's interest in movies—and his talent for them—faded as he grew older, and he gave more and more of his energies to helping Mercouri, his wife and moral compass, in her work as a socialist politician and eventual Culture Minister of Greece. After she died in 1994 he devoted himself to her last cause, the return of the British Museum's Elgin Marbles to their original home on the Parthenon. Not a quixotic battle, exactly, because it might yet succeed. But still a heartbreaking one somehow. For over two centuries those marbles have sat there, white and serene in their London tomb, far removed from the passage of time and the turmoil of Greece and the racket of New Oxford Street, and the British are in no hurry to let them go. The corrosive smog of Athens, they say, would damage them. Dassin outlived his wife by fourteen years, but in those years he came no closer to bringing the marbles home. So they stay frozen, those Centaurs and Lapiths and horsemen and basket-bearers, some headless, some handless, but all imperturbed, so far from the building they were meant to glorify.

      There's a trace of the pain of all those early 20th century left-wing patriots in that unrealized dream: the return of a pure, shattered beauty at long last to its rightful home.

(Listen to the) Paisley People

Nothing about America’s future today, only our distant past. Archaeologists from the University of Oregon have just announced the discovery of the oldest known human DNA in the Americas: coprolites—fossilized doo-doo—radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. The petrified dung was uncovered in the Paisley Caves, near the town of Paisley, Oregon (named by a settler after the mill town in Scotland where the famous Persian teardrop pattern was introduced to the West), and so we can hope that the original depositors will become known as the Paisley People.

      For seventy years the oldest known humans in America were the Clovis People, whose 13,000-year-old spear tips and cutting tools were unearthed in Clovis, New Mexico. (When I was a kid I learned about them as Clovis Man, because that’s how they did it then. Java Man, Peking Man, Piltdown Man. Sometime around 1970 archaeologists got reluctantly in touch with their feminine sides and started talking about the Clovis People, making our antecedents sound less noble but more homey.) Some archaeologists have disputed their place as “first known Americans” for years, but no one has been able to provide the hard data to strip them of the title—not until Dennis Jenkins and his UO team found, not stone tools that could be dated only roughly by the stone strata they were buried in, but the perfect, dateable organic relic.

      That in itself is a miracle. Picture it: some guy takes a dump in a cave, a minute later he's forgotten that particular dump forever, but the stuff somehow survives all the dung-eating bugs and molds until it gradually turns to stone so that 14,300 years later it’s thrilling the scientific community and getting written up in our family newspapers. It’s one of those times you really wish people could have a sudden glimpse of the future. “Who are these wondrous beings with their vast villages and miraculous devices? And what are they doing with my crap?!”

      What a symbol of eternity! What a reminder of the continuity of time and life. It’s like the Clock of the Long Now, except instead of a whirring masterwork of perfectly calibrated machinery it’s a pile of turds.

      But here’s the real revelation: the first known Americans were the Paisley People of Oregon. The Paisley People. Of Oregon. Forget your noble savages, man. Forget your bronze-skinned warriors and your blood-stained hunters of the plains. This has always been a hippie nation.

Can We Talk about Race?

Ask anyone concerned with the growth and healing of people and institutions—a therapist, a religious leader, an addict in 12-step recovery, a motivational speaker, or that consultant your company hires for team-building workshops—and they’ll all agree with one principle: you can’t solve a problem unless you can talk about it. If we can’t be honest about our fears and resentments—with an expectation that we’ll be listened to with a measure of openness—then they’re only going to fester.
      So how is this country ever going to get past its racial tensions, especially in politics? I applaud Barack Obama’s effort to run a “post-racial” campaign, but one of its side effects has been an intensification of our reflexive, angry suppression of racial discussion. As unpleasant as Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright’s recent comments were, I don’t see us helping ourselves when the only responses we hear are cries of “race-baiting” and demands for heads to roll. Maybe the way to be “post-racial” or “trans-racial” or “inclusive” is to talk without venom and sloganeering about why so many of us bring race into our political decisions.
      Like, I keep wondering if this blue-collar white resistance to Obama in the Rust Belt isn’t so much due to “racism” as to decades of experience with ugly battles between white and black Democratic political machines. Philadelphians remember the Rizzo machine being replaced, not always to good effect, by the Wilson Goode machine in a racially split election; more recently they’ve seen John Street disappoint the early promise of a broad-based administration and fall back on “the brothers and sisters are running the city!” cant. I think there may be a lot of white people who’d like to see themselves as being willing to vote for a black man but find some experienced-based worries getting in their way. Maybe the reason Obama does so well among blue-collar whites in Illinois is just that they’ve known him long enough to see how well he works with the Daleys, the Blagojeviches, and the Reznos to believe that he can avoid the old us-and-them politics that Chicagoans know so well. (I don’t know that this eases the minds of voters like me, but then latte-sipping Prius-drivers aren’t the main issue in the Pennsylvania primary.)
      But how can we find out if this is true or not—how can we understand what this racial divisive is and how we can get past it—if we can’t talk about it?
      I like the tone of Obama’s most recent comments on divisiveness in the campaign, but I feel that there’s more he can say. He’s better positioned than any politician in our history—and, as an orator, perhaps more capable—to lead us to think more deeply about our own ideas of race, ethnicity, identity and national unity. And now is the perfect time to start. There are risks in talking openly about a subject that makes us all so uncomfortable and that we have all been so conditioned to fear mentioning in public. But there might be huge rewards too. It might be good for the campaign, giving him the chance to reassure white voters that he understands their reservations and that it’s safe to move past them-and-us politics. It would certainly be good for the country.

They Had Faces Then

I'm in the mood to let the great issues of American politics take care of themselves today and think instead about one of those cultural contributions of ours that flourish despite all political and economic vicissitudes. The movies, specifically. A video artist named Philip Scott Johnson has made two stunning little films with some still photos and some morphing software and posted them on YouTube.

      The first, Women in Film, shows 80-some actresses morphing into one another, from Mary Pickford to Halle Berry, set to a haunting Bach cello solo. The effect of the morphing is hypnotic, and I'm struck simultaneously by the changes in ideal type, in facial structure and hair and make-up as well as in the expressions we expect our beautiful women to strike, and by the essential continuity of what we've thought of as beauty and glamor for the past 90 years.

Then there's Men in Film, in some ways less "easy on the eyes" but in others more fascinating, as it really lets us see what a greater variety of facial types we allow to our ideal men than our ideal women. Watching Fred Astaire stretch out of Erroll Flynn and then squish into Clark Gable is quite a moment.

      I find them both compelling. It's hard not to just keep hitting "replay." The names of all the actors and actresses are listed, but I had more fun trying to identify them on my own several times first. Some surprises when I finally checked the list: the face that I thought was just a transitional morphing image between Gene Tierney and Ingrid Bergman turned out to be Olivia de Havilland (was that why she never quite made the first rank of stars?). And I strongly recommend watching them on full screen, with the sound on.

Change of Shift

David Ignatius has just written a column in the Washington Post expressing his doubts that Barack Obama will be an effective bipartisan "bridge builder" because he "has not shown much willingness to take risks or make enemies to try to restore a working center in Washington." Later in the same column he writes that "unlike McCain, Obama bears no obvious political scars for fighting bipartisan battles." His point is that creating true bipartisanship often involves opposing the more divisive elements in one's own party, which is true enough. But it strikes me as a peculiar idea that one must "make enemies" and bear "obvious political scars" to bring parties together.

      It comes as no surprise to me to learn that David Ignatius was born in 1950, in the thick of the "baby boom." Because this is the essence of boomer politics: There must always be enemies. There must always be scars.

      I've never been able to consider myself a "baby boomer." Any demographer would include my birth year, 1957, in the boom—it was the crest of the wave, in fact, the peak procreational year in American history—and yet, the people who generally identify themselves as boomers are distinguished by a set of cultural and political experiences that I do not share: an awareness of America before the mid-'60s upheaval; a consciousness of Kennedy and the impact of his death; a visceral involvement with the Vietnam War; the draft, or at least the fear of it; an active experience of the Counter Culture, or an active reaction against it; a lifelong sense of "the '60s" as a personally formative moment.

     Not me. I never heard of Kennedy until he died. It seemed like Vietnam and the anti-war movement had always been on TV as I became vaguely aware of what my parents watched before dinner. I'd learn later that the draft was the reason my brother joined the Coast Guard and moved out when I was nine, but I didn't get any of the connections at the time. I turned ten during the Summer of Love. One day that summer my mother drove me to Haight Street because she was about to take her first job as a high school teacher and figured she ought to know what it was all about; all I remember is that a young man gave her a flower, which I thought was some sort of official greeting, and that we had lunch in a place that sold piroshkis. I liked piroshkis—that's what I learned from the Summer of Love. The assassinations of 1968, Kent State—news stories I couldn't quite comprehend. I didn't even hear about Woodstock until the movie came out a year later; I was in seventh grade and far more interested in the next Planet of the Apes sequel. The war was over and the draft being abolished a couple of years before I had to worry about it. The big song at my senior prom was Mandy, and the first election I could vote in was the 1976 California primary: Jerry Brown vs. Jimmy Carter.

      To me the great battles of the '60s are a mixture of vaguely remembered news items and historical recountings. The great battles of my own '60s were in my backyard and mostly involved G.I. Joe. I grew up hearing about baby boomers, but the phrase always referred to my big brother's peers, those grinning, yelling, fearless, arrogant, argumentative, eternal adolescents riding their roller coaster of manic idealism and self-pitying disappointment. There was no label for us quieter, humbler, more conciliatory little brothers and sisters of the boomers, and that's just as well. A lack of generational self-consciousness suits our temperament just fine.

      During the 1980s we heard much about the rise of those "children of the '60s" who were becoming the mainstream. Surely, we heard, they would surely change the world yet again with their vast numbers and hunger for change. When Bill and Hillary Clinton took over the White House after 32 years of occupation by the generation that had come of age in the Depression and World War II, when they danced at their inaugural ball to Fleetwood Mac, looking so young and alive, the boomers were enshrined as the generation in power. But it wasn't just the old lefties, the ones who'd gotten all the media attention during the '60s, who'd ascended. The big rebellion had shocked other baby boomers into action too, Young Republicans and neocons and angry anti-hippies and newly politicized evangelical Christians. Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove represent their generation just as thoroughly as the Clintons and Gores, and the tribal elders of both right and left were "proto-boomers" of the same vintage: Jerry Rubin was born the same year as Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney the same year as Bob Dylan.

      But left-wing or right, the generation has shared a single approach to public life: endless conflict.

      This is a generation that has always defined itself through denouncing an Other. We're us, they're them, and we have to fight them to remember that we're us. Once the "us" was generational, the youth movement that didn't trust anyone over thirty. That was the battle line that gave the generation its original unity and power. Over the decades the "us" has proven to be endlessly plastic, but the basic dynamic doesn't change.

     The "culture wars" have been mainly a boomer fight. Dan Quayle brought the baby-boom style of symbolic combat to presidential politics when he attacked Murphy Brown as the embodiment of all that was wrong with liberals, Democrats, and the media. Just as the over-thirties with their Sinatra and their martinis could be objectified, so could those liberals with their un-American values and entertainment. (And how perfect for a man born in 1947, part of the first tube generation, that wave of kids raised on Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, to launch his culture war over a sitcom.) Karl Rove's divisive electoral strategy is a literalization of the same attitude, its implicit underpinning being that it's fine to hurt, enrage, and alienate those people as long as we win the power struggle and piss them off.

      In struggling to retake the electoral center in the wake of Reagan, the Democrats have never embraced the culture wars so openly (anyway, it's hard to fire up the troops by advocating unwed TV moms) and have shown far more willingness to transcend party lines. And yet, they've certainly enjoyed playing the hipper, smarter party, parading their movie stars and rockers, still defining themselves as the young rebels to the parental Republicans. From the conversations of boomer Democrats you'd almost think that Bush's Texas drawl and cowboy affectations were as offensive as his politics. And the Clintons and their peers have always relished their literal and metaphorical boxing gloves, their battles against vast conspiracies and attack machines. In the end, the Clinton administration was hamstrung nearly as much by its own partisan gamesmanship as by the assaults of the Republican Congress.

      Yes, I'm over-generalizing, I know that. Plenty of boomers hold the opposite ethos; they were the first generation, after all, to go big-time for Buddhism and Sufi and other philosophies of transcendence. But those who have led and shaped the generation politically, those who rose to positions of power when the boomer ship came in, have been driven by an angry passion for being right—and for seeing the other side as wrong. By a need to define an "other side" even when there doesn't have to be. By a love of arguing, of mocking, of righteous indignation. A joy in watching opponents sputter in frustration. An intolerance of contrasting viewpoints. Little interest in "win-wins" or the "big tent," preferring a vivid delineation of who's hip and who's not, who's telling the truth and who's not, who's right and who's not.

      There's a power in that, no denying it. The most combative leaders of the generation are capable of great things. Their intellectual energy is inexhaustible. They are fearless in their willingness to dispute what has been handed to them from the past. Their innate belief in their own rightness gives them an extraordinary resilience: have there ever been two more indestructible politicians than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush?

      But mostly the "'60s generation" has squandered its powers and wasted its potential in endless skirmishes and the hunt for new skirmishes.

      To me, this is Hillary Clinton's tragic flaw. For all her dedication to children and health care, issues close to my own heart, she ultimately limits her effectiveness and hurts her causes through her reflexive combativeness. She has become a "polarizing figure" not simply because conservatives have developed a neurotic fixation on her (although they have), but because she plays the part with such obvious joy. She has defined herself by her battles with the vast right-wing conspiracy and the Republican attack machine to such an extent that she can't see outside that even as the electorate, driven by younger generations, tells her that it's done with those battles.

      Among Clinton's criticisms of Obama—which I hear echoed by many of her boom-aged supporters—is that he's never had to stand against the right-wing attack machine, that he won't be able to survive it. She asks us to support her because she's "tough" and "a fighter." This is a frequent justification of Clinton's own attack strategy: she has to prove that he's "not tough enough" before the Republicans prove it and it's too late.

      And yet, so far, Obama only grows more popular as he is attacked. His success is largely founded on the belief that the opponents' attack machine can be mostly dismissed because the attack itself has no more power than we give it. The voters under 50 who are driving his campaign don't want to give attack machines power, and so the attacks are blunted or even turned back on themselves. But the Clinton camp, wedded to the idea that enemies and conflict define us, can only see this as naivete, more evidence of his unreadiness for the battle with the Republicans. At times Clinton and her followers seem almost addicted to battle, to the maneuvering and short-term victories and tit-for-tat squabbling—but most of all to the anger. They see Obama's call for unity as weak because their entire sense of political identity is built on the eternal hostility of us and them.

     Eleven years after my mom took me to Haight Street, another woman led me back there: my girlfriend moved to the neighborhood in 1978 and Haight was our main street. There were still relics then of the explosive moment of the '60s—we were always walking by the purple Victorian with the sign reading, "The Jimi Hendrix Electric Church Foundation"—but there were also the twitching speed freaks in the doorways and the panhandlers on the sidewalk and the sullen long-hairs in the book and record stores who looked suddenly so much older than their years. My sense then was that a powerful wind of dreams and ideology had swept down the street and left wreckage behind. The kids my age and younger—call them late boomers, after-boomers, downslope-boomers, or, better yet, give them no label at all—suddenly looked a lot better to me. Without a lot of noise and fireworks, we were trying to clean up the wreckage and make the place habitable for all of us again.

      When I look at the aftermath of the Clinton and Bush years, I see the same wreckage. When I look around me, I see the same desire to clean it up. Not through more fighting and more finger pointing, but just through doing what we have to do and doing it together as best we can. I look at the candidate born in 1961, and I hear his rejection of those decades-old battle lines, and I know it's time to put a new generation in charge.

A Long and Splendid Journey

Before I beat myself up too much for taking over a year to face the fact that I'm not getting my new book written as fast as I thought I would, I should acknowledge a lesson I just received in the mysterious tides of creation.

      It will probably come as no surprise to you that some books take longer to write than others. A research-heavy non-fiction book, like this Undressing of America, can typically take three or four years to complete. But another book may have a completely different timeline. A humor book, for example, written by two collaborators in a white heat of inspiration and excitement. Last night I uploaded the first episode of just such a book—My Pal Splendid Man, my new collaboration with Will Jacobs—on its own website. And how long did My Pal Splendid Man take to write, from conception to completion?

      Just a little over twenty-seven years.

      In January, 1981, a young Will Jacobs was sitting in his apartment on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco looking out at the gray sky and drizzle, having just finished reading a few old superhero comics, and a scene flashed into his mind. There's this frustrated would-be writer named Will, see, sitting around catching up on his self-pity, and suddenly there's a knock on his door. He opens the door and a friend walks in, a guy in a blue business suit and glasses who looks unprepossessing enough—but there's something special about him. Something that does not immediately meet the eye. And after some cryptic dialogue between Will and his pal, we suddenly get it: this guy is a superhero, the most powerful superhero in the universe, in his secret identity. And with all the great crises a hero could and should be tackling, this one, for some reason, had come around to help Will snap out of his funk.

      Our young Jacobs wrote a few pages, liked it, and called up the even younger Gerard Jones to read it to him. Jones thought it was funny and intriguing and asked what happened next. Jacobs had no idea. He'd have to let it sit and see if the next scene came to him. Jones said he'd love to hear it when it happened. Back in those days, you see, Jacobs and Jones had written a few unpublishable things together for fun, but they didn't think of themselves as any sort of humor-writing team. Whereas now if Will Jacobs has a humor idea his first thought is, "I wonder if Jones will want to work on this with me?" and if Gerard Jones likes an idea of Jacobs's his first question is, "Can I help?" back then their friendship was still on a "Well, let me know when you've got more to share" basis. So those few handwritten pages of story on lined paper went back into Will's stack of fragments and notes.

      Four or five months later, however, our young Jacobs and Jones found themselves starting a humor book together—they called it The Summer of the Beaver but it would eventually be renamed The Beaver Papers—then finishing it, then sending it to agents and editors, and finally selling it to a real publisher in New York. As neither of them had ever sold anything to anyone before (aside from used books and discount jewelry), this had a tremendous effect on them. They decided that they had a talent for writing humor together, and so they looked for the next funny idea they could develop. One of them, they no longer know who, remembered those few pages about the would-be writer and the superhero. They figured out what the odd friendship would be based on, they developed the characters, and they hurled themselves into the stories with the aforementioned white heat.

      By the end of 1982, Jacobs and Jones had written several inter-connected stories about Will Jones and his god-like and supremely virtuous pal. (Who was not yet named Splendid Man. He's gone through a couple of names along the way.) Some of them were pretty lame, but some of them were actually quite funny. Unfortunately, even the better of them somehow didn't add a book. Our young writers had become extremely fond of the characters and the style of humor and the narrative voice, but they just couldn't figure out how to bring it all together. So they put it down for a while. And then, in the fall of 1983, they got a job with The National Lampoon, and life carried them on.

      Occasionally over the years they dusted the pages off to see if they could do something with them. They got a few of the stories printed in a little comic book fanzine. In 1987, when the now not-so-young Jacobs and Jones scored some success with their comic book The Trouble with Girls, they got a publisher quite interested in adapting My Pal Mighty Man (as it was briefly known) into a comic book. But when the publisher almost immediately folded, they moved on again. A few times in the late 1990s, Jacobs would have an inexplicable brainstorm and crank out another My Pal Whoever story or scene, and Jones would say, "Hey, that's funny." But by then it was just a hobby.

      By the time Checker Books contacted them in 2006 to ask about reprinting their old Trouble with Girls comics in graphic novel form, our now middled-aged friends had ceased to write humor together at all. But the knowledge that their collaborations were going to be seeing print again got them missing the days when they had regularly made each other laugh and fall in love with preposterous characters. So Jacobs pulled the old superhero stories out of his desk drawer. "You know what?" he said to Jones (emailed, really). "Some of these are really good. And I'll bet with what we've learned about storytelling over the past couple of decades, we could figure out what it's been lacking."

      The first thing they did was come up with a character name that made them laugh: Splendid Man. Which opened up a whole new subplot that, they suddenly realized, would tie all the stories together in a wonderful way. (I'm not telling you what it is. I want you to read it.) Suddenly they were able to throw themselves back into the stories in a white heat of inspiration and excitement that belied their advanced years. They showed it to some people and heard that it was very funny but not quite ready for publication yet. So they set it down, wrote a whole different book (Million Dollar Ideas) in a heat of comparable whiteness, and came back to it. This time they—we—think we've really got it. We're putting it on line, one story every three weeks, to draw attention to it and solicit some reader comments. And already we're hearing very nice things.

      What struck me most forcefully when I scanned the Splendid Man website this morning is that the initial spark from 1981 is still alive in it. (You'll recognize the original scene described above as the opening of Episode Two.) And yet there's so much else in it that Will and I have learned in the journey from our twenties to our fifties. It's a rare gift to be able to connect so intimately with one's own past, and to bring something back to life that I honestly thought I'd have to put down.

      I need to remind myself of this whenever I catch myself falling into the trap of dropping each new day that I don't write The Undressing of America onto the scale of my self-worth. Sometimes books happen when they happen.

      Unfortunately, there is that problem of the contract with FSG...and that other half of the advance that would sure come in handy....

Presidents' Day

This "President" thing has always vexed me.

     The first time I ever heard of a president was when I asked why my mother was crying and my brother told me "the president" had been killed. I was told that he was a great man and he had two children around my age who were now very sad. A president, I gathered, was a good thing, but also a vulnerable one who brought pain and fear.

      My first awareness of what a president was came through Lyndon Johnson. At first I was hearing good things about him in my family, as he signed the Civil Rights Act, but then came that hideous war and I began to hear about his cruelty and duplicity, his vulgarity and madness. A president, then, betrayed people.

      When I was eleven, I first began to understand some basic political realities, and the American people elected Richard Nixon. He defined "president" during the six most formative years of my political education. I don't imagine I need to elaborate.

      I almost thought Ford was going to get in and out without causing too much damage to the nation or its soul, but then he pardoned Nixon. Not just for the crimes we knew he'd committed, but for any crimes he might have committed.

      And yet, all through this I was being taught in school that there had been great presidents in the past who changed history in noble ways and came to represent what was good about our country. Not all of them, not hardly: one February my class held a "Presidents Pageant," and somehow I ended up being James Knox Polk. And even then I suspected that the story was a bit cleaned up. But clearly it had once been possible for a president to be a leader. My parents spoke of one—"FDR" my father called him, with something like infatuation in his voice—who in their childhoods had turned the mood of the country from fear to hope and sustained that hope through twelve hard years. I fell in love with '30s movies and through them—Warner Brothers from Little Caesar through 42nd Street to Dead End—I could feel the transformational power of that president across the intervening decades. Even Truman and Eisenhower didn't sound so bad against the self-destructive losers I'd seen in the job.

      I wanted to give my heart to Jimmy Carter, although even before the election there were yellow flags waving all around him. I waited and hoped for him to rise above the confusion and ineffectiveness of the first part of his administration. I even wanted to believe that his "malaise" speech was the turning point, although that cold spot in the middle of my gut told me that it was really the opposite. Perceptive sociology but lousy politics. Then came the Iran hostage crisis and his announcement that he would not leave the White House until it was resolved, still my personal choice for the just-plain-stupidest presidential moment in history.

      Reagan at least acted presidential. He at least made it through two full elected terms and actually became more instead of less popular as he went along. And a lot of things went pretty well during his tenure: the economy perking up, the vile Soviet empire beginning its final crack, a national snapping-out of the malaise, a lot of fun dance tunes. (Those were also the most exciting years ever for the comic book industry, for reasons that had a lot to do with Reagan; but that's another essay.) The problem with Reagan was that I hated what he was doing to the country long-term. The hastening of the two-tier economy, stirring up our latent social intolerance into a hostile and wrong-headed "values" movement, the so-called war on drugs that's still crippling us as a country, the manipulation of the Iran-Iraq War that led us straight to where we are now.

      The first Bush was more a place-holder than a president, at least until his own contribution to the Middle East mess.

      I was 35 years years old and feeling pretty well beaten up by American presidents when Bill Clinton caught my fancy. Yes, I was a bit troubled by the faint aroma of sleaze that filled every room he entered. Even then he had the air of a man who would say anything to get the approval he craved. But he said some fine things, and I liked his wife, and I saw the potential in him to turn the nation's political tide. Then came those infuriating first two years, when he handed Gingrich and the neocons everything they needed to take over Congress. The dawning awareness that he would cut any deal to remain the main conduit of power in the room. He did some good things too, and for a while my country seemed to be doing better, but gradually his obvious love of political gamesmanship and symbolic victory came to overwhelm his political agenda.

      Finally came the nightmare of the Lewinski aftermath. Not that I couldn't feel some compassion for his obvious sexual compulsiveness: I grew up under a cloud of addictive behaviors, especially alcoholism, and I've had to deal with plenty of my own compulsive patterns. What sickened me was the smug, gleeful game-playing afterward. The hairsplitting over not having had "sex" with that woman. The definition of "is." His apparent belief that he had won the fight, although he had demoralized his party and his country on the way to scoring a legalistic stalemate. For years the public life of my nation was about Bill Clinton's dick. Literally and metaphorically.

      By the election of 2000 I felt thoroughly disgusted with presidents. I started telling myself that there was something so inherently wrong with the post or the system or the country that we could not do any better. I even voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election—and I don't even like Ralph Nader very much. I just wanted to believe that there could be some way out of the duality of the party of Clinton and the party of Tom DeLay. So disgusted was I that the difference between a Democratic and a Republican president didn't really seem to matter.

      Then the Republicans on the Supreme Court hijacked my democracy and handed my country to a gang of thugs. That taught me something about the need to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, but even it wasn't enough to thrill me about the prospects the Democrats were offering up. I campaigned some for Kerry, seeing him as clearly the lesser of evils, but I also felt some relief at his defeat; I didn't see a Kerry presidency doing the progressive cause much good in the long run. Knowing that Hillary Clinton would be up next did not thrill me. I liked her a lot more than Kerry. I knew I could admire her savvy and toughness, and with a Democratic Congress she might be a lot more effective than her husband. She might well be a president who could engineer the legislative and executive changes I wanted to see made. But I also saw her pulling us deeper into a political drama I was sick of. She still seemed to have her punitive streak, her feeling of entitlement, her love of conflict for its own sake, and, of course, that husband and co-president of hers. I would vote for her, even campaign for her, but with a certain sickness of heart.

      I found myself at 50, beaten up and resigned and not believing that I would never know what it was like to have a president who wanted to make this country better and had the mind and soul to do so, who had the skill and the spiritual soundness to turn his values into realities, who could actually represent what I hoped was still true about America, who could actually be an inspiration and not an obstacle to my belief in my country. Then I heard Barack Obama speak, and I found myself thinking that it might be possible. I began to follow his campaign, I studied him, I talked to my trusted friends about him. And sometime in January I realized that I'd begun to believe.

      I've wanted to know a Presidents' Day that actually made me want to celebrate the president. Next year I think I may get that at last.

Hard Choice

I wish my mom had lived to see this election. Leslie Jones was the definition of a Loyal Democrat. In November 2000 she was dying of cancer—she’d chosen not to continue chemotherapy and we all knew that the end couldn’t be more than a few months away—but she was more depressed about George Bush’s victory than about the end of her own life. “God, I hate to go out on this note,” she said. “I was hoping I could at least leave you all with a Democrat in the White House.” She did, in fact, die a few months later, and over the past seven years I’ve often been glad that she didn’t have to see what was happening to her country. But I wish she was here for this one. I wish I could ask her who she would choose between Obama and Clinton.

      My mother was a feminist: by instinct lifelong, by political self-identification starting in the late ‘60s. On camping trips our family game was Parcheesi, and one year, when I was twelve or so and newly in thrall to Marvel Comics, I named my four Parcheesi men after the Fantastic Four, writing the names Reed, Ben, Johnny and Sue on their wooden bases. My mother snatched my pen, tipped up her four "Parcheesi women" and marked them with the names of her heroes: Germaine, Gloria, Betty and Simone. (As in, for you younger readers, Greer, Steinem, Friedan and de Beauvoir, four great mid-century feminists.)

      But before feminism, her driving political passion was civil rights. She was born in the piney woods of Mississippi into a family of Methodists who spoke up for racial decency in a time when the Klan spoke for the mainstream. She was finding radical civil-rights groups to join in the mid-‘40s, before most of liberal America found its voice on racial issues. She took non-violent resistance training through the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962, planning to participate in sit-ins or freedom rides in the South. Ultimately she didn’t go, I think because she didn’t want to die and leave two young sons.

      My mother dreamed of the day she would someday be able to vote for a woman for president. One of her favorite elections was 1984, when she got to put a mark by Geraldine Ferraro’s name for the vice presidency, even though she knew Reagan was going to roll to victory. I know she dreamed too—though more privately, not daring to believe it could ever come true—of the day she would be able to vote for a black nominee.

      Well, here is that election of her dreams. A woman and a black man as the sole contenders for the Democratic nomination in a year when the GOP seems bound to lose. It’s not Elizabeth Dole versus Colin Powell, either, but liberals who support nearly everything Leslie Jones believed in.

      And yet, what a cruel dream it’s turned out to be. Because she would have to choose. She’d have to vote against one or the other. I can only imagine how agonizing it would have been for her—and how agonizing it must be for those millions of women who fought the feminist battles of the ‘60s and ‘70s—that in order to elect the first woman to the White House she would have to rise up against the first plausible candidacy of a black man. No wonder so many women in their fifties and older have said that they hope Obama will settle for the vice presidential spot, or just that they wish he had waited eight years.

      In her essay Goodbye to All That 2 the feminist writer Robin Morgan casts her support for Hillary Clinton as a direct continuation of those struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s. A Clinton victory will mean “Goodbye to the double standard…to the toxic viciousness…to the news-coverage target practice….”

      “The real question,” she writes, “is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?

      “‘Our President, Ourselves!’

      “Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jimenez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.”

      She concludes, “I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.”

      I get it. I understand the desire to believe that supporting Clinton is the right thing for any woman to do. But if my mother were still here, I’d have to ask her if she could really believe it was true.

      Yesterday my friend Xandra, a feminist of the generation after Hillary Rodham’s, born in the ‘60s, told me, “I’m not sure Hillary Clinton is the feminist hero I’ve had in mind. For one thing, her life and her career are so completely intertwined with her husband’s. From her election to the Senate until the unspoken message of her campaign has been, ‘Let’s elect the two Clintons again.’” There’s no question that Hillary Clinton is extraordinarily tough, smart and capable, and her politics are mostly true to classic feminism. But she does trade on claims of experience that more accurately belong to her husband. Polls show that much of her support, especially among blue-collar males, is based on the expectation that we’re getting Bill back. She hasn’t been a very active or outspoken Senator in her own right. And why does her husband, when ostensibly campaigning for her, keep referring to “us” and “our agenda”?

      And she’s made such painful compromises with male power. I can still visualize her on that talk show in early 1992, as her husband was working damage control on his Gennifer Flowers mess, talking about how strong their marriage was. I think how profound her humiliation must have been. And then she had to go through it again over Paula Jones, and then again ten-fold over Monica Lewinsky. Of course, her endurance of public humiliation by her husband is probably more than politics; she probably really loves him. But still. The feminist revolution of the ‘60s was supposed to do far more than merely knock down the barriers that kept women out of public power. The wife who would suffer any indignity silently in order to advance her man’s career was supposed to be one of its casualties too. And yet Hillary drags that ancient, prefeminist response to the philandering of powerful men into the 21st Century.

      She’s also trying to play her relationship with that male power in a way that’s becoming embarrassing. She’s on record in many sources, including her own autobiography, as supporting NAFTA. But now that NAFTA has become a bone of contention among the blue-collar workers she’s courting, she’s trying to dissociate herself from it, implicitly saying, “That was Bill, not me.” She seeks equal credit for whatever is still popular about her husband’s administration (her “experience”) while making him exclusively responsible for what isn’t. Every politician dances a similar dance with his or her political history, of course, but in Hillary Clinton’s case this is compounded by a quality of ducking behind the male screen, minimizing her own public self. This too feminism was supposed to undo.

      And then there’s the war. She supported that war, including troop increases after the fall of Saddam Hussein, more energetically than she now wants to admit. And when she speaks of ending it, she adds that first we must find a way to do so with “honor, dignity and respect,” words that echo eerily Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor,” which turned out to mean four more years of war. Are this the agenda of a candidate who embodies the values of feminism, or is it another uneasy compromise with an old male power?

      I would tell my mom what my friend Xandra said. And what she said next: “At first I was sure I was going to support Clinton and I saw Obama mainly as a male threat to her. But after a while I stopped seeing the candidates as people of a certain gender or race. I started seeing them as people. And the more I learned about Obama, the more I felt he was the one representing me.” We will have our female president. Now that Clinton has shown that gender doesn’t stop a candidate from being a contender, more women will emerge. There will be one who fulfills the feminist dream in a way that Hillary Clinton cannot, one who has beaten her own path and not made so many deals with the devil along the way.

      I don’t think the Democrats offer absentee ballots where my mother has gone. (They used to in Cook County, Illinois, but they’ve stopped the practice.) If they did, I’d say, “Mom. It’s okay. This is Obama's time."

Thanks...

...to those, especially Michael Chabon, who nagged me into finally creating a blog. For the time being it will mainly concern the election, but we'll see where it evolves from there.