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• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

  Thursday, Dec 4, 2008 6:30PM / Standard Entry / Members only

  
  

  Forever Young
  

  “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
  

  By Jimmy So
  

  “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is about a man who takes 86 years to kick the bucket. The man, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), is born old and grows younger, but the curiosity is in seeing how the man is born and how he dies; the misfortune is that his demise takes two hours and forty-seven minutes. To my knowledge, nothing quite like this has been attempted on screen, unless you include the turn-back-the-clock efforts of Joan Rivers.
  

  So how did they pull off giving birth to an old man with “a long smoke-colored beard” who can speak as soon as he was born, as F. Scott Fitzgerald intended in the short story the film is based on? The meaning of “based on” is taken as loosely as possible; screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord merely borrowed the idea of the story and none of the material, and certainly none of the light-heartedness of the social satire. Admittedly, Fitzgerald’s inchoate story doesn’t give the director, David Fincher, much to work with, but in some cases such a deficiency would free up the film maker to not be bothered with how best to convey the author’s style. Sure enough, Fincher isn’t cramped by Fitzgerald’s lack of curiosity, and the picture doesn’t deal with whether Button can go to Yale or Harvard (a big concern in the short story). But neither does Fincher offer his character anything but lumpy indulgence—Button is a bore with no personality and no moral core, and the man who plays him would win an Oscar if acting consists solely of gazing mutely out of the frame. The picture might as well be called “The Sluggish Stare of Brad Pitt."
  

  The film cares nothing for immediacy, despite a frantic search for it that has the screenwriters creating a clock that runs backwards, “So that the boys who died”—in the First World War—“will come home.” Button is then born on Armistice Day. But this metaphor is not connected in any way with his life; Button has no vision, no drive and does not live as if he was given a second chance. Button comes into the world with his mother dying in childbirth, is nearly thrown into the Mississippi River by his wealthy father Thomas (Jason Flemyng), and gets adopted by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a black woman who runs an elderly home. With a background like that, you’d think Button would do something about civil rights—or become President (there are some scenes where Pitt looks a little like Franklin Roosevelt with a great white mane)—but the film doesn’t once touch on race relations. And not only does Fincher adopt temporal illogicality, the incongruence extends to social relations—a black woman picking up a white baby in the South without anybody saying anything?
  

  Before anybody could say anything, Button has already messed with their idea of the irrevocable arrow of time, healthily ungrowing into a slightly less old, diminutive man. The reverse-aging basis offers Fincher an unrivalled opportunity to reproduce those computer-generated mouths they put on cats to make them talk. Button’s childhood (or is it his senility?) is forged on computer and detachedly mechanical. Dare we request Brad Pitt to competently portray an ancient creature with juvenile charm. (Pitt is not Robin Williams in “Jack” (1996), but then again, is anything and anyone like Williams in “Jack?”) Even if Pitt did any acting behind that wrinkled avatar, we wouldn’t be able to tell, and reviewing his track record we can safely assume he did none.
  

  This is a movie of strung-together anecdotes—an evangelical preacher dies for no reason, a man gets struck by lightning seven times (every one of those hits are shown), and the picture must present the most pointless recitation of “The First Part of Henry the Sixth” ever put to film. The dull tale of Benjamin Button is actually told by Julia Ormond’s character Caroline as she tends to her dying mother Daisy (Cate Blanchett), reading out loud the diary of Button, who was Daisy’s lover. There is one scene—really, just one look—that Blanchett was able to salvage from this distant film: a lioness stare, as Button abandons Daisy and their daughter. Button is a coward and a chauvinist for underestimating the strength of Daisy, assuming that she’ll be unable to raise a daughter and a retrograding husband, but the film makes no effort to engage the audience on the possibility or consequences of that drama. One look—that is all, and forget the other scenes. Blanchett can do nothing for them. Every time Button and Daisy meet, a bit of chemistry builds up, but Fincher—who hasn’t had a strong sense of visual imagination since “Se7en” (1995) and “Fight Club” (1999)—fails to provide any amplitude, and things fizzle out. What about the sex scenes between the two supposedly hottest stars on the planet? When Button and Daisy finally sleep together, they do so in the elderly home, and they couldn’t proceed more matter-of-factly.
  

  There is a klunky “Blind Chance” (1982)-like sequence that comes out of nowhere and goes away without doing its job, which is to disguise a deus ex machina. Thomas Button even runs into his son in a whorehouse—a nightmarish scenario for every father-and-son pair, and not a bad scene for a movie to find itself in. And what does Fincher do with this? Nothing. He doesn’t even bother, not in a Richard Lester way, but in a what-else-do-you-want-from-me way. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” dies well before Benjamin Button is dead, which is remarkable because that effect is indigenous to a good number of Brad Pitt films—it must be written in his contract to drain a picture even before it begins. Consider “Meet Joe Black” (1998), “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007) and “Legends of the Fall” (1994).
  

  But “Benjamin Button” most readily recalls “Forrest Gump” (1994). Fincher’s picture is little more than a series of vignettes that represents its characters through the news of Pearl Harbor, a Lusitania-like assault, Balanchine, “Carousel,” Bolshoi and a storm that’s supposed to bring to mind Hurricane Katrina. There’s even a Captain Mike (Jared Harris), the “Benjamin Button” version of Lieutenant Dan, and Queenie—though no Sally Fields—also has a drab line that is nearly identical to Momma Gump’s “you never know what you’re gonna get.” Both films are childishly naïve, but whereas “Forrest Gump” infuriated some viewers, “Benjamin Button” will leave them little more than blasé. But perhaps “Benjamin Button” is an imperviously effective, self-referential exercise—for anybody who’s ever doubted that they grow older and not younger, after a hundred and sixty-seven minutes, you’ll know you’re never getting that precious time back. ♦
  

  
  

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• Vince Wins! Vince Wins!

  Friday, Nov 21, 2008 7:52PM / Standard Entry / Members only

  
  

  The indomitable Vince Matthew Chung has won TAR Asia 3! God knows I get lost just driving around my block (seriously, I missed two turns yesterday and my sister hit me upside the head) so I can only imagine the man's achievement. Add to that the fact Vince is on the HK team and we've got a true celebration at hand (when he gets back to HK). (But I'm not...even...in...town.) Hong Kong Reprazent!
  

  I know Vince through Peapops, subsequently running into him everywhere. Then one fateful New Year's Eve I saved his life by starting a street fight that Vince got my back on; I chickened out, thus giving him a chance to live another day or avoid going to jail for manslaughter, either way allowing him to compete in The Amazing Race. No need to thank me, Vince—just hand me some of that US$100,000 in cash.
  

  By the way, I hope you didn't get that dough a few months ago and put it all in the stock market.
  

  If not, buy low now.
  

  In all seriousness, congrats. You have a wikipedia page now, and the TARA 3 wiki page needs a mug of you and Sam.
  

  You have inspired me to compete in The Pickup Artist. Actually, I'd be much better on Beauty and the Geek.
  

  
  

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• Prop 8

  Thursday, Nov 6, 2008 6:57AM / Standard Entry / Members only

  

  Last night, we elected our first African-American president. Never have I seen people everywhere spontaneously revel in the streets. On the radio, a celebrating Seattleite said his father had called to say that they were also having a big party in their village in India. Somebody else said the whole island of Santa Lucia was rejoicing. Kenya was going bananas. White-Americans, black-Americans, Latino-Americans, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans, young Americans, old Americans—they had all gotten it so right.

  In Seattle, hundreds of students swarmed into the University of Washington's Red Square, chanting, shouting, singing, and crying. They had burst into "The Star Spangled Banner."

  I had been in a similar square six months earlier, on May 19, 2008. A flag had also waved above the crowd, but it was not an American flag. It was a Chinese flag at half mast, and I was in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. It was a week after the Wenchuan earthquake, and thousands of people were also chanting, shouting, singing, and crying. They were overwhelmed by their emotions and intensely patriotic. But they were also full of sorrow, and I had seen that patriotism elsewhere, too, at the annual candlelight vigils in Hong Kong to remember the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example. The people in that Chengdu square were very proud of their country—and yes, the economy was booming and China was powerful, but the people were not unabashedly celebrating their nation—not simply because they were mourning and had to show restraint, but because there was an air of the defensive about them. I saw in them a desire to protect the country and fend off criticism rather than rejoice in their land.

  America is not booming economically. Things aren't going all that well. But I have never seen Americans more elated and more proud. There was almost zero prompting—something just overcame them in their hearts, so genuine and direct was their emotion that they poured out into the November night. As I stood in that square last night, of course I thought of that early summer day, in the other country I love. How wonderful to call both China and America my home! But what I was a part of last night had the distinction of exhibiting no pain and sorrow whatsoever—just vast, ecstatic pride. The American people—not the government, institutions, or the bureaucracies, but the living, breathing souls of folk—had accomplished something monumental and wonderful.

  A morning after the national day of memorial in Sichuan, I spoke to a group of visiting American students just outside the square in Chengdu. They were attending a music school in California and were touring China to give performances, and I asked one young man to described what he saw the night before. He said that it was amazing to see so many people who obviously love their country. He had never seen anything like that before, and probably won't be able to see the same thing in his own country.

  Now he has.

  But the road ahead is long and hard, and there is so much more to do. The passing of Proposition 8 in California to write bigotry into the state constitution and reverse same-sex marriage is something of a killjoy for this election. America had not gotten it completely right. Maybe it's time to take back a little bit of that elation and exhibit some of the ambivalent patriotism we saw in Sichuan. Unfortunately, one of the most liberal parts of America had told us: "Hey, black people, you're alright. But gays? Not so much." ♦

  
  

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• It's Been A Long Time Coming - Letter From America

  Wednesday, Nov 5, 2008 7:06PM / Standard Entry / Members only

  "Quit your job in Hong Kong." Why? "Move to the United State of America." I don't know about that. "If you don't, you can't go back at all." Damn it. "You are now unemployed." Clearly. "Found out that days later, the global economy goes into the pooper." That's not good. Now go eat a bag of chips and don't bother leaving the house till you’re fat.
  

  Well, that's where my life was. Until tonight.

  Tonight made months of personal fears and uncertainties go away. I had chosen America, and I had been very nervous about that decision, but tonight made it all worth it.

  Tonight, I was proven wrong, shown that the American electorate was smart enough, good enough, and courageous enough to vote for an African-American president. Part of me questioned whether it would ever happen in my lifetime. My eyes seem to have doubted if tonight was real.

  Tonight was real.

  The bar I was in erupted into cheers and tears when MSNBC gave the 2008, 56th quadrennial U.S. Presidential Election to Senator Barack Obama of the Democratic Party.

  America has elected President Obama.

  Am I dreaming?

  

  "Yes we can."

  Yes we did.

  I was overcome with joy, and though I was watching history, I was also breathing disbelief. Was there, at long last, a new chapter to rewrite in "Souls of Black Folk," a new clause to follow W.E.B. Du Bois' "for the problem of the Twentieth-Century is the problem of the color line," the clause being "the color line has been torn asunder"?

  He had not only garnered the admiration and trust of millions of white and black Americans. He had won a contest against a man I admired eight years ago, a man's whose party I dislike but who courageously defied that party and its religious right. Eight years ago.

  

  I walked out into the chilly November night, a tall, proud flag hanging high above the university's square. Richard Wright's "Black Boy" came to my mind:

  "I heard a trolley lumbering past over steel tracks in the early dusk and I knew that underpaid, bewildered black men and women were returning to their homes from serving their white masters. In the front room of my apartment our radio was playing, pouring a white man's voice into my home, a voice that hinted of a coming war that would consume millions of lives.

  "Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain..."

  Sixty-three years later, we might have finally found that human path, and rather than spiral down the same drain, Americans, black as well as white, are lifting one another up.

  

  Hundreds of energized, proud, and inspired students swarmed into Red Square, chanting, shouting, singing, laughing, and crying.
  

  

  Certainly we have spiraled down long enough, far enough, and it is a long and hard climb back up. But at least, so it seems, we won't be hanging down our heads anymore. You know what they say: dumb criminals make dumb cops. If the road ahead isn't difficult, we won't need a good president, and it won't make a good president. I'm pretty confident that we will have quite a good president to work with in the next few years. I'm by no means certain, but I'm hopeful.

  
  

  We had been on the losing side for the past eight years. We did not want to be disappointed. We would have readily embraced a capable Bush presidency. It did not come. We soldiered on.

  

  This time round, did we vote for a great president? ♦

  
  
  
  

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• Barack Obama

  Wednesday, Nov 5, 2008 3:45AM / Standard Entry / Members only

  

  THE VOTE Eight Years Gone February 3, 2008 by Jimmy So In retrospect, erstwhile-future-president Al Gore might have been better off losing the Supreme Court decision on December 12, 2000, having since gotten an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize and all. But when he quipped this Halloween that the economic downturn began in January, 2001, and he was the first to get laid off, many voters—some 51 million of them—probably didn't think they were any better off the past eight years and were likely thinking of what might have been. They are thinking about that in a way they wouldn’t have even two months ago. Eight years ago, the biggest focus in the general election campaign was the headache of what to do with the 700-billion-dollar budget surplus. The people of 2000 had what we could only describe now as an envious dilemma but hitherto seemed a bummer of a problem. Next year, the federal budget deficit is projected at half a trillion dollars. The principal predicament of this 2008 election is what to do with the entire socio-economic system we have been accustomed to. In 2000, America was on top of the world; in 2007, Washington’s international relations political capital was depleted, but at least economically Wall Street seemed unstoppable as the Dow reached an all-time high. But now, America is on its knees politically and economically. After eight years and two terms of George W. Bush presidencies, it is true that nowhere-to-go-but-down would not apply to the leadership at the White House, although that is hard to say about the economy. And yes, things have been down lately. These have been eight years marked by an insultingly unjust war in Iraq that have cost 600 billion dollars and the lives of more than 4,000 American soldiers, an arrogant and unilateralist approach to foreign policy that has antagonized nations around the world, the veto of H.R. 2082 and the signing of the Military Commisons Act of 2006 that allowed the president to deny Guantanamo Bay detainees the right to habeas corpus and to determine practices such as waterboarding as “enhanced interrogation methods”, the unapologetic circumvention of the constitution through the authorizing of the NSA warrantless surveillance program—in short, a frighteningly successful assault on the civil liberties of not only Americans but people around the world. And Bush’s 2000 campaign promise of stimulating the economy has worked, really, as long as you ignore that real GDP growth has been considerably low (an average annual rate of 2.5 percent), unemployment rose from 4.2 percent in January 2001 to 6.3 percent in June 2003, and after a subsequent drop, rose again to 6.1 percent this August; poverty rose 0.8 percent, and income inequality has ballooned, with the richest 1 percent of Americans receiving its largest share of gross income since 1928, while the tax burden has shifted from the top 1 percent to the bottom 99 percent. No need to feel any shame—ignore is exactly what Bush did in February 2007, when he explained the rise of inequality in a way only he can—that is, without the by-product of rational (forget rigorous) thought: “The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills because of that education.” The familiar marks of the Bush presidency are all within that quote: Therein lies the rogue grammar and syntax that have come to be expected in Bushisms, and to give the impression of winning an argument quick and dirty so as to sweep the issue under the ever-propped-up Bush national rug, he offered the explanation that only the top 1 percent of the country are getting super-hero level education. Leave it to him to cast aside every discourse, meaningful or not. And just like that—eight years. Mind-boggling, wasn’t it? Now will you be careful about your vote? The candidates for the 44th President of the United States of America—John McCain of the Republican Party and Barack Obama of the Democratic Party—both offer intelligence, dignity and hope compared to another Bush day in office. The choice poses a formidable challenge: the voter cannot simply punish a former president or vice-president because (wisely so) none of them are running. There is an incumbent party, and McCain has come to court Bush’s conservative base despite being one of the first politicians to dislike Bush so much that he had angrily lashed out at him and his fundamental Christian collaborators. But let’s ignore, for a minute, the (often helpful) heuristics known as the political party. Maybe you’re not an undecided voter and you largely follow party lines. Maybe you are an undecided voter. Either way, it is probably a good idea to examine the candidates, study the issues, go over the past, anticipate the future, and analyze the science and reason of your choice, lest you regret it, or you are simply asked one day why you checked that box instead of the other one. But here’s the thing: The 56th quadrennial presidential election is tomorrow, and I consider it my responsibility to point out the elephant in the room. So here it is: voting is stupid. And if you ask most liberals, they might say that voters are stupid based on their past two goes at it. As Louis Menand wrote: “Why should anyone bother to vote? The chance that one vote will change the outcome of an election is virtually nil, and going to the polls involves a significant cost in time and opportunity. Presidential elections, in which more than a hundred million people vote, never turn on a single ballot. The lesson of the 2000 Presidential election was not ‘Your vote can make the difference’; it was more like ‘If you’re taking the trouble to vote, at least fill in the ballot correctly.’” Or maybe voters are too smart, because it is irrational to be politically informed: “For fifty years, it has been standard to explain voter ignorance in economic terms…In other words, it isn’t worth my while to spend time and energy acquiring information about candidates and issues, because my vote can’t change the outcome.” The rule that governs any self-respecting voter is that he or she should vote according to the issues. His or her business is simple: develop a coherent political ideology. One should at least read the candidate’s platform. But political scientist Philip Converse famously estimated that only about 10 percent of the public has what could be considered anything like a political belief system. Any number of studies outlining how voting can be significantly influenced by lousy weather, the color of a campaign button, how names are placed on a ballot, or the jut of a candidate’s jaw can take away your confidence in the average citizen. About 70 percent of Americans don’t know who their senators and congressman are. A majority cannot name a single branch of government. More than two-thirds don’t know the substance of Roe v. Wade. Between 1987 and 1989, polls found that 20 to 25 percent of the public said that too little is being spent on welfare, while 63 to 65 percent say too little is being spent on assistance to the poor, even though they’re the same thing. Such evidence seems to provide some support to various schools of thought that democracy is largely arbitrary and that throughout the years, elections are simply the random choice between the given options of red or blue. Converse believes that the public holds opinions that bear no more than a half-assed resemblance to a set of principles, and that they don’t even care about who wins. Speaking of the 2000 election again, 18 percent of voters decided on whom to check on their ballot only in the last two weeks, and 5 percent decided the day of. Economist Bryan Caplan doesn’t believe that voters don’t pay enough attention to politics; they are just the wrong politics. He thinks that since an individual can vote for the loser every four years and a single vote wouldn’t make a difference, being wrong doesn’t cost you anything. According to economics, we have the desire, the right, and—damn it—the responsibility to be irrational. It is the very thing that democracy is set up to make us into—raving, robotic ballot-box-stuffers. At last count, that’s a lot of damning opinions against American democracy. Then there’s the lack of a National Popular Vote plan. Oh, and the Bradley effect, that some people would rather lie to a pollster than admit to being racist—or at least, not voting for a candidate simply because of his or her race. Talking about race might not be the easiest task, since those who have made up their minds to not vote for a candidate because of his or her race could be a bit adverse to changing their minds. But consider the story of McCain—not John McCain, but one Franklin McCain. Some of you might recognize this date: February 1, 1960. It is the date of the famous Woolworth sit-in. Four students from the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into a Greensboro Woolworth with the trifling matter of ordering lunch. Just one problem—the manager of the Woolworth had every intention of maintaing the lunch counter’s whites-only policy. Franklin McCain was one of the unwavering four young men. Here he is recalling the moments that passed when an older white woman sat at the lunch counter a few stools from him: "And if you think Greensboro, N.C., 1960, a little old white lady who eyes you with that suspicious look … she's not having very good thoughts about you nor what you're doing," McCain says. After some time, the woman finished her doughnut and coffee. She walked toward McCain, and put her hands on his and his friend’s shoulders. “She said in a very calm voice, ‘Boys, I am so proud of you. I only regret that you didn't do this 10 years ago.’ “What I learned from that little incident was … don't you ever, ever stereotype anybody in this life until you at least experience them and have the opportunity to talk to them. I'm even more cognizant of that today — situations like that — and I'm always open to people who speak differently, who look differently, and who come from different places.” It might be just as well not to stereotype the typical voter. Surely members of the public can be smart, and surely they can make a difference. It is even unnecessary to support Obama on the basis of his race. However, it is not a negligible issue. To a comfortable cynic, Obama's race means next to nothing; to practically everyone else in the world, the election of Obama, half black, half white, would at one fell swoop topple the walls America has built around itself. He would be the triumph of Lincoln and the civil right acts of the 1960s, the beginning of the victory in the centuries-old war against discrimination, prejudice and intolerance. The global brain-damage and mayhem accomplished by the Bush Administration in the past eight years and international hatred of America, stemming from a perception of the country as inhabited and led by arrogant and culturally ignorant racists who do nothing but further imperialism and tell others what to do, could more easily be reversed. (But I wouldn’t put it past the terrorists—radical Islamic or otherwise—to denounce the United States without skipping a beat.) No, it is not entirely necessary to focus on Obama’s race, but there are good reasons to vote for him because of what he looks like. There are also good reasons to vote for him not because of what he looks like but because of who he is—that is, his character and judgment. And there were reasons to vote for John McCain because of who he was. It’s true that he had the fortitude to take on the fundamentalist evangelicals and Rovians who helped Bush win in underhanded ways, blast his tax cuts in 2003, and exhibited his “maverick” ways by taking on unpopular (especially to Republicans) but sound positions and working with Democrats like John Kerry, John Edwards, Edward Kennedy and Joseph Lieberman on a patients’ bill of rights, environmental issues, campaign-finance reform and immigration policies. Where have eight years gone? For one, eight years ago, I might have voted for Senator John McCain. Not today. Republic Frontrunner and Eventual Nominee John McCain has abandoned the center and moved to the right. That is not necessarily an unforgivable move, yet he’s gone so far right that it is no longer a fistfight that’s expected but a kiss-and-hug make-up when his name is mentioned alongside preachers like Jerry Falwell. He is willing to embrace people he once admirably called “agents of intolerance.” And he has delivered his speeches and debates with a viciousness and disregard for truth and ethics that had distinguished the dirty primary campaign of Bush in 2000. The past two years has seen the degradation of a once-courageous politician, the pandering and desperation for victory evident in his face, and it is something of a tragedy. And that was even before the selection of Sarah Palin as his nominee for Vice-President, someone he had met all of two times before he picked her as his running mate. Most political endorsements and condemnations around the country have specifically called out Palin and pointed to her selection as the clearest example of McCain’s impulsiveness, selling-out and poor judgment. I need not add more. On the other end stands a man who effuses a calm and level-headed image. Eloquent, inspirational, the last word in equanimity, Barack Obama’s is the temperament best suited for a time like this. He does not dismiss discourse with snappy, deceiving attacks, like McCain does. Obama’s seemingly superhuman composure stems from a willingness to discuss differences in views in healthy, open and assertive dialogue. Some might call that professorial, but it is a noble and responsible attribute. Post-Bush, America needs a leader who can govern with truth-seeking principles and methods. This endorsement is not from a media juggernaut, rather it is a well-written and well-thought-out editorial from Seed Magazine: “It is abundantly evident that science can refuel economic growth, address the energy and climate challenge, and help restore America's soft power around the world. President Bush dismissed this potential, turned the very act of defying science into an art, and in so doing diminished US competitiveness and disenfranchised the country's source of innovation. His administration not only disregarded evidence time and time again but also rejected and debased the very enterprise that offered that evidence. Renewing the promise of science starts first and foremost with restoring scientific integrity to government… “Far more important is this: Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated. “Sen. Obama's embrace of transparency and evidence-based decision-making, his intelligence and curiosity echo this new way of looking at the world. And that is what we should be weighing in the voting booth. For his positions and, even more, for his way of coming to them, we endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States.” And finally, the issues. Voting according to character and judgment isn't wrong. It cannot be dismissed as heuristics if character is assessed thoroughly and carefully, just as following party lines cannot be labeled a shortcut if one understands the platform and has decided that it best represents one’s political belief system. It might be difficult to convince an ultra-right-wing conservative that liberal policies will best serve the nation right now—possibly harder than convincing someone on the matters of race. Political beliefs should ideally be strongly held—a conservative and a liberal might have equally good reasons to hold his or her views. That is why crossing-over is not easy, and when it happens it is likely based not on issues but on character or judgment. It’s not an easy task to pull voters from one end of the spectrum to the other, and thank goodness it is not necessary. America has a good supply of centrist, independent and undecided men and women roaming around in a pile, candidates ready for the picking. America is a center-right country, and whereas Bush was able to win the electoral college by securing his base, Democrats then and now would likely not be able to claim victory without the undecided and swing-voters. Many of these center-right voters are self-labeled social liberals and fiscal conservatives. On the one issue that is on most people’s minds—the economy, it could be made quite clear that a Republican White House will not lead to fiscal prudence. Again, eight years ago many center-left liberals might have voted for McCain. Not today. Most ought to know that McCain has moved ever so far to the right, that making Bush’s tax cuts permanent and deepening them (especially for the top 1 percent, once again) should logically rule out a balanced budget as well. That hasn’t stopped McCain from promising both, and it won’t happen. Time and time again, Republicans have feigned outrage at gigantic budget deficits, and time and time again they have run up gigantic budget deficits. According to Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank, this is a great paradox, but only on the surface. Ever since the Reagan years, Washington conservatives have found that budget deficits defunded the liberals. It allows them to cut social programs, or any program threatening to and detested by conservatives, and to privatize and outsource public operations. A Washington Republican like Bush did it and an increasingly pandering “maverick” Republican like McCain might do it as well. McCain is promising to freeze spending across the board. During the debates, he tried to lure Obama into promising the same or look foolish and less prudent when refusing to do so. Obama did not take the bait, because freezing spending would be “calamitous,” as Frank said on Marketplace: “Maybe there's another way of looking at the problem. Suppose we understand the current deficits that benefited the rich and the well-connected as stupid deficits that didn't stimulate much more than the market for yachts and lobbyists. Smart deficits, on the other hand, would come from federal spending that gets the economy going again. Spending money on infrastructure, on stabilizing the housing market and on a massive energy independence program—that's the kind of energetic and intelligent governing we so urgently need today.” Match that up with Obama’s plan to create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank and you have a winner. The plan would build and fix roads, bridges, public transportation systems and mass-transit railways. It would create millions of jobs and become a major cornerstone in green-energy investment and research. McCain was one of the first Republican senators to support federal limits on carbon emissions, and although his plan is less ambitious than Obama’s (Barack’s plan being a healthy 80 percent reduction by 2050), it was not damning. That was until the compulsively erratic McCain thought it a good idea to capitalize on the public’s fears about rising gas prices and offered, loudly, the idea of “Drill, baby, drill!” and lift the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling. On the whole, whereas Obama has exuded confidence and an eagerness and quickness to learn about the financial crisis, building an impressive team of advisers around him, McCain has seemed indecisive and panicky. And Obama has never seemed to panic in the face of crises. If he had lost hope, as the aggregate studies of impulsive voters could lead him to, or the jeers, slurs, taunts, and threats hurled at him would convince anyone weaker of mind and heart that America would never vote for a black president, he would not be here today. He would not have “out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right,” as The Economist puts it. If he had panicked about himself, his race, or his campaign when crisis struck in the form of his ex-pastor with a particularly serpent tongue for divisive provocations, he would not have delivered one of the more inspiring, searching and honest speeches ever given by a candidate for the presidency: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe…These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love. “Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. “But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America—to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. “The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through—a part of our union that we have yet to perfect… “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.” It could not be ignored that Obama is not perfect. There are risks in electing him to the highest office in the country and arguably the most powerful position in the world. Some might even say it is a gamble. There are questions of a relative lack of experience, and there’s no getting around that, nor could much be said to dispel those fears. It was also said, at the time, that inexperience might plague Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. Obama has made mistakes. His running mate could be a little less gaffe-prone. But the fact is that candidates can never be perfect, democracies are flawed, and voters are not rational machines. Giving a voice to the masses is what democracy is all about. Voters on the losing side don’t get their way, and even those on the winning side don’t always get the policies they were promised. Could a Gore-supporter blame a Bush-backer for the way things have turned out in the past eight years? Maybe, but neither one can question the other’s right to freely choose his political beliefs. And although every four years presidential candidates significantly compromise their standards and pander to a lower common denominator, baiting voters into making decisions with reasoning they would gladly admit as infantile if it were applied to areas of their interest or expertise, it is an election that best holds politicians accountable for their deeds. The participating citizen, the battered, the weak, the worried, the weary, the self-interested, the know-it-all, and the unwilling voter are all empowered and, more importantly, held responsible for their choices. It is almost less about holding the leaders accountable than about making the individual answerable to his or her decision. Rolling the dice and losing every time is different from not being allowed to play the game at all, and a clean election is a spat in the face to every autocrat around the world. There will always be maneuvering between rational and irrational choices, and winning or losing is not the heart of the matter. Even the irrational are loveable. They are adverse to the risk of losing anything (or everything), exaggerate justice to punish cheaters at their own expense, esteem the symbolic as much as the use-value of things, self-dramatize themselves into historical moments, enjoy the status quo when things are going well, and embrace change when things aren’t going well. That doesn’t sound too bad at all. Those who have made up their minds about their political beliefs and consider the inattentiveness, indifference or indecision that bedevils modern democracy a tragedy might, upon leaving the voting booth tomorrow, cross paths with their unpolitical counterparts who might in turn consider the ideologues fanatics. But in the end, those voters who come out on the wrong side of the election must live with the majority’s decision (except in 2000). They must do their best in a country led by a person they may have come to despise. But a relatively reassuring level of stability almost always protects the United States of America, which seems odd, because we know how passionate some of our defeated voters can be. But they always continue about their business—Gore and Kerry supporters have done so for the last eight years, albeit painfully, as they see days, months and years filled with opportunity plundered. And so it proves that they live to vote another day, hopefully the difference eight years on being that they will belong to an electorate that, years from now, will look back and say they had voted for a capable president, one Barack Obama. ♦
  
  
  

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