Dear R J and Daily Blague readers,

The first wave of the McCain campaign’s indecent Negative Surge has shaken me so badly that I can’t possibly write what I’d intended to write this week, which was a chatty post about eggplants (?), and comfort food. (!)  At a time when we are all so raw over the economy, McCain and Palin are actually inciting their supporters to a level of wild rage that the rest of us can’t help but fear.  Ratatouille Pie is not going to comfort anyone right now.

My only source of comfort in the news is Barack Obama himself.  Has anyone else noticed how he is handling this?  Has handled everything since we first became aware of him?

Whatever mistakes he’s made, whatever else this man is or is not, whether he wins this election or loses — his ability to remain calm and focused under extraordinary pressure has been a balm for my weary soul.

Nevertheless, it was rather a terrible moment when the following thought about the Democratic Presidential Nominee clambered into my conscious mind:  “I think I love him.”  (Go ahead, please, have a chuckle, get it out of your system…)  Terrible, because that would be bad.  Bad!  I’m too old, and too wise — or at least too sad — to be emotionally invested in a presidential candidate!  Too young to have registered the inspirational impact of Bobby Kennedy; too burned by the only Democratic President in my sentient adult life, Bill Clinton.  In no mood for politician-love.

The unwelcome heart-flutter happened as I watched Obama give his speech in Berlin.  It was not prompted by any sort of mindless nationalistic pride — although seeing so many American flags being waved in a crowd of 200,000 Europeans, who’d shown up in the middle of a workday to have a look at this guy…yes, I was impressed and touched by that.

I’m sure I’d also been softened up by the pre-speech scene-setting, which I was watching on an internet feed, blissfully free of yakking pundits and graphics and headline crawlers.  It was such a beautiful day in Berlin…a light breeze waved through the many Tiergarten trees.  Volks of all ages were just hanging out, everyone looking relaxed and cheerful; there was music from the PA system.  Soon after I settled in to watch, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance was in the air.  Many people took up the invitation, and the cameras, as cameras do, loved the dancers:  the tall gorgeous black woman swaying dreamily; the uninhibited middle-aged white guy and his wife, who were working on some complicated frug moves with intense concentration…it was wonderful.  The general mood was light and festive and happy.  I was swaying.

But then Obama took to the podium, and I, funnily enough, had an unexpected attack of nerves.  Imagine:  five years ago this guy was unknown — and now he’s standing before 200,000 people who are counting on him to…what?  Save his country?  Save the world?  The sight (via the window within a window on my computer screen!) of all those people, zillions of people, packed in…all those eyes trained on him…frankly, it made me queasy.  It was too much.

Yet from the moment he began to speak, he seemed just fine.  He’d chosen his quiet, plodding tone over the passionate orator’s cadence that first captured our attention at the 2004 Democratic convention.  (A sigh of relief:  he had no intention of “firing up” this crowd!)  He eased into his bio, the details of which are so well-known (Yada, yada, mother from Kansas…) that I was about to tune out.  But that’s when my Big Love moment happened:

Fifty-three seconds into the speech:  “….my father grew up herding goats in Kenya…”  Some people, eager to show how much they liked him — were charmed by the story of him — applauded this.  Yay, goats.  Amid the noise of the applause and cheering, a wiseacre somewhere in the crowd made a ululating sound:  a goatherd’s call.  (I only recognized it because Emmanuelle Béart does such a fine rendition in the film Manon des sources!)  It wasn’t obnoxious or overly loud; it was cute.  Obama heard it too, looked in the direction of the sound and unleashed that smile of his.  He laughed.  He paused for a few seconds,  savoring a playful moment among fans in a park on a lovely, breezy day…then smoothly returned to his speech.  And I thought, oh my God, he’s not only calm — he is fully present.  Facing that overwhelming mass of people, he had not disengaged, as I think most anyone in his situation would need to do…at least a little, at least at the beginning, to get the voice under control and make sure the legs would hold.

This guy is all there.  He’s present.  I think I love him.

(As much as I enjoy that smile of his, it’s not “love” in the Samantha Bee (of The Daily Show) sense.  She once described Obama as “charisma, piled on top of gorgeous, wrapped in a sex tortilla and served with two scoops of Rrrrowwl.”  And by the way, if you find that quote kind of funny?  And think you might want to pass it on to someone? — do go ahead and copy it right now and paste it somewhere for safekeeping.  Because I’d hate to think of any of you following in my Google footsteps:  the phrase you’re most likely to remember is “sex tortilla”, but you might misremember it as sex taco, and…oh, darlings, it turns out that there are some unwholesome things on the internet!  It’s too late for me, but please spare your own delicate eyes.)

Erm…what was I talking about…?

Oh, yeah:  staying present.  Presence happens to be a quality I admire very much, and aspire to myself.

Please don’t think I’m accusing  Barack Obama of being perfect, or Enlightened, or, God forbid, Buddhist!  — the man has enough problems right now.  He’s likewise not well served by the earnest essays I’ve read comparing him to Atticus Finch, Jack, Bobby, Jesus, or Joan Jett.  (I spend way too much time at HuffPo, waiting around for Jane Smiley to post.)

But I do believe that the composed, steady temperament he displays is for real.

So I would like to declare myself in disagreement with those who, at every turn it seems, bark for Obama to start getting mad.  It’s annoying enough to hear from snide agitators in the press like Maureen Dowd — whose game of let’s-you-and-him-fight had already worn thin for me before the primaries were over — but I feel such despair when I hear it from Obama’s supporters.

If they have a shred of awareness, those calling for Obama to “grow a spine”, etc., should feel a chill of recognition upon encountering these words from Rabindranath Tagore:  “If anger be the basis of our political activities, the excitement tends to become an end in itself, at the expense of the object to be achieved.”

Any time Obama expresses some good old righteous anger, that’s fine by me — but I don’t want to see him feigning outrage to please those for whom rage is cheap fuel these days.  Of course I too hope that our nominee is not…a robot; I certainly hope that he feels anger at what he is seeing.  But what to do with that emotion?  If you are a parent, you’ve helped your child learn this lesson:  in between the immediate gratification of throwing tantrums and the self-betrayal of pretending you’re not angry when in fact you are — there is a third option:  choosing an appropriate and effective response.  I could be wrong, but having watched him closely for months now, I would say that’s what Obama’s been doing throughout this whole process:  reacting appropriately, like a grown-up.  Isn’t that what we’ve been missing for so long?  (And if his remarkable equanimity is a calculated choice to deny the right wing even one single YouTube video of him speaking in anger, which they’d use to misrepresent him as That Scary Black Man…then I’d say he’s handling that effectively as well.)

There’s a chance that Barack Obama, a man who is present, calm, and cool-headed, might be the next President of the United States.

It’s freaky how many different emotions — many of them pairs of opposites — go through me when I contemplate that possibility.  (Oh, the mess the next President will inherit!)

But at the still center of all those roiling emotions is cold, detached curiosity:  how many Americans would decide to be inspired by his example and calm the hell down?  (Would I stop going to the angry political blogs for doses of adrenaline?)  Because we need clarity now.  We need our energy.  Or are we too far gone, incapacitated by and addicted to our rage?  Even those who love Obama, as I’ve quite bravely admitted that I kind of do, sorta (and those who love him as Samantha Bee does — whatever! — I don’t judge!) — might find it a challenge.

After his speech in Berlin, the song Let’s Dance became for me an improbable theme song for Obama’s campaign, and I’ve been sneaking over to YouTube to listen to it whenever I want to recapture that Breezy-Afternoon-in-the-Tiergarten vibe.  If he wins, I’m putting Let’s Dance on my iPod.  I’ve already found just the version I want.  Bowie fashioned a new arrangement for the opening — it’s slow now, wistful and pretty, in a minor key.  Appropriate for our victory celebration, which would feature plenty of joy…but filtered through sadness over what has been broken in this country.

Take good care of yourselves.

Yours,

Yvonne

(Here’s a link to Obama’s speech.)

PS  Thought some of you might like to see a recent photo of the baby Cardinal I wrote about in my last letter:

She still visits our deck often, and is doing very well…my husband keeps the area clean and stocked with nice food for her.  As a late-season fledgling, she’ll probably keep those juvenile feathers through the winter — but her voice is already strong and adult-sounding.  The damaged part of her beak is only visible from certain angles; as you can see, she does have a cute side!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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