Knocked Up: A Week in Politics

Yesterday, while on the phone, my friend Vince asked me if I had heard the rumor that Sarah Palin was pretending to be the mother of her teenage daughter's baby. I laughed really hard and thought it was funny, 'cause that was a story line from Desperate Housewives last year. Ha ha. Funny joke. Well, about an hour ago, Sarah Palin, in an attempt to dispel the rumor, announced that her 17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant. Like, right now.

I don't have too much to say about all of this. I mean, I think McCain is a nut, and I think his choice of a running mate is questionable for a lot of reasons. Not because her daughter is pregnant, though. I mean, if nothing else, Sarah Palin definitely has a real family with real problems. And just think, she and her daughter will both be breastfeeding at the same time. Yay!

Soon after Palin's candidacy was announced I read a comment on facebook (a friend of a friend's posting) ranting about the "ridiculous" nature of the now-"circus" of an election. I was livid. Furious. I wanted to write a scathing reply to the guy who posted this opinion. I didn't for a lot of reasons, but if I had, I would have explained "how curious it is to me that a political election becomes "circus-like" when, for the first time in a nations history, two of the four candidates do not look like you, white boy." The audacity to suggest that politics ceases to be serious and real when it is no longer run by the status quo is a dangerous and haunting suggestion. And yet, I am afraid that there is this way that McCain's choice of a running mate has lent itself to this type of criticism -- there is something so superficial about the whole thing. It tastes like candy and shimmers in the light.

And this sense of the election become more and more superficial is not exclusively in the hands of the Republicans. As was noted by lots of people I have talked to, the convention was so canned, insincere, and scripted. I wanted to be much more moved by Obama. I wanted to see something genuine, and was disappointed. The closest we got to a genuine moment was when the Obama girls were handed microphones for a minutes, and the ten minutes of real-american speeches. Although the latter were super-scripted, it was the delivery and the deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces that made it seem so much more bearable.

I wanted to feel more than I did because it was such an important event. I never, ever, thought I would see a black presidential candidate in my lifetime. I thought it was beyond the limits of the possible of US political representation. I have been deeply moved by the significance of Obama's candidacy and the suggestion that maybe, just maybe, things have changed a little bit. I am not so naive as to suggest that Obama is going to offer some great liberal deliverance, and all that is wrong will be righted. However, I want to believe that there is something real, sincere, and meaningful happening in what I perceive to be a movement.

And yet, there was not a single mention of race during the whole convention. Not a word about blackness. This is disheartening to me. Even more so was the comment I heard an Obama supporter make recently that "I don't think of him as a BLACK candidate." But don't you see? The moment you take race out of the specific terms of this election you take away the historic, political, racial context that constitutes our cultural history. The reality is that to be black in america is a different lived-experience than to be a white man. To be a woman, queer, a person of color, etc. means that you have experiences and perspectives that are different from those of almost all of the other senators, governors, presidents around. I want to beleive that this difference in experience, perception and lived-reality translated into change in the White House. The minute you say race is no longer an issue is the minute you completely disenfranchise the meaning of this event. The moment gender is just an arbitrary box you check and the female running-mate becomes nothing more than a tokenized joke is the moment that we all bow down in complicity to the pretty, shiny, plastic version of ourselves and our nation.