Mix #1: So today I managed to vote for Harold Ford at the same time that I cancelled out his declared vote in favor of the anti-gay-marriage amendment. Bittersweet.
Mix #2: So I'm in line this afternoon at the courthouse in this redder-than-red county in East TN--of course it's at the last minute, knowing me, but at least I've got a chance to volunteer on election day now--and it's a HUGE line. Huge. It was huge at the primary, too.
So, passing the time while waiting, conversation strikes up. The guy behind me is asking one of the poll workers if any women had been in today who were born before the 19th amendment. He says no, not that he saw. And it'd be unlikely: She'd have to be at least 87. But what I'm wondering is a little more realistic: How many people voted today who had to pay a poll tax fifty years ago? And here we are with the chance to elect the first African American senator since Reconstruction.
(And if nothing else, we should learn from history: what we have in Iraq isn't Europe under the Marshall Plan--it's the South under Reconstruction.)
I'm thinking about my students, my freshmen. I showed them the anti-Ford RNC ad the other day, and asked whether they thought it was racist. God bless 'em, they didn't understand the question. I hated to be the one to tell them about Emmett Till, but I did. "So there is," I explained, "Some history to all these 'wild' charges of racism. The odds are good that your grandparents were kids when Emmett Till was killed." (That may be stretching it a bit, but I don't want to think about how old I'm getting.)
Unmix #1: The conversation continued.
Poll worker: "But there was one guy earlier today. He was a Columbian. Just got his citizenship and was voting for the first time. When he came out, everybody applauded."
Guy behind me: "Yeah, that's great. You know, I work with a guy from Cambodia. He was out the other day--we all knew he was getting sworn in with his citizenship. So the next day, we had a big red, white, and blue cake for him. And I guarantee you, he knows more about the Constitution than most people in this line."
For me, that's pure, straight-up misty eyes. America: It does sometimes work, doesn't it?
Mega-mix: The aforementioned long line. I'm passing time looking at people in line (as I think Sandy from Signal commented in another diary), trying to suss out who are the D's and who are the R's. It's not too hard--this part of TN was a nice bright crimson a couple of years ago. But there are a lot of question marks. A tousle-haired 18-year-old right in front of me, reminding me of what it was like to vote for Clinton in 92. (Boy, the world was shiny and new, then, wasn't it? Don't stop thinkin' bout tomorrow, indeed.) That guy in the sweater with the gray moustache--retired Democrat from Wisconsin? Or local business owner? The redneck--and I use the term lovingly, coming from good redneck stock--woman in front of him, complementing the kid, saying her two sons never follow politics at all. Am I happy or sad that they don't? The guy in front of her, in his blue work clothes, dirt stains on the left shoulder and right waistband. Good ol' boy for Corker, or union stalwart for Ford? In front of him, a longhair like me: redneck or hippie?
The poll worker comes down the line again, asking if everyone's voted on the new machines yet. He pulls a small group aside and runs through how to do it with a demo model, so they're ready when they get in. At 4:30, the line doubles up as they pull everyone in from outside so they can close the doors. We're in what was once the prisoner unloading area: "SALLY PORT MUST BE CLOSED BEFORE PRISONERS EXIT THE CAR." It's a little disconcerting to hear the rattle as the gates get pulled down and we're all shut in. And ironic that I'm exercising my franchise in the place where so many other people have had it taken away.
And even though I know that, statistically, more of these folks are here to vote for Corker than for Ford, I still get this long-forgotten feeling, this fondness for the forms of the Republic. Even if I hate the result, we seem to be getting the kind of turnout that at least guarantees that the process is working. That people, again, are speaking. And even if I dissent from the overtones of that voice, the fact that this voice is heard at all, in this day and age, with all that's going on in our country, is a precious gift.
Maybe this year, of all years, I'll like the results from this part of the state better than I think I will. I'd be ecstatic if a solid third vote against Amendment 1--it'd be nice to look around me and think that no more than 2 out of the 3 people in the room are, unfortunately, bigots. The odds are good, though, that I'll be disappointed again, and that the magnitude of The Work to be done will crash in on me. And this is why I have so little patience these days with those people who slam the South, damn the South, we can win without it, and say they won't cry for Ford. Maybe putting the South down lets you forget that Jewish families are being chased out of Delaware, that Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times in New York City, that everyone in Boston gets along swimmingly, or that a significant number of people in California are working their damndest to legalize discrimination against Latino/as there.
The South has problems from a liberal perspective? Don't you think I know that? Don't you think that Eleanor A, and R o o K, and GoldnI, and Sandy on Signal, know that? We wake up every morning in the damn South. We know full well what it's capable of. And still... we love it.
Jack Gilbert, the spare and unrelenting poet, has a poem called "A Stubborn Ode."
All of it. The sane woman under the bed with the rat
that is licking off the peanut butter she puts on her
front teeth for him. The beggars of Calcutta blinding
their children while somewhere people are rich
and eating with famous friends and having running water
in their fine houses. Michiko is buried in Kamakura.
The tired farmers thresh barley all day under the feet
of donkeys amid the merciless power of the sun.
The beautiful women grow old, our hearts moderate.
All of us wane, knowing things could have been different.
When Gordon was released from the madhouse, he could
not find Hayden to say goodbye. As he left past
Hall Eight, he saw the face in a basement window,
tears running down the cheeks. And I say, nevertheless.
So this is a stubborn ode, I guess, to the state that wounds me every day, the nation that every day falls away from the grace and glory that it might be. In the foothills of the beauty of the color-dappled Appalachians, people vote to deny others their basic civil rights. A mile or so away from the Constitution, President Bush signs the Military Commissions Act, and all the blast doors and bulletproof glass in the world won't save it. As I write this, somewhere a man in some concrete room smelling of piss and fear is hanging his head, after being "aggressively questioned." He's been put there by Americans. Back in Tennessee, people are voting on the man who represents the city where Martin Luther King was shot--the year before I was born--and some of them, even after all this time, will judge him not on the content of his character.
All of it, I say. Nevertheless. A precious gift.