re-printed from WOID: a journal of visual language.
It’s Morning in America. Alaska's in another time zone.
It’s morning in America. Time to brew the coffee, toss a few tortillas on the comal, and send my sweetie off to work. Send her with an extra hug because, thanks to you, Sarah Palin, I won’t be seeing much of her this term.
You see, my sweetie teaches at the Graduate School of Social Work, and they train community organizers. Technically, Community Organizing is one of several degrees offered, but all social workers are trained to advocate for the poor and the screwed, to identify problems personal or political and help people solve them. Many of them branch off into politics: Social Work is one of the most heavily represented professions in Congress and, thanks to Palin, about to be represented-er.
Sometimes my sweetie does duty on the Admissions Committee. Bad enough that applications to schools of Social Work have soared nationwide over the past few years, now she’ll be staying in late, slogging through piles of applications, tossing out the narcissists and the values freaks, evaluating the tough, smart candidates who know that democracy is coming at the neighborhood health clinic, the Community Board, in Children’s Court.
Looking over the audience for Palin’s speech last night at the Republican convention, I was struck, not only by the sameness, but the glorifying of sameness, including all the blacks in the audience: no wonder Republicans think they all look alike, it’s the same five blacks, with costume changes.
Only it was her brand of same. What Palin glorified in herself and in her audience, she called "experience," meaning of course her own experience and that of her audience: the experience of our great, glorious nation of mid-level bureaucrats - black bureaucrats included, if they behave. At a rough guess, I’d say eighty percent of the audience had once applied to an MBA program. At a rough guess, seventy percent had been rejected. Palin’s act is the good-enough mother, the good enough administrator, the lady in Human Resources who informs you with an experienced compassion that your job’s been sent to China, a jar of jellybeans on the desk, help yourself and close the door. These are the people of whom Karl Marx wrote that they organize the masses by disorganizing them. As the Man said, "We are better than that."
One of the great intellectual influences on community organizers in the early ‘sixties Was William Appleman Williams’ The Contours of American History. Williams argued that the Great American Myth, the ever-expanding frontier, was about to hit the great wet wall. As it gradually dawned that resources were finite, the glaciers melting, that a man could, and had to, depend on others, America, said Williams, would shift to something close to – well, not exactly Socialism, perhaps, but close. The news last night was that the news haven’t reached Wassila. The news is that Wassila's the only place they haven't.
The news, it seems, have reached Obama’s campaign: its immediate response to Palin’s accusing Obama of being a community organizer? "Effin’ A. Make that A-plus, with honors." Ronald Reagan got away with Palin’s brand of compassion-bashin’ thirty-odd years ago, but this is a bright new day, Ms. Palin, and we’re not in Kansas anymore, let alone Alaska - excepting a very small percentage of the population, of course. I’m looking forward to an Obama campaign that takes the offensive, once again, and carries it through on the notion that we are all community organizers, we are interdependent, I am Spartacus. Not that I have illusions, any more than organizers in the ‘sixties had illusions about JFK’s promises to liberalize American life. But, as in the sixties, I have hope, as do many others, that Obama will turn this election into a referendum on participatory democracy against the autocracy of small-town managers and large. And that in doing so he’ll begin to set free the forces dormant in America since the maypole was torn down at Merry Mount. Still, I’m going to miss my sweetie...