Strange memories on this nervous night in South Dakota. (And a nervous night it still is, here. We're still hoping to gain a majority in the State Senate for the first time in decades.) Four years after the heartbreaking election night of 2004, each passing state running up the total in the Obama column (and each near-miss) elicits all manner of memories and emotions.
And for some time now, in anticipation of Nevada rolling Blue this year, my mind has turned again and again to one of the most poignantly elegiac moments in 20th century American literature, from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. There comes a moment about a third of the way through Fear and Loathing when Hunter's antagonistic and autobiographical protagonist, Raoul Duke, pauses to contemplate the receding waters of the tide he remembers emanating from somewhere around the Haight--although there a came a point when the epicenter could be detected everywhere. And if any seawall reared up to stem that flow, it was 1968, with our loss of Martin, and then Bobby.
Strange memories, indeed. More mnemenic oddity in Lower Foldistan.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
And then, Hunter being Hunter of course, he veers off into fond reminiscences of chemical-fueled madness about the Bay Area, but being, after all, Hunter, he eventually gets back to the central elegy:
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high - water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
This has been a day and a night full to overflowing with such emotionally resonant turns.
After dropping off my last packet of walk lists late afternoon to our local Dem HQ--run by Ellen, who is untiring in a way available only to the young, and who had run a volunteer crew that had already finished all the other walk lists, and was running through them again--I drove past our polling location, just for the sake of it having already early voted.
At a respectful distance, small pro- and anti-11 (the abortion ban) crowds held up signs. As I rounded that corner, I honked and gave a thumbs up out the window, with Green Day's "American Idiot" blasting on the stereo of my wife's minivan, and was met with a much larger cheer than the small crowd should have produced.
Sparks, striking anywhere. Everywhere.
My earliest immigrant forebears, and those of my wife, first entered this continent through the estuary of the James River in the 1600s. Our ancestors moved, generation by generation, through the narrow bottleneck of the Cumberland's well-worn path, from there splaying out throughout the rest of Appalachia and the rest of the continent, coming by out thousands and ultimately millions to a westering north across prairies and moutains, until, in some cases, we reached the other ocean.
More waves of human change washing back and forth across the American West.
So coming on the heels of Obama's historic rally in Mannassas Park, VA last night, to now stand tonight on the side of the angels alongside the Old Dominion of my ancestors at long last carries an emotional weight I don't think I've even begun to process.
What would they think to know that this was how the South would rise again?
This night of marvels didn't include my vote counting towards the electoral college, but it's quite satisfying to see how long it took for them to call SD for McCain.
As the west-coast projections pushed Barack over 270, for the first time ever, the candidate I wanted from the primaries on was elected President. For the first time, I got my guy. And then I was floored by the realization that with tonight's result, I have now shaken the hand of a President.
We are riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. It reaches Florida, it reaches Colorado.
And now comes the word that Nevada has gone for Obama. I imagine that vista of Hunter's imagination, and imagine that wave coming up again, and not stopping. Rolling over Vegas, rolling across the country.
My tag line for months now has been this quote:
"No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." --MLK
Wave, hell. Tonight is a mighty stream. Tonight, possibility is everywhere.
Hunter would've loved this night. He would have cackled madly, and broken open another bottle of whisky. Or of...something.
Progressive Hussein Witness