First of all, I don't believe the polls. This is a dead heat race.
Renewed my driver's license early in the a.m..
The DMV is a place where all sorts of people have to come together, to sit together side by side, sort of like the subway in New York where I grew up, but, in the case of the DMC, going nowhere. (Or rather, the stations are the LED numbers: C 319, window 9; A 718, window . . .) To shorten my journey, I'd driven out to Georgetown to visit the DMV at the Georgetown Mall.
A friend of mine in a university I used to teach at put it somewhat ungrammatically but perfectly, "The DMV is what we have in this country instead of the Soviet Union." That is so. There is always a feeling of tax-paying time hovering over the DMV. But as I looked around, I realized that several of the people around me had more money than I do, almost certainly, and that by and large, very many wealthy and powerful people have sat in the row of fiberglass chairs facing the impersonal, gray banks of desks, most likely in the seat I occupied at that moment. So I listened to my Ipod podcast of BBC Africa Report, as usual.
There were also of course many people who were less fortunate than I am. In Washington, African American people run the city from the inside out. The security guard, an African American man, could not convince a young Asian-American women to sit down, and there may have been a language barrier. She left suddenly. The guard had twice been to tell her, he said to me, and he was frustrated the situation turned out like that.
I wondered what they thought of a President Obama, if they thought it was possible, or likely. I kept to myself. Then I got home and turned on the television, always anxious lest this dream in the making explode.
The Palin-McCain campaign was again showcasing a phony image of the average white man in American: the lusty, beer-drinking, white, Joe the Plumber. Not the real Joe, because he seems testy and unstable, but as McCain put it today in "Defiant" (?) Ohio, "You are all Joe the Plumber! Point A: Obama is all image. Point B: So vote for an image of yourself, white men, not the real candidate, Obama.
Are going to fool ourselves again? Are we going to lack the courage to elect the best, instead of an image of the self fashioned by admen? Are we going to finally realize that we are all Americans, every Goddamned one of us at the DMV? Palin was putting down "Washington," saying the solutions aren't going to come from "Washington." I found I was shouting at the television.