Enjoy Your Shit Salad

I watched the American election here in Montreal, in the bar at Concordia University. It was packed. People were cheering. An unmistakable feeling of optimism was in the air. Friends in France emailed me about it too. It was like the entire world's team had won the Superbowl.

The question no one seemed to be asking was: "Since when has it been okay to trust politicians?" Most of the people I talked to seemed to know nothing about Obama or his platform. When I asked a friend what he liked about Obama, he said that "Obama is a visionary and he represents my views". I got similar answers from everyone I asked. What are these views?

He's pro-environment? Maybe. There are both hits and misses on his record. Time will tell on that one. If the environment truly is an important issue, why choose this option?

He's going to rescue the economy? Perhaps. Does that make me moist? No. Who's he going to rescue it for? You will note that there aren't any representatives of the labor movement, any labor economists, any representatives of progressive or economic watchdog groups, nor any representatives of consumers in general on Obama's economic team. I'm not very optimistic about the policies that these guys will generate. (And on a side note: apparently there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country. You're telling me only a fraction of this group foresaw the credit crisis? I call bullshit.)

Obama is going to promote peace in the world? Wrong. Obama supports the occupation of Afghanistan and plans to increase the size of the military. These are the most fundamental reasons why I could not get excited about his campaign. In my opinion, it is always wrong to take human life. Thus, war is the greatest wrong there is. Fighting for peace doesn't work.

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've noticed that asking most people these questions is like trying to get them to ackowledge the turd in their potato salad that they're trying desperately to ignore:

"Dude, this potato salad smells funny. I think someone shit in it."

"What's wrong with you? Are you telling me you'd rather eat macaroni salad? Obama made this potato salad just for us. It's a salad we can believe in."

"But I'm sick of eating potato salad. It's not really a change at all. We've been eating it all our lives. I know there are healthier alternatives out there. Why, look at this recipe right here..."

"What the hell is this? Only hippies and French people would eat that shit. You fag."

To me, the obvious win for all of us is that we now live in a country where a black man will have been president. This is a fundamental, radical change in a society where, less that 150 years ago, the next president could have been legally owned by another person. And yet, as Obama himself implied, racism has now been pushed far enough into the margins that the Boys Who Run The Show have finally realized that it doesn't matter what their public representative looks like. Or as Le Canard enchâiné put it, "America's not afraid of the black man anymore!"

Somewhere deep in my little, wizened black heart, I'll admit I did feel a tremor of hope, like a trapped pocket of gas escaping from a fat man's thigh folds. It's a really unfamiliar feeling. I think it's what the people at the Concordia bar were celebrating. But they also seemed to buy into the unspoken, yet universally-understood lie that, if we can just get the Republicans out of office, our lives will change for the better in very obvious, tangible ways.

The facts don't seem to indicate that this is likely to happen. But, it's enough for me, at least until Obama takes office, that every child born in America after January 20, 2009 will have never lived in a country where only rich white men have been president. I wouldn't have put money on it happening in my lifetime. Racism may have been pushed to the margins in some ways, but it's such a fundamental part of the human condition, and so firmly ensconsed in our country's history, that I didn't hold out much hope for things changing for at least another generation or two.

I know what life was like before the invention of the internet. We wrote letters instead of email and beat off to magazines and VHS porn instead of a succession of minute-long WMA clips. Big whoop. Imagine living in a time when women weren't allowed to vote. Man or woman, how would this have affected your sense of social justice, your respect for the system, even your entire worldview?

It's a curious gain: the president is a puppet, but the puppetmaster has shown himself to be less racist than he used to be. I think that our collective, apparently unconscious assimilation of the fact that race is no longer a barrier to attaining the presidency has very real, positive implications for our society. In my opinion, this assimilation is the only unquestionably positive outcome of the election, and I believe that if we focused on that, we might start thinking seriously about creating a world where someone other than rich men, black or white, are allowed to govern us.