Forgive Us Our Sins

And now we shred him.

Another way in which Barak Obama is the American Jesus: he is our sacrifice. He is going to pay dearly for all of our sins. He is a young man with an old soul; serious, but the champion of hope; brillant but not yet wise. Here is what wisdom looks like -- Lincoln at the beginning of his presidency, and at the end:

Hard times. Impossible choices. Law versus justice. War. Miserable mothers wrote letters, lamenting their dead sons lost in battle. The righteous path, ending slavery, required dismantling the economic foundation of half of our nation. A lawyer who suspended habeas corpus and tried civilians in military court. A father who lost his son. A husband whose wife drifted away from her sanity. And all the while, the sins of our people poisoned him from the inside. Our nation hemmoraged, blood saturated the landscape. We pleaded with him, our best surgeon, just to cut off the mangled limb and let us be free of this terrible pain. He risked our life to save us, and we shot him in the head.

Barak Obama. What a kind face. His family. Those sweet little girls, that smart pretty wife. These hard times will eat them, I fear. Unfathomable secrets have already been told to him, he's dragging the weight of them. The decisions he will make are ones no one should have to live with. The entire world, every breathing soul, will fail or prosper due to his judgment.

I know he can do it. I chose him to do it. He knows he can and therefore must.

But the price hurts my heart.

The deepest gift of this surrender -- he already knows what it will cost.

A New Dawn

VAGINAL STATUS: Blessed
The line at Central Library was around the block when I joined it at 7 a.m. and it looked like America. All kinda folks, Baltimore is indeed multi-layered and everyone represented. I felt like I was waiting in line for a ride at Kennywood I was so EXCITED. The girl in front of me was voting for the first time, she was 19. I tried to get her to bounce up and down about it like me, but she chose a dignified restraint.

I wanted to cackle and cry. Looking at those people, America – old folks and people in wheelchairs and gay boys and suits and young moms with kids in tow and lots of people in scrubs and middle aged women in a sensible hat for warmth. And wrinkled brown grandfathers who have seen Presidents come and gone since the Depression, grinning ear to ear at the chance to vote for a Black man for the very first time long overdue. And all of us, the urban heart of blue-state Maryland, had come to the altar from our warm beds, called to petition for this one very special man.

Yep, I think Barack Obama is pretty much an American Jesus.

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I’m sure he has personal flaws we’ll hear about in 30 years, and I know he can’t get his whole agenda accomplished. I think he will inevitably disappoint me. His platform does not measure itself by my radical agenda. He has assumed my vote, and can afford to take me for granted – Duh, I’m a queer feminist with most of my work history inside abortion clinics. If my people are not so far left that they see voting as playing into the government’s evil plan to placate us, we reliably vote Dems.

But every time I see him on TV I well up with the deep, dear promise of my patriotic childhood, old soldiers beaming and firetrucks tossing candy in the Memorial Day parade. He makes me dream and trust, two indulgent confections I swore I’d never fall for again after the terrible day when the Court chose Bush, the bitter anguish when we chose him again all on our own. I wasn’t right for more than a year after 2004, none of us were.

But he’s charmed me, I believe in him. Tears rolling down my cheeks while he tells me the story of America I’ve so longed to hear. The kernel of decency I believe is still aching to swell within us; he is the champion for it. He makes me think this time is History, this time is different, and this is THE MOMENT when we finally rise. I said a little spell to help him out when I pushed the button.

He HAS to win. It’s impossible that he won’t win. I know I said impossible before, and I was kicked in the stomach for it. But please, Please. Please, America, the Universe, the Goddess and all the ancestors, please Xenu and Jehovah and Allah and the first star I see tonight, please Electoral College and youth voters and poor country white folks and the wasted souls we have lost in this war, PLEASE.

Please let him win.

Three Wise Men

VAGINAL STATUS: Smartypants


I heard Salman Rushdie speak last year – megawatt smartie, he. He spoke to the conflicts going on around our world these days. There is a misconception, he said, that we are engaged in a holy war; Christians versus Muslims. East versus West. Actually, says he, these are not separable factions, let alone polar opposites, these “sides” are an illusion.

East and West are inextricably intertwined, and have been since the Crusades. Christians and Muslims are both the children on Abraham; they dance, taking turns leading and following, their diaspora link together somewhere in every family, the tracks of these ancestors cross and cross back through millennia.

The conflict, says very smart Salman Rushdie, is between reason and fundamentalism.

And he is right. Two other smart men have also come to this conclusion. Mouse is a student of History, actually, literally, and a teacher to his core. He tells me this is all about the Age of the Enlightenment. There was a time when God was the only Mover, and human lives were short and brutal, and a Better World was the thin comfort that kept the peasants from revolt. Then the Enlightenment dawned, the Revolutions rolled over tyranny and superstition, and the world r/evolved forward.

We built our nation on reason, on logical fairness compelled via laws written and interpreted by Reasonable people. Certainly the system runs good people over from time to time, is full of the flaws that come with humans – our cradle-mates, fear and stupidity – but the basic tenant is that we will try to uncover truth and live by what it says. During the Enlightenment science was at the pinnacle of regard, a web of discovery and excavation expanding our self-knowledge through deciphering the codes manifested in the natural world. Truth IS discernable, our earnest nation thought; we have to make ourselves wise enough to REAL-ize it.

And now this third smart man, Barak Obama, he is telling us that our reasonable selves are needed by our country. He talks to us as though we are capable of critical thinking. He does not refuse to acknowledge complexity, nor does he see complexity as an impossible barrier. He tells us the solutions to our headaches of Now are still possible, but that they will require much work and these hard times are realistically likely to last a long while yet.

Sarah Palin and John McCain are the poster kids for fundamentalism, for because-I-said-so logic, for the theory of fake science that the world was Intelligently Designed for us to consume, for the comforting binary of Us vs. Them. They are rumor-sowers, conjuring up the dragons we ignorant serfs both dread and worship. The bogeymen of that dark side have cultivated our savagery until we’ve almost eaten ourselves right up.

Obama is about nuance and negotiation, wisdom and justice and restraint and the daily work of citizenship, asking us to vote our better selves in a cool, low-pitched lullaby tone. He’s literally the Voice of Reason. Blessed be his name, may he deliver us from evil.