Our house has regained essential livability, but we still
lack the landline telephone and with it connections to television news and the
Internet. But though Verizon is
not on the horizon, blog day is. I
soldier on. You may have already
picked up the news somewhere, but yesterday, November 6th was
election day in the United States, and the incumbent Barak Obama, bested his
challenger Mitt Romney in their presidential contest. The vote was pretty close, but nonetheless decisive. All of us ought now to be able to go
back to productive work, except of course in the state of Florida where
everybody is either retired or a full time vote counter, sometimes both.
A
single day’s voting was the culmination of a seemingly endless and usually
mindless political campaign on which some billions of dollars were squandered, with
a bloviating ratio of perhaps fifty thousand words per dollar. Bottom line: we have the same president
we had before along with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic
Senate. As President Obama
recently said, “We know what change looks like.” In this regard there were some happy surprises. The Republicans are expert at plucking
defeat from the jaws of victory, but never before in living memory have they
employed gynecological theology as an accelerant of self-immolation.
Though
one may grow weary of our politicians, there is an excitement about American
political life itself. Think about
it for a moment. Nobody really
knew who was going to win that election until the votes were counted. In many states the issue was decided by
a relatively small number of votes among a large electorate. Many voters could credibly believe that
their votes “counted”. That may be
democratic minimalism, but it’s a good deal more than most people in the world
have.
The
apocalyptic rhetoric of the campaigners is a different matter. Just as there is a “trial of the
century” every decade or so, we as usual faced “the most significant election
of our lifetimes.” We were to
choose between “two fundamentally different visions of who we want to be.” I do have many friends, not a few of
them highly intelligent, who seem sincerely to believe this kind of thing; but
it is very hard to do if you have much of an historical consciousness. What is needed is a little perspective,
of which I was given an invigorating dose even before I voted.
Yesterday
morning following my swim, as I stood doing something necessary in the large
lavatory in the men’s locker room, I saw directly before me, taped to the tiled
wall at eye-level, a colorful poster sheet, about A-4 in size. I had just then emerged from a swimming
pool, and I was not wearing reading glasses. Even so I could clearly make out what it was: a calendar
sheet, a rectangular grid depicting in tabular form the current month,
November. Most of the rectangle’s
little square subdivisions—there were thirty of them--were marked with graphic
messages in differing sizes, colors, and type faces.
These
messages turned out upon inspection to be useful nuggets of wisdom, especially
prepared for me by that organ of the Department of Athletics called “CampusRec”,
which I believe alludes to the recreational
as opposed to the semi-professional varsity
activities in and around our athletic facilities. By straining hard, and from a sufficient distance, my eyes
could see the particular importance of each day in November as viewed from what
might be called the “jock perspective”.
I saw that there was indeed a message for November 6th. It was, I was sure, a helpful reminder
of my civic duty, an exhortation to vote.
But
not in fact. Dimly, as my eyes
hazily focused, I learned that from the point of view of CampusRec, that is to
say from the jock perspective, the
most important thing about November the sixth was this: “Make sure to register
for Flamenco Class that starts Today.”
Flamenco, as everybody must know, is an extravagant form of Spanish
dancing, with lots of foot stomping, rosebuds between the teeth, plangent
guitars and smoldering eroticism. No
one can accuse me of over-interpretation in finding a personal dimension to
this message. Flamenco is supposed
to come from Andalusia, but as any linguist can see a mile away it obviously
must mean dancing “in the style of the Flemings,” who were for an unfortunate
historical episode in the sixteenth century subjected to Spanish domination and
Catholic tyranny. The Flemings’
imaginative resistance to such Hispanic mistreatment is a principal subject of
the great Belgian novel by Charles de Coster, The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak (1867), a book I cannot too highly recommend.
As
for me, I managed to vote, but I never got it together to register.
No comments:
Post a Comment