Spent the day working, doing laundry, working, breaking down boxes. Occasionally my mind got shot through with a flash of dread and revulsion. Then work, laundry, boxes.

Time stretched out in my early morning dreams to the point that I was sure I was oversleeping by hours; it had to be past noon. But I opened my eyes and it was seven something. When I opened them again it was a little past nine.

It was a day of mundane tasks: head shaving, box opening, taking out the trash. The take a book leave a book. I perused the titles and opened up an anthology by school kids called “Growing Up in Park Slope.” In the middle of the page was a sort of prose poem about Grandma having a stroke. I superstitiously thought of reading something else before closing the book, something happy, but I didn’t. I left Raggedy Ann and Andy and Grisham and something else, taking nothing.

We didn’t talk too long about it. S. thinks a woman can’t win in America. Maybe but we have to try. 

It was the day McConnell froze midsentence. The old crank suddenly at a loss for words. His gaze utterly vacant. You’d think he was contemplating something deep within himself. But there was nothing there.

Sinead O’Connor dead and there’s more talk about her shaved head than anything about her.

I lay face down on the floatie, wondering what side of the pool I was bumping against. My mind drifted toward sleep. I considered Kim Jong-un. Was it his uncle he had killed? The ashen-faced man in his military garb, being escorted from a party meeting and to his death. The image I conjured of the supreme leader was of him greedily inhaling a cigarette on the platform where his official train had stopped somewhere on the way to somewhere else. He’d had a personal attendant light it of course. His sister maybe? Keep ‘em coming and he might not turn on you. 

Election Night 1981

We arrived at our hotel by cab, in the middle of the day. There was a light rain falling and everywhere people clutched roses and embraced each other. Laughing, crying.

After we checked in we went back out and met a family friend for dinner. The daughter of my parents’ friend. The grown-up daughter.

We took a walk toward the river where a crowd had gathered. The bridge was closed and a band played courtesy of the communist party. Drunk dancers whipped each other ‘round, chanting “Mit-ter-and! Mit-ter-and!”

The family friend stood next to me and I stood next to her. She asked me to dance.

I placed my arms around her timidly, tremblingly. We circulated for a little while in the mayhem. Celebrating victory.

Drivers are worse and worse these days, weaving back and forth across the lines as they text or tap their apps or God knows what. When I see a car like that I hold my breath and pass it, to put the impending calamities behind us.

Feel tired and a little nauseous now, after three days of weird eating and drinking, of too much at once, then not enough for too long, then too much again. And all of it under this cloud of grief, this funeral that doesn’t end.

But there is always something to look forward to: the empty page, another day, and death.

Someone, maybe it was Cruz or Bush or Rubio, but it could have been anyone, spoke of violence “in our communities” as the bigger issue than gun rights. It struck me how obviously “communities” is a metaphor for “ghettoes.” Reminded me of that dick Rudy Giuliani mocking Obama for being a “community organizer” at the 2008 Republican Convention. He was really saying “ghetto organizer.” He was really saying “N-word organizer.” Ha! Can you imagine that? A lowly N-word organizer. Now he thinks he’s gonna be president!

Now I’m remembering Giuliani’s objection to the pissed-on Jesus art exhibit way back when. Someone should have pissed on Rudy’s face. That’d be art.

Sitting at work, I watched them take down the Stars and Bars in South Carolina today. Who were they, National Guard I guess. The fussy ritual—the elaborate rolling and folding, one soldier stepping stiffly closer to the other—was incongruous. Really, a mob shoulda just clambered up the pole and tore it down. Just the other day they shot at it, anyway. “USA, USA!” the crowd chanted, just like they did when we killed Bin Laden. One more symbol of terror vanquished.

That imbecile Ronald Reagan wrote every day. That means I can, too.

Had a thought while reading the latest scary article about the presidential race in the Times. Apparently, a third of voters believe Romney has become more moderate since becoming the Republican nominee. If so many voters believe that this 65-year-old, experienced politician has significantly changed his political views in the last six months, why are the polls so close—basically even? “Flip-flopper” has long been a damning label in presidential politics. But the difference between Romney and, say, John Kerry is that Romney is an avowed flip-flopper. I think the American public, by and large, see him as a gleeful opportunist, happy to change his tune to suit his audience, from the liberal voters in Massachusetts to the hyper-conservative ones in the Republican primaries to the moderate undecideds who are the prize target now. It’s OK because he’s doing it callously, connivingly. Like a man. Like a good old, Machiavellian leader. Kerry, of course, got the label hung around his neck in spite of his meek protestations. Like a pussy. Americans will respect—maybe even adore—all sorts of equivocation as long as it’s carried off brazenly. With balls.

Fortunately, the Obama strategy has been to take him at his word for saying he was “severely conservative.” As opposed to any politician who might win, that’s a specific politician who can’t win.

You’ve done nothing wrong. A vehicle follows you. A man with a gun gets out and chases you, shouting. He does not seem to have any official authority but he acts as though he does. You try to escape, but he’s got you cornered. As you cry out for help he shoots you dead. When they arrive, the police do not arrest him.

Is this Kafka, Orwell, or Florida? It is certainly a vision of thuggish, oppressive dystopia. Isn’t this exactly the sort of nightmare that gun-loving Tea Partiers are constantly warning us about?

Jobs Plan

There's a sinister irony in the fact that Steve Jobs is being extravagantly mourned by many of the same people who are participating in the anti-consumerist, anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street rallies, and by many more people who are at least sympathetic to their cause. The purposeful and righteous text, tweet and shoot video from the crowded parks on iPhones and we all view them on iPhones, iPads and Macs. But Apple is an enormously wealthy international corporation. And was Jobs not perhaps the single most powerful promoter of consumerist lust in the history of civilization?

It's curious that the Tucson shooting is being described as an assassination. If that's what it was - if Jared Loughner had meant to kill Gabrielle Giffords - why did he shoot all those other people? His lunacy is to blame, obviously, you might say. But John Hinckley was crazy, too. (Consider how far backward we've gone in the time between Hinckley and his handgun and Loughner and his semiautomatic - what an insult to Brady and the effort that bore his name, what a joke!) I get a sense that everyone else was shot just because Loughner could shoot them. That was the elemental calculation in his unsound mind. And why could he shoot them? Because he had the right gun, and the right amount of bullets. It may sound reasonable to say, "Guns don't kill people, people do," but here's what an insane person thinks when they've committed to killing someone: "This gun wants to kill people. And I'm going to let it."

Rachel Maddow's interview of Jon Stewart tonight was curiously depressing. He seemed obstinate, touchy, ornery. His defense of his neutral posture was obviously practiced, and not without validity or insight, but there seemed to be an emptiness at the heart of it all, one that he, more than anyone, perceives. He kept saying things like, "That's true," or "That's a fair point," or "Fair enough," in the manner of a too-reasonable boyfriend who, despite his erudition, is losing the fight. "That's a valid point, honey, I fucked the babysitter." Or more like: "You're right. I want to fuck the babysitter. But I never have and never will." What I mean to say is that his points were too fine.

And Rachel didn't take him sufficiently to task. Occasionally she ventured the observation that they are in the same line of business, but she didn't make it stick. The fact is, Stewart is in her business when he wants to be in hers and in his when he wants to be in his. What a privilege! What an opportunity! He should embrace it honestly, make the most of it. He claimed that he was in one of the oldest professions in the world (satire - second oldest?). But maybe he's in one of the newest. Why not celebrate that? Why not see where it takes him, where it takes us?

Jon Stewart's interview with Texas governor Rick Perry last night was excruciating. What a glib, glad-handing asshole Perry is. His mocking suggestion that people couldn't possibly prefer living in India to living in Texas was repugnant. It felt racist.

As is too often the case, Stewart was feeble, fawning. He undercut his own lines of attack with tension-cutting schtick. The liberal critique of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is correct: it presented a false equivalency between the loudest voices on the left and right. Stewart was disingenuously trying to seize the moral high ground. The story of the 2010 election season has been the resurgence of right-wing extremism: fear-mongering, race-baiting, bullying, intolerance and, above all, the cynical wielding of lies as propaganda. The craven outrage over the "Ground Zero mosque," the lies about health care and financial reform in the service of corporations and millionaires, the continuing vilification of immigrants. All of it is disgraceful and odious. And is there anything more reprehensible than fake populism? The tea party groups paid for by oil billionaires, lobbyists, corporations. There is no equivalency between these forces and the "unreasonable" voices on the left. Stewart's "can't we all just get along" message came off as pathetic and dishonest.

Here's something intriguing about Virginia Thomas's disgraceful phone call to Anita Hill: She asks Hill to apologize for what she did "with" her husband. Not "to."

Is Thomas suggesting that Hill had a consensual affair with her husband? If that's what she's thinking, then she is upholding a grotesque, archaic, sexist meme: that it's the fault of the other woman - the temptress, the whore - when a husband cheats. It's remarkable that this is somehow less humiliating to Thomas than what most of us accept as fact: that Clarence Thomas was a loutish, harassing boss.

Or maybe not. It's always easiest to blame the woman.

I stood in the corner of the Yankee Tavern, where the locals sit; there was a spacious pocket of calm there, by the window. The drunks going to the game seem to know not to invade it. I decided I didn't know any better.

I put my beer on the counter and scrutinized the scene outside. An older man with dark hair and a mustache, well dressed, lighting a cigarette. Brylcreemed, Billy Martin-looking guy. Could be a livery driver. Could be the King of the Bronx. Most of the passersby were the game crowd: families, old timers, Manhattanites and Jersey guys. Mixed up with them were the locals trying to go about their business: harried Dominican women with their kids, odd-job guys and b-boys. I watched a tired black man in a lime-green suit, a matching fedora and two-tone shoes in beige and white. He carried a plastic bag of groceries. Everybody's gotta take the groceries home.

An older black man in glasses and a cap turned from the bar to interrupt my reverie.

"Lotta commotion today. Lotta fuss," he said, putting his red wine on the counter.

"It's a big day!" I said. It was the first game at the new stadium, an exhibition with the Cubs.

"Yeah," he said warily. He launched into an ornery rant about the team: Tickets are too expensive; families have been priced out. The new luxury boxes are half-empty because of the recession so now they're gouging regular people to make it back. The Steinbrenners are making one last, big push for a championship so they can sell the team in the next two years, "while the gettin's still good." That's why we have these great new players.

"But we always picked up great players. Clemens, Johnson," I pointed out.

"Those guys were at the end of their careers," he said. "We're picking these guys up at the peak of their careers. Teixeira."

"Sabathia," I added. He was a hard man to disagree with.

He was dressed middle class and seemed well on his feet but he was missing most of his bottom front teeth. His tongue wriggled behind his lone remaining incisor as he spoke and it was difficult to look elsewhere. I'll not soon forget that tooth.

He moved on to the neighborhood, the burrough and the city as a whole. This Metro North station they're putting in, what do you think that's about? The South Bronx is turning into Westchester, that's what.

"New York City is fucked," he said.

We looked out the window for a little while.

"Listen. My wife has an iPhone that has 10 times the computational power of the computer that sent Apollo to the moon."

Ten times seemed to me to be an underestimation but it was enough to serve his point.

"She can get her e-mail anywhere she goes. Do you think Wall Street matters now? You don't need Wall Street. You could be in Peoria, Illinois."

"Business can be done anywhere now," I added helpfully.

"New York City is fucked."

He digressed further: the economy, politics, the environment. He bemoaned the coal and oil lobbies.

"If we don't do something about global warming right now, we're gonna be fucked, and we might still be fucked."

"We won't really be fucked for a while, though, right? Forty, fifty years?"

"How long?"

"Forty years?"

"I'm 72 years old," he said. "Within my lifetime, we're gonna see disasters from this thing. I work in energy. I know. Flooding of coastal regions. Manhattan? Battery Park? Forget about it."

"Wow."

"Manhattan will be totally fucked."

"I'm still relieved that Obama is in office," I offered. "As bad as things are, he seems to be the right person to—"

The man made a faint grimace.

"Obama has a chance. As long as he picks the right people. His Energy Secretary is very good. His Agriculture Secretary is good. But why you would want Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in charge of anything I can't understand. They're the ones who caused these fucking problems in the first place."

I cited Obama's talent for promoting consensus, for accomodating differing points of view. Again, the man's face soured.

"Accomodation isn't good," he said.

I tried to backtrack. "That might be the wrong word. But he listens to all sides. He can compromise—"

"There's always a wrong side. You don't want to listen to the wrong side."

It occurred to me that I'd assumed he was an Obama supporter—not just because he was black, not just because we were in New York City, but because in the past year I'm not quite sure if I've so much as been in the presence of a single person who did not support Obama.

"Listen, I'm a patriot. I love my country. I think we should bring back mandatory service."

"Military service or some kind of national service?" I asked.

He winced. "Any kind of service would be OK, I guess," he allowed. "I graduated high school in 1955 and then I went into the Army. The Army's the only place in the world that teaches you to get along with people who are not like you. When you're in the Army, no matter who you are, you only want one thing. Do you know what that is?"

"What's that?"

"To go home. All you want to do is go home. And the people you're with are the only people who can help you do that, and you've gotta help them too. If your commanding officer tells you to carry this and that to somewhere by tomorrow morning, you're not going to be the asshole who doesn't do it. If you don't do it, everyone is fucked. You have to find a way to work with people to get it done."

We were interrupted as one of the regulars, an older black woman, creaked off her barstool to say her goodbyes. I stood deferentially apart, giving ample berth to her ceremonious exit. After she was gone I approached again, nonchalantly, not sure if the conversation would resume. The man acknowledged me with a nod.

"Now McCain, the only reason I didn't vote for him was nuclear power. He wants to build all these nuclear power plants. Where you gonna put the waste? Nuclear power is like asking people to store their garbage in their homes. We'd all be fucked."

It struck me that he felt more kinship with McCain as a military man than with Obama as a black man.

"The other thing about McCain," he added, "is that he was tortured for six years. You can't have an experience like that without your brain being addled."

Finally, he put his empty glass up on the bar and gave hugs and handshakes to those remaining in his circle. He shook my hand: Great talking to you. Great talking to you, too. He walked out the door and past the cops and smokers and crossed 161st Street and went on down Gerard Avenue, past the stadium.

After months of worrying that Obama would not get elected, now you get the unnerving sense that he can't possibly be President - can he? It's not just the tedious, stubborn challenges to his citizenship, or that, of all things, the fucking swearing in was flubbed. It's this: Can all the pomp and ceremony and ludicrous, fawning deference that's reserved for American presidents really coalesce around him now? Over the past 16 years we've grown accustomed to the President as exalted clown - with Bush, the emperor had no clothes; with Clinton, the emperor had no pants. The elaborate ritual surrounding the office seemed more suited to these farcical figures - they were both versions of the grandiose, infantile King Ubu. It made sense that they had a special airplane, an outsize kitchen staff and guards outside their bedroom door. Part of what Obama brings to the White House is a seriousness, sobriety and prosaic approach - much in evidence in his inaugural address - that we might expect of a great college football coach but not of the occupant of this most curious perch atop our politics. In his life experiences, too, there is more for most Americans to relate to: community organizing (odiously disparaged by Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Convention), teaching, dropping off the girls at school with a kiss. He is "a guy of the street," but not in the sense the McCain campaign intended. And now he is our president. Can it be true?

You have to lapse into a kind of death when you become president. You've gone abstract; you've become an idea. You can no longer live in your house or cook for yourself or drive a car or go to the movies or sit in an airport bar drinking bloody marys. You can no longer send or receive e-mail either, evidently - is there any surer sign that what I say is true? E-mailing in 2009 is akin to inhaling and exhaling the air. When you're not allowed to do it any longer, you know you've reached a different place. It could be a nursing home, where your few remaining days will consist of being administered medications, drifting about in your wheelchair in a baby-blue bathrobe, eating soft, bland foods, and watching television in a common room. It could be prison, where life consists of reading, lifting weights, and parrying the efforts of rapists by periodically exploding with brazen, heedless rage. Or it could be the presidency of the United States. How could such a person be a person, when you think about it? I believe any presidential acceptance speech, any inauguration, must be tinged with this: the solemn aura of the condemned man, the designated one, the sacrificial lamb.

The Nader

We were sickened when Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000. We get chills imagining what a better world we'd inhabit if Nader had been just a bit pragmatic and thrown his support to Gore. We're outraged, now, at Nader's central claim - that there's no difference between Democrat and Republican, that it's like Coke and Pepsi, a Chomskian false choice. What profound differences there are, and would have been manifested these past eight years: on the environment; on the Constitution; on diplomacy; on governing, period. But there was always a part of me that respected the purity of Nader's views. His resolute stubbornness. His refusal to abandon principle even as a means to an arguably better end. It's the same part of me that whispers, Become a vegan or Throw out your TV. It's a faint, meek voice, masked by a thousand louder sounds, but daunting in its cold moral authority nonetheless.

So now it's sad to see Nader wonder out loud whether Barack Obama would be an Uncle Sam or an Uncle Tom (a point of view which was, poignantly, echoed by Al Qaeda in a statement by Bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahri). Fox News's Shepard Smith scolded him for it in words that drip with smug, sanctimonious reproach, and Nader did a pretty good job of calling Smith out as a typical TV news bully and defending his view (Obama's got a history of siding with corporations, supports an increase in the defense budget that's desired by the military-industrial complex, has a tax plan that doesn't address the needs of the poor, etc.), but there's something very depressing about seeing this cranky old idealist becoming more marginalized by the minute and lashing out like a petulant child.

Ralph, after all this time, all this effort, all that it means and may yet mean for Barack Obama to become President of the United States, can you please just drop it for a second? For one second, man. Be generous. Lift your perpetually hunched shoulders, that gray face, and say something positive, something. The weight of your dourness, of your sobriety - it's too much to bear. We've appreciated your tireless rages on our behalf, your fuck you to the man, your secular sainthood. But something's passed you by now. You're not helping this world anymore.