anti:freeze

I am not sick; I am exhausted by election anxiety. More writing coming soon.

Please, please, please get out and vote. I will see you on the other side of November 2nd (and maybe even before).

Back when I was still a kid, Bill Clinton was the Comeback Kid. I was seventeen, a senior in highschool, and only a few months short of my eighteenth birthday.

After twelve years of Republican presidents, the very sound of Clinton's voice made me giddy with hope. I believed he was the real deal - the man who could help turn things around for families like mine. People without adequate health insurance. People forced to decide between groceries and medications. With kids and grandkids who were the first in their families to pursue college. And all those who struggled even more.

When the results of the November 1992 election came in, I screamed and cheered and jumped around the living room. I hugged my mother and called my friends. (And immature as I was, I also gloated. Scott Patten, I am forever sorry for the way I laughed into the telephone.) It was a feeling I will never forget.

But I will also never forget the bitter disappointments and heartbreaks under Clinton. I will never forget his failed healthcare reforms, the dismantling of the welfare safety net, NAFTA, and the list goes on. When I eventually landed a job as a newspapter columnist, I criticized Clinton week after week. At some point, I realized: despite an entire childhood of union pickets, Democratic fundraisers & get-out-the-vote efforts, and Carter/Mondale/Dukakis campaigns, I was no longer a Democrat. A liberal, yes. But not a donkey. Immediately following the 2000 election, I changed my voter registration from Democrat to Independent. After all, I had always voted without allegiance to party; my ballots were punched for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats alike. Whoever had the best record for working people earned my vote. (And in one case, I voted for a moderate Republican simply because he refused corporate and PAC contributions.)

This week, I have been sick with grief over the outcome of Oregon state ballot measures (especially Measure 36) and the presidential election. But friends, we have been handed an extraordinary gift; we now have the chance to reshape the Democratic party into something real. We can create a party with backbone and vision, the party Paul Wellstone always imagined for us. And so, I am coming home to my party. I am not sure what I can do, but I promise to be passionate and work hard. Yes, 2004 was the most important election of our lifetime. Let's make it count.

More on this soon. I have some serious thinking to do.

One week after the presidential election, I am still taking it all in. I will be posting more of my own thoughts soon, but for now, here are some articles and posts you simply must read:

Mourn by Katha Pollit.

Don't Mourn, Organize by Molly Ivins.

Democrats lost the battle, not the war by Joe Conason. This is a must-read for all the depressed, despairing progressives out there. Here is a snippet:

Only six years ago, the self-appointed guardians of "moral values" wailed their despair when midterm voters rejected the Republican impeachment jihad, and pundits pondered the political demise of the religious right. Paul Weyrich, architect of the modern religious right, described Bill Clinton's escape from judgment in near-apocalyptic terms, as a signal for the "godly" to withdraw from politics. The Republican House members defenestrated the outspoken proponent of "moral values" then serving as speaker, and his would-be successor, too. But in the next election two years later, the Republicans came back to win the White House (with the assistance of Florida state officials and the Supreme Court), and kept control of both houses of Congress.

Democrats Cannot Give Up by Howard Dean.

Meanwhile, those of us who demand a Democratic party with real backbone are thrilled to read this. To those who will resurrect the scream heard 'round the world, consider this: the DNC is all about organizing, fundraising, shaping the party platform, and firing up the base. Nobody can do that like Dr. Dean. (More on this soon. Does anyone else remember the pundits musing about how Dean ran a movement instead of a campaign? That's because they saw in him the makings of something more than a candidate. He not only sought to change policy; he sought to revitalize our whole process of civic engagement and democracy - and the Democratic party.)

blue oregon features a lively discussion about the failures of the DNC and where we might go from here.

More from The One True b!X on why the primary elections do not tell the whole story about Dean (or any particular candidate, for that matter).

Michael Totten on the concept of Zombie Hordes of Theo-Cons and immature Eighth Grade Caricatures.

Or is it all up to historical circumstance? Well, of course. Which is why the next several years will spell trouble for Republicans, beginning with the midterm elections. But that requires the Democrats to fight harder than ever. Which brings me to my final link.

One thing I know for sure (if I can really know anything for sure at this point) is that we lost this election long before 2004, despite the widely-held belief that 9-11 and the Iraq war bolstered the Bush presidency (or that Republicans are somehow better on defense, etc). The Democrats were already losing ground in 2000. Just look at the 2000 electoral map (and remember, in this map, the colors are reversed. Democrats are red; Republicans are blue. You have to scroll down a bit to see it.) Click the links to view 1992 and 1996, and you will see the grim pattern. Our party is sick. Time to take some serious medicine.

I was reading the latest issue of Wired magazine when I flipped to an amazing photograph by Michael Wesely, part of his Open Shutter show at MOMA. For this show, eight cameras were placed in strategic locations near and inside the Museum of Modern Art to document its massive renovation. 5 x 7 inch plate glass negatives were exposed for a period of 34 months, resulting in multi-layered and hauntingly streaked photographs.

Unlike most photography, the pictures do not capture single moments.

And unlike video, all moving things - people, cars, and construction cranes - are absent due to the long exposure. Instead of a linear progression from one video frame to the next, every moment is presented at once - in layers. Past and present are fused into one. Time collapses. The relationships between layers are not clear. Which came first? Which are most recent?

But most fascinating to me are the missing people.

I cannot help but think of the construction workers, how they are absent from these documents, despite fueling the whole renovation process with their labor. How like the history books, leaving out the workers. I imagine all the random pedestrians. Who were they? Did they know the cameras were trained on them, and that it didn't matter?

Unlike the history books, nobody was spared. Every person is missing, rubbed from the record just by moving too fast. Just by living in human time, too brief.

From a recurring dream (or sequence of dreams?):

I. Ten years ago today, the missing woman was found. Her casket has been exhumed and placed on an empty bedframe in the cellar. As I ascend the stairs, I am overcome with the sensation I have been here before. I am not sure I want to see the body.

II. A man leads me into a closet, pulling me gently by the wrist. He has papers, he tells me. Documents that will prove who I am.

III. We are trapped in the lobby of a suburban bank, locked inside by enemy forces. The basement is flooded. Gunmen hide beneath surplus desks, soaking and waiting. I decide to risk it and run downstairs to fetch my cell phone. I want to call Los Angeles. I feel an urgent need to connect with Wendy O.

In response to several email requests, I am posting a brief excerpt from Little Motors, an essay I wrote many years back (and the namesake of the littlemotors.org site). So now you will know what the name means, and why I wanted this particular band of badass women to share a little corner of cyberspace with me. Here goes:

My teacher draws a triangle on the chalkboard and divides it into sections like the USDA Food Pyramid. “Maslow’s Hierarchy has five parts,” he says, tapping his chalk once inside each section.

Physiological needs - food, water, shelter and warmth - fill up the base. "These are the most important," he says. "Like bread and water."

He writes our emotional needs next: safety goes right above the base, then love on top of that, and above them both, esteem.

“The first four – bodily needs, safety, love, and esteem – we call deficiency needs,” he says. "They're like food. When you don't have enough, you hunger for them."

At the very tip, he leaves the fifth section blank. The section seems chincy and small, like a bottle of expensive perfume, and I wonder what makes it so special. Why so little of it to go around? Is it bad for us? Does it rot out our teeth and make us fat, like sugar? I lean forward, rapt.

Inside the tip, my teacher writes self-actualization. “When a person becomes self-actualized, she discovers her authentic self and sets out to achieve her true calling in life,” he says. “She becomes whole.”

He explains that self-actualization is not a deficiency need like the others, but rather a growth need, only activated when all the lower needs are met. According to him, we cannot long for actualization if we are starving or tortured or unloved.

I copy down the triangle in my notebook and slide my finger up from the base to the tip, like I’m pushing a game piece across a board. I am suspicious of the hierarchy, how according to Maslow each need is separate and distinct – as if food is not mixed up with safety, and love is not a bodily need, an ache deep inside your muscles, a cold longing close to your bones.

Self-actualizated people hunger for truth and beauty, personal growth, new knowledge, harmonious aesthetics, and symmetry. Symmetry. I think about my right hip, higher than the left because I was born with broken hips that healed funny.

"Another way to think of self-actualization,” my teacher says, “is when you understand and embrace your identity. When you know who you are.”

Esteem makes sense to me. So does aesthetics, like how my bedroom walls are ever expanding collages of defaced BOP! Magazine posters, broken Madonna records, picket pamphlets, and “The Course is a Curse, Vote Democrat!” signs stolen from my father’s stockpile in the garage. I tacked up the posters back when I still liked radio pop, but see no reason to tear them down now. I am charting the movement of my stars, and the BOP! Posters have long since been scribbled on, pasted over, or juxtaposed with gross medical illustrations ripped from an old encyclopedia set. I smashed the Madonna 45’s with a hammer in my front yard, replaced them with The Cure and REM, Sonic Youth and the Dead Kennedys, and best of all, Mom’s forgotten collection of Beatles records – rediscovered while digging through her closet for old hippie clothes. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy, Frankenchrist represents a long developmental step back from Like a Virgin. No harmony in punk rock. No symmetry. Fuck Maslow.

But the top of the triangle still terrifies me. Self-Actualization. When you embrace your identity and become whole. When you have a sense of mission for your life. When you are not deficient. What if, at any given moment, hundreds of hierarchies live inside you, flickering from tip to base. What if you are more than one person at once?

I will be back to anti:freeze very soon (maybe even later today). I received some grim news over the holiday weekend, and it has been hard to concentrate. Even harder to write.

I am, however, working on process explorations for evidentiary:alchemy, so check back there. The current question for evidentiary is whether we can ever have too much process, exploring the case of Coral Eugene Watts as a metaphor for writing. I will be posting there today, continuing the thread I began last week.

See you soon.

update: I posted more on the Coral Eugene Watts case this afternoon, at evidentiary:alchemy