When the moment came, it surprised me.
Not the outcome. I had been cautiously optimistic for several days that Senator Obama would win. But "caution" is the key word--there was a great deal of optimism, whole barrels-full of hope, that had been bottled up because, frankly, we've seen voting shenanigans before. (And there were some--emails sent to Democrats declaring that because of long lines at polling places, it was perfectly okay for them to come and vote on Wednesday. But this sort of thing only really works when the race is close. It wasn't.)
And this is the sort of history that isn't made easily. I am the descendant of a Southern slave-owning family, and I've seen these changes in my own family. I knew very well my great-grandmother, born in 1896, who would openly talk about "those little pickaninnies" playing on the corner. As the child of a hippie, liberal to the core, now living on the "left coast," I was an Obama fan since about a third of the way into his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention--but had the rest of the country made these changes along with me and my family? (Bear in mind my own Californians' appalling decision on Proposition 8, in this same election.)
And it's been so bad for the last eight years. Way back in 1994, when the Republicans were sweeping into Congress, there was another result that disheartened me even more: George W. Bush defeated Ann Richards to become governor of Texas. I watched him at the podium, making his victory speech, and I was filled with dread. I could see so clearly what was coming; but still, when it came, it was so much worse than I had ever feared it might be. For the past eight years, this has not been my America. It has not been generous, it has not sought peace, it has not led by example. My nation has done things that filled me with horror: spiriting innocent people away in broad daylight, sending them to nations where unspeakable things could be done to them, any idea of individual rights stripped away at will. It has been so bad, and the idea that this ship could ever be righted again seemed to drift farther and farther away.
So when the moment came, when Obama's victory was declared right at 8:00 p.m. local time, I could tell the moment was coming--the electoral math was such that California's preordained result would put him over the top--but when it actually happened, when I saw the words blaze across my TV screen, it genuinely took me by surprise.
Because I had not expected to be so moved. I had not expected that the optimism, pushed down and bottled up, might erupt as vehemently as it did. I had not expected the sense of relief to be as enormous as it was. And when CNN cut to footage of the celebration at Ebenezer Baptist Church, I had not expected it, and tears just kept rolling for a good five or ten minutes.
It may not be the Promised Land, not quite yet. But we're a lot closer than we were, and damn if that isn't just about the greatest thing I've seen in a long long time.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Perks!
Lest you doubted that doing a thing purely for the love of it leads to the greatest rewards, a few notes:
Our Michael Palin for President video, now viewed 660,000+ times on YouTube alone, has also been embedded in hundreds of other people's blogs, and was picked up by other sites like Will Ferrell's funnyordie.com. News reports popped up a few Sundays ago in all the major London papers talking about the video, even reporting that unnamed Republicans were complaining that the video was clearly the work of Democratic operatives running a smear campaign on Sarah Palin.
We were even contacted by an enterprising CNN reporter, although she did warn us that the producers at CNN are notoriously lacking in a sense of humor. Having seen the "Picture of the Day" spot that runs on AC360, I believe her. Nothing about our video ever appeared on CNN.
But the people who were watching the video, and visiting the website, started contacting us. They demanded buttons and bumper stickers, so we uploaded some designs to CafePress and started selling buttons and bumper stickers. (Plus thongs, because you just have to.) It's not the sort of thing that'll make any of us rich, but it'll certainly pay for the domain name registrations and the website hosting for the next several months. (Although I'm still waiting for the moment when I see someone with a Palin bumper sticker out in the wild....)
Some very well-meaning folks simply missed the joke. A very nice, very earnest woman in Atlanta wrote to Michael Palin care of us, begging Michael not to run for President because he might split off too many votes from Barack Obama. Which does raise the startling possibility that there might actually be a few people, here and there, who actually do write in Michael's name. I seriously doubt there would be as many as a thousand, spread across the country, but you never know. Someday, Marc and I might be reviled in the same way Ralph Nader is.
And just today, I was handed a copy of The Complete Monty Python Collectors Edition Megaset, a massive DVD box set containing the entire TV series, the live performances, the "Personal Best" discs, and two new documentaries I'd never seen. It's currently deeply discounted on Amazon at just over a hundred bucks, but the merchandising company that created the set found our site and, for promotional purposes, offered us three free sets to give to our newsletter subscribers. (They even handled the shipping, all we had to do was pick three people, get addresses, and forward them on.) Then they sent over a couple extra sets so that we too could enjoy them, thus leading to a happy Saturday afternoon as I watched both documentaries.
We made the video because it amused us. We had no expectation of anything, we just did it to have some fun and geek out a little. And from it, all this has come. Pure intentions, without expectation, has indeed yielded these great rewards.
I say all this because Thereby is done. I've excerpted it before, and I've always known it was massively uncommercial, the sort of thing I did for the love of doing it, largely to amuse myself. But watching the documentary about how the Pythons conquered America, none of them ever believed that the show would have any impact in America; it took Cleese years to believe it really had caught on. I have now written and rewritten my mad little novel to the point that I'm ready to start sending it out to real publishing people. (Actually, a friend of mine from high school knows a publisher, so I've already started there.)
A novel of pure intention, written without expectation. Is it hubris to think that maybe there's a place for it in the world after all?
Our Michael Palin for President video, now viewed 660,000+ times on YouTube alone, has also been embedded in hundreds of other people's blogs, and was picked up by other sites like Will Ferrell's funnyordie.com. News reports popped up a few Sundays ago in all the major London papers talking about the video, even reporting that unnamed Republicans were complaining that the video was clearly the work of Democratic operatives running a smear campaign on Sarah Palin.
We were even contacted by an enterprising CNN reporter, although she did warn us that the producers at CNN are notoriously lacking in a sense of humor. Having seen the "Picture of the Day" spot that runs on AC360, I believe her. Nothing about our video ever appeared on CNN.
But the people who were watching the video, and visiting the website, started contacting us. They demanded buttons and bumper stickers, so we uploaded some designs to CafePress and started selling buttons and bumper stickers. (Plus thongs, because you just have to.) It's not the sort of thing that'll make any of us rich, but it'll certainly pay for the domain name registrations and the website hosting for the next several months. (Although I'm still waiting for the moment when I see someone with a Palin bumper sticker out in the wild....)
Some very well-meaning folks simply missed the joke. A very nice, very earnest woman in Atlanta wrote to Michael Palin care of us, begging Michael not to run for President because he might split off too many votes from Barack Obama. Which does raise the startling possibility that there might actually be a few people, here and there, who actually do write in Michael's name. I seriously doubt there would be as many as a thousand, spread across the country, but you never know. Someday, Marc and I might be reviled in the same way Ralph Nader is.
And just today, I was handed a copy of The Complete Monty Python Collectors Edition Megaset, a massive DVD box set containing the entire TV series, the live performances, the "Personal Best" discs, and two new documentaries I'd never seen. It's currently deeply discounted on Amazon at just over a hundred bucks, but the merchandising company that created the set found our site and, for promotional purposes, offered us three free sets to give to our newsletter subscribers. (They even handled the shipping, all we had to do was pick three people, get addresses, and forward them on.) Then they sent over a couple extra sets so that we too could enjoy them, thus leading to a happy Saturday afternoon as I watched both documentaries.
We made the video because it amused us. We had no expectation of anything, we just did it to have some fun and geek out a little. And from it, all this has come. Pure intentions, without expectation, has indeed yielded these great rewards.
I say all this because Thereby is done. I've excerpted it before, and I've always known it was massively uncommercial, the sort of thing I did for the love of doing it, largely to amuse myself. But watching the documentary about how the Pythons conquered America, none of them ever believed that the show would have any impact in America; it took Cleese years to believe it really had caught on. I have now written and rewritten my mad little novel to the point that I'm ready to start sending it out to real publishing people. (Actually, a friend of mine from high school knows a publisher, so I've already started there.)
A novel of pure intention, written without expectation. Is it hubris to think that maybe there's a place for it in the world after all?
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