Divided we fall?

I had an early-morning daydream yesterday while showering (my best place for free-form thinking) in which the McCain-Palin ticket did in fact win the election. But within days of taking office, John McCain died suddenly and suspiciously (in one version of this reverie, he was shot; in another, someone slipped a mickey into his daily meds). In either case, Sarah Palin was immediately elevated to the presidency amid all of the angst of recent weeks and compounded by the aftermath of an assassination.

These thoughts drifted through my mind after reading Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert’s article “Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals” on Salon.com. This fairly sobering piece of investigative journalism sketches a portrait of an ambitious young local politician who allowed—and seemingly still allows—members of the Alaska Independence Party to fill her head with gun-totin’, secessionist, Christian ultra-right ideas as she’s marched her way from local to statewide to national office. While her husband was a card-carrying member of the AIP until just recently switching to Independent (after all, an obvious AIP affiliation could hinder her political ascension), Palin allegedly has repeatedly used her role as mayor and governor to front for any number of the group’s questionable goals. No surprise, Extremist Number One “Bo” Gritz surfaces in the piece, claiming her as a devotee of his us-versus-U.S. movement. And the neo-Nazis and skinheads aren’t far behind.

The lengthy piece is worth a read, so I’ll say no more about it. But it raised another concern for me. And that has to do with where we Americans get our information and what it means when we pick one media source over another.

For me, at least, unlike any political campaign in the past, the media has squared itself off into distinct pockets of perspective. Certainly, in our nation and many others, there have always been the “liberal media,” the “right wing press,” and every shade in between. It’s been a part of the fabric of mainstream media in much of Europe and in most Latin countries for decades, but it seems to have blossomed most obviously in this country in the last decade. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a truly independent, right-down-the-middle media outlet.

Given my own leanings toward liberal causes, and thus toward Obama, I find myself tuning in mostly to the media Sarah Palin loves to hate. Couple that with a growing desire for a slightly escapist take on all the grim economic headlines of late, we’ve gravitated toward MSNBC for the nightly newsertainment of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

(For anyone who hasn’t seen it or read the text, you ought to watch Olbermann's Special Comment from Oct. 12, in which he goes full-bore against McCain and Palin’s unabashed inciting of supporters to threaten the safety of Barack Obama. It’s a remarkable piece of anger and honest outrage.)

So it struck me the other night, after watching the final McCain-Obama debate and sliding first into one mainstream network’s straight-laced post-event analysis that I wanted—no, needed—to hear Olbermann and company’s more pithy (and mostly anti-McCain) take on the proceedings. I’d watched the debate, and had my own opinion of how the two men fared. There wasn’t much I missed of their good points and bad calls. So an hour’s worth of “yeah, right on!” railing before bed seemed appropriate.

Somewhere along the way, however, I found myself wondering what the right-leaning media was saying about who won or lost or lobbed the best zingers. Fox News and their ilk too have their punchy pundits and their outraged commentators. And they were no doubt preaching to their own choirs and fanning the flames of diehard Republicanism. So what were they saying—and to whom?

In all the sniping and yelling, I am left wondering what wounds this election will leave in its wake. We are a country more divided than at any other time in my life—divided between left, right, and middle; between haves and a growing number of have-nots; between hope and anger and despair—with a media that, for better or worse, encourages the divide. You hear Obama and McCain talking about “reaching across the aisle” to achieve consensus, but it rings as overly idealistic, or pandering, or plain old politics-as-usual, to think that they, or the public, can or will so easily “get along” once the votes are counted. When you have guys with guns in their closets who are ready to use them against fellow citizens (and candidates who will watch their backs)… when you have politicians who will blatantly lie to get ahead, who cynically know their supporters are listening to the cues and winks but not the words coming out of their mouths… when “fear itself” is what we have to fear these days and loathing is waiting in the wings… it’s hard to be very optimistic. I do look forward to a brighter day as promised by the Obama campaign. But today, it feels like behind every silver lining there’s a dark cloud.

[End note: Despite the gloomy prospects, you still gotta laugh. So for today’s bit of levity, click on this Palin-as-prez spoof. Remember… it’s a joke!]

Old home week

Lately I’ve been mulling the notion of home and one’s sense of place …

As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, our historic neighborhood association is hosting a performance this weekend by internationally known storyteller Jay O’Callahan, who grew up in our neighborhood and has based a number of his most popular stories on his escapades and observations of growing up here in the 1940s to early ‘60s.

Meanwhile, our family is preparing for a trip to my hometown to visit my mother, who herself is at this moment down in South Carolina visiting my sister and her partner, who moved from St. Thomas to horse country this past spring. It’s been ages since I was in Erie last; the visits are way too infrequent for my mother’s liking, though for me the place changes so little from one trip to the next that it is so fixed in my mind that it is easily visited in memories.

And… my wife and I are going through our own mental exercise of considering how long to stay in our current home versus packing up and downsizing our family unit to smaller, more manageable digs. (There’s nothing like a coming winter and an economic calamity to get you thinking about having someone else shovel the sidewalk—or better still, sweep up the sand and palm leaves!).

And … at work we’ve been spending a lot of time researching 50+/senior-lifestyle subject matter as grist for possible publications and website work. The world of 50+ is a land of man opportunities right now… as a business market, as a social landscape, as a destination that is approaching fast.

Anyhow, in our neighborhood—known as Pill Hill for the many doctors who settled here at the turn of the 19th century and filled with grand Victorians and other many-roomed manses (the O’Callahan’s house has 35!)—homes rarely change hands. Until just the past few years, almost no one left their house standing up, as they say—that was the case for our home, and with any number of others around us. Certainly the burgeoning options for senior citizens (assisted living, continuum communities, and the like) is starting to cause a shift, but even then, many of the most recent expatriates have stuck pretty close to home turf as they have downsized to condos and apartments on the fringes of our neighborhood. As a result, they maintain their friendships with former neighbors nearly as much as if they still lived around the corner.

As we prepared for tomorrow night’s performance, and a reception afterwards at the former O’Callahan house, the old-timers have surfaced in great numbers and will be driving in from across town, down on the South Shore, and other parts. I know of at least one native who is actually flying “home” from California for the event! Along the way, I’ve heard interesting stories from some of them as I’ve taken their ticket orders—this one grew up next door to the O’Callahans and remembers watching the children playing in the yard (a yard designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, no less!); another one bought the house from the O’Callahans and raised her children there over 10 years, surviving a major fire and lord knows what else; still another was a cohort of Jay’s and factors into a few of his storied exploits; still one other revealed that she is guardian of a fabled cookie recipe of a long-passed O’Callahan neighbor (also central to a story or two) and asked if our caterer would object if she baked a batch for the occasion.

Anyhow, I think you get the drift… it’s a neighborhood in the truest sense. It has history. It has a back-story. It has its characters, its clashes, its gossips, its rivalries, its rules and formalities (heck, at the annual Christmas party, everyone wears nametags, even though most of them have known each other for 40 years). It has secrets that some of us newcomers will never live to know.

Except for the well-to-do-Bostonian part, it reminds me of the community in Downeast Maine where my wife and I owned a house for a number of years. There they refer to you as “from away” if you aren’t a second or (better) third or fourth generation local. You could be accepted—to a cautious degree—by evidence of your hard labors on your property and your willingness to engage in the social mix (mostly man-to-man talk, and woman-to-woman). But basically you would forever be “from away.”

All this is rattling around in my head because I recognize myself as one of those tail-end baby boomers who is somehow, somewhat rootless. It wouldn’t have done to stay in my hometown after high school—the options were just too limited, then and today. And Cleveland didn’t quite cut it when I finished college. Though I’ve lived in Boston for more than 35 year, I’m not sure I feel “from here” either. Maybe it comes from reading too many travel magazines and watching too many episodes of “House Hunters” and “Bizarre Foods.” I can see myself, our family, living someplace else. And in these anxiety-fueled days of uncertain finances and unstable employment (not to mention bio/nuclear terror, global warming, pesky Russians, killer Koreans, irrational Iranians, mooses, and other things that keep Sarah Palin up at night), I find myself thinking about starting over in somewhere that’s cheaper, warmer, simpler, and offers a bit more peace-of-mind. (Call now if you know where that is…operators are standing by! And no, Margaritaville doesn’t count.)

Then I think of a gathering like what will happen tomorrow night—200 friends and neighbors coming together to celebrate their unique sense of community and collective history—and I wonder what I would miss, what our son will have traded off when he looks back on now from his future self, by picking up and moving on.

(Spooky end note – I just noticed that the streaming radio station—reallymusicradio.com—I’ve been listening to has been playing a succession of “movin’ on” songs. The last one had a refrain that caught my ear: “time to leave .. it’s hard to care.” Ooooooeeeeee! Time to sign off!)