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Call Your Mom
by Erik Bader
November 2004
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty. —Walt Whitman
I was at the Khyber, among ten or so of my friends, all of us looking up with dismay at the television set hung in the corner of the room, ordering a bulwark of drinks before last call, bracing ourselves for the inevitable, as the map of the United States of America, which is the county that we live in, relentlessly filled up with the menacing color red, reminiscent of that scene in M. Night Shalahan's Signs where the family watches the alien invasion being tracked on a map the exact same shape as the one we were watching, like deer frozen helplessly in the oncoming headlights of impending doom. Here are some of the things you would have heard at the Khyber that Tuesday night:
“Fucking hicks!”
“Fu-uck!”
“Ohhhhhhh.”
“Well, see you in Canada…”
“I can't watch this.”
“You've got to be fucking kidding me!”
“Raw power sho' to come runnin' to yoooooou!”
(The last quote, an appropriate one, was Iggy Pop, on the jukebox.)
Not to say I didn't see it coming. The facts buried somewhere in a dark place betwixt the intersection Idealism and Hope, I guess I knew it all along. But from late September until the second of November something special seemed to be hovering in the autumnal air around the streets of Philadelphia. Like the charged atmosphere of the Flyers heading towards the cup in '97, there was a headstrong feeling that maybe, just maybe, the impossible was going to happen—that although there were wrongs committed in our name by our country, that those wrongs were soon going to be righted, that Good would indeed triumph over Evil, that a few good people were actually going to make a difference. I wasn't old enough to vote in '92 when Clinton ran against Bush senior, but it must have felt good to have seen this chill guy who liked rock'n'roll, smoked doobs, played sax, and wasn't afraid to show up on MTV to “Rock The Vote” go out there and win like that. But this year it felt more urgent, more pressing—maybe P. Diddy wasn't being presumptuous when he said “Vote or Die.” This felt big, bigger than what the Boss was saying, or Michael Moore, or angry street stencils, or the countless slabs of incensed punk rock vinyl that was pressed in the hopes of getting this guy out of office once and for all. There were old guys I knew from South Philly who were voting for the first time since McGovern ran against Nixon in 1972. Back in the summer I was in the smoking lounge of an auto train coming from Florida, heading up the coast to Virginia. A balmy night haunted by thunderstorms, it was past lights-out and I couldn't sleep. There were seven of us in that car, all insomniacs, chain-smoking the night away and passing around what bottles we had with us. We were seven total strangers, and every person in that room was firmly against George W. Bush.
I woke up early on the second, an impossibly bright and clear morning, and I voted. It felt real, pressing that button and seeing it light up red (Ah! Red!). I walked out of the place feeling strong, confident, important. All over the city that afternoon you saw kids from various grass-roots organizations waving Kerry propaganda proudly up at the blue sky. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing people young and old breathlessly discussing the election, reminding others to vote … there was a nervous buoyancy that everyone seemed to share, all of us in this together, a confidence that we were going to do this.
“Think about it,” a good friend of mine told me the night before. “When Kerry wins we're all gonna get laid. That's a fact. There's some motherfuckers out there who haven't gotten laid once in the past four years! But mark my words, shit's gonna change real soon.”
I wanted that change. I didn't want to feel ashamed to be an American. I didn't want to feel that my opinions were the minority in a country that I loved, or at least thought I loved. I don't think I've ever felt more patriotic (a word I don't think I've ever typed in a story or essay in my life) than I did that morning and afternoon.
Did I think things were going to be different? I mean did I believe that suddenly life was going to be better, that people would be happier, everyone would make more money, the war would suddenly stop, that everyone was going to get laid? No, of course not. If anything it was the glow that I was hoping for as I was brushing my teeth and getting ready to go out and watch the votes come in on the television with some friends. If Kerry had won there would have been that glow, you'd have felt it radiating from everyone everywhere you went, in the bars and cafes and the streets and at work, everywhere. A smile on your face, a skip in your step, and later that night? Hell, maybe you would have gotten laid after all. But the power feeling of making a difference, even if it's a small difference, like let's say you had protested the merciless bulldozing of an old tree that some developer wanted knocked down and so you got some good folks together and wrote letters and petitions and people signed the petitions and then it worked, the tree survived unscathed, and you were the one who had saved it. That tremendous feeling of pride and accomplishment you'd have, passing by that wise old tree every day, knowing that you had made a difference. Things weren't necessarily going to get better if Kerry had been elected into office, not any time soon anyhow, but we would have shared that feeling that because we had made difference, that some day, perhaps years from now, things were going to get better.
I went to the ragtag “protest” in Love Park that evening, really just a bunch of disgruntled punk rockers, political types, and cool kids standing around in the chilly blue Center City twilight, some looking dejected, some shouting anti-war epithets, some just shooting the breeze and figuring out where to get a beer later. One guy came up to me and tied a black piece of fabric around the arm of my corduroy jacket, and though I felt it looked ridiculous, it felt nice having some stranger tie it on there, like he knew what I was going through. United we fall, I guess.
Working at the Produce Market later that night I spoke to a number of guys down there about how the felt regarding the results of the election. The prevailing sense was that most of them couldn't have given a shit either way. One guy brought up something I hadn't even considered—the historic fact that never has America switched presidents during a war.
“Who the fuck would do that?” he told me. “I mean here we are in the middle of a fucking war with these guys … what the fuck would happen if some new guy came into office and was like, okay let's try to sit down and talk peace with these guys? What do you think they'd do, after we've been bombing the fuck out of them for the past year or so? They'd blow us the fuck up is what they'd do. That's all there is to it.”
That's obviously not all there is to it, but on a straight and from the streets level there's absolutely nothing faulty with his logic. In fact it makes perfect sense. We are a country that has experienced terrorism, and we are now, like it or not, in the middle of a “war”, and terrorism and war means guns and bombs and these are things that make hardworking people with families afraid. Fear is the most primal emotion we have—even animals have it—and fear is inextricably linked with survival. You want to survive, you eliminate that which is causing your fear. I do not think that the votes of Red State America were overwhelmingly dictated by opinions on abortion, or gay marriage, or stem cell research. I think that at the end of the day your average working class American couldn't give a rat's ass when it comes to these matters. I believe that the overriding emotion that won this election was fear. “How could anyone vote for someone who is so dumb?” is one of the biggest questions the majority of my peers have asked since Wednesday. But command of the English language and educated opinions aren't going to win a fight, the average guy on the street will tell you. I think that to most Americans this election was a question of the tough guy and the smart guy. They chose the tough guy.
The big question that seems to be on the tips of the tongues of most of the people who I knew who had invested quite a lot into this election seems to be now what. Because let's face it: maybe that night at the bar or party you were at you swore up and down to your friends that you were going to expatriate to France, or Canada, or wherever, but guess what—you're not. Unless you are filthy rich and/or hate your family and never want to see them again you are not going to leave the country, and by the time you have procured a new citizenship and renounced your old one there will be a new president anyway. And so the question remains: now what?
I know I'm going to overstep my bounds here with this part, make gross overstatements, and obtuse generalizations, but it's a jarring transition, going from feeling at a loss for words and diving headlong into writing an essay with the simultaneously sincere and presumptuous hope that it could possibly make things better. It's a windy day to be tossing caution, but here goes. It is my observation in my brief twenty-eight years on this planet and in this country that my generation is generally an unhappy one, but although I despise that sinister gang of Texan thugs as much as the next liberal guy or gal, in the end I do not believe that trading one filthy rich white guy for another filthy rich white guy is going to make anyone I have ever known in my life any happier, I mean intrinsically happier, than they already are. That last idea came from my father, whom I spoke to the night after Bush declared victory. Our telephone conversation went like this. For the record, my old man voted for Kerry.
Father: How's it going?
Son: Eh, you know.
F: What. What's wrong. [deadpan, no inflection.]
S: I mean the election, and all. Four more years.
F: Oh will you get off it? It was a tossup between two rich white guys from the east. What's the difference which one you get?
S: But pop, I mean, you can't just lie to the country and get caught doing it and—
F: Erik, they're presidents. Name one who didn't lie.
I didn't say George Washington, but the old man had made his point. And maybe he was right. We could have had that glow, for sure, but once that glow had faded, and fade it would, it would have been back to business as usual. This is not a justification for Bush winning the election. This is a means towards a provisional answer to the question of now what.
The fact is that we aren't as nice to each other as we could be. Even the nicest among us could perhaps even be a little nicer. This is what I mean when I say make your own America. The America that you want to live in. Going out into the streets holding up banners and screaming at total strangers because they are wearing business suits is not going to change the fact that you haven't called your parents in some time and told them that you loved them. So why not do it right now? Put down this paper, pick up the telephone, call your mother and tell her that you love her. I'm being serious here. I know countless people who voted for John Kerry who just the week prior cheated on their boyfriends, or made fun of someone's band, or forgot to call someone back, or told someone that they should lose some weight and no matter who the white talking head on your television screen who calls himself the president happens to be, it is not going to change the fact that we all have the potential to be very crummy people indeed and that we could all try a little harder not to be.
If we can't change the horrific fact of four more years, if we can't turn Red State America blue, then at the very least we can make some changes of our own, right here in our own little personal America. Maybe there's a certain someone who keeps trying to get a date with you, but who has some kind of flaw that you find unacceptable, or your friends find unacceptable, so you decide instead to spend another night alone. Why not take this person up on their offer? There are a zillion free and easy things you could do to brighten your corner, the little corner of the world where you dwell. Compliment someone you know. Learn to say yes a lot. Sometimes I think that American's are so uptight because our word for yes is tripped up by a consonant. Oui is all vowels, for example. But learn the power of yes, which is the opposite of no, no being denial, no being prudence, no being conservatism, something that fifty-one percent of this country voted yes to. Yes, I'll come to your party, yes, even though it's late I'll come over and watch that movie with you, yes I'd like to hear your tape of home recordings, yes I'd love to meet you for coffee. Get out of your own way and stop being so busy. You're not busy. Your cellphone is making you busy, checking your email is making you busy, posting on that message board is making you busy. Little expensive machines are keeping you from doing the most wonderful thing that humans can do, that animals can't do, that presidents and trial lawyers and doctors don't have time to do—sitting around passing time together. So pass time together. Share a drink. Hold hands. But please, be with human beings. With your fellow Americans. Love each other.
It is a sad kind of country votes because of fear, and it is an awful kind of populace that is afraid of each other, afraid of the person next door, afraid of the people they love, and afraid of themselves. When we stop being afraid, and start being in love, then we'll start being free. But not until then.
Erik Bader is the author of The Pilot and the Panda, a forthcoming novel. lives in Philadelphia and can be reached via email at etbader@hotmail.com.
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