woohoo! i just saw my first presidential ad of the year. it was for barack, on the news in denver.

(and being colorado, it had the irony of being followed immediately by an ad for The Tanner Gun show, famous for being the event where the Columbine killers purchased three of the four guns they used to kill all those kids. how nice. the commercial was appalling. lots of close-up shots of tables strewn with high-powered rifles as submachine guns, and then these displays of knives with curving twelve-inch blades (also very similar to the knives the Columbine killers carried into the attack, but did not use.)

well, it is colorado.

meanwhile . . .

my friend in LA said TV commercials have just ramped up in the last 24 hours there, mostly the caroline one for barack. i found it on youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVlnL1_xXJM

wow. i was not quite expecting that. they are not kidding around with the comparison to JFK. good call.

i always roll my eyes when people try to stretch to make those connections (eg, when bill clinton first ran, and endlessly milked the photo of him shaking hands with JFK when bill was a teen. big deal: bill wanted to be the next Kennedy. the connection felt manufactured to me.

but this time, caroline really endorsed barack at the right moment: after that sense of 1960 and 1968 had so clearly returned. months after even barack's rightwing enemies began to acknowledge it, and after the iowa and south caroline victories started to make the dream feel real.

it reminded me of what frank rich said about brokeback in his new york times column about a week after its release, when the film was the talk of the nation. i don't have the exact quote, but i believe it was something like: This film is having such an impact at this moment, because it is ratifying a movement, rather than leading it.

i thought he got that exactly right. there are pioneers, who prep the rock-hard soil, and that is really hard work, and vital. for gay rights that included the stonewall drag queens, and maybe the ACT Up people and all sorts of pioneers. in the media, it included The Real World and Ellen and Will and Grace. we are well past that stage, now. the ground had been ready, but someone or something had to come along and really take advantage of that. Brokeback was that moment.

i think in their own way, hillary and barack are kind of those people, too. people martin luther king and susan b anthony feel like their predecessors, who broke the ground and made today's road possible. and many others, of course. (also gloria steinem, and Betty Friedan on the women's side). these two today are poised to be ratifiers: the country is finally ready for a woman or a black as president--not necessarily eager, or asking for one, but ready, if the moment presents itself. a person of great strength had to come along and make it so.

i do believe that we have two people of great strength today, with very different talents, one of whom will make it so. we will finally have either a woman president, or an african american.

hmmmmmmm. i drifted astray there.

one idea that i was grasping for was that by luck or design, caroline got the timing of her announcement perfect.

if she had done it a month earlier, it would not have worked the same. the obama movement was already rising--very powerfully in some circles--but most of the country, which ignores politics until the moment is almost at hand--had not yet felt it themselves.

most people had not yet felt anything like 1960 or 1968, so if they heard caroline's commercial and saw those images a month ago, they would have felt she was trying to make that connection for them. it would have felt like a bit of a reach.

now i think so many people have felt it--or at least heard about it from people they know--that when she says it overtly, and the commercial shows the images of her dad . . . it ratifies a feeling they already had. it takes an existing hazy connection inside the viewer and transports them directly there: it is 1960 again, we had a leader the country rallied behind. this is how it feels to unite. this is how we can feel again. this is how we will feel, if we make this really happen.

i get tingly when i watch it. i've had my hopes dashed before, and i'm a little afraid to dream again. but i want to.

it was illuminating to sit in the obama precinct captains' meeting wednesday, too. not for exactly the reasons i expected.

i looked around a lot, and what really caught my eye, over and over, was a cluster of the national staffers, who were mostly standing up along railing. (there were 500-600 precinct captains in that meeting, btw, so it was not an intimate experience. they had driven from all over the state, some six hours or more away. those people must have gotten up around midnight to start their journey.)

so the meeting was held in the basketball court in the same complex with the arena, and we were packed into the bleachers. i picked a seat up at the very top, in the handicapped section, partly because there were actual chairs and my back was aching (i have two six-inch rods in my back and seven fused vertabrae), and partly to watch the participants. i was more interested in watching them than the candidate.

when barack came out, i looked over my right shoulder to see how the full-time staffers were reacting. they were pretty used to this stuff, and had been unfazed by anything throughout the morning, but when he came out on the court below us, those guys up top just glowed.

one guy, in particular, i was watching: the one who had recruited me first thing in the morning, six hous before. he had been very nice all day--and really freaking good at his job--but i'd never seen him smile. he had been pleasant, but intent. now, he was beaming. he turned to the guy beside him--one of the guys with a radio in his ear all day--and they exchanged the nicest smile. they were so proud.

is this what it felt like in '68?

bobby's bid didn't pan out, of course, for very sad reasons. it might not have anyway, even if he lived. his brother really excited the country in 1960, too--both were before my time, but i always pictured '68 being more powerful. both ended painfully, but JFK's legacy lives on, both in what he did and what he set up for LBJ to do.

this barack phenom may or may not pan out. he's got a big institutional power to unseat in the clintons. in a week or a month for next december, he might be yesterday's news.

but either way, it will have been exciting and illuminating just to experience it as it unfolded.

(i wrote this immediately after i got home wednesday, so the timing in it is two days off. and i was too damn tired to capitalize. hehehe):

i just got home from obamamania. quite a day. obama campaign to Denver today, and unexpected chaos ensued.

the campaign announced on Monday that he would come to Colorado at 10 a.m. Wednesday. They booked a 7,200-seat arena on the University of Denver campus and planned on filling about a third or half of it on a weekday morning with 36 hours notice. they thought 2 or 3 thousand would be great. fifteen thousand showed up.

it was nuts.
 
it's not that that was such an outlandish number of people, it was that no one was equipped to handle that. sporting events handle 50, 60 thousand or more all the time. but they have huge teams set up, and paid employees who handle the same thing every day, and standard processes they use over and over at the place, and facilities, and so on. t

his was planned in 36 hours, mostly using volunteers with little or no experience in this sort of stuff. even the 2 to 3 thousand they expected would have taxxed their ability to control them well. this mob, nobody had a clue how to get ahold of.

obama was set to arrive at 10 a.m., doors were opening at 8:30 and i got there at 7:30 to help set up. (my field organizer said don't come at 7, there would be nothing to do yet.) i expected early birds to start showing up around 8.

large numbers were lining up at 6 a.m., in the dark, temp about 9 degrees, about an hour before sunrise.

when i got there, at 7:30, thousands were massed around the entrance, and it was crazy out there. i could barely get in. security refused to let me in as a set-up worker. hundreds of people were pushing forward trying to use that. i said the name of noah, my area coordinator, and someone back there recognized it and said to let me in.

i was in about 30 seconds when a guy came around with clipboards asking for volunteers who were dressed warmly to go back out and do crowd control stuff. that sounded fun, or at least interesting. it took me about one second to volunteer.

people had all sorts of printed web-reservation reciepts, and VIP badges, and lots of other VIP connections to get in, and tons of people who didn't know they needed to bring a printout, and we were also signing up volunteers on the spot.

someone in the campaign made a great logistical decision: no way could they deal with the bottleneck of trying to figure all that stuff out at the entrance. the security people allowing people into the building had to go by one standard thing to stand in instead of a "ticket."

in the end, no matter who you are, or what you had, the only way you could get in that arena was with a big X on the back of your right hand from a dark highlighter.

a handful of us with highlighters roamed the crowd converting all the different entry papers and sob stories and volunteer offers into Xs. it worked really well. i spent three hours working the line, which spanned the length of much of the campus, shouting, "does everyone have an x! you must have an x to get in!"

it was fun.
 
i did all sorts of jobs--i would see one and just start doing it. had a blast.

how exhilarating to be a part of something like that. i knew pretty early on that i was going to lose my seat in the VIP area if i didn't turn in my highlighter and clipboard and go in. but big deal. i've met politicians. the thrill for me was outside, in the mass of confusion. you don't get mobs every day.
 
when barack spoke, i was out on the lacrosse field, with the people from the very tail end and lots of organizers. we had told the crowd barack could come out to speak to us afterward, but he came out first, and so did special guest caroline kennedy, and that was nice.

there was a precinct captains meeting afterward, and he came to that, too. he's really something.

---

i learned a lot. and there were a few odd moments. just because i happened to be there--and was willing to run to the end of the block to tell people--i got to make the announcement to huge numbers of people that they would not get in, but barack was going to meet with them outside. i parroted the phrase the campaign manager said to me, "the senator will address you/them." i started telling one chunk of crowd at a time--the line still stretched about two blocks--and they did seem that excited about it. and about the tenth group, a lady asked, with a little disgust, "what senator?" i was taken aback. "barack." the went nuts. then i started telling the other groups "barack will come out to address you," and i got the same excitement. that cracked me up.
 
i can't wait till Super Tuesday. it's cool that most of America gets to be a part of choosing the nominees again. we get our chance in Colorado that day. i've never lived in a state where i had a voice. exciting.

I have made some changes to the look of this place: new logo, navigation bar below it, new pic of me, simplified sidebar. Changes still to come soon include: simplifying the sidebar further, updating my blogroll, fixing bugs (I know about the Macro Error under each post), propogating the new look to all the archive pages, and making sure the archives are all up.

I've got a ton of updates about my book, my life and BarackOMania, but first . . .

Blessing #1: Painful as it is to say, I needed to break from this blog for awhile. The book needed my full attention. A blog and a book was too much for me, it seems, at least for this whale of a book. So the blog crashed, and I could not restore it, and got so frustrated, I gave up for a long while.

That was a good thing, it turned out.

In this case, "crashing" meant that something on the ancient PC I used to run it crashed. Salon blogs are stuck on an outmoded system where the master contents of the blog reside on your hard drive: so if it crashes, the blog crashes. In this case, something went awry with the PC's web access. I tried changing cards, uninstalling IE--all sorts of things, all of which failed. And I'd lost my tech person, so I couldn't resolve it.

It seemed time to move to a new PC anyway, and I had a newer PC, so I tried porting it over on May 1, 2007, but that failed. Radio UserLand's tech support is abysmal, and all they succeeded in doing was helping me get up a single I'm Back post, which wiped out the (five?) years of previous content, and then froze again. Ugh. I stayed stuck there for nine months.

So . . .

Blessing #2:

Two days before my book deadline, as I was racing to make final changes to the manuscript, my hard drive on my new/main computer crashed. (I got a corrupted dll file.) After three precious hours wasted on the phone with Dell tech support, they told me it was hopeless: I had to wipe my hard drive and re-install Windows XP. Ugh. They always say that. But I had no time to mess around.

I had the manuscript broken into four different pieces, with friends around the country proofing different sections and offering editorial feedback. I had a most-recent copy of only one of the four. It felt like disaster.

My friends really came through for me, though. A wonderful guy named Alan took the whole PC to Best Buy five minutes before closing on a Sunday night, and got the Geek Squad guy to move it to the front of the queue and copy the full hard drive to a backup device. Alan stood there for 2.5 hours babysitting it, and brought all my files back safely. Lydia and Ira and Dave continued proofing and offering edits.

So I had to wipe my hard drive and that included removing the failed re-install of Radio UserLand, the software for this blog. Today, I decided to start from scratch, and I'm not sure what I did differently this time, but it appeared to work.

So now I'm back up and running, on a much faster PC which is several years further from death. Eventually I will port the whole thing to a new system that is not dependent on a single PC, but that's down the road.

I just saw The CBS Evening News, which described the new string of school shootings, different than Columbine, because they are committed by outsiders--adults. The reporter referred to this as 'puzzling.' I don't think so.

I really need to go to the gym to work out some of this anger and frustration, but I'll come back this evening after I've collected my thoughts on why.

Yow. Another one today.

In Amish country, which threw me a little. I just hope the killer didn't plan it there just to get my attention.

I had always thought murderers were the lowest form of life. I'm starting to feel like copycat murderers need their own private circle of hell. I know that gets into really shaky territory of ranking one evil against another, and there are worse elements than copycatting for sure, but they have my ire up. It feels like a more blatant attempt at publicity: I saw this person garner fame for killing people, so let me find a gun.

And this business about adults doing this and choosing schools for publicity is just taking a horrible act and making all the more despicable.

On a personal note, it's helpful to talk about them, though. I actually learned about this one from a reporter emailing to talk about it. We talked for quite awhile and just hashing it out helps. A lot. If I had just turned on the TV and seen it today, I think I just would have lost it. But forcing my brain into analytical mode and trying to be constructive in some way, I guess that makes me feel slightly less powerless about it. At least the pain--(the helplessnes? the revulsion?)--doesn't stay bottled up inside me.

I just watched last night's 60 Minutes segment on bum-bashing over breakfast and I don't know how much more of this I can take. If there's another school shooting or horrifying act of senseless violence any time soon, I think I need to just sit it out. I know they're happening somewhere every day, and I'm not normally one to turn away, but . . . you can only take so much.

The bumfights segment was so debilitating because they rattled off some stats about how common they are--one a month, that we know of, and we mostly only know about them if somebody captures them on video. So God knows how many.

I wouldn't have expected to see parallels to Columbine or Platte Canyon or Montreal initially, but then I watched some of the perpetrators being interviewed. They didn't really have a reason, it was just somebody they perceived being lower than them, that they could pick on. And of course, something they could get away with. In these cases, they started smacking a helpless sleeping drunk with a stick. Then they came back with bigger sticks. In one case, they finally came back with a two-by-four, with a nail exposed and bashed him in the head with it. They killed him.

That small group got locked away for a long time, but most of the crimes are invisible to the rest of us. Street people rarely report crimes against them.

It's just so disheartening. So painful to watch these defenseless people get attacked for no reason on film. I'm not sure which emotion was stronger when I watched--the horror for that poor person, or my revulsion at the human being that could or would do it to them. God.

Then there's the whole issue of the horrible, exploitive Bumfights video series that clearly inspired a lot of these attackers. I am very leery of ascribing motive to the influence of video. I think it's dangerous to pin too much on the videos, because the videos are not going to inspire any sound person to do this kind of thing. But people have been doing shitty things from lynchings to the Holocaust since the beginning of time, and some people don't seem to take much to wind them up. These videos, which treat bums as subhuman--submammal, really; a person would never get away with treating a dog or cat this way--and justify attacking them for sport are clearly throwing gasoline on the smoldering fires inside some of these people.

The guy who made them and still defends them was a whole different case entirely. Morally bankrupt as well, but motivated differently than the others in the story, not by the bullying instinct, but by greed.

Huh. I feel so much better just writing about that. I was kind of overcome when it ended. Just couldn't stop sobbing. It's been a rough week. I've been writing about death for what seems like ages, and then Wednesday I just watched that horror at Platte Canyon for hours. It dredged up a lot of pain, I guess. The events were very different, but the feelings were the same. They're right up on the surface now. Not sure how long they'll stay. I can actually feel the warm, prickly feeling right now, like it's bubbling just underneath the skin layer, up and down my arms mostly, along the tops my forearms, less so in my upper arms, but along that strip between my biceps and triceps, then really strong again in my shoulders. I don't usually feel it in a physical way like that, mostly just an overwhelming sadness. Not all the time, or even most of the time, mostly just right after. Thursday was hard, but it got better, then watching this show was just . . . too much. For the moment. Writing this really helped, though. It at least got it out of my body, onto the page. I think I'm feeling it in my arms because they're so close to the keyboard. I'm sure it's all imaginary, but it's like my brain is visualizing the stuff literally pumping through my arms, out my fingers and onto this screen via the keyboard. I'm just glad to get it out of me..