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 tivo Charlie Rose every day. I don't always get to them right away. I use them as radio--while I cook breakfast, clean up, exercise . . .

The great joy of that show is the incredible breadth of ideas and perspectives you hear. I tend to get the most out of the various sorts of artists he has on the show, though those are people I can often hear elsewhere, just not in such depth. (Outside of Fresh Air, the other great source.)

But weeks like this are always special, when most of the world leaders are in NY for the UN assembly, and so many of them stop by his studio for a chat. (It kinda started midweek and will continue through much of next week, if he follows his past pattern.)

In general, politicians are the least interesting guests on his show, but he either culls out the few who are not full of hot air, or perhaps they're not windbags when they're not talking to a domestic audience. These people aren't running for anything here. They do have an agenda with the American public, of course, but most of the ones he has on are smart enough to know they're going to impress us a lot more if they leave the BS at home and just talk candidly. (Or am I just used to American politicians--have they not gotten so slick and full of shit everywhere else?)

It can also be a tough week, because you have to deal with a lot of accents--tougher if you're in the kitchen cooking and trying to listen with one ear and one brain hemisphere, and sometimes the ideas sound a little foreign . . . it's a little more work, but usually worth it.

Tonight, was pure pleasure. The President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, a woman I'd never heard of--OK, I didn't even know they had elected a woman, I'm embarassed to admit--was something of a revelation. What an incredibly intelligent person. And such a wise, thoughtful take on everything. She had been tortured by Pinochet's goons, and her father, a general, had been murdered by them, but she spoke about it without anger. She spoke of the horrible anger she'd had in the past, but it was clear from her demeanor that it really was gone.

I think she was most refreshing the way she talked about issues passionately, but with none of the us/them mentality we have in our politics now. In fact, she talked about her frustration reading our press, which she sees as still speaking in a Cold War vocabulary, about good guys and bad guys in her region. She sees those countries struggling to enact economic reforms that will build their economies in the long run, but also improve people's lives, and how difficult that balance is, and how everyone is looking for the right answers. Essentially, she says that there are a lot of well-meaning people trying different approaches down there, and for us to split them down the middle and slap half of them with the goodguy label and half badguy is ludicrous, yet we do it with barely a thought.

She had a lot to say. I can't convey more than a fraction of it, but I'm the richer for having been exposed to her. I can't wait for the rest of the week.

I've been loving this Boondocks TV series.  

Makes me kinda squeamish sometimes, though. If this were written by a white guy, it would have been cancelled after one episode, and any TV executive involved in greenlighting it fired in disgrace.

But it's freaking funny.

And . . . how do you say this without sounding REALLY white . . . ? I'm understanding better.

Thought I understood the race stuff pretty well. Not well enough, apparently.

So I'm loving the show, for a whole lotta reasons. But the Nigga Moment episode--officially titled "Grandad's Fight"--that one was just too much. Grandad gets beaten up by a mean old blind man, and humilated for it. Everyone involved is black, including the narrator, who tells us and grandad about twenty times that it's just a nigga moment--where two niggas find themselves in a situation where they find themselves driven to act stupid, and it always ends badly.

Halfway through I literally felt like I was going to throw up. And all i could think was: I don't care how black the writer is, it's still freaking racist.

And I sure felt racist chuckling at it. And it was hard not to, it was funny. But good lord. Man, did I feel dirty.

I turned it off, but didn't delete it from the tivo.

Came back about a month later and decided to finish. More nigga nigga nigga, dumb niggas, stupid niggas, Goooooooood!

But finally, the episode climaxes with gramps and the blind guy in a rematch that ends horribly, followed by a mini riot among the crowd gathered to watch. Riley--the angry (eight year old?) grandson who set up the whole disgusting fight and took bets and charged admission and then instigated the riot to get the hell out of there when it went sour--stands back, looks at the mostly white crowd acting like idiots, and says, ruefully, "niggas!"

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Wow. Nicely done. Almost sounds heavy handed describing it now, but it sure lured me in. And enlightened me, too. And not just about white people, but about us, too. And the whole idea of niggas. Or one crucial nigga idea, at least.

This is the first show in ages that makes me feel like a nerdy white guy, and/or a white-guilt kinda guy. Discomforting, because I thought I was way past all that, but I guess that means I wasn't.

And it's funny as hell.

(FYI, It's on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Sunday at 11, I read at one point, but I have no idea. That's what your tivo is for.)