McPln Meets Bollywood

I'm not so crazy about spreading video -- there are so many, and many blogs seem to prefer YouTubes to writing -- because it takes a lot longer to look at a video than to read, at least for me, and so much is so repetitive.

However, thanks to Nancy Lebovitz on Making Light, here's one you really want to see. There are no words to describe it, but the video itself is filled with words.

Does it feel to others like it feels to me, that the entire world -- not to mention myself -- is just holding its breath through the Election Day for POTUS? As if until we really know who is going to be POTUS we cannot sensibly plan ahead for anything?

Vaquero says that everyone he talked to in Barcelona, whether from South America, Europe or Asia, is feeling like this. Even at this enormous arts and literary and cultural festival (that the Jazz Festival was a part of), everyone was talking about this U.S. election. He did not encounter a single person supporting the other ones. If nothing else would, this has to be the overwhelming evidence that this nation has lost its mind. The whole world is pulling for us to recovery our sanity.

In some ways I'm cautiously experiencing a flutter of a coming lightness of being of the sort I haven't felt in many, many years. Rather I've felt an ever weighty sense of repression and oppression and pessimism. This flutter is caused by the elegance of the Obama campaign, which has given one a glimmer of hope, that if he and his people get to run this nation we all, together, can turn things around, and not just turn them around, but do as with the FDR era, actually make the nation better for a lot people than it was before, at the best of times.

That's a hell of a burden of expectation to put on one person, it seems to me. But as Vaquero and I discussed this morning:

Joe who isn't Joe and isn't a plumber compared Obama to Sammy Davis, Jr. (who was, btw, one hell of a tap dancer), and today Stanley Fish compared Obama to both Fred Astaire and Jesus vs Satan in Milton's Purgatory -- talk about over-the-top rhetorical excess! But Vaquero thinks what Obama really is, is the Mozart of politicians.

Vaquero says, "It effortlessly poured out of Mozart. He didn't have to puzzle over it, or tinker, he just knew. His musicality was so deep, and so was his undestanding of instruments and instrumentation, that he knews just what fit where to create not just good effect, but the best effect to carry out the master vision. Thus the elegance. Obama's the Mozart of politics."

I don't want to get symbolic about this election. I support Obama, not because of skin color or in spite of skin color or any of that. I support him because I genuinely think he's the superior candidate. He worked damned hard to get me to think this way. I'm not much of a bandwagon person. However, symbolically? This terrible mess the nation is in? We want Obama to be POTUS because we believe, we hope, that with our help, he can clean it up. Isn't that just the history of this nation? When things are a wreck, we need a black person to show us the way, you could say. Considering the history of this nation, how much throughout its history, events and economy depended on the efforts, so unrecognized, so exploited of African Americans, it is above and beyond time we have an African American POTUS.

BTW, Bruce Sterling was the star this last week at the festival, with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson -- but while Bruce and Reed were actually there and doing what they were supposed to do, Laurie literally phoned in her part. She probably had a dog agility competition that her appearance was unfortunately scheduled against ....