Years of Poems and Spirits

Finally, I sort out the graduation mess. Something is going my way for a change. Obama’s apparent ticket to nomination certainly helped too. I am sure I will cherish the memory of the 2008 election.

HRC said something quite explicit: the hardest working class, white American’s support of Obama is weakening, or something like that. It was pretty upsetting when I first heard of it. But then again, it really helped me to understand HRC a lot better. In a way, she is a politician’s politician. She has a mind that is powerful and clairvoyant. The demographics are so lively and obvious in her mind, she had to say something like that. It must be therapeutic to her: “I don’t know how I can make this any more clearer than what I have been saying all along. Just let me be myself for a moment …” Yeah I had those moments. Actually a lot recently.

Is this still a racist nation? There always have been the first black something: ball player, Justice, movie star, etc. Always a big deal at the inauguration but then the country learned to live with it. If this pattern holds and BO is elected, it is another learning process and we will move on. However, given the success HRC had lately (would Wisconsin still go Obama had its primary took place post-Wright?), I am quietly rationalizing for a McCain presidency.

One thing for sure, Cindy McCain is classy and … oh lala. Really like the picture above. So funny.

Just saw the news that Obama openly repudiated Rev. Wright. Also, there are reports that the Wright appearance in the Press Club was in part orchestrated by a Clinton supporter within the organization.

I have never been so disgusted by the political process since I came to the States. I can barely think now.

1. Why the liberals can’t appeal to more Rockefeller Republicans but have to pander to the Reagan Democrats? I would rather give in to the R.R. on tax cuts, law and order, and restrained regulations, rather than to the guns and religon of the racist hillbillies. Is it ever possible to keep a mass of ignorant, easily manipulated, and even reactionary people happy and to commence progressive social changes at the same time? What is the point to keep those people in the tent, so to speak? Do their votes help or hurt the liberal cause more?

2. What Obama is doing is to repent in public: I have sinned for knowing this man. What he did is no different from what a jailed dissident has to do in a Totalitarian regim: he can only be released after he confesses his “crime” and begs for forgiveness. What Wright said is extreme but is well within the limit of freespeech (and is true too!) But the mob society just quartered this guy: humiliated him ruthlessly and played him subtly. Apparently, this is not enough. Obama has to confess too. Otherwise, how best can the powerful mob ensure that Obama, who is running to be their President, is sufficiently disciplined and obdient than forcing a black man to repudiate another black man for protesting against racial injustice–in public and in earnest?!

3. Hillary Clinton is perhaps the most deserving President for this mob society. Not unlike what Bush and Cheney did after 9.11, she knows how to appeal to the worst in human beings. To ascend to the pinnacle of power, to fulfill her own imagined destiny, she is more than happy to pimp herself out to the dirtest fetish of the least desirable group of men, and the insecurity of the pettiest group of women.

NYT just identified the prostitute Spitzer hired that night. It turns out she was from a broken family, abused drugs, went homeless at times, and moved to NYC hoping to launch a singing career. She is pretty but neither exotic nor classic. Her hands stand out as anti-climatic. Her boss sent her out for $1000 an hour but she couldn’t pay for the rent on her own.

That is all I know about her. But what struck me the most was her own words. Before going to see Spitzer, she was alerted that he might want to do something “unsafe”. Her reply was nonchalant yet embued with I-am-in-control kind of confidence, “Listen dude, you really want the sex?” Today, however, when interviewed by NYT report at the court house, she said only, “I don’t want to be remembered as a monster”.

I don’t know whether I am in a position to feel sorry for her. Nor do I know whether that is what she is looking for. She is only 22 and still calls home when she is in trouble. But her story made me feel like living in a Kafka-nesque world.

Why does NYT has to parade her in front of the public? Because she ruined so much promise for NYT and what it stands for? What recourse does she have to defend herself or even “opt out of the game”? She begs not to be remembered as a monster, but how she’s perceived is already out of her control.

I thought about posting comments on NYT online or even write to their editors. But then again, how different am I from “Kristen” in front of the machine that has no face, no name yet is omnipresent? If NYT doesn’t pick her out, someone else might. All in the name of public’s right to know but actually is out of the public’s desire to know. I feel a chill to the bone.