THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT (6 page)

I could have filled a history book with things I couldn’t say to the buyers. I couldn’t tell the bird-watcher beaming at Audubon that Audubon had to shoot a lot of those birds to paint them. Or tell the couple admiring the Bodmer lithograph of the Mandan ceremonial dog dancer that the guy in the picture was probably dead soon after he posed because smallpox wiped out 90 percent of his tribe. Or tell the fellow spending all afternoon deciding whether or not to buy Catlin’s buffalo hunt picture for his office that in Catlin’s first letter about the natives he was drawing he wrote that the “means of their death and destruction have been introduced and visited upon them by acquisitive white men.” Can I wrap that up for you, sir?

Graham Arader’s America is a prettier picture than mine. And he believes in it. That is why, as he would say, he is the best, the finest, the most successful antiquarian map dealer in the history of the world. His is an easier picture to sell. But it’s also a lovelier, less sarcastic one to buy. I want to buy it. I like the telegraph and the railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge. Graham’s map of America has an elementary school quality that I admire. How many times have I wished to go back there, to live once more in the country I thought I lived in as I stood on the stage of the second-grade Thanksgiving pageant, singing “This Land Is Your Land” in a cardboard turkey suit?

I think the reason I wasn’t cut out to be a good map seller or a good Californian had something to do with the fact that I dressed up as Wednesday Addams for Halloween that year.
The Addams Family
and
The Munsters
, shows where roses were grown for their thorns and pretty blondes were pitied as monsters, were on TV every afternoon after school when I was a little kid. Throw in three Pentecostal church services a week where they preached that the Antichrist would be a sunny, smooth, all-American charmer, and you have the makings of an insular worldview. Namely, a sneaking suspicion that there’s always a dark side of nice.

When I called Graham those years ago to tell him I was quitting my job and leaving California to go to Chicago to study art history, he told me what a dumb idea that was and how I would learn a lot more about art by selling it. At the time, I laughed. But I can see now what he meant. There’s something educational about trying to see the good in things, holding some old picture in your hands and telling another person why it’s significant and excellent, special.

A rosy letter about voting written the day before an election day now infamous for poorly designed butterfly ballots, disenfranchisement of black voters, nationwide malfunction of voting machines, incompetent network TV coverage, and a snippy Hillary Clinton campaign worker insulting me as I walked into my polling place to vote for her candidate:

November 6, 2000

Dear Congressman Synar,

I’ve never written to a dead man before. But there’s something I always meant to tell you, and I’m not going to let a little fatal cancer stop me. You probably won’t remember me. My mother used to do your mother’s hair in Muskogee in the sixties. My parents still have one of her paintings, by the way, a brownish still life with flowers. When you were running for the House that first time, in 1978, I handed out some pamphlets for you at my town ‘s rodeo. I’m from Braggs. I was eight. I live in New York City now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a rodeo in Oklahoma (or anywhere else). At the Braggs rodeo, you shook my hand and gave me the “Synar for Congress” button off your own lapel—which I still have—and told me it was the last one off the printing presses. You’d think Elvis was handing me his sweaty scarf or something, I was so excited. I realize now how young you were. You were twenty-seven then, younger than I am now.

There’s this letter you sent me right after your election. I’ve kept it with me all these years. It’s written on House of Representatives letterhead marked “Mike Synar, Member-Elect, 2nd District, Oklahoma.” It reads:

Sarah—

Thank you so much for your help during our campaign. Don’t forget that when you become eighteen you should get registered to vote. Get involved in government and our government will be better.

Thank you again Sarah

Best Wishes,

Mike Synar

Lord knows, you probably mailed hundreds of these notes during your sixteen years in the House. It’s even possible an aide wrote it, but in my heart of hearts I believe it came from your own pen. I must have pulled it out of the envelope and reread it a thousand times, dreaming. Someday, I thought.

How I pined to vote. In 1985, the movie
The Breakfast Club
came out. In my teen world, it was a really big deal. Every kid who saw it was supposed to identify with one of the stereotype characters—the rebel, the weird girl, the jock, the nerd, the princess. I identified with Anthony Michael Hall’s nerd, Brian. (Though I was only about nine months away from turning into black-clad, antisocial Ally Sheedy.) There was this one scene, my favorite, in which Ally Sheedy has just stolen Anthony Michael Hall’s wallet. Jock Emilio Estevez is looking at the nerd Hall’x phony driver’s license, pointing out that it says the nerd, who looks like he’s twelve, is sixty-eight years old. Clearly, the kid’s no barfly, so the jock’s suspicious.

JOCK:
What do you need a fake ID for?

NERD:
So I can vote.

I cast my first vote in 1988, in the Montana Democratic primary, for Jesse Jackson. I handed out pamphlets for him too—hope you don’t mind that I started seeing other candidates. My love for Jackson was pure, was unconditional and real. I rode my bike eight miles on a highway shoulder, swerving around roadkill, to hear him speak at the airport.

As you know, he lost. I’m sure you can relate. (Sorry about ’94, by the way. Some tough year for Democrats, especially those who campaigned so hard for the president. When your friend Bill Clinton delivered your eulogy in 1996, he said this about you, “When he was defeated in 1994, there was probably no person in America more responsible for it than me.”)

It’s that time again. On Tuesday, I’ll be going over to the housing project on Twenty-fourth Street to vote. I think of you every time I draw the voting booth curtain behind me, every time I pull the lever. I love it in there. I drag it out, leisurely punching the names I want as if sipping whiskey in front of a fire. I mean, how many times in a life does an average person get to make history?

I sometimes look at the appendix in an American history reference book I have that lists the vital statistics of all the presidential elections. For example, during Andrew Jackson’s successful reelection campaign of 1832, William Wirt of the Anti-Masonic Party garnered 101,051 votes. Eight percent of the voters went for Wirt, and I like to think that if you put the chart under a microscope, you can see all their rotting white male faces crammed inside that number, chanting, “Not him! Him!”

On Monday, September 25, 1 was watching the David Letterman show and something happened I’ll remember for the rest of my life. The day before, the Sunday
New York Times
magazine ran a story about how television comics are influencing the coming election. The article quoted a former Letterman writer who called Letterman a “non-voting Republican.” To me, that phrase stuck out, for three reasons. The first reason is that I am extremely partisan, a capital
D
Democrat, and I’m always on the lookout for which of my heroes might be Republican. (Though I would say of Letterman what I always say about Frank Sinatra—his work doesn’t make you
feel
like a Republican.) Second, as a regular Letterman viewer, I knew that earlier this year he was called for jury duty in Connecticut because he talked about jury duty every damn night for weeks. And how do you get called for jury duty? By registering to vote. So “non-voting Republican” sounded fishy, but scoffing at the
New York Times’
s mistakes is a morning ritual, like oatmeal. Finally, the phrase “non-voting Republican” stuck out because that is how one might describe Dick Cheney, who responded to press attacks that he didn’t vote in local elections by saying he was more focused on “global concerns.” Which I think is a polite way of saying he was out of town on the corporate payroll sticking it to foreigners and couldn’t be bothered with what his running mate might rhapsodize as “local control.”

Anyway, Letterman. I wish you could have seen him. This presidential election has been so weirdly down-to-earth, so issue-oriented, that Letterman’s tirade was maybe the only moment of true over-the-top grandeur of the whole campaign. Letterman brought up the
Times
magazine article, said it was about political humor, and stated that it characterized him as a non-voting Republican. “When I heard this,” he said, “frankly, I was insulted.” He recalled voting in 1968: “That was my first election. We had an ugly, awful war going on. It’s not an election about who’s banging interns.” He mentioned he also voted in 1972 and then spent the rest of the seventies abstaining, because those were his “cocktail waitress days.” For this he was embarrassed, confessing, “I realize that that was an irresponsible way to live. I straightened myself up. I come here, I’m living in New Canaan, Connecticut, so I registered to vote.” To corroborate this, he called up the registrar of voters in New Canaan, a man named George, who confirmed that Letterman has voted in every election since at least 1988. “Prior to 1988, they don’t know,” Letterman continued, because previous records are kept in a vault somewhere and “they’re scared. They don’t want to go down there.” He laid out his evidence as though testifying, concluding, “So I think I’ve established, Your Honor, I do vote.”

I don’t know if I’m capturing the intensity of this, of the sheer civic thrill of watching someone so clearly offended by being called a nonvoter, as if
nonvoter
is some kind of curse word, a slanderous insult he couldn’t not refute. His outrage was so—there’s no other word for it—righteous. I was touched. The litany closed like an old-fashioned oration. Thus saith the talk show host, “I believe I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans. Am I either one? Absolutely not. Ladies and gentlemen, I am an American.” At which point, I, in my living room, clapped.

One of the items on the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s platform is election day voter registration. Theoretically, I support anything that increases voter turnout. On the other hand, what’s easier than filling out a card with your address on it four weeks before the election? Christ, this thing’s been going on for over a year now. Who are these lazy idiots who can’t pay attention more than five minutes before they cast their votes? Isn’t voting called
suffrage
, a word that sounds like doing it should hurt a little?

Speaking of suffrage, I’ll end this on the following thought. The protagonist in a recent movie called
The Contender
, about the confirmation hearings of a vice presidential replacement, admits that she’s an atheist but says that she has a religion. Her faith is the idea of American democracy itself. It’s what she believes, believes
in.
I was struck by that, because that’s how I feel too. During the New Hampshire primary I got in a screaming fight with the candidate Gary Bauer. Okay, I screamed, he didn’t. He had just whipped a little paperback copy of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution out of his pocket and said that anyone who doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t believe in those documents because of the phrase “endowed by their Creator.” I told him that, on the contrary, those documents for me have superseded God, that they are my Bible.

All of which is to say, look up the word
suffrage
in the dictionary. In mine, after noting the main meanings—the privilege of voting, the “exercise of such a right,” the third interpretation of suffrage is this: “A short intercessory prayer.” Isn’t that beautiful? And true? For what is voting if not a kind of prayer, and what are prayers if not declarations of hope and desire?

I guess I’ll end my letter to you the way you ended yours to me.

Thank you again Mike.

Best wishes,

Sarah Vowell

In the movie
Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation
, Harold, the nephew of the hero from the first film in the series, arrives at his uncle’s alma mater, Adams College. Thanks to Uncle Lewis’s crusade for nerd rights, the previously jock-ruled campus has now turned the gym into a computer science center. There are cheerleaders, but these cheerleaders chant, “E! Equals! M! C! Squared!” Harold tells his friend, “Adams College is one of the first schools in the country to treat nerds with respect. It’s the Promised Land. Kind of like a nerd Israel.”

Ever since I started opening my morning e-mail to find two or ten or twenty postings from an e-mail group devoted to tracking the 2000 presidential election, that’s how I have come to regard the Internet. The Internet is the nerd Israel, a place to speak and listen to spectacularly specific concerns. According to a sex advice columnist I know, whenever he receives a letter from a lonely fetishist who wants to get in touch with others who, say, also enjoy biting the heads off of dolls, all my friend has to do to cheer up the advice seeker is type the words “biting off doll heads” into a search engine and have five Web links to other doll head biters appear straightaway.

The inherent specificity of the Internet made it the perfect forum in which to discuss the 2000 presidential campaign and postelection bedlam. From Bush and Gore haggling over pennies for senior citizens’ prescription drug costs before the election to Bush and Gore haggling over a few hundred votes in the state of Florida after the election, it was a year of minutiae. So what better way to evaluate those events than poring over statistics with your egghead friends? Especially Paul, our doting numbers cruncher. Interpreting polling data about the public’s perception of the legitimacy of Bush’s presidency, he wrote, “So assuming that those 39 percent of respondents all voted against him, that means that of the 53 percent of Americans who opposed him, three-quarters believe that he stole the election, and that his presidency is illegitimate.” I have no idea if that’s true because I’m not sure what it means.

The political e-mail group might be the all-time nerdiest thing I’ve been involved in, and I say that as a person who has been involved in public radio and marching band. All of us were Al Gore supporters of varying levels of enthusiasm—a bunch of nerds rooting for a nerd. Joel, a group member from Brooklyn, describes it as “this weird bastion of totally out of touch liberalism.” A typical message about a group member’s Saturday night begins, “Late Saturday evening, I finished reading about Inauguration Day in
The Washington Post
and the
L.A. Times
and ABC News on-line and MSNBC online….”

A few of us went down to Washington to watch the inauguration. Jack, a Connecticut father of two, drove down in his titanic dad van, setting off from his house in New Haven, picking up Deirdre and Paul in Milford, and stopping for Kevin and me in New York. We’re all friends, but this trip isn’t an act of friendship so much as the culmination of a laborious process.

On the eve of our road trip to the inauguration, I wasn’t sure I was going. It promised to be depressing. The forecast called for rain. But Kevin’s e-mail convinced me. A novelist given to grandiose electronic orations, Kevin is the group’s dinosaur, an old-school, Roosevelt-style Democrat out of fashion enough to go on and on about the fate of the poor, the unlucky, and the young. His e-mails are grand WPA murals commemorating the ordinary yearning to live and work in an honest, earthy republic. More than anyone I know, Kevin would make the best president. At the same time, he’s the least electable. He’s the biggest hothead in the group, which is saying something. We are not subtle people.

Kevin implores us to drive down to the inauguration “to be able to say to those of our children’s grandchildren’s generation that at least we were not willing to let American democracy—to let America—die without standing up and being counted.” No pressure. He continues, “This is the real crucible of being a true American now—to stand up for what we believe in without illusions, without any real hope that we will be able to change anything. There will be no great, new third party to rescue us; no grassroots revival of the Democratic Party. All there is—is us, willing to stand up and say no.”

He actually talks like that. In January 2001, it was hard to be a patriot without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

Before joining the e-mail group, I had always thought of citizenship as a duty. For the group, citizenship became a sort of hobby. Some days it was a part-time job. The discussion of current events would follow some historical tangent, such as whether or not the early Clinton administration should have honored the promised middle-class tax cut instead of going for deficit reduction in 1993, and we would bicker about the findings of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and blah, blah, Alan Greenspan, and the next morning I would wake up to find that in the middle of the night my friend Stephen had called me a “deficit hawk,” which, in his vocabulary is a synonym for “Republican.”

The best part about being a nerd within a community of nerds is the insularity—it’s cozy, familial, come as you are. In a discussion board on the Web site Slashdot.org about
Rushmore
, a film with a nerdy teen protagonist, one anonymous participant pinpointed the value of taking part in detail-oriented zealotry:

Geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of endeavor. The modern geek has been generally dismissed by society because their passions are viewed as trivial by those people who “see the big picture.” Geeks understand that the big picture is pixilated and their high level of contribution in small areas grows the picture. They don’t need to see what everyone else is doing to make their part better.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant. As a kid, I never knew what to say to anyone. It was only as a teenage musician that I improved my people chops. I learned how to talk to others by talking about music. At fifteen, I couldn’t say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album
Charlie Parker with Strings.
In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.

I have fond feelings for the people in the e-mail group. “A nice sense of community during wartime,” the low-key Paul says about the group’s exchanges during the postelection period of vote-counting-in-which-votes-weren’t-counted. Kevin amps up Paul’s wartime comparison by identifying with the Free French circa 1940, calling us “rudderless, leaderless, confused, and bitter.” While I find it flattering that Kevin would equate our computerized griping with battling Nazi collaborators, I don’t really feel like the French Resistance for two reasons—they looked cool and, with a soupçon of help, they prevailed.

Campaign 2000 was what a mail-order catalog might call a real conversation piece. Thanks to the Internet and the twenty-four-hour news channels, the kind of inside-the-Beltway chat that used to be quarantined in the Sunday morning network TV talk shows is everywhere, all the time. It’s Sunday morning every day. The political class has had this freakish population boom, as though that bitch George Will gave birth to a litter of bow-tied puppies and they all found homes. And all the commentators and columnists and party flacks and talk show hosts are hustling and spinning as much as, if not more than, the politicians themselves. For me, the novelty of the e-mail group was simply finding out what a relatively average, intelligent, home-owning, middle-class father like Jack thought about tax policy or campaign tactics. Our e-mails were different than just talking around a dinner table: We were a sort of homegrown talk show, where one person would state an opinion and then everyone else would go McLaughlin Group on his ass.

Looking back, it’s stunning how much of the political group’s e-mail was fueled by powerlessness. Especially during the up-in-the-air gray area between the election and the Supreme Court ruling that decided the winner. There was nothing we could do but come together and type loud.

Sending messages to the group “did change the way I followed things,” Stephen tells me. “Or not so much changed it as focused it. It was more fun coming on some info knowing you’d get to pass it on to someone like-minded. There seems to be no end to the satisfaction one gets in having one’s opinions confirmed.”

For instance, inauguration day coverage, a topic we scrutinized even more than usual because we were actually there. We’d been part of an uneasy national event. We had noticed plenty of jolly celebrants, but we’d been elbow to elbow with scores of enraged, sign-toting protesters too, one of whom—an acquaintance of Kevin’s—held up a sign directed at Bush that simply said, “I Hate You.” So the next morning’s press postmortem in the group was particularly thorough. Paul’s posting about the lead stories on the inauguration in
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
shows how a typical reader of one or the other—a regular person who does not belong to a sarcastic Internet consortium of amateur media watchdogs—would have formed entirely different opinions of the event’s, for lack of a better word, vibe. Paul remarks that
The Washington Post’
s fifth paragraph mentions “thousand of sign-waving protestors” but complains that the
Times’
s lead story finally mentions the protesters in paragraph forty-nine, but that “there is no further word on who those protesters might be, how many of them there were, or what they might have been protesting.” Stephen forwards a London
Observer
piece that reads, “The
Observer
considers [Bush’s] election an affront to the democratic principle with incalculable consequences for America and the world.”

Walking to the inauguration, we duck into the National Archives to look at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, just to see if they’re still there. Jack chats with the guard about the nuclear-proof underground vault the documents are lowered into every night. Then it’s on to the police checkpoint. The inaugural parade route is completely blocked off, and the only way in is through checkpoints where the authorities search all bags. It’s all over the news that, thanks to the healthy number of expected protesters, they’ve banned fruit, as well as sticks attached to protest signs. Also, giant puppets. Those things could be used to hit another person. Never mind that my club-shaped umbrella is admitted without a word, or that a president endorsed by the NRA is so apparently worried that a cantaloupe or marionette might put out some spoilsport picketer’s eye. The police search of my backpack is anticlimactic, no big deal. I was actually hoping for a little more cop interaction, because I thought it would be amusing if I had to account for the Abraham Lincoln paper dolls I’m carrying in my backpack that Jack bought at the archives for his two little girls. Maybe the cop and I would even share a brief but lighthearted moment of communion, agreeing that Mary Todd Lincoln sure had dumb hair. The cops must be humoring us to check our bags, as we are the least threatening-looking group of people here. Even elderly Republican ladies are more menacing than we are, because they have the guts to wrap themselves in controversial mink pelts.

We get to the muddy Mall just as Chief Justice William Rehnquist is swearing in Dick Cheney as vice president. From where we stand, the men are faraway specks. But, thanks to the CNN JumboTron, their faces are bigger than the Capitol dome. Rehnquist, as one of the five Supreme Court justices who effectively gave Bush the presidency, was a particular object of the group’s e-mail scorn. We all boo him. Then we boo Dick Cheney. Or rather, I would like to think that it’s nothing personal, that we are booing the fishy process that got him here. Staff Sergeant Alec T. Maly of the United States Army Band sings “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” I’m stunned when Kevin boos him too. I ask him, “You’re booing the army guy? You’re booing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’? Are we against everything now?” Yes, he answers, we’re against everything, and boos louder.

George W. Bush places his hand on the same Bible that George Washington placed his hand on in 1789 and repeats after Rehnquist that he will “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I’m sure he means it, if he’s actually thinking about it, but it’s reassuring to have that underground vault at the National Archives as a backup.

I told myself I came down to “protest.” But I choose to display my dissent by bursting into tears as Bush finishes up his oath. Alas, my tears are my picket sign.

It’s happened. It’s over. He’s it.

Once, I was prepared for this, even looking forward to it. Because before I am a Democratic nerd, I am a civics nerd first and last. Back before election day, there was a part of me—the part of myself I don’t like—that harbored a secret, perverse desire that Bush would defeat Gore. Because a Bush victory, I thought, would offer me four illustrious years of taking the high road. I would be dignified. I would be wise. Unlike my Republican brethren, who pooh-poohed Bill Clinton’s legitimacy from the get-go—Texas Congressman Dick Armey, speaking to Democratic colleagues, referred to him as “your” president—I would be a bigger person. During the Clinton era, being a civics nerd of any political stripe was like having the school bully paste a “Kick Me” sign on your back every day year after year. In my preelection daydream of what a Bush presidency might be like, I imagined that I would criticize his policies and lambaste his statements with a civic-minded nobility. All my venom, spite, and, as long as we’re dreaming, impeccable logic, would be directed at
our
president. As in “Look how
our
president is wrecking
our
country.”