Election 2008: What Divides Us

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's not enough to worry about race and class and sexual identity this election. In New York there's also sheer and unmitigated stupidity -- the poll workers who resent it when you interrupt their early morning donuts and force them to wipe the sugar from their hands, open their ledgers and let you sign. Then there is the outdated and misleading information at voting websites and phone banks.

Last week, I called the General Election Board and asked if I could vote there because I'd be out of town. The woman said yes, so I hopped on the subway, and turned up at the office where a row of flabbergasted men told me I was nuts. "For that you have to go to the borough office. They're closing any minute. How long are you here?"

When I finally got to the next place on Varick Street, where you had to have serious ID before you could even go upstairs, there was a woman trying to change her party affiliation to Democrat. "I'm either Independent or nothing. They told me I could do it until the 15th."

The guy argued with her for ten minutes, but it became a moot point when he went back to check and she was already registered Democrat. From 2003. "I don't know why they couldn't have told me that on the phone when I asked," she complained.

I had an easy time voting, but we commiserated going down in the elevator. "It's discouraging," she said. "It's like they don't want people to vote. What if you were a new citizen? An immigrant? This would all be so off-putting."

Not for her. She spoke standard white English, was dressed to the nines, with café au lait skin. I wondered what her background was. When it comes to voting, there's a world of difference between African Americans and Latinos. I guessed first generation Dominican but couldn't bring myself to ask.

The atmosphere surrounding race is changing again in the country, and not for the better. It's a little like after the Diallo shooting when there was mutual defensiveness and hair-trigger tempers among New Yorkers. It was justified then. But the recent exchanges between the Obama and Clinton camps are almost as bad, and any truce they may have come up with doesn't hold with the rest of us.

It's not easy to deal with race in America. And I'm still worried when I hear Obama insist that skin is something more than a temporary bridge, or his campaign imply it's some kind of guarantee against racism. Which is what they must have thought when they briefly attempted to cast South Asians as economic bogeymen this summer, demonizing Indian contributors to Clinton, and invoke robber barons who "laid off American workers to hire Indian techies."

Obama apologized of course and washed his hands. That's politics. All the dirty tricks in the book. And the press is just as happy as anybody else to jump in, managing to insult almost everyone by explaining Hillary's sudden surge in New Hampshire with the fact that she cried and got the female pity vote, especially from uneducated whites with lower incomes -- in other words, all those who were too ignorant and racist and stupidly feminist anyway to vote for Obama. Another bridge burnt there like a candle to the joys of America.

Anybody'll say anything. Sometime or other a Clinton staffer actually called Obama "uppity". Clinton's remark this week that MLK needed LBJ to solidify social gains, though somewhat true, was about as graceless as what inspired it -- Obama climbing onto the pedestal and declaring himself the next Martin Luther King. What a bunch of buffoons.

A truce may help them out of the election, but the scuffle is a sign that America's still in the same old mess. And once again putting black and white folks at the center of the debate about race to the exclusion of everybody else. So much for Hispanics representing one in eight residents in 2000, and slated to be one of four by 2050.

No wonder Hispanic voters don't see Obama as a bridge to anything, partly because they don't recognize his name but also because a dark skin doesn't mean much when they're consistently left out of the equation. Clinton gets points because of her husband, but she shouldn't count her chickens either.

In general almost half see themselves as independent and vote that way. Last time it was for the family values of Bush. This time, Latino indies are leaning more toward the Democratic side, especially after the Republicans' recent immigration laws, and the Iraq War fiasco. There's no perfect choice.

Voting may be a hassle, but nothing is more off-putting in politics than politicians.

Iraq, What's That?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'm a victim of serial amnesia. I'd almost managed to forget all those roadside bombs, the blank grinning faces of GI's hovering over naked Iraqis in Abu Ghraib until I got stuck on a plane and the only interesting thing to watch on video was "In the Valley of Elah" with Tommy Lee Jones.

A guy in my Laundromat had recommended it a couple months ago when he heard my accent and I admitted to being from the U.S. "Great movie. Really nice," he said. "A shame about the war. Lot of people dead. Lot of people." He turned to be North African, from Morocco, but a Jew. "There aren't so many there anymore. All immigrated, many to the last state," he said.

I didn't understand.

"You know, U.S. foreign policy. U.S. and Israel like that." He twisted two fingers together, and forced a small, bitter smile to his lips. "The 51st American state. You should see the movie."

So I did finally. It wasn't a masterpiece, but an antidote to amnesia. How can we still be in Iraq? Why did we ever go? How many decades will it take to stabilize the region? And what are we going to do with all the young monsters we unleashed there? Because what else are the soldiers who have been taught to kill and torture with the expectation of perfect immunity to everything but their own deaths?

Some of my cousins are among them. I've quit asking my sisters how they are. They're alive, I guess, or I'd have heard, but who are they now, those little blonde boys that used to tumble all over me and tug at my hair? I don't want to know.

Totaling up all the dead Iraqis and Americans, all the lost souls, the lost cities, the lost time isn't enough to convey the extent of that disaster. For that we need commentary, or art, aesthetics nicely mixed with fury. Or better yet, a multitude of histories.

Politicians are always talking about what they can take away from history, but somehow all the lessons end up like the takeaway Kung Pao chicken in the back of the fridge, half-eaten and reeking.

The lesson we're avoiding once again is how easy it is to go from oppressed to oppressor. That's what my friend from the Laundromat was alluding to. How the wandering Jew found a home at last and with the encouragement of the U.S. used it as a station to bully Palestine. How the U.S., which got hit so hard in 9/11 turned around and began to destroy not just the Middle East, but themselves.

Domination is a suicidal impulse history is full of. (Note all the Caesars that overreached, the inquisitions that ended up burning themselves at the stake.)

The curious thing about historical amnesia, is that the good stuff, too, fades away, especially if it were accomplished by women, or lesbians, people of color, the working class.

The Lesbian Avengers, for example, was a moment of real flight that nudged forward the queer community, and America at large, but even as an eyewitness, I have to make an effort to remember those years, drag out photos and videos of lesbians demonstrating on the street, eating fire, challenging passersby in Grand Central to join us in a lesbian waltz.

The lesson of history then was that ordinary people could act, we could change things, if not the world, at least increments of it. Without that knowledge, there's no liberation for queers, no possibility of democracy itself. We're stuck with the Bushes of the world, stuck with segregation and invisibility.

Memory is everything. And there's a battle on how to define it, the objective article privileged over the memoir and first person history, Reuters over the op-ed.

I ran across an entry about gay history in Wikipedia last week, that had a banner spread across the front declaring SOUNDS LIKE ADVERTISING, STYLE NOT RIGHT FOR US, REVISE, DELETE?, DESTROY, or something very like it. All because it had the word "groundbreaking" and a couple of laudatory quotes. The rest was all footnoted to within an inch of its interpretive life.

Who owns "groundbreaking" anyway when it's a certainty that holding hands with your lover in the streets of Newark is still worth a front page announcement in the New York Times? Who owns the word accomplishment? And are the facts enough when anybody can shape them?

We need more writers like Sarah Schulman, who may not always get her dates right as a historian, but as a writer captures the spirit. She dredges up, and hoards and remembers what she sees. It's not so easy staying awake with a media that devotes more time to Britney Spears than the Iraq War.

It's not so easy to care.