Swing State Syndrome and Why This Writer Guy can Piss Off

For those of you just catching up, I recently moved from Cleveland, Ohio to Wilmington, North Carolina to go back to school for creative writing. This has, therefore, been an extremely painful yet cynically entertaining  election cycle for me. One swing state to another, not much changes. I registered to vote here in NC as soon as the campus drives started, and since then I've been bombarded with fliers, phone calls, Hulu ads. I've had an Obama volunteer knocking on my door looking for me every day for the past two weeks. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood, so the Romney volunteers have been noticeably absent.

The only people who cared more about early voting than Ohio were North Carolinians. I'm one of those perverts who enjoys going to the community center on Election Day and making a whole ritual of it, and it got to the point where I was lying to the volunteers and telling them I had already voted, just so they would stop trying to give me directions to the library.

This morning I was laying in bed, contemplating my very non-political thoughts, and as I hopped on Twitter to post my deep musings about the correlation between my vibrator and my teddy bear, I saw THIS ESSAY linked to by my friend Angie. I have a lot to say about this, so you'd better go read it first, even though I absolutely hate to give this guy the page views.

First of all, fuck you. Just had to get that out there.
Alright. Let's try this again.

First of all, Ohio didn't choose to be the lynch pin of the electoral process. It's not like years ago, we somehow bid on it, somehow lobbied to be the place where every four years campaign strategists cum on our faces with 300 political ads a day and tie up our cellphones with blocked numbers just because one time we decided to sign that Move On petition. Oh yes, Ohio has email, can you believe it? No wait, actually some parts of Ohio DON'T have DSL, because not a single one of these candidates blowing their coffer loads here comes back in between elections to help us out with real issues - like accessibility of internet services, alternative energy sources, or a governor that's trying to frack us all into a giant hell pit. We are not rubes, we are very well aware of the disparity and the abuse we suffer at the hands of these invaders. There are not a bunch of Ohioans walking around going "Oh man, I'm so special and important, I'm the future of America." No, instead we're sitting in our finished basements, being pissed off that we can't watch our Black Key's youtube video without first having to sit through our 17th Romney ad of the hour.

Second, let's address this idea you posit that all human beings of vitality and vision leave Ohio as soon as they are able to crawl. It's painfully obvious that you consider yourself one of these visionaries. Let me assure you, your style is mediocre David Foster Wallace rip off at best, so tone it down a bit Chump. I mean, I sympathize, because I am obviously one of these glowing talents as well, and yes, I too ran far away from Ohio. To an even smaller town, in the Bible Belt, where grown men regularly call me honey and the job market is so slow I've been considering selling "used" underwear on Craiglist just to make rent. Look, I grew up in Revitalized Cleveland, so I'm well aware of the concept of "Ohio good", and I am not a fan of the legions of cheerleaders whose sole mission in life seems to be to convince me that Ohio is the very best place to live in the entire world because we have a restaurant with weird grilled cheese sandwiches.

But, and I'm going to go ahead and siphon off some of your ego here, I'm a good writer. The reason I am a good writer is not because I somehow had the far reaching vision to escape Ohio, but because I stayed there. I lived there for my entire formative twenties. That means I had to find jobs in Ohio, entertainment in Ohio, love in Ohio, and confidence in Ohio. In order to accomplish any of that, I was required to learn perspective.  You dismissively call Ohio "our republic in a can", and that's right. A lot of rednecks, some lone outposts of urban minorities, a thin icing of college educated professionals. That's absolutely correct, that's our country. Growing up in that microcosm, I am now able to live wherever I want in the country, even this weird little coastal town full of Republicans, and get along with people. I can even genuinely like them. I am capable of having an opinion about people with opposing viewpoints that doesn't involve degrading or vilifying  them. Those famous writers you cite, Anderson and Thurber and Crane, you know what they had that you don't have? They LIKED people. They were INTERESTED in people. They didn't just immediately dismiss anyone who didn't go to Princeton as intellectually inferior to them, or maybe if they did, they understood that intellect isn't necessarily the mark of a good man.

I was going to write a snarky little paragraph here about how you must have come from some beige little suburb town, and how the deeper subject of your essay is obviously your own unresolved bitterness towards your hometown. But then I tried googling your biography, and there wasn't much to find, except maybe you converted to Mormonism as a teenager once? Here's what being an Ohioan has done for me - I read that and immediately felt this pang of sympathy for your childhood. In my head those sugars converted to "oh, he probably just doesn't know any better" and now I've completely lost steam to make fun of you because I just feel bad that you think of your country as someplace to escape from, instead of the unending weird and interesting place it actually is. I mean, if you've made a career out of non-fiction writing, you must know this too, at least intellectually if not viscerally.

Here's what you did in this essay. You saw a week of the country crowing about the Impressive Mediocrity of Ohio, the Breadbasket of the Boring Modern Man, and you somehow felt compelled to scream against it. Nevermind that it only happens once every four years, and it isn't fooling anyone. You said to yourself "Stupid Ohio thinks it's so fucking special, it's time I remind the rest of this high school who the real cool kids are" and then you tried to pants us. So good for you, you reminded your peers that Ohio is fat and unemployed and stupid, that's awesome. We totally deserved that right? Cause god forbid, anyone pay attention to an entire section of the country that needs jobs and education and love. That isn't what politics is about at all, right? No, politics is about proving you're smarter than everyone else. Way to be a visionary there. And I hope, when Ohio goes blue tomorrow, you have a follow up essay prepared about how that doesn't really matter, because being a normal mediocre person still sucks. That will for sure help the effort to convince the "rednecks" here that they should vote with compassion towards their fellow man.

Okay, I'm not going to wax on about this, those of you who know how I feel will understand the deep psychological reach of this situation, in all its multi-colored dimensions.

I took November 4th and 5th off from work this year. Today I learned that I'm being sent on a business trip to Texas that week to represent my business unit to the new branch the company is just starting. It's a really nice way for the site manager to acknowledge my hard work, and it's a great opportunity for me to network. I fly to Texas Tuesday, November 4th, early in the morning.

I'm sorry, I realize that last sentence may have been too subtle for some of you.
I fly to TEXAS on NOVEMBER 4TH. Where I will be for the WHOLE DAY. And the NEXT DAY.

I keep telling myself to start thinking about other things but......

From the Washington Post

By Shailagh Murray (Thank you Shailagh Murray for making my day a little happier)

YORK, Penn. -- Sen. Barack Obama addressed reporters just now and had feisty words for Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain, and all the other Republicans who have been railing against him in St. Paul this week. Some highlights follow below:

Summing up the Republican National Convention so far: "I understand they don't have much of an agenda to run on. But I think the American people deserve better than to get the same old vitriol and slash-and-burn politics that we've been seeing over the last couple of days. We are going to tell the American people exactly what I and Joe Biden and an Obama administration intend to do to make their lives better. And I hope at some point the Republicans decide to engage in that debate."

On being ridiculed during primetime by Palin and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his work as a community organizer: "They're talking about the three years of work that I did right out of college, as if I'm making the leap from two or three years out of college into the presidency. I would argue that doing work in the community, to try to create jobs, to bring people together, to rejuvenate communities that have fallen on hard times, to set up job training programs in areas that have been hard hit when the steel plants closed, that that's relevant only in understanding where I'm coming from. Who I believe in. Who I'm fighting for. And why I'm in this race. And the question I have for them is, why would that kind of work be ridiculous? Who are they fighting for? What are they advocating for? They think the lives of those folks who are struggling each and every day, that working with them to try to improve their lives, is somehow not relevant to the presidency? Maybe that's the problem."

On whether the Palin coverage has been sexist: "If they want to work the refs they are free to do so. And I think the public can make their judgments about this. The notion that any questions about her work in Alaska is somehow not relevant to her potentially being vice president of the United States, doesn't make too much sense to me. I think she's got a compelling story. But I assume she wants to be treated the same way that guys want to be treated, which means that their records are under scrutiny. I've been through this for nineteen months. She's been through it what, four days so far?"

Why not criticize Palin more directly, in light of the shots she's fired at him? "John McCain's running for president. I'm running against John McCain....That speech that she delivered was on behalf of John McCain. The central question in this campaign is, who's got a better plan, a better agenda, to move this country forward and fundamentally change it from the economic and foreign policy failures that we've seen over the last eight year? I believe that the American people need change, they want change, and I'm in the best position to bring it."

Is he surprised by Republican attacks? "What did you guys expect? I anticipated this last Thursday in my acceptance speech. This is what they do. They don't have an agenda to run on. They haven't offered a single concrete idea so far in two nights. They spent the entire two nights attacking me and extolling John McCain's biography, which is fine -- they can use their convention time any way they want. But you can't expect that I'd be surprised by attacks from Republicans. And by the way, I've been called worse on the basketball court."




Also, here are my favorite anti-Palin videos from the week...

All day long I've been getting texts from people who were absolutely terrified by the sight of the Republican Convention in force shouting "drill baby drill!".

So here, let's do this. The Republicans can drill in ANWR, as long as they all go live there. I really wanted to see Alaska before it was spoiled, but hey, I'll make that sacrifice, as long as it means they stay the hell out of Ohio. They can have the 3% of oil reserves there, but they have to use them there. And they're not allowed to drill anywhere else, ever. When they're out, they're out.

Why don't we make a law that says all people who use gas must live within 50 miles of where the gas is being produced? No importing. I bet a lot of people would learn to ride a bike if the alternative was living in dirty carbon coated slums and working in the refinery. And think of what a relief that would be to the foreign policy mudpie.

Oh geez, why don't we just arrest all of them and throw them in work prisons, for not giving two shits about humanity's future? The Federation would never have allowed a faction this ignorant and selfish to flourish. They would have shipped them off to another world and washed their hands of them.

Yes! Send the Republicans to start another world! Man, seriously, inter-galactic colonization, after years of books and movies, just took on a whole new level of meaning to me. Get those fuckers out of here. Give them some planet of their own, where they can live however they want to, and we won't have to constantly fight to have any sort of reasonable government. Maybe our species has just gotten too big to live together? It's time to start thinking outside Terra, towards the future. We can appeal to their sense of missionary duty, they have to go sow the word of god among the cosmos! Remove themselves from worldly temptation! The angels told them to leave Sodom and Gomorrah, not stay and shit on the place! "But wait Bridget, won't that mean that at some point centuries from now, our two planets will become locked in a holy war spanning galaxies, thereby dooming their offspring to a gruesome genetic enmity for all foreseeable time?" Well, I've got greater confidence in the gene pool that would be left here, dude.

We decided at work today that Obama is not actually the anti-christ, Palin is. Sarah C. got into a fight last night with some girl on Facebook who said "I heart Sarah Palin". What better sign do you need that the end is nigh?