A year ago today, I celebrated the inauguration of President Obama with approximately a gadzillion people on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
View from National Mall, January 20, 2009
Today, I woke up to news of aftershocks in Haiti, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and the predictably gloomy economic news. It’s easy to reflect on the mood of hope that predominated a year ago and focus, now, on what seems to be a rising tide of despair.
I have to remind myself: did we really think any of this was going to be easy?
If we had any illusions about that, we certainly don’t now. And that, in a way, is pretty heartening for me. The task is simply at hand. And hand-wringing clearly won’t help.
Ask me about where my hope is right now, and I guess don’t have a very good answer. But I’m going to resist the temptation to hunker down and despair. After all, friends, I think we’ve got a president who actually understands. His response to the election of Scott Brown:
Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country. The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.
Ask me where my hope is right now, and I guess I’ll tell you it probably doesn’t matter, anyway. I think that hope probably doesn’t stand a chance against anger and frustration right now. But I think Obama is a very smart leader, and while I shake my head at much of the WTF-inspiring performance of the House and Senate leadership this past year, I am prepared to weather the storm. In the face of so much anger and frustration (and my own anger and frustration) there seems to be only one good thing do, and that’s to do more good.
So I guess that my hope is still where it’s always been, in the power of doing more. This here and now needs us to do a lot more good! And we don’t need a Democratic senator in Massachusetts to do it.
Every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I find myself asking “What would Dr. King have thought about…?” and reflecting on some timely issue or event. (This is an exercise that Baratunde Thurston calls “Hypothetic King” in his really excellent post, “What Would Martin Luther King Think of Twitter?” over at Vanity Fair.) This is, of course, a total exercise in projection on my part. I’m no scholar on Dr. King, I possess no credentials to presume about his legacy, and I was born well after he was murdered. But still, I wonder. And this year I can’t help but wonder what he would have thought about the devastating situation in Haiti today.
I can’t imagine, really. But I do believe that he would have provided a clear, strong, and much-needed reflection on poverty and foreign policy, two issues at the heart of Haiti’s recent history and two issues that almost always seem to get lost in familiar narratives about Dr. King’s life and work. It’s always been alarming to me that Dr. King’s interest later in his life on fighting poverty and his critiques of American foreign policy get lost in so many of our celebrations of him. His speech, “The Other America”, is such a stirring call for economic justice, and it gets so little airtime. It seems clear that Dr. King would have done tremendous – and, strictly speaking, much more radical – work on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign and other similar movements had he not been assassinated.
I’m heartened, then, to have seen more and more discussion of Dr. King’s thoughts and work in these areas over the past couple of years. Postbourgie has a fantastic post on this today: “Martin Luther King, no matter how people remember him now, was not nearly so safe as most of us believe.” I also really appreciate the insights from this 2008 article in The American Prospect:
…When a white mob hurled bricks and cherry bombs at marchers in Chicago, King told reporters that the scene outdid anything below the Mason-Dixon Line. “I have never in my life seen such hate,” biographer Taylor Branch quotes him as saying. “Not in Mississippi or Alabama.” Today, we hear little about the ideas that experience provoked for King: His deathbed blueprint for changing America’s caste systems included a three-pronged attack on racism, poverty, and war.
It seems right to me, then, to spend a few moments reflecting thoughtfully on Haiti, switching off the coverage of disaster and death and instead focusing on the fact that we have the opportunity (I will avoid using the words “responsibility” or “obligation” here, even though I believe them to be correct in my heart, because they are so fraught) to help the poorest country in the Americas. And not just in the short-term. Not just because we see people suffering. We can help in the long-term on many fronts, including infrastructure and economic development. For in our part of the world, Haiti is surely The Other America.
Opportunities to donate abound. There’s the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, Doctors Without Borders, Yele Haiti, and so many more. I also really appreciate this post from the Feminist Peace Network on how to support the needs of Haitian women in the aftermath of the earthquake.
It is inspiring to see so many people reaching out to donate and help. But especially today, let’s not let those donations make us feel as if we’ve done enough – not for Haiti, and not for economic justice in our own country and worldwide.
January is traditionally the cinematic dumpster, a time when studios are tossing out the films even they think are garbage. But it’s always been a good time for fans of genre film, who can inevitably find a few treasures in the junk pile. So I’m pleased to report that Daybreakers – yes, the Ethan Hawke vampire movie – officially earns a happy dance from me.
Daybreakers actually looks less like horror and more like very stylized sci-fi (the presence of Hawke makes it feel all the more like Gattaca) until the first of many buckets of gore are unleashed on the audience (frankly, I haven’t seen this much head exploding since Scanners) at which point you know that you’re in for some serious horror action. But the premise is smart enough: it’s 2019 and vampires run the show, but they’re about to run out of human blood. Our Hawke hero is a reluctant vampire scientist searching for a blood substitute, who also has a trigger (fang?) happy brother in the vampire army. Enter Willem Dafoe, a redneck former vampire who goes by the name Elvis, and a group of hunted humans, led by the very compelling Claudia Karvan. Rounding out everything is a perfectly cast Sam Neill as a (literal) corporate bloodsucker. There’s a bit of social commentary here – Hawke works for the equivalent of big pharma – but it’s never particularly heavy-handed. Instead, the film is a pretty solid blend of brains, blood and actors who do a good job of selling the script, which gets pretty thin at times. Add to that a solid dose of muscle cars, a lot of cheeky visuals, chimpanzee vampires (chimpires!) the most ludiciously fantastic bloodfeasting sequence – we’re talking SLOW MOTION BLOODFEASTING here, people – and a couple of very good jolts and you’ve got yourself quite a January horror gem. It’s good!
One other item of note about Daybreakers: being a vampire is seriously uncool in this film. These vampires are bad. What a refreshing return to form for a supernatural creature that seems confined to handwringing and canoodling with humans in pop culture these days. Hooray for the return of the bloodsucker!
Friends, readers, listeners, viewers… I’ve just joined the team over at At Length, a really lovely venue for ambitious, in-depth (read: long) works of writing, music, photography and art. I’m terrifically excited to be AL’s community manager and help promote the magazine as well as its content. Using social media to promote good words, thought-provoking images and meaningful music? Well, that’s just rad.
The magazine publishes several times a month – and the line-up for 2010 is looking phenomenal. You can find me tweeting for At Length here. Find us on Facebook here. We’ll also be sending a monthly email to keep in touch and make note of recent content – sign up for the emails here.
Hooray!
I’m finally getting past the holidaze and looking forward to a good year ‘o meaningful blogging, but I just had to indulge the impulse to note that I turn the big 35 today. Mid-thirties: whoop!
I’m totally well aware that I’m undercutting their intended irony, but I’m still going to be bopping around singing Timbuk 3 today. I’m wearing sunglasses in January in NYC today, just because it feels right.
