He's Back!

America

January 30, 2008

How it can have taken most of the day to penetrate rather than jump out and grab me by the shorts, I cannot imagine.

Mark this day.

When John Edwards dropped out of the race, it meant that the Democratic nominee – and quite possibly the next President of the United States – will be either a woman or a man who is of mixed race.

Never before in our history.

I can hear some of you (I know who you are) chortling: Ah, the Democrats have found yet another way to lose an election.

Perhaps.

There will be time enough in the months ahead for the bitterness and snarling that inevitably – and quite properly – accompanies the contest for such an awesome prize. Many will see all that as making this moment look naïve and ill-advised.

But no matter what lies ahead, this day is forever etched into the likeness of our nation. Amidst all the cruelty and swaggering that may or may not be required of the world’s primo power, comes this sweet sign that the promises we have long made to the world and to ourselves are not mere rhetoric.

Today I am proud to call myself an American.

No slow news day today.

I am now adding to this entry after having already published it, because I was just led to realize something so awesome I missed it entirely. There are two candidates remaining in the race for the Democratic nomination. One is a woman and one is a mixed race man.

Never in the nation's history have we ever had a president - or a nominee - from either group. Now we will for sure have one or the other.

Likely the Republican Party will - overtly or sub-rosa - do what it can to scare the voters with this astonishing reality. I would if I was running against them. The story? We are the traditional American Party. They are the Party of radical, unprecedented change.

I hope they do that. And I hope they get trounced. I have never been more proud or excited to call myself a Democrat.

The Fed dropped the discount rate a full half percent. i had been reading it would be a quarter, since they had already dropped the rate 3/4 of a point a week ago. But guess what? After a predictable bounce (what investment people call a "dead cat" bounce) the market actually lost a little ground before today's close.

Who ever really knows how these things work? But it looks to me as if the markets are saying that maybe the Fed either doesn't understand what is happening in the global market place, or no longer has the clout to make it behave.

A devoutly conservative investment advisor I know emailed me yesterday saying he thinks maybe Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor and NY Times op-ed columnist, may be right when he says the Fed better understand - as FDR understood in 1932 - that the issue for this economy is not supply but demand. For this man to suggest Krugman can even tell time is a major change. And to buy the notion that putting Americans to work on public works projects to address long neglected crumbling infrastructure is tantamount to his joining the Communist Party.

A seminary professor used to describe moments like this by comparing them to being out in your sailboat when all the markers by which you are accustomed to getting your bearings have come loose and are drifting in the wind and tide.

A Wall Street type lawyer and his wife, who have moved to Florida to dodge taxes, emailed me yesterday that they had both cast votes for Sen. Obama in the Florida primary. (My spell check had better get used to Obama's name). They said they would never vote for Hilary Clinton. But I would have thought they would vote in the Republican primary to influence that much more significant contest.

Today Rudy Giuliani (OK, spell check, you don't need to learn his name now) dropped out and, within the hour, will endorse John McCain. I can remember - even though this still falls within the purview of short term memory - when the press pronounced Guiliani the Republican front runner, nearly suggesting no one could beat him for the nomination. America's Mayor turns out to have been way more in love with himself that the Republican voters were. He was the one guy who really made my skin crawl and I am glad to see him gone.

John McCain is, I believe, the strongest Republican against either Clinton or Obama. His biggest problems appear to be with the very conservative voters in his own party, and with his age. And I wonder how his glitzy wife - whose image I don't remember seeing until recently - will play with middle America. Conservatives hate him for all the reasons I once liked him: reasonable on immigration, cautious on tax cuts, once doubtful about Iraq. He has slid backwards on those issues, so i find nothing to like about him. But his conservative opponents haven't forgiven him and think he is a sheep (conservative) in wolf's (liberal) clothing.

I don't think I would make a big fuss over Guiliani's endorsement if I were him.

John Edwards dropped out today, endorsing no one. One commentator suggested that his quitting will help Obama on whose side he has been consistently against Clinton. Another said when someone drops out it always helps the front runner, who has long been Clinton.

But today there is much being made of the way Obama has been moving up on Clinton in national polls, from 20% down a month ago to within 6 points today. Yet another has said he would have thought Obama would have gotten a bigger boost from the uproar that followed his Iowa win than he did.

And so it goes.

The NY Times magazine this week led with a piece about the end of American hegemony in the world. The author has advise for the next president that basically counsels coming to terms with the end of American dominance economically, militarily (not because anyone can challenge us militarily, but because it turns out that military might isn't as useful in getting one's way as it once was) or politically.

Learn to do business, he suggests, in a world with three strong centers. We remain one, along with the European Union and Asia. Notably, of course, China.

Other than that, there's not much going on in the world today.

Scientists from the American Astronomical Society attended their annual meeting and agreed that the universe is bizarre and violent. "This is
the glory of the universe," said the association's president. "What is odd and what is normal is changing." Harper’s List

******

Is that him? Is that Tom Brokaw?

He looked too short, his hair too flat on top of his head, his shape too square. As soon as his perfectly modulated baritone wafted across the ballroom there was no doubt. Even though he got off to a puzzling start:

So glad to be in San Diego, he began conventionally. Because, if I was in LA I’d have to speak more slowly and use smaller words.

The crowd, 750 customers of Wachovia and Russell financial advisors, had been warmed up by a young Russell analyst who may have had to alter his usual spiel with the markets now resembling a gaming casino. His basic message: the greatest danger to your portfolio is you. In this volatile market if your advisor can keep you from making two stupid mistakes this year he is great. Best strategy: don’t just do something, stand there.

Speaking to a roomful of the remnants of the greatest generation and the now aging boomers, Tom played us deftly, consummate communicator that he is. Scattering anecdotes from 1968, that watershed year, again and again he made my breath catch in my throat as I revisited people and events that shaped my world.

Having drawn us into his web, he went on, as if campaigning, praising young people he has encountered doing heroic service – notably the wounded soldiers he has visited in Walter Reed. As if to shame any of us who didn’t appreciate their sacrifice, he chastised us for not having made sacrifices of our own and urged us to get involved as young people are.

He didn’t mention the chaos in global markets, and few of us knew yet that Jerome Kerviel, a 31 year old French investor, somehow running up a $7.1 billion debt, may have single-handedly triggered the international panic, underscoring Tom’s point about young people taking hold of the world.

On the way home I grumbled that Tom’s smooth delivery manipulated us. Uh huh, Lacey, corroborated, Just like yours did for 30 years.

Saturday morning we woke to seals barking, perhaps forecasting the furious rain that is causing houses here to succumb to gravity, again. And we went to hear another speaker, a woman of the 60s – long stringy hair, jeans, tee, sandals – speak at a nature center about the birds who were her only neighbors for several decades. She lived in a trailer on top of a mountain, fed the birds 50 pounds of seed a week, put out over 40 water dishes for them. Some would let her get very near, others not, but none of them had been around people and she and they formed a community. She guarded the small song birds, when she could, from the raptor that would swoop down and tear off their heads, seemingly for sport. She tried to persuade them to feed on the mice the seed attracted, but they preferred to choose their own kill.

She confused the names of some species, laughed at her memory lapses, and charmed the 10 of us who came to learn more about identifying birds.

Saturday evening a friend called and said, Turn on your TV and watch Barack Obama’s speech after winning the South Carolina primary. Perhaps the Bird Lady had softened me up. I was drawn in by this man whose origins and identity would have made him invisible to me when I was his age. How to know whether to trust the emotions and convictions he rouses in me, or retreat into the cynicism that protected me from Brokaw’s eloquence?

I slept on it, fitfully, hearing the seals through the night. Sunday I sent Barack Obama a check. I have a bumper sticker in my journal, waiting.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them-never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
- C. S. Lewis


Oh, oh, deep in my heart I know that I do believe, we shall overcome someday…

The person who picks through the recycle bins came last night just as we were dropping off. Clattering bottles, his radio playing. Normally we don’t hear him, but we had stayed late at friends’ table, laughing, gossiping, then watched the end of the women’s quarter-finals from Australia.

I lay there waiting for him to go away, irritated at having to listen to my detritus – what I meant to be rid of – being noisily reconsidered.

The first demonstration in which I ever took place was in front of the Boston State House during the early days of busing, a new remedy for school segregation that exposed the deep ethnic and class divisions in Boston that extended far beyond race. Louise Day Hicks looked poised to ride the Irish resentment against Yankee do-gooders into the Mayor’s office.

It was 1963 and before the organizers of the pro-busing march would let young hot heads like me take part, they sent us to a training session run by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Having been told we were likely to have someone spit in our face, our bile stirred by Ms. Hicks’ florid face on the evening news, we were nonplussed by the last admonition in our training manual.

When you face your enemy, examine the solution you imagine will resolve the injustice. Where does your enemy fit in that solution? If there is no place for him, it is not a solution but merely a new oppression.

When I protested to our leader that racial justice could never be achieved until Ms. Hicks was gone, she asked me, “And what about your own prejudice? What shall we do about that?”

Strikes me that the greatest divide in the human community is not racial or economic or political, though all those count, but between those who own their own darkness – hidden deep beneath our façade and even consciousness – and those who do not.

When my father and I used to watch the Friday night fights on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports in Charlotte in 1950, it seemed to me that black fighters always beat white ones. When I asked my father about it he told me that Dr. Mayer - our family doctor and the smartest, gentlest icon of the old South – explained to him that blacks have thicker skulls (and thus smaller brain cavities) than whites and could sustain heavier blows.

It was delivered as straightforward scientific information, from an unimpeachable source.

When I answered a question our maid asked me, by saying, “Yes, Mam,” Dad patiently explained that it was not proper to call a negro woman Mam. It would make her uncomfortable and demean my mother.

A friend forwarded me a clip of a powerful, unsettling interview Bill Moyers did with Shelby Steele, the prominent black intellectual conservative. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01112008/watch2.html

I have dismissed Steele in the past in much the same way I have Justice Clarence Thomas, though I have been uneasy wondering if my refusal to take a black conservative seriously – since only liberal/progressives are on the side of racial justice – might in itself be unconscious racism.

The interview persuaded me that it is. In a twist that still has my mind cramping, Shelby Steele’s opposition to the icon of the civil rights movement – affirmative action – is a radical challenge to liberal racism.

Dr. King’s genius – which I first encountered in his famous letter to the white clergy written from the Birmingham jail – was to point out that he was fighting for the freedom of white people – from the bonds of their conscious and unconscious racism – as much as we was the freedom of black people oppressed by unjust laws.

Lawton Chiles, running for reelection as Governor of Florida on a platform that embraced racial justice, was challenged by someone from the crowd.

“Governor,” he shouted, “you trying to tell us that you, a man reared in the deep South, aren’t racially prejudiced?”

“Oh, hell yes, I have racial prejudice,” he admitted. “I’m shot through with all sorts of prejudice. But I try not to let them run my life.”

There are so many ironies in the nation's annual observance of Dr. King's birthday.

Banks are closed. Government offices are closed. Our trash doesn't get picked up today. The financial markets are shut.

Aside from the trash collectors getting a day off, it's hard to see what this day has to do with Dr. King's having likely done more to change the tenor and direction of the nation than anyone since Abraham Lincoln.

He was murdered while in Memphis supporting that city's trash collectors who were on strike.

It is altogether proper that we should have a day to honor him. He is an American icon.

And that means our portrayal of him has become mythological and often quite aside from the realities, always more complex and nuanced than the myth.

Recently he became the source for another dust-up between Senators Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, when she seems to have suggested that she would play Lyndon Johnson to Obama's Martin Luther King, Jr. By which she was alleged to have meant that Dr. King was the inspirational leader who brought the issue to national consciousness, and President Johnson did the hard work of steering actual legislation that would address racism, through the Congress and into enforceable law.

What all this obscures is both the incredible changes that have taken place in the racial climate of this country in the past fifty years, and the pervasiveness of the racism that remains in the bone marrow of this nation that was born with slavery as an integral part of its identity.

My children look at me with astonishment when I tell them that virtually the first thing I notice about a person of a different race - whether black, tan, yellow or some mix - is their race. Their astonishment gives me hope that the profound, deeply imbedded racism that I will carry to my grave, may in fact be losing its power.

If you want a look at how tricky this business is, take a look at the interview Bill Moyers recently did with Shelby Steele. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01112008/watch2.html Steele is an articulate and very conservative black American intellectual. If I have ever heard him before, I either have forgotten it or, because his political views are so opposite to mine, dismissed him.

In a future piece I will go in some depth into his arguments - which help to explain his political and social views which are akin to those of the only black justice on the Supreme Court. I have found Justice Thomas' views almost as puzzling as they are upsetting. Listening to Shelby Steele doesn't make me any happier to have a person with Thomas' views deciding cases that shape the life of the nation, but it does make me understand and respect the reasons he holds those views.

To quickly summarize: Steele says there are two stances a black American can take in today's climate. Either as a negotiator or a challenger. The negotiator - which he ascribes to Obama - says to white America, "I will assume you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me." The challenger says, "Given the reality of American history, I assume you are racist until you prove to me that you aren't."

Steele has chosen the second way.

And, based on my own psyche, I would say he is on firm ground.

Dr. King shamed and prodded the nation into changing laws that made it impossible for black Americans to take a full part in the commercial, political and cultural life of the country. There is ample evidence that his efforts bore much fruit.

What remains are the deeper emotional attitudes. They get changed, not by laws, but by the experience of competent people of color making their way into visible places of power and responsibility.

I hope my children are in some measure the evidence that is underway.

If you were an investor, or maybe simply an observer of American financial markets, you could be forgiven in thinking we are in a melt-down, maybe like the one we all remember leading up to and getting a new head from the 9/11 attacks.

In fact this one could be even more unnerving because it looks to be the result solely of economic issues, not the sorts of geopolitical issues that terrify investors but often don't necessarily interfere with the practice of commerce around the world.

From this untutored (and uneasy) investor and observer, it looks to me like the growing pains of a new economy.

Since WWII the United States has been the 800 pound gorilla.

The 800 pound gorilla still shops and eats, but is growing older and changing habits.

Rather than boldly innovating (although this wise old gorilla still comes up with some surprises) it is on more of a maintenance program, looking to the younger, more aggressive economies in which it has invested over the years to provide leadership.

Reminds me of the summer I beat my father in tennis. Straight sets. Likely would have done it a couple of years earlier except it made me anxious. What sort of a world would it be, one in which I was a stronger player than my father?

For the rest of his life - and likely for the rest of mine - he remained an important and central figure to me.

Towards the end I was aware that he was deferring to me in most things, asking my advice, even occasionally, my help. I understood and thought it quite appropriate, but I never quite got used to it.

We spent Christmas this year in Hanoi, Vietnam, with our son and daughter-in-law. Much about being there reminded me of the years I spent as a young adolescent in Manila.

But much did not. The bustle of the economy, unmistakable on every street as you walked through the city, signaled a nation on the move, growing and vigorous. Not the downtrodden peasant economy we remember from the days of the war we fought there. Nor what we have been led to expect in a country still run by Communists.

I played tennis with my father just six months before he died. He already had the slowed breathing caused by the cancer in his lungs that would kill him. And the prosthetic hip. But he was crafty. Instead of the hard serve and powerful ground strokes, he sliced shots so they barely cleared the net. He remained formidable, but unmistakably weakened.

The so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis that is being blamed for the melt-down in our markets, is the equivalent of my father's wily slices after he could no longer take a full whack at the ball. Crafty attempts to keep our economy booming even though we weren't really adding much to the world's goods.

I don't think we are finished, not looking at our death throes.

But I suspect this dislocation in the markets is our own and the word's uneasiness at seeing the old man weakened and having to rely on tricks to keep up with the younger players.

The biggest divide among humans in the 21st century is not racial, or national, gender, political or economic, though all those count.

The biggest divide is between those who discern and acknowledge – at least to themselves – the darkness – racist, rage, fear, impotence, uncertainty, envy – that lies beneath their veneer of civility, and those who refuse to acknowledge it, even to themselves.

The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset. -Geoffrey Madan,
writer (1895-1947)

******

We lucked out. When we went to see the Bodies exhibition – in the defunct Robinson May department store in the UTC Mall – last Saturday, a 5th grade class was lined up to go in at the same time.

Many of you have seen it. Real bodies – defunct fellow humans – desiccated, dissected, plasticized, and mounted, so we can have a close look at the mystery we carry around. The catalogue refers to them as specimens, but we recognize kin when we see them.

My most vivid previous encounter with my own interior was through the good offices of a sigmoidascope and TV screen which I chronicled in the chapter in God Knows titled Entry Point, Our Hero’s Technicolor Self-Discovery.

Whether such a compelling presentation of what we keep under wraps could have overcome my lifelong reserve about my bodily issues I can’t say. But going with 30 5th graders from the room in which the fellow with his muscles all exposed (no, that’s not a muscle, but there it was anyway), to the room where his alimentary canal stands extended in all its splendor, , alternately provided hilarity, solemnity, reverence and awe for this carapace.

The startling number of blood vessels and of fibers in the nervous system put me in mind of something Lewis Thomas wrote in his wonderful book, Lives Of A Cell. He said that, while we focus on what can go wrong with our bodies, we forget to marvel that at any given moment the billions of cells managing countless transactions are performing perfectly.

One case showed the skin, carefully removed from someone and flattened out like a Halloween costume on November 1.

A 5th grade boy eyed it for a while and then turned to the two girls standing next to him, perhaps a foot further back than he was.

“I’ll give you a million bucks to eat it,” he challenged.

One of the girls looked satisfyingly horrified. The other stroked her chin thoughtfully and hmmed as if she was considering it.

“Would you eat it for a million bucks?” he pressed.

“If you had a million bucks,” she trumped him.

I have been dipping into John Sarno’s latest book, The Divided Mind. He’s the orthopedic surgeon who became convinced that the vast number of our bodily maladies are psychogenic, created by the mind. His take is a little different from the well-known psychosomatic explanation. He believes the mind detects a message coming from our unconscious (his favorite is rage) that our mind regards as too upsetting for us to absorb.

So it signals the circulatory system to pinch off a little of the normal blood supply to some vulnerable place in the body (he says lower back is perhaps most common.) The purpose is to cause physical pain to distract the conscious mind from the emotional storm. The pain is real, not imagined.

Sarno says the beginning of the cure is simply to acknowledge the process and not be fooled into thinking that a pain-killer or surgery is going to do any more than mask the issue until it reappears.

My doctor friends regard him as a quack. Something tells me he is providing a glimpse into the future of healing.

Considering the intricacies of our bodies is thrilling and overwhelming. Hoping to discern the totality of what make us us, is as daunting as hoping to pick through and reassemble the pieces scattered in the Big Bang.

One of the last cases displayed the female reproductive system, removed from the body, laid out and labeled.

Two 5th grade girls stood in solemn silence for several minutes staring. One of them leaned into the other and whispered into her ear. Then the two of them hunkered down on their haunches to inspect at eye level.

As they stood up, one said to the other, “No wonder.”

I'm not going to tell you the details of the dream, both because they're not germane, and because they contain material unsuitable for my audience. Meaning they don't cast me in a particularly complimentary light.

Vivid.

That is, when I woke I could remember all the details.

And disorienting.

That is, were those events to take place in my waking life I would feel as if I had gone mad.

So, what to make of dreams?

There is no such thing as a bad dream. Because all dreams are written for our edification. Something important, with a survival benefit, has been authored and telecast from my unconscious to my conscious. It may well be unsettling, even frightening, but it is somehow useful. I am sure.

And it may be an accident of waking off schedule that my conscious even gets involved. When I say the dream has been telecast to my conscious from my unconscious, I am not so sure that is really what was meant to happen. It may be that the purpose of deep, REM sleep is for the unconscious to do repair work while the conscious is offline.

There was a period - like still going - in which therapists were very big on people remembering dreams and telling them to their therapists who then tried to help them interpret them and figure out what they were saying. I did my share of that and, while it was a lot of fun, I think it was futile. I don't think the conscious understands the subtleties of the symbolic language in which the unconscious communicates.

Nor does it need to.

Any more than I need consciously to lend to the knitting of my broken wrist. Sometimes I experience the pain my wrist causes as it goes about its healing, which may be analogous to remembering details of dreams.

Conscious and unconscious are useful names, metaphors, really, for a phenomenon beyond human reach. Since unconscious suggests experience which we cannot "know," it is a logical contradiction to expect to access it. But something in us knows a lot goes on beyond what we can discern and describe. So we distinguish between conscious and unconscious.

And many of us suspect that our minds (yet another useful but hazy metaphor), like icebergs, are vastly larger unknown than known.

So, here's what I think about that dream I remembered so clearly when I woke this morning. (I will give you a hint: the protagonist in the dream was my wife's first husband, and he was in my hotel room). I think the backup to my mind's hard drive was unscrambling some of what I have been scrambling in my attempts to make rational sense of my life.

Protecting me against the danger of acting as if a rational approach to the day might be useful. Or even safe.

Rational, well-ordered intentions - which we are all taught to prize and polish - can be useful for impressing each other. But for guiding us through the chaos of real life, they leave us impoverished and even in danger.

Dreams, the deep defense against the arrogance of ego.

Two of my daughters - smart, sophisticated women with jobs requiring more of them than i think any of mine ever did of me - sent me the Gloria Steinem piece from the NY Times the day before the New Hampshire primary, when Barack Obama looked about to become the rock star of the Democratic Party and Hilary Clinton was to be relegated to the dustbin.

What neither Gloria nor the pundits (nor, I dare say, Hilary or Barack, or just about anyone else) could have known, what the column was about may have turned out to be what caused one of those major surprises that make politics still and fun sport even with all the pollsters trying to remove the guesswork.

The article begins by asking the question: if a young smart, attractive, half black, half white, first term woman senator ran for president, would you think she wasn't quite ready?

The point of the article was that gender remains the largest unresolved stumbling block to rising to the top in American life.

Ms. Steinem claims that a black man can now rise to the top (and can be fired if things go sour as they did recently at Merrill Lynch). But a woman still faces deep free-floating prejudice.

One of our daughters wrote after Senator Clinton had betrayed some emotion (I watched the clip and thought she merely paused at a significant point in describing why she was running, hardly a breakdown like Senator Muskie's famous tears when someone spoke ill of his wife.In fact I am so cynical that I wondered if Senator Clinton might have purposely put that hitch into her voice to counter some of the criticism that she is cold and hard-hearted.)

It seems our daughter and her husband had a discussion - maybe even an argument - about what to make of that uncharacteristic show of Senator Clinton's emotions. Our son-in-law said he thought it was a show of weakness inappropriate to the carrying out of heavy responsibility on the world stage. Knowing our daughter, I doubt he came right out and said that's why he doesn't think a woman should be president.

Our daughter asked him why a show of emotion in a wearying, tough moment should be considered a weakness.

I got drawn in because I always get drawn into these things in our family.

First of all I said - remember, we were all acting as if Clinton was through and Obama was ascendent - that I thought there were too many extraneous variables in this equation to try to measure whether Clinton's gender was causing people to turn to Obama and abandon her. I wonder how much all that has been written recently about the dynasty issue has turned people against her candidacy.

If Hilary Clinton were to be elected and serve two terms, we would have had either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House from 1998 - 20016. That begins to make us look like one of the banana republics we accuse other nations of being. And I happen to think - quite apart from Senator Clinton's merits - it is an argument that should be taken seriously.

Several of the pundits who were - as I was - dazzled by Senator Obama's Iowa showing - wrote of the hope he seems to engender, that we might be able to come together in problem solving rather than having a power showdown between the deeply divided opinions in the country. This argument I also find compelling, but I am doubtful that Obama or anyone else will quickly or soon be able to bring much closer together the ideological differences about how the country - and the world - ought to be run. If one thinks the hard, nasty contentiousness is going to go on, Senator Clinton strikes me as a Democrat I would like to have facing down the other side.

After the New Hampshire results - particularly the unanimity of the pundits in admitting they were surprised and never saw it coming - I think the gender issue may be more significant than I have previously considered.

In this case I think it may have worked the reverse of what Ms. Steinem was saying in her column. And it may even be that Senator Clinton's show of emotion - whether genuine or contrived - marshaled the support that put her ahead of Obama.

Exit polls suggest that it was women who gave Senator Clinton her New Hampshire win. Especially young women without children. Those, I suppose, would be the women who are making their careers and fighting their way through the glass ceiling.

51% of the electorate is women. Democrats traditionally carry the women's vote, Republicans the men.

I wonder if Senator Clinton's show of emotion, tired, hurt, exasperated at working as hard as she has only to see a young, new man seem to be put ahead, may have sounded an alarm among women who have had similar experience. Some of them may have been prepared to vote for Obama (no doubt he appeals to young women) and some to sit it out. But when they saw the frustration Hilary Clinton was feeling, they said to themselves, this woman hasn't been given an even break and I'm going to do what I can to see that she does.

Her handlers will likely try to figure out a way to bottle that and use it going forward. I have no idea whether that can be done. I honestly hope not, because I don't think it will help us much in discerning who we want as president.

But, less than 100 years since women go the vote in this country, I do wonder if the moment may have come in which women have reached some sort of collective psychic resolve, so subtle and beneath consciousness as to be immeasurable, that they are ready to take the Big House

As we wait for the results in Hew Hampshire, the boys on Wall Street tell us things are deteriorating.

And George Bush is quoted in this morning's paper as admitting that the economy is hard to read right now. Makes that - from this often mindless cheerleader president of ours - we're in big trouble.

Odd, don't you think, that when George Bush was first running in 2000, we were at the end of an amazingly long run of good times economically? Yes, it's true that things had begun to unravel some before that election - and no president could have stemmed the debacle of post 9/11.

But i still believe that if Al Gore hadn't listened to Tipper, who hated Clinton and was pushed right over the edge by the Monical Lewinsky Oval Office blow job, and simply said that, while he didn't agree with everything Clinton did, and though the two of them are entirely different personalities with opposite ways of living their lives (read that, I don't do blow jobs, and I don't think he should have either), but I am proud to have been a significant part of the administration that brought us 8 happy years of prosperity, and hope to be able to keep it going for 8 more (and if he hadn't chosen that prig, Joe Lieberman, to be his running mate), he would be finishing up his second term today, and the history of the world might be quite different.

We have had yet another long run of prosperity - at least for rich people and investors - since 2002. At the close of Clinton's term all my Republican friends were saying Clinton had just been lucky, in the right place at the right time, and should get no credit for the prosperity.

Ironically, after cutting Bush slack on every score for the past 7 years, they are now abandoning him, rats deserting the sinking ship. Because the economic cycle - along with the usual greed and excesses that go along with good times - has brought us to another of those moments in which the old formulas have worn thin, the realities (especially the global realities) have changed, and we are going to feel the pain of economic dislocation while we figure out how to live in a new world.

Given all that, Barack Obama becomes even more appealing to me. (Oh, how I hope whomever the Republican nominee is chooses Lieberman for his running mate; how delicious to watch him snivel his way through another losing campaign, this time in the other side) As many have pointed out, Obama the man will undoubtedly turn out to be different from Obama the man.

Like Jack Kennedy, he has become a symbol, which means that we have each projected onto him what we hope our nation, after the nasty, embarrassing years of Bush, may become.

A President Obama is going to have to deal with some dicey stuff. The Islamist militants have gone way too far to step back now. They still believe they have the USA and the west on the run, and they will quickly test a new young president. The global economy, which is no longer an idea Wall Street and the Republicans champion to tilt the economic playing field in their favor, is going to siphon off a lot more jobs from middle and lower income Americans before we figure out how to compete in a world of Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan laborers who do good work for much less money. The rich/poor divide had widened strikingly since Bush took office, in part because Bush and the Republican Congress have passed laws that favor the rich, but also partly because of the realities of world business that no one can stop.

So I would guess that Obama's first two years would cause disappointment among those of us who have made him our icon.

But, all that being said, I still get excited thinking about him standing on one podium after another, in this country and around the world, offering that face and that promise to a world that had just about given up on us.

Last night I spoke with a friend who is a Republican lobbyist in the New Hampshire state legislature. Even though I am most interested in the Democratic primary, she is a smart, tuned-in person and i wanted to her her take on what's happening.

She also, it turns out, is interested in the Democratic primary because, as she put it, "New Hampshire has become a frenzy of Obama excitement." She said that Obama showed up at a local high school and more than 1000 people came to hear him, a huge turnout in the small state.

This morning I heard that the pollsters are saying Obama has a double digit lead going into tomorrow's primary.

Today I spoke with one of my most partisan Republican friends and teased him with the question (he is a financial advisor), "How are the financial markets going to like a President Obama (come on spell check, you better get with it before this guy is in charge).

He smiled and said, "This is going to surprise you, but I think he is the best of the bunch on your side. Unlike Clinton and Edwards who are still talking about fighting the other guys, Obama is talking about getting people together to find new ways of going ahead."

He still prefers a Republican, thinks Romney will make a good candidate (and he hopes Romney or McCain will choose Joe Lieberman as their running mate, a man for whom I have a visceral dislike approaching the dislike I have for Bush).

But clearly he has decided he can live with and Obama presidency.

Now, we have a long time before the election, even before any candidate clearly emerges in either party.

But I do have that feeling, that if Barack Obama wins New Hampshire by a wide margin tomorrow, it is going to be very hard to keep him from being the nominee.

I fear the nastiness the Republicans may mount to defeat him. The dirty secrets that - like the Swiftboat charges - turn out to be baseless, but not before they have done their damage.

But there is something about the man, akin to whatever it was that John Kennedy aroused in many of us, that makes me hope that he will be able to stand up under that and get elected. And that, despite the crushing issues he will face on January 21, and the pressure to bend to the will of the big money that has run the country for at least the past 30 years, that the excitement he raises can find just cause and we can hold our American heads high after the long period of shame.

Yesterday's exciting news of the Iowa caucuses (how do those things actually work?) shining a light on two candidates who appear to take their cues from somewhere other than their hunger for wealth, was, ironically, soured a little for me by the disintegration of the financial markets.

But maybe the two are intertwined.

I know even less about Mike Huckabee than I do about Barack Obama (it tickles me that my spell check has never heard of either of them), but, even though I have worried that Obama is becoming more dependent on big money as he becomes a more serious candidate, at least the rhetoric of both of them is about evening the playing field for people who have been expected the past many years to stand on the sidelines cheering on the big players. Their (our) incentive was meant to be the hope that we might enjoy some of their largesse.

But can you imagine a president who stirs our excitement the way John Kennedy did in 1960?

Even Huckabee has railed against the grossly fattened payoffs to Wall St. barons, saying it is unjustifiable that they should make thousands of times more than someone who works hard too.

No doubt the best explanations for the market meltdowns yesterday is found in the unemployment figures, oil over $100 a barrel, housing still slumping, and credit tight.

But can you imagine the shaking around that must be happening among those guys who thought they had persuaded the whole world forever that greed was the best incentive for making us happy?

I have never understood the Iowa caucuses.

How can a handful of people from a small, white, midwestern state, gathering in living rooms and raising their hands to indicate which candidate they are supporting, cause such a tsunami in our nation's politics?

Same reason a dog licks himself in his private parts; because he can.

Winning Iowa doesn't make either Barak Obama or Mike Huckabee (can you imagine, President Obama, President Huckabee?) the next president. But I suspect it does rearrange things so whatever seemed inevitable or even likely yesterday, is no longer.

Arianna Huffington - God love her reckless bravado - caught my feelings by writing that last night's results, at least for a moment, moved us away from the fearful nation we have been for the past nearly 8 years, to the young nation with moxie we Americans like to think of ourselves as being.

One has to wonder whether anyone can really be prepared to be president.

I have always loved the story (that drove the Republicans nuts) about Bill Clinton rolling over after their first night in the White House and saying to Hilary (at least it was Hilary in bed with him!), "Can you believe this? Bonnie and Clyde living in the Whote House.

I like the thought of Barak Obama (do you know my spell check still doesn't know him?) being our face to the world after 8 years of that Bush sneer. And I like his story, an American story set in the 21st Century.

Mike Huckabee - who strikes me as less likely even than Obama to end up as his party's candidate - is the first religious conservative I know of who has a sense of humor and even, perhaps, irony.

So, who knows what's going to happen next Tuesday in New Hampshire, or beyond? But for today, I am enjoying life and politics in America for the first time in a long time.

So oil has - already - crossed that magic barrier we all speculated about and said would never happen.

My patient and beleaguered financial advisor, struggling valiantly over the years to explain arcane ways of the markets, has gotten through to me on the matter of herd behavior.

Today as I passed by the news stand (I only read what shows through the glass front) I saw the big bold headlines that screamed about oil prices and economic slowdown causing the financial markets to suffer meltdown.

I smiled. Not because I like seeing the markets drop (I live off a pension, Social Security and investments) but because my guru has persuaded me that when the headlines show up, what they are shouting about has gone by. Is passe.

I haven't checked today, but I suspect they may rebound.

But $100 a barrel of oil, whether the markets have already adjusted for that awesome number, has to be felt across a culture that depends on that oil for its existence.

Ever wonder if we humans really have simply gone beyond our ability to sustain ourselves, likely know it is our bones, but choose to keep the music going as long as possible?

I have a friend who is 96 and has what another friend describes as the "dwindles." They can't find anything particularly wrong with him, he's just fading. Losing weight, gets tired easily.

I asked our mutual friend if she thought we were now seeing the beginning of the end of him. She said she had asked, and he said he wanted to make 100. She has been cooking him food she knows he likes because he has no interest in food.

"Interesting," I said, "seems like his body is making a different decision from the one he is mouthing."

Perhaps we humans are doing something like that.

Walking to my writing post this morning I found myself humming the Penn football fight song:

... fair Harvard has her Crimson, and Yale her colors, too, but for dear Pennsylvania we wave the red and blue...

Sometimes I eavesdrop on my mind (if that's what it is) like a voyeur hoping to discover something of what is cooking beneath my relentless and too-tricky conscious.

See if you can follow this. Or care to:

I am buried lately in the fight between so-called atheists and so-called believers. I call them so-called because neither party to the argument represents either the atheist in me nor the believer.

I am a believer because I recognized a long time ago that there is a dimension to me - sometimes healthy, sometimes neurotic - that is going to find an object of devotion. I could have been a Nazi or one of Jim Jones followers who drank the cool-aid. Or- if I wasn't so tactile, restless, and erotic - a monastic.

I am an atheist because the God of conventional church religion strikes me as silly and preposterous. That there might be a mighty and personal Being who listens to our woes and praise and rearranges the universe in response seems so obviously the projection of human ego that can't bring itself to see us as just another phenomenon alongside all the others that have showed and eventually gone extinct.

Having been a parish priest for 30 years, never quite letting go of the illusion that people who come to church are searching for an encounter with the Wholly Other, the unsettling energy that convicts the ego of overreaching and disciplines the intellect to find pleasure in the odds-against fact of being here in a largely empty universe.

I guess I have been pretty proud of my courage and intellectual honesty about all this. In fact I am loving this chapter, the western slope chapter, in which I get to look at a life with a perspective I could never have mustered at a younger age.

But I have forgotten - or ignored - that non-rational believer in me. From earliest memory it has attached itself to the feminine side of life. And specifically to specific women.

I am going to save the long complex unfolding of this for future writing (and for the book I am at work on), but the short version is that I can make of a woman what I saw Vietnamese in Hanoi making of the many shrines scattered around the city. They buy and light incense sticks, put them into the pagoda, put the palms of their hands together and bow, again and again.

I never asked, but I imagined they would tell you they do that because, well, because they do that. No specific reference, no creed or set of rules. Clearly there is an element of reverence and respect for ancestors and for their history, but, again, no elaborate holy writings or beliefs. Just obedience and surrender to a dimension of themselves that defies reason.

Maybe you've forgotten, I began this piece by telling you I found myself singing the Penn fight song this morning.

Penn named a new president last year. Amy Gutman. When I saw her picture - she is young, blond, with a nice smile, nice figure - I was spellbound. Why? You figure it out. I haven't.

I graduated from Penn 45 years ago and have never been back. Send them a few bucks occasionally. Read the alumni magazine about all the fascinating things going on in the university, and check my class for luminaries and obituaries.

But since Amy became president I scour the magazine for pictures and news of her.

Now I understand better what made me so uncomfortable all those years as a parish priest, being a stand-in for the projections of people hungry for that other dimension.

Amy is my priest because she is the leader of my church, the academy. And she often wears red.

Penn just announced a capital funds drive with a goal of something over $2 billion. We'll see if this non-rational religious hunger can be translated into those big bucks.

I hope it works better for Amy and Penn than it ever did for the church and me.

Singing Penn's songs won't build a new science center, but, like those hymns they play in stores during Christmas, it likely does pay tribute to the power of the symbols we have entrusted to those who have been ordained to guard the holy grail.