The Day After: Caveats First

Day After: Fred Smoler – Caveats First

THE DUTIFUL caveats first. Let’s get them out of the way: Yes, Senator Joe Biden helped craft and pass one of the most loathsome pieces of class legislation since Walpole’s Black Act of 1724 and is the darling of the extraordinarily predatory credit card industry. Wall Street has given Obama’s campaign three times as many contributions greater than $25,000 than it has given McCain’s. It seems safe to assume that a candidate whose chief economic advisers hail from either the University of Chicago or Goldman Sachs is not going to be the most radical economic reformer we have ever seen.

Obama’s long-stated and never renounced policy on withdrawal from Iraq by a certain date, whether or not that risks genocide, remains either vastly cynical or idiotic. Most foreigners will not love us tomorrow, and to assume otherwise evokes the oddly widespread implication that our enemies were so furious over the invasion of Iraq that they blew up the World Trade Center. Tonight, however, it seems hard to care too much about all of that.

A month ago, a British friend, irritable after a week of Manhattan dinner parties among the politically pious, asked if it were less racist to vote for a man because he was black than to vote against him for that reason. The question, in one sense unanswerable, was in another incomprehensible, thus almost as exasperating as those dinner parties must have been. If you are a certain age you cannot easily forget that for a portion of your life Obama could not have voted for himself in a significant number of American states, and at that moment the memory was a reminder of the founding paradox, the one that makes up a fair piece of the Howard Zinn school of American history. It seemed ponderous and moralistic to tell a young Englishman that while people who choose to remember nothing else about America are always maddening and sometimes contemptible, the paradox remained live and cruel.

The run-up to the election inevitably saw a fair number of columnists belaboring the obvious. Frank Rich’s column in last Sunday’s New York Times can serve to sum up a multitude: Approvingly quoting another commentator on the impossibility of America transcending race, Rich opined that “America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it’s built into our DNA.” But cultures do not have DNA. “Transcend” is defined as “to rise above or go beyond,” and the second meaning of “disown” includes “to deny the validity or authority of,” in which sense history can be at least in part disowned, and certainly transcended, despite all those somber-gleeful assurances that it cannot be.

Watching fellow citizens on television, I remembered two terse anecdotes my father had (on different occasions) off-handedly related when I was a boy. One was about the experience of briefly commanding a black company occupying what would become an East German town, an experience he unselfconsciously described as being the loneliest moment of his life.

The other recounted something that happened a few months later: Approaching the port of Antwerp in the back of a truck and exhilarated to be going home in one piece—he had been the only one of his platoon to have walked both into and out of the Ardennes–he remembered drinking from a bottle of whisky, then offering the bottle around to some fellow soldiers, black GIs. A black sergeant, apparently warily astonished, accepted the bottle and asked “Lieutenant, where you from?” “New York,” my father answered. “That figures,” he recalled the sergeant coolly replying. For tonight, anyway, an awful lot of the country seems to be from the New York that sergeant conceived the town to be, and not the one that had prepared the only white American in a German town to be so piercingly lonely. It feels as if the country has begun to disown and transcend something.

Fred Smoler teaches literature and history at Sarah Lawrence College. He is a contributing editor at American Heritage Magazine and has been published in various other places, including Dissent, First of the Month, the Observer (UK), Nation, and the New York Times.