Topsy Turvy With the Republicans- McCain's Speech was Substantive and Inspiring (for the chosen masses)

Wow.I have no idea how to think about this presidential campaign. There's just nothing to compare it to. McCain was fascinating tonight, talking about WARSHington, as if he'd never learned phonics and didn't care. But he made some sense, and was himself, unadorned and unpretentious. I guess all rumors of his "practicing" were real, and that maybe he really did practice the speech in front of the mirror, in front of his mother, in front of ...I want to say...in front of GOD.

The other night I fell for the Sarah Palin trick. Most of my kids and co-workers nearly strangled me to death for saying even a little bit positive about her this morning. By noon, I had allowed them to convince me that I was crazy, caving in. It took me all day to get my defensive footing back and to square my shoulders, preparing to listen tonight to McCain's speech objectively. But now, I'm starting to believe it all, starting to fall for it all again, bamboozled, stirred, shaken, uplifted, yea, UPLIFTED by a Republican.

I was there in the 60's when music was at its best, and we knew there'd be a revolution. I was protesting peacefully in California (at UCSB) when Reagan was governor, and swore I'd leave the country if Nixon was elected, but I didn't. I was the first Democrat ever in my family, and the source of disappointment and some shame I'm sure. My grandfather was a Republican senator for 32 years. I strove for Democratic ideals, such as they have been, for many years as I raised my family. I never cared about money or capitalism and free enterprise. I know now, in my sixties, that that was risky, given the education and advantages I had had in life. As the little wooden plaque above my other grandfather's chair said: "We grow too soon olde, and too late schmart". But still, what the Republican party is now is not what Winston meant by conservative.

I've thought a lot about McCain's captivity in the context of the era when he was in Vietnam, and in the context of psychology, and decided some time ago that his refusal to accept that offer of freedom from his captors could have been more a result of an Oedipus complex than anything else, a slap in the face to his father the admiral, who had been pulling strings for him. Sort of a "F+++ you, dad, I'll show you what a REAL soldier is, and make mom proud"- but those things (deeper meanings) get brushed aside in men's lives, as well they should, I suppose, to keep things simple.

Tonight I'm remembering that Winston Churchill said something like "If you're not a liberal in your twenties, then you have no heart. And if you're not a conservative by age 40 or 50, then you have no brain." I'm just wondering which I'll be by light of day.

In any case, all things considered, I'm moving to Canada.

Reflections from Youth: Still Not 100% Sure

I'm not as liberal as I used to be. And even back in the day, I wasn't as liberal as I thought I was. For awhile I was the rebellious daughter of solid Republicans, my father a hematologist/oncologist and former Navy doctor, my grandfather a Republican senator from Pennsylvania who served in the senate for thirty-two years and as chairman of the State Appropriations Committee. Naturally I was ecstatic to become a Democrat in the sixties, the first one in recorded history on either side of the family, and they all blithely respected that.

I was never a woman's libber, valuing wholeheartedly the woman's natural caregiving role at home and hearth. I wanted a husband, and children, and I wanted to make them my life's ministry and devotion. I never wanted to enter the workplace, and never planned to carry my liberal arts education beyond the home. I had been told by more than one teacher at my private school that my education would make me better able to converse pleasantly and intelligently with my husband after his difficult day at work, and that was fine with me. But I ended up in a time and space warp where those skills were not required, those days long gone, that way of life past.

There is a memory of my misspent youth that makes me cringe in shame more than any other. It's not the worst thing I did, but it is emblematic of the self-righteousness of the sixties. It was a night after I had hitched rides home to Pittsburgh from California and tried to stir things up by playing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at full blast as my parents were having their after-dinner drinks and heading off to bed. I thought I was enlightening them, and they, always cordial, listened patiently and endured elegantly.

I remember tossing aside their record album and triumphantly replacing it with some of Frank's screaming, and then, less horribly, The Velvet Underground- Nico singing "I'll Be Your Mirror(and reflect what you are, in case you don't know)"- What a little snot I was! Mom and Dad were years and miles ahead of me, and had been listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, sage musicians who knew more than Frank, Nico and I all rolled together might ever know about what's going on in love and life.

So it's a little of the lost euphoria of my rebel youth that makes me want to love Barack Obama and to do all I can to encourage my little corner of the electorate to support and nurture him into true greatness. It's just that, as I occasionally say: being a social worker is making a Republican out of me. It's that old standard, still immanent in my very being, that makes me want to listen more closely to the more mature McCain. When I look at pictures of him as a young man, I'm reminded of a few earnest and principled boys I knew who didn't waste time at Woodstock, in Haight-Asbury or Studio 54 - solid boys who moved on quickly to greater things.

Have to run, but will look for the exact quote, one of my all-time favorites: Winston Churchill said that when a man is twenty, if he isn't a liberal he has no soul, and if when he's fifty he's not a conservative, then he has no brain. So the trajectory that some Boomers have been on is ok with Winston. We're just late bloomers, we Boomers.