Dinner

A few days before the election, my friend Bob said he would buy my husband and me dinner at his favorite vegetarian restaurant, the Great Sage in Clarksville,1 if two of the following three things happened: (1) the Democrats took the House; (2) the Democrats took the Senate; or (3) George Allen lost.  (Bob was particularly outraged by the “Macaca” incident.)  I didn’t hold out much hope for dinner, but I wrote it on the calendar.

By election eve, I wasn’t feeling too optimistic.  The polls looked Blue, but polls had looked that way in the past.  My husband went out to the hall in which the local Democrats gather to lick their wounds.  I put on my jammies and went to bed. 

As I lay there, the TV remote in my hand, I couldn’t help but be reminded of those past few nightmarish elections: how I had fallen asleep in November, 2004, thinking that John Kerry was our next president and woken up to another four years of Bush—to say nothing of the rollercoaster weeks-from-hell of hanging chads following the 2000 election.  As I lay there flipping between CNN and MSNBC, it seemed like things were going well for the Dems, but I was not the least bit cheered; I was sure that there would be another glaring “inconsistency” between the exit polls and the end results, thanks to Diebold, and that America was doomed to another Red Tide.

The day after the election, I went to work and discovered that my Red officemate seemed glum.  All day, she kept calling relatives and saying, “How are you holding up?” and “Are you okay?”  But it wasn’t until my Blue colleague Carolyn burst into our office, yelling, “Burns is conceding and Rumsfeld is stepping down,” adding, “Hot damn!” and giving me a big high five that I knew that things had somehow shifted and that at least for the time being, America had dodged the bullets of rigged voting machines and insidious propaganda (well, except for poor Harold Ford) and would not be marching with the Bushevites into the future singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”—at least, not yet.

That night on my way home from bellydance class, I was, coincidentally, driving past Bob’s house when I heard on NPR that Allen, like Burns, was conceding to his Democratic opponent.2  I called Bob and gave him the news.  He cheered vociferously and added, “The Great Sage.  Sunday.  6 p.m.”

And so it was that we ended up at the Great Sage, an event no one, except perhaps Rahm Emanuel, would have predicted.

***

The week before the election, I had been reading Vanity Fair on an airplane—the magazine, not the novel—and was struck by a letter from a reader complaining about an article that had run in the previous issue.  The article, which I had not read but which evidently concerned global anti-Americanism, had been, the reader said, “laced with hatred and shame for the United States, which causes any reasonable reader to ask the writer, ‘Why are you still here?’” 

I reached my destination and all but forgot this distasteful case of what looked to me like shooting the messenger, but it had stayed in the back of my mind.  As I have mentioned ad nauseum in past columns, I asked myself this question in 1980—“Why are you still here?”—when Reagan was elected, and in 1981, answered it by leaving the country and staying away for the rest of his presidency and some of Bush I’s.  When I decided to move back to America, despite having acquired legal permanent resident status abroad, I was very clear on why I wanted to be here.  These were my reasons:

1.  My family was here.

2.  Although I had lived in the same small village in England for six years, I still felt like an outsider.  I had been told that even when one was British, it took approximately thirty-five years for the locals to accept one.

3.  And no matter how long I lived in England, I would always be conspicuously foreign.  My then-husband and I once received a postcard from our chimney sweep, a colorful, Dickensian character, addressed to us with only the name of our village and the word “Yanks.”

4.  I missed America.  For one thing, though it’s hard for me to imagine now, I missed the American language.  While I loved the way British English-speakers had a tendency to speak in complete sentences, which makes them sound so much smarter than us, there was something about the cadence of American speech that felt like comfort food. 

5.  And I missed American humor.  In those days, America had good jokes, which I used to hear from my acupuncturist, an expat whose brother habitually mailed him the latest topical wisecracks from the States (this was before email).  Whenever any important event occurred, no matter how grave, I could count on my acupuncturist for its translation into humor.  (Now there’s “The Daily Show.”)

6.  When I first moved to England, I happened to meet a British couple who lived in the States and had been there for donkeys’ years, as they put it; when I asked them why they had chosen to live in America instead of Britain, the woman said, somewhat apologetically, “Well, I don’t know, it’s just so much more ‘go-y’ there, isn’t it?”  Years later, as I prepared to return, I thought well, for all its faults, it’s true, America is go-y.

7.  And I am, and will always be, an American.

Before the election, I found myself talking to the writer of the Vanity Fair letter in my head, saying to him, “How dare you suggest that because someone has written an article that in your view is critical of America, they should leave the country?”  In my mind, as a tribute to Keith Olbermann channeling Edward R. Murrow, I added, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”3

But once the election was all over, the voices in my head stopped.  It’s my country, said a new voice, and I can stay if I want to.

***

On our way into the Great Sage, we ran into a young couple Bob knows—he knows everyone—so they joined us and our other cronies.  Bob regaled the couple with stories from the archives, the way one does with new people, as we dined on sumptuous organic vegetarian food (I recommend the Indian Vegetable Cakes).  No one talked much about politics except to marvel somewhat obliquely at the way life takes such strange turns when you least expect it.

At the end of our three-hour meal, we all toasted the amazing Democratic victory.  When I clinked my glass of water against everyone else’s, my husband pointed out, as he always does, that it’s bad luck to toast with water.  But I toasted anyway, as I always do, and if the Democratic party splits in a shambles over the thousand ideological differences that still divide it, and if they fail to put forward a strong candidate against the Republican PR powerhouses in 2008, well, you can blame me.

But for now, I raise my glass.

_______________________

1 http://www.great-sage.com/

2 Music trivia note: Don’t you find it odd that Webb did not choose as his campaign song “Up, Up, and Away”?

3 If you haven’t read or seen Keith Olbermann’s powerful commentary blasting Bush for comparing his detractors to the Nazis and Al Queda, you really should: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15000217/  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THYBCEoxlxI

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