Amidst these convoluted relations and the atmosphere of fear that colors the narrative about the Middle East, a group of 14 average citizens took a trip to Iran in order to create real relationships.

Rae Abileah, a local groups coordinator for CODEPINK out of San Francisco, called the trip a jihad in an effort to recast the word’s use. “Jihad simply means spiritual pilgrimage,” she explained. “Words like ‘jihad’ have been misused, or used out of context, by U.S. mainstream media and the former Bush administration and Republican party to take on whole other definitions.” The intention of these citizen diplomacy missions is to recast the mainstream narrative of the Middle East, defining it in terms of peace rather than war.

The mission, sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, consisted of Jews and Christians, university students and retirees, activists and rabbis. They explored mosques, temples, bazaars, and ancient ruins, amid a backdrop of chalky mountains and sandy cities.

But most importantly, the group members spent time talking to real citizens. Through Farsi interpreters and non-verbal communication, the delegation attempted to “find common humanity within poisoned social contexts,” said Rabbi Rosen Brant, from the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston.

Describing life there, Abileah’s overriding notion is that Iran is a “tale of two cities:” one out in the streets, and one behind closed doors. This is particularly true for young people and women.

Upon entering Iranian airspace, women on the trip wrapped themselves in their hijabs. Because Iran is an Islamic Republic under the control of a Supreme Leader who functions both religiously and politically, women are required to wear some form of the hijab in public, but the degree to which the head is covered is left up to the individuals.

“Honestly, I didn’t feel a Western righteousness or anger around wearing head covering,” Abileah said. “I figure ‘when in Rome…’ when it comes to something that is not physically harmful…. We learned to poof our bangs and hair in the front in the hip style of the young women in Tehran.”

Beyond hidden hair, women are furthermore disbarred from singing in public and are almost always separated from men in public.

Despite these restrictions, Rabbi Brant noted that the many Iranians, including those who are not Muslim, enjoy living in a country that “moves to a religious rhythm.”

The citizen diplomats extensively explored numerous mosques, including the beautiful mirrored mosque in Shiraz, and met with leaders of the Jewish community in Iran, which numbers approximately 20,000 and is represented by one member of parliament. According to the Iranian constitution, a population of 500,000 is needed to gain representation in the parliament (also known as the Majilis of Iran), but an exception was made for religious minorities like the Jews, Zoroastrians, Catholics, and Armenians.

The delegation generally refrained from speaking substantially about politics.  “Once you raise the issues, you stand in judgment,” Rabbi Rosen said.  But when they did touch upon the subject the perspective was invaluable.

The United States’ storied relationships with countries of the Middle East, particularly our alliance with Israel, weighs heavily on the minds of Iranian citizens. The history of our interactions with the area are not widely known among the American populace; for example, the 1988 U.S. attack on civilian Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 290 on board, including 66 children. Not only has the U.S. failed to apologize for accidentally shooting down the airbus, but many citizens are not even aware of the event.

Not to say the void in cultural understanding rests with Americans alone. Restrictions on freedom, an idea so distinctly and loudly rejected by Americans, is a habit of life in Iran. Besides the restrictions on women, there are other violations of liberty. Alcohol, forbidden by the Koran, is forbidden by the Iranian government; Facebook is banned within the city limits of Tehran; protests that Iranian NGO Mothers for Peace planned against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq were forbidden; public hangings still happen regularly. But even the most egregious of human rights violations should be solved by Iranians, as Rabbi Rosen points out.

Agreeing that aggressive U.S. military or economic policy will not positively effect the country’s political or social atmosphere, Abileah says “This kind of external pressure and threat will allow more fundamentalist leaders to rise to power in Iran, and nationalism, rather than internal social change movements, will prevail.”

Abileah emphasizes the need for Americans to educate themselves on life in Iran and ignore the “saber-rattling hype.” CODEPINK will launch a Winds of Change campaign soon, in which American citizens will be able to invest in an Iranian wind power company for just $5 a share. “This act defies U.S. sanctions, supports alternative energy in Iran, and fosters peace and friendship between our two countries,” she says.

Speaking about her experience now that she’s returned to the U.S. has shed more light on the intercultural tensions for Abileah. One woman in New York City thought her oft-repeated slogan, “Peace With Iran,” was wildly idealistic. Instead of arguing with the woman, Abileah listened and acknowledged, a vastly important skill she fostered while in Iran. By learning this skill, we can all progress toward understanding.

For a complete look at the delegation’s trip, see Rae’s two-part blog and Flickr page, as well as Rabbi Brant’s blog.

Editor’s note: Abileah’s quote “Jihad simply means ‘spiritual pilgrimage’” may be terminologically misleading. ‘Jihad’ does mean struggle. Abileah’s usage is more akin to a ‘great jihad’ or spiritual jihad, that of the inner struggle toward improvement. She wrote, “We are on a jihad ~ which means that we are going to a conflict[ed] region and seeking to transform our perception of it into a field of compassion, a spiritual journey to deepen our understanding…”

The first time I went to Europe, I traveled to the old and shimmering city of Prague. I was prepared to conceal my American identity and join in on the Bush bashing so they would see I wasn’t one of those Americans. I found it interesting that no one in Prague seemed to care that I was American, and when I asked about Bush, I got “He’s your problem.” In fact, Bush came to Prague while I was there and I saw no protesters, no angry people. I was confused. Could it be that the anti-American feeling had been exaggerated? Or was it because they had been under Soviet rule so long that they still weren’t there yet?

I relaxed a little until I went to sunny Spain and realized that much of the resentment for Americans was reserved for Western Europe, and the rest of the world. Only the part of Prague I was in was immune.

Once I got to Barcelona, as long as I spoke my less than idiomatic Spanish, things were relatively mas o menos. Yet other friends I know felt stung by the Spaniards. I eventually did too, when I didn’t get up quickly enough for a Spanish woman on the bus. She spat out some rather unkind things about me as I was making my exit, including thoughts on my nationality in her list of insults.

Everyone has heard stories about trips to Europe: anti-American graffiti, rude waiters, and general “screw you” attitudes. When Americans flip open their passports abroad, they are inflicted with the feeling that they are personae non gratae. I think Diane Lane put it best in Under the Tuscan Sun when a German woman declares “You Americans, you think you’re so entitled. You ruin everything.” To which she sincerely replies, “Some of us feel really badly about that.”

That’s the thing, some of us really, really do. A lot of Americans feel bad, and those Americans are usually the people who are most instilled with wanderlust. That is why in the last few years, we’ve been trying to reverse things for ourselves. We’ve been fighting to combat the stereotypes since our former president fought to degrade our image to a dangerous degree (a factor that makes American travelers magically turn into Canadians).

This time, going to Europe, I wanted to find out if anything had changed. I wondered, as I sat on the plane next to a Croatian gal with an Obama pin on her luggage, if European opinions of Americans had changed since Obama was elected. Prior to the election, all the Europeans I knew thought we were incapable of electing a black man as our leader. In their minds, most of us were backward, gun-toting idiots. I asked one British friend how much diversity there was in his government and he quickly became quiet.

I spent most of my time in my boyfriend’s hometown of Frankfurt, Germany, an Obama hotspot. Everyone was overjoyed with the election results. The dinner conversations usually included praise, as if they had a chance to give a universal pat on the back to all Americans through me. The German people are in love with Obama and they seem to take the “any friend of Obama is a friend of mine” attitude.

Frankfurt recently had a local election; signs with different parties’ candidates littered the boulevards, near the eye-catching skyscrapers, and along the streets filled with markets and the smell of glühwein. A nine-year-old girl named Carlotta was eating dinner with us one night and suddenly the Frankfurt election came up. She turned to my boyfriend and in German asked: “Did you vote for Obama? I love Obama!”

I was shocked. A German schoolgirl not only knew about Obama, but knew enough to love him? Germans of all ages had definitely been struck with Obama fever and weren’t shy about proclaiming it. I felt only enthusiasm and happiness exuding from the German people. Every person I met had a comment or two about the new leader of America.

The next stop was Paris, the perceived holy grail of anti-American attitudes. Basking in my sheer excitement over going to the city of lights, I tried to forget what I had heard about the stereotype of pompous Parisians and their attitude about Americans. I was nervous about opening my little French phrase book in front of the suave Parisian pedestrians. I was slathered from head to toe in self-doubt. To me, I was the butcher and their dancing language was the unfortunate slab of meat. I relied on my boyfriend’s German accent and my high school French to get us through uncomfortable restaurant trips. Eventually I began to notice that it wasn’t as bad as I had expected. People were gracious about giving directions; whenever I dropped my gloves (which was often), someone chased me down to hand them to me. When we went to buy wine and couldn’t get our desires across, the store’s owner managed to sell us a great wine as well as giving us a free glass to ring in 2009. “Bon Année!” he exclaimed cheerfully, downing his wine. I had to say that the residents of Paris were as pétillant as their wine and as colorful as their luminous city.

The only time I noticed snobbery was in the very touristy areas. I got the feeling that people there weren’t so much snobby, but instead annoyed by the massive number of tourists. When I thought about it, I was able to sympathize with that. How often in Chicago am I annoyed by the clusters of clicking cameras on Michigan Avenue when I’m trying to get work? It did not so much seem to be a slight towards Americans, but more of a general irritation at those who do not really know how to get along in a bustling city. I could equate tourists in Paris to small town Americans going to New York City for the first time. New Yorkers aren’t being rude because you are from a small town; they are being rude because you are in their way and they are in a rush. The majority of people in Paris seemed indifferent about Americans overall. They lumped me in with the Japanese, German, and Australian tourists. The exception was the African Eiffel Tower keychain vendors: when they found out I was American, they smiled and said “Go Obama!”

We stayed with a friend of my boyfriend’s father and his girlfriend, Sabrina. When the news came on after dinner, conversation turned to politics. “I used to say that I would never go to America if Bush was president. Never. I didn’t even want to step foot there. But now that Obama is president, I think I would like to go,” she said happily. Though people in Paris seemed to be excited about Obama and Americans for the time being, the general attitude was a reserved enthusiasm. The French seem to keep in mind that the foreign policy of the US is so fickle, it may be hard to maintain the enthusiasm in years to come.

The last stop was the Netherlands. The laissez-faire Dutch attitude is known throughout the world due to their relaxation habits and lack of judgment towards others. I was thrilled to see Amsterdam’s flowing canals and billions of bicycles. I came to find the most kind and sincere people of any city I have visited. Alarmingly friendly street traffic greeted us at every single corner, happy to give us directions, and to smile warmly while waving goodbye.

As we approached a woman outside a boutique, we asked directions to the Anne Frank House. She gave us intricate instructions, and eventually asked us where we were from. When I told her I lived in Chicago, she immediately began to talk about Obama. “Yes we can!” she said, laughing out loud as I began to walk away. Her cheeks were as red as the tulips in my postcard-imagined Holland.

The broad rule of thumb seems to be that if you actually sit down and talk to a person in Europe, they will respond to you on the basis of whether you are a gracious traveler, rather than from where you hail.

Overall it seemed to me that most European people are as swept up in Obama fever as that little German girl. It seems that the world is cheering with us. International news praises Obama, and a sense of universal relief has swept over the globe; everyone’s realized that Bush’s time has come to an end. From China to Canada, the general feeling is that Obama is the the future, a future in which we will not use military force to secure our best interests. For the first time in years, the leading figure in the White House believes in humanitarianism, environmentalism, and all the isms that have been lacking in American foreign policy. This is a man who said he actually wanted to “build bridges across the world,” a pleasant shock since the public was accustomed to the literal destruction of bridges. Not only that, but he’s… cool. The same goes for his family. The German newspaper BILD proclaimed Michelle Obama the beautiful, sensuous, and interesting new first lady.

The sense of change has even been marked by Americans who have said ciao to America in search of greener pastures. Bernd Debusman of the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times) writes “What was remarkable in 2008 was how quickly Americans abroad sensed a change of mood. After the Nov. 4 election, American expatriates posted jubilant messages to social networking sites like Facebook saying it was cool to be American again.”

In my opinion, European attitudes towards Americans have definitely improved, but still have a few kilometers to go. Will this pro-American feeling last? As for Spain, my sister has been studying abroad outside Madrid for the past five months and said that the people in Spain have proved to be ecstatic about Obama’s win. The morning after the election, the country was buzzing with sheer thrill. In fact, she walked into her classroom to find Si Se Puede! (Yes we can!) written on the board in bold lettering. I think the same goes for us Americans in improving our world reputation… yes we can.

I was born in Detroit, a good place to be from (ba-dump-BUMP).  My father was a lifer at Chrysler. Every kid I knew had a dad who was a lifer somewhere in the car biz.  In grade school, we didn’t go on field trips to museums, we went to the River Rouge plant and Jefferson Assembly.  Our civic heroes weren’t writers or actors or statesmen, they were mythical lions like Ford and Olds, and “car guys” like Iacocca, Shelby and DeLorean (pre-coke bust). The annual international auto show was the event; for a week it put my grubby rust belt city on front pages worldwide. We lived not too far from the steak house where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen; it was not some far off mob story, it was right there on Telegraph Road, on the way to the mall that, like all good Detroiters (and Americans), we drove to.  And now Detroit may be the first industrial American city to die.

As such, people keep asking me about the “bailout,” thinking that the 10W40 in my blood might make for some insight that doesn’t redact this Gordian knot of a problem into the easily digestible either/or proposition that we seem to be comfortable with in this era of Jerry Springer chair-throwing-styled debates. It is a dynamic that largely ignores the swirling vortex of factors and players; it’s like the end of Reservoir Dogs–everyone’s got a gun pointed at everyone else, and we get to watch with a mixture of revulsion, disbelief and schadenfreude.  Unions, executives, politicians, economic Darwinists and ideological blowhards of all persuasions have dogs in this fight.  All have their interests, biases, valid points and hysterical overreactions.  Some intersect, most diverge.

A popular bogie man (especially among the Wall Street Journal and Fox News crowd) is the UAW.  They grew fat and powerful and lazy.  They are grossly overpaid (especially compared to those in workers’ paradises such as China and India) and saddle the industry with untenable “legacy costs.”   Any bailout has to include provisions to “control” them, or rein in their influence.  Many Republican commentaries on the bailout sound like nothing more than a naked, union-busting power grab, as if a good union salary is somehow more “un-American” than an eight-figure CEO salary.  However, one need not look further than the jobs bank (where workers are paid even if there is no need for their job at that time) to see that there is some merit to this viewpoint.  On the other hand, they also provide tens of thousands of skilled manufacturing jobs.  If those jobs are lost, we are told, the ripple effect would be devastating.  After all, no car industry is worse than a failing or broken one.

Maybe the government is to blame.  Maybe there needs to be more intervention from Washington; legislate higher fuel economy standards, dictate what kind of cars can be made, require innovation.  Ignore Congress’ decades long predilection for being the industry’s lapdog, or the convoluted CAFÉ standards that allow for political cover but accomplish little, or that government-run auto companies give us winners like the Yugo.

Then there are the companies themselves, with their business models leading straight for the concrete abutment of oblivion or irrelevancy.  Sure, they gorged themselves at the hog troughs of SUV profits. Didn’t hear many complaints then about how unfair unions or government meddling were then, did we?   They have been painfully reluctant to accept change and display a pattern of resistance and outright hostility to science (Who Killed the Electric Car?) and safety (it took untold lawsuits and some [rare] useful action from the government to force carmakers to implement safety glass, seat belts, airbags and emissions reductions).  To paraphrase Hearst’s muckraking: Remember the Pinto!

To top it all off, we have the perfect perp walk, via scapegoats that sit sweatily in the white glare of the hearing room lights: the out of touch, tone-deaf CEOS!  Didn’t we all enjoy the theater of them being castigated for their Robber Baron salaries and smug sense of entitlement?  Didn’t the righteous indignation over the corporate jets make us feel better?  The promises of a pay cut to $1 may have exacted our pound of flesh but solved nothing of import.  Sure, these guys should be publicly flogged, but these are cosmetic changes and the lawmakers are all too eager to comply now that the political winds have shifted, especially if it deflects any culpability on their part.

And, yes, they deserve to be punished; a business that does not thrive should not be propped up by the government.  Should the government should have kept Underwood in business making typewriters in the face of the nascent computer industry?  It goes against all the precepts of free market capitalism (just ignore that that is exactly what they recently did for the banks…).  More damning, though, is that they chose not to lead, to look forward, to innovate, or to use America’s dynamism and technological prowess to improve their products.  But, really, can you blame the CEOs for running their companies into the ground by making bigger and more obnoxious cars?   It’s merely a reflection of our crack-mentality approach to capitalism, in all its eight-cylinder glory.

With all these villains to go around, the dirty little unacknowledged or unrealized truth is that we too are one of them, perhaps the main one, but nobody likes to hear that they are part of the problem.  Our short sighted, selfish interests as consumers add a substantial piece to this little morality play.  While it is cathartic to point our fingers at unions or government agencies or craven CEOs, it ignores the basic tenet of supply and demand.  We demanded it, they supplied it.  Now we are playing the hapless victims, like we were forced to buy a shitty, gas-guzzling car.  Hell, they were just giving us what we wanted.

Americans have a remarkable capacity to delude convenience into necessity.   Instead of demanding fuel efficiency or development of alternative fuels and power trains, we asked for more cup holders, three rows of seats, an entertainment system and a high riding profile.   We wanted a car that could tackle the Sahara desert or the drive through raging rivers or scale Everest, even if we were only driving to the Chuck E. Cheese’s in Schaumberg.  Fuel economy?  Let the other guy worry about that. After all, we needed the Escalades and Tahoes.  It was the OTHER guy who was the jerk for having one.

We bought the SUVs (and when I say “we” I mean “not me”) when there were already ample reasons not to.  We were sending money to our enemies–despotic, unstable, unFREE regimes. A journalist recently summed it up by noting “we are borrowing money from China to send it to Saudi Arabia”. We were hastening global warning–is there anything more galling than an SUV with anti-Bush bumper sticker? We were filling the roads with obnoxious, oversized and unsafe eyesores.  Driving a Hummer represented a giant FUCK YOU.  It was a grand expression of selfishness to which we all aspired.   Only when gas got expensive did we get our dander up.  We demanded little and received it in a massively over-horse-powered dose.

Now we are eager to blame everyone else for going along with it, for enabling our base indulgences and extravagances.  It was THEM that forced the gas-guzzling SUVs on us, depriving us of fuel-efficient hybrids.  We were powerless innocents.  Hey, if you don’t want a McDonald’s in your neighborhood, don’t buy any fucking McNuggets, okay?  The SUV binge was our own damn fault.  When will we learn that when we buy something we are voting for the kind of world we want around us?

Ultimately, the “what to do” question is far too complex for me and too complex for a short attention-spanned public looking to an obliging media for an easy scapegoat.  It’s certainly too tough to tackle in a short blog posting geared towards the digital, short-attention spanned generation.   I can only hope a lot of people far smarter than me, and not just some political poltroons, get a chance to address the problem in a meaningful way.  God help us if we get an “auto czar” in the mold of the Michaels, Chertoff or Brown–the wizards of Katrina relief.

It’s probably time to move on and a bailout is only delaying the inevitable, the necessarily inevitable.  The century of reliance on the internal combustion engine is perhaps over, and the gas-thirsty entitlement of generations of Americans is at an end. This bailout might be along the lines of sinking money into the canal system at the expense of ascendant railroads, only now the stakes are much higher, for our economy, our planet, our security, and our place in the world as a political power, as well as source of hope and entrepreneurial vigor.  The grand American tradition of problem solving by our spirit of innovation and big thinking is being diluted by this false choice of bail out or no bail out.  With private car ownership per 1,000 people at 480 in the US, in comparison to a rapidly-rising 1,000-9 ratio in China, it is an unsustainable proposition anyway.  The paradigm has to shift, but all the entrenched interests (including us) would rather point fingers or shrug shoulders or turn a blind eye; they didn’t see it coming, or didn’t WANT to see it coming; it is a solution (or non-solution) based on status quo thinking, and that’s the saddest part of all.

The year started out on a note that was surprising to most Americans as then Senator Barack Obama began his assent in the presidential primary race. The somber warnings of black mothers and fathers began to fade from their children’s minds and were replaced with the belief that the highest political challenge could be overcome in their time. As his campaign gained momentum, however, the greatest, most direct obstacle to President-elect Obama’s primary victory came not from the feared Bradley effect some were sure would infect the majority of moderate Democrats, but from the words of his former preacher and spiritual leader, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

When the recordings of Rev. Wright first surfaced, the only thing I found appalling was the fact that someone was using them in an overtly racist fashion. When one reviews the four- to ten-second sound bites shown, all the Sheppard’s castigate is the actions and policies of a government. Never did he single out any ethnic or religious groups as many Republican leaders have by enhancing the titles of terrorists through unpacking the overly descriptive adjective of “Islamofasist” terrorists. Nor did he point to a specific region or particular political party within the United States. But the reaction to his comments were as thought the reverend held a map of only Red States in one hand and a framed portrait of the Keaton’s in the other during his denouncement. So I was pleased and encouraged when the candidate not only smothered the growing social fears of those unfamiliar to the average Sunday morning speech of black preachers (which, I assure you, did not stop with the end of the campaign,) but addressed the issue of race in a way no political figure has been brave and/or eloquent enough to do in my brief lifetime.

Then, our next president’s attempts to bridge a divide were burned and its ashes were kicked by the same man he refused to break from. Rev. Wright, a man who has committed his life to working and improving the community that Obama served in as an organizer and politician, seemed to want to make his congregant’s career more difficult and divide the nation for no other reason than the fact that his feelings were hurt and his beliefs were challenged. By personalizing the schism between himself and Obama in the media, Rev. Wright placed his pain and desire to be vindicated above the possibilities of what he could do for the citizens of his church, the south side of Chicago, and the suffering of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged as a whole who, unfortunately, continue to be made up mostly of citizens of color.

In the nation’s marriage to the Obama’s as our first family, the Rev. Jesse Jackson decided to serve “Scandal Old” to Rev. Wright’s “Scandal New.” To me, Rev. Jackson has always had the aura of a great-uncle; distant, yet enduring, and keeper of all of the family secrets. Growing up in California, my father hung a homemade button from a 1980’s convention where Jackson spoke at a podium and my father, in a three-piece suit and an Afro, stood proudly behind him. I paired this image with that of the local activist I found still busy in today’s troubled and swiftly gentrifying Chicago. History come to life.

Then in July, Rev. Jackson reminded us all why his run for the highest office in the land never got off the ground as he was caught off-guard demeaning Obama’s remarks at a recent Father’s Day event and sharing a longing to maim him. The shear amount of irony in this one slip of the tongue is bafflingly disappointing. While one might be more incline to forgive Jackson’s whispered remarks before Wright’s outwardly broadcast ones, he whispered them on Fox News, a place where the same rules of flight in Neverland apply in order to have productive interviews. In his anger, Jackson chose a way of harming someone that was used to degrade and humiliate victims of lynching in Jim Crow south.

Now as the country prepares for a day that was anywhere from 2 to over 200 years in the making (depending on individual viewpoints,) a third obstacle from the black community has set up a road block. Roland Burris, former Attorney General of the state of Illinois and former National Executive Director of Operation PUSH, a group that is now a part of Rev. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition (please see earlier statement on the quantity of irony,) has been selected to fill the US Senate seat once held by Obama under the questionable authority of the federally indicted governor, Rod Blagojevich.

It must be said that as of the publication of this story, Mr. Burris has not been proven to be a part of any illegal or unethical activity, including the allegations which surround the governor. However, in anticipation that there would be problems pushing forth the appointment, Congressman Bobby Rush, representative of a district which includes Chicago’s south side, made a statement at the press conference announcing the decision which alluded to the fact that the Burris appointment would be the only way to keep black representation in the Senate. Using the terms “…hang or lynch…,” he indicated that any form of resistance to this appointment would be a battle fought on the ground cradling the warriors Rush, Jackson, and Wright stood beside to make this a country of limitless possibilities for all.

Of all the incidents of 2008 that reflect on the black community, the shameful circus Mr. Burris has created is the most damaging and degrading. Since his inaugural press conference, he has gone on every available form of media saying that he is not the one who is under investigation, ergo he deserves this appointment. What Mr. Burris has done, conversely, is allow an alleged criminal to use his race as a divisive implement to turn public attention away from his crimes. He has allowed his lust for a Senate seat to override his commitment to the people of Illinois he claims to care for. If he were as qualified as he says he is, he would be the first person selected by either the people in a special election or by an acting governor, instead of sliding in on a deal made at Blagojevich’s crossroads. 2008 showed that people want more from the leaders than competence and experience. They also need to know the show the quality judgment, which Mr. Burris has proven he lacks.

I fully admit that I share Rep. Rush’s commitment to more diversity the senate. But does it not dishonor all of Rush’s work as a Black Panther to allow someone else to work you because of your skin? And if he disagrees, why Roland Burris? As long as we are boiling people down to their base parts, why not a black woman? One of my personal choices would be Sun-Times journalist Mary Mitchell, who is respected, committed to the black community, and has a history of speaking truth to power with or without love. Better yet, why worry about obscure limits like state borders? If we expand our search, the possibilities for qualified leaders of color are virtually limitless. Then we could finally put Dr. Cornel West’s brilliant social theories and positive temperament to use in the development of laws and public policy. The only problem with a Mitchell and West appointment is they are wise enough to know–and care–when they are being hustled.

There is a term my father introduced me to as a teenager at the dinner table. It was popularized in the mid-nineties by Chris Rock (another figure I might consider for my appointee list.) As the head of the house, it was known that Dad got the big piece of chicken. It had nothing to do with subsistence, as a good father would never let you starve. It was about the family showing we appreciated everything that was done for our well being. It was about love and honor.

It is for these virtues that I write this in hope. 2008 proved that the leadership void in the black community has been blown wider than ever before. As people throw around the term ‘Post-race America,’ they seem to ignore the fact if this place exists, there should have risen a wealth of post-racial leaders. But I have yet to see this groundswell of figures asking why it was the two largest groups of people who voted for Proposition 8 in California, a measure to limit people’s freedom, were white Evangelicals and blacks. I do not hear anyone discussing why black college enrollment rates continue to rise as black college completion rates stay stagnant. And it seems that the villains of my generation are the heroes of my father’s and I am left burdened with the weight of the honor I desperately want to bestow on the worthy. May 2009 bring us a reason to lighten our loads.

Join us as we break through the year’s rhetoric and double-speak as simply as we know how, and leave your own equations in the comments. For the historically minded, take a look at 2007’s edition.

Brigid Barry

Thrift shops > American Apparel
Why buy your ill-fitting 70s throwbacks from a misogynist who overcharges when you could buy them cheap and green from the used clothing store across the street?

Brigid Barry is a freelance copy editor based in San Francisco, CA. She is the Associate Editor of Is Greater Than and also writes short fiction and cultural analysis, and knits in her spare time.

Leland Cheuk

The Economy > The Price of Oil > The Popularity of Private Jets

2008 was a very bad year if you were a corrupt politician, Gordon Ramsey, a UK social services worker, a banker investing in oil futures, or a Republican. But 2008 was much worse if you were, say, a private jet company reliant on flying executives of Sean John or the Big Three automakers. Not only did the price of oil cause Diddy to swear off Cristal-loaded private jets early in 2008. The nose-diving economy caused private jets to become a political football when GM, Ford and Chrysler executives flew into Washington D.C. to ask for what ended up being a $14 billion bailout. I hope 2009 is friendlier to companies like Onesky and Privateair so we won’t have to bail them out in June. After all, it’s not their fault that we’re in the bind that we’re in.

Leland Cheuk is is a currently an MFA candidate at Lesley University’s Creative Writing program. His writing has appeared in MostlyFiction, Punk Planet, and other publications. Recently, one of his short stories was selected as finalist in the 2007 Washington Square Review Contest. He lives in San Francisco and is working on a novel.

Leilani Clark

Mushrooms > Anything made by humans

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road mushrooms are the first organic matter to grow after the an apocalypse brings on nuclear winter. While humans fall into cannibalistic disarray, the fungi keep on trucking. Tenacious and communicative, mushrooms are key to a thriving natural ecosystem. They make a simple hike in the woods into an awesome treasure-hunt. In addition, they are damn good to eat.  In 2008, you could listen to mycillium guru Paul Stamets talking about the glorious power of toadstools on just about every media outlet–from books to radio to YouTube. We should pull up a chair, take notes and learn something new that just might save the world.

Leilani Clark has written for Clamor Magazine and the North Bay Bohemian. She loves free media and defending the working class. She writes about more then mushrooms at www.leilaniclark.com.

Paul M. Davis

Reason > Superstition

The election of 2008 wasn’t only a triumph for those of us who have watched the last eight years in horror as the imperial President attempted to drag this new century into the 17th. Indeed, it was a triumph of a reasoned, pro-science, pro-progress mentality over the superstitious beliefs of the Christian Evangelical crusaders. But it was also the year in which the reasonable majority appeared to wipe the collected mung out of its eyes and return to its senses. To wit, the Republican intellectual schism of August and September 2008, in which numerous vocal figures dismissed the party’s insane Evangelical wing in favor of critical thinking. It was also the year in which a realistic appreciation for regulated markets emerged out of the ruins of post-Friedmanite, neoconservative economic policy. It was a year for sober realism over faith in destructive myths, and even if the reality before us is fucked, it’s preferable to living a collective fantasy.

Paul M. Davis is the editor and publisher of Is Greater Than. His Is Greater Than blog is Attencion!

Whitney Dibo

Gail Collins > Maureen Dowd.

Thank god the New York Times finally landed a female columnist who can write coherent, if shrill, commentary. Collins’ editorials around the election season were hilariously poignant and spot-on, as opposed to Dowd (whose idea of a productive use of New York Times editorial space is to write imaginary conversations between famous people). And Collins doesn’t even have a glamour-shot picture, (almost no makeup – gasp!) a sharp contrast to Dowd’s vampy smirk.

Harry Potter > Twilight

As a child of the Potter generation, it seems painstakingly obvious that to even put the two fantasy novels in same league is treason so high even He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named wouldn’t dare do it. Harry Potter is to the Imaginatively Curious as Twilight is to the Sexually Frustrated. I mean – the apple on the cover? Come on.

Whitney Dibo is a freelance writer and also works in the Education Department of Steppenwolf Theatre Company. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 2007 with a degree in English and Political Science.

Levi Fuller

Elective democracy > Direct democracy
In Washington, as in many states, “The People” lately have a huge boner for legislating via initiative.  Every once in a while this ends up being a good thing:  Smart, active citizens can ban together and pass legislation that our elected officials are too afraid or busy to pass (witness our recent “Death with Dignity” initiative).  For the most part, however, it’s a complete, unalloyed disaster that has our legislature and courts scurrying to and fro trying to manage the repercussions.

The most egregious recent example of this “tyranny of the majority” is, of course, California’s Prop 8.  Millions of church dollars went to hammer home the message that “traditional marriage” needed defending from the loony left judges who wanted men to marry men and gerbils to marry ducks and kindergartners to be indoctrinated into the ways of homosexuality.  Another, smaller example from Seattle:  Our City Council recently passed a $.20 per-bag tax on grocery shopping bags to encourage people to get reusable bags and curb the ridiculous waste of resources that occurs all day every day in grocery stores.  This bill was much more moderate than San Francisco’s outright ban on plastic bags, but of course it was still too much for the American Chemistry Council, who banded together to get a recall of this simple, sensible bill on the ballot for next year.  For now, the status of bags in stores is in limbo, and every time I shop at Fred Meyer the checker automatically starts putting my item or items in a bag without even asking.  Elective democracy isn’t perfect, and the initiative process can be a useful tool of last resort, but there are times when we should just let our elected officials do the job we elected them to do.

Levi Fuller plays music, DJs on the Internet, curates a quarterly series of compilations, and generally runs himself ragged in Seattle. www.denimclature.com

Matt Gajewski

Buying fruit at red light-stalled intersections > Buying subprime mortgages at red light-stalled intersections

In previous years, the lane line-tiptoeing hawkers at US-1 and Bird Road near my home were all about subprime mortgages: “Hungry and homeless and need investors for asset-backed securities,” “Will disregard borrower’s past credit history 4 food.” But with the housing bubble bursting, the global economy collapsing, 2008 was the Year of Intersection Fruit: sweet-smelling guavas, succulent mangos, to-die-for tamarinds and tangerines and papayas; investors clearly voicing their preference of juicy, vitamin-rich produce over risky, subprime collateralized debt obligations. Let’s hope that 2009 will be no less delicious, and that our nation’s intersections will remain a cornucopia of discount, indigent-vended citrus for many years to come.

Matt Gajewski hosts Pure Imagination, a radio program featuring darkly comic short stories set to music on 90.5 WVUM in Miami, FL. Listen to past episodes at www.vangloria.net/pureimagination.

Narinda Heng

Real food > Bacon-wrapped, deep-fried, gravy-drowned novelties

While I can see the fun in chicken-fried bacon (and am in awe of the genius behind the bacon weave), real food that can be eaten every day (without giving you a heart attack at 40) is infinitely more interesting. The appearance of people like Michael Ruhlman, Michael Pollan, and Alice Waters in mainstream media advocating more sensible, healthful cooking shows that there is hope that we might be able to fit into last year’s skinny jeans someday.

Narinda Heng is planning to start 2009 unemployed. She’ll be writing at Long Cool Hallway and wherever else she can get a word in.

Rob Miller

Hysterical hyperbole > bland euphemism.
The following are exact quotations from ABC World News Tonight as they have described the economic apoplexy during the past couple of months.
At least as we all get closer to selling pencils out of tin cups (or would the modern day equivalent be flashdrives?), we can rest easy that we will be suitably entertained as we watch the news (even if we might be looking at the TV through an appliance store window like a Dickensian waif cuz our electricity was cut off).  But still….

Thus, in order of appearance:

• Troubling downturn
• Confidence is ebbing
• Contracting economy
• The Dow is losing ground
• Has the Bull market run out of steam
• Grim jobs report
• Panic on the trading floor
• Cascading job loss
• Might send investors heading for the ledge
• It was a bloodbath on Wall Street

See?  Isn’t that more fun?  When we started, you could feel your eyes go droopy with the musty, lifeless talk.  Shit, it’s like you’re in some Econ 101 lecture after spending all night proving you CAN play Quarter Bounce with tequila shots instead of beer.  But by the end of the list, you can almost SEE Chuck Norris starring in the movie version with guts and explosions and falling buildings and cars driving through plate glass windows.
It’s more warming than drinking after-shave lotion.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Rob Miller is the owner and founder of Bloodshot Records.

Laura Pearson

Supporting independent booksellers > Buying books on Amazon or at B&N or downloading digital files to your ebook reader. (Plus, talking all about your Kindle just sounds gross.) As we all know, it’s getting more difficult to be an independent anything, and there are oh so many reasons to support nearby, non-chain stores (e.g., Of $100 spent at a local business, $68 stays in the community; whereas at a national chain, only $43 of your $100 sticks around (www.indiebound.org)). Most importantly, in an age where virtual experience often supersedes the tangible, real-world stuff, the time has come to get in close proximity to actual pages… Bookshelves. Book smells. Or to put it in another, lamer way: In 2k9, acquire a spine.

Laura Pearson is a Chicago-based editor and writer. She has written music news stories, as well as book, zine, and comic reviews, but her favorite subject to write about is people who are both contributing to culture and creating culture.

Erica Phillips

The Beijing Olympics > everything else

The rest of the world got served by China this August. From the awesome spectacle of the opening ceremony, to the mod and exemplar facility architecture, and the over-coverage, obsessive interviews and photo opps. The 2008 Summer Olympic Games was the shiny and bedazzling thing that made us all forget everything else.

We forgot China’s human rights record and the Olympic torch parades through Tibet, when residents were not allowed in the streets unless they promised to yell “Go China” and nothing else. We forgot that NBC was making it censorship-level impossible to find Beijing youtube footage anywhere on the internet. We forgot about the diplomatic mess between Russia and US-backed new “democracy,” Georgia. We forgot about Pakistan and Iraq and Turkey and everything, because China stepped up and we were like “Woah, it might not be all about us anymore.”

Erica Phillips currently splits her time between an immigration law office and the Venus Zine headquarters. She is editor / publisher of globalhuman and has written a few things for Love, Chicago.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Cloud Cult, Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) > Any other new music I heard this year (or last year)
I heard a lot of great music this year, including great new stuff from Sam Roberts and Malcolm Middleton, but I feel that this album really just is 2008. Taste this bit from “Hurricane and Fire Survival Guide”:

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired
I’ll laugh my whole way through the hurricanes and fire
That’s why you don’t wanna bring me down.”

The first Black President of the US was elected. You just try and bring me down. I will laugh my way through hurricanes and fire.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is in the process of building a veritable cornucopia of degrees in physics and astronomy. The black hole of academia is a dark and dangerous place. In a perhaps related story, she also seems to be known as a trouble maker. Her Is Greater Than blog is Disordered Cosmologist Is >.

Elaina Ramer

1929 > 2008
None of the Wall Street dudes who were taking those huge bonuses from dying financial companies really lost much as the markets have crashed and, thus did not throw themselves out the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. Bummer.

The Half Pint (8 oz.) > The Imperial Pint (20 oz.)
At some point a few years ago, I discovered that my fav local pub, the Poet and the Patriot, serves beer in 20 oz. glasses. I was delighted. This year I discovered that consuming more alcohol makes me neither healthier nor wealthier nor wiser and that the Poet also serves beer in 8 oz. glasses. If I’ve got to cut back, I’d rather sacrifice the quantity of my beverage rather than the quality.

The Wide Leg > The Skinny Leg
Just trust me; I’m right.

The Shoes > The Bicycle> The Public Transit > The Private Automobile
This is as much practicality as it is green washing. For those of us who live in urban areas, walking, cycling, and taking transit are things we do and things we could afford to do more often. Each of the things listed above are affected by the price of gas and the political situation (listed from least to most affected). But when gas hits $10/gallon and people are rioting in the streets, you’ll still have your boots and no one is going to set your bicycle on fire.

Elaina Ramer is a fashionista, bike messenger and radical economist living in Santa Cruz, CA. She completed most of a degree in Global Economics before she dropped out of college to pursue enjoying her youth. Elaina blogs about fashion and global politics at frugal and hep dot com.

Boaz Vilozny

pretty good > best
Let’s face it—it was nice being the world’s dominant nation for a while back in the 20th century, but who wants to deal with all the pressure? It’s high time we stepped back and let someone take over as superpower #1 while we get our own house in order. Any volunteers? China? India? Cuba? Anyone? What if we throw in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Boaz Vilozny is a native of Santa Cruz, California, where he is currently completing his doctoral research in organic chemistry at UCSC. When not busy thinking deep thoughts about molecular recognition, he spends time with his family, plays music, reads, and cooks.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times announced that American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If you missed this piece of breaking news while watching Fox and Friends, or didn’t catch it in your RSS news feed, there’s good reason: this wasn’t the old Gray Lady announcing the end of the war, that venerable one-time home of fabulist Jayson Blair, the allegedly leftist mouthpiece that gave safe harbor to WMD cheerleader Judith Miller. Instead the news was broken by the New York Times Special Edition, a mock recreation by a grassroots army comprised of activist groups and individuals.

Responses to the paper were mixed. The popular narratives attempted to parse the project as either a would-be Onion-esque parody, or as a throwback to ‘60s merry pranksterism, one rendered moot by the recent election of a center-right Democrat to President of the United States. Bloggers drilled into the minutiae, pointing out that the faux-Lady didn’t follow the New York Times’ style book or house typography, and obsessing over minor spelling errors. The Times‘ response was one of official bemusement, while media outlets ranging from Fox News to Gawker glibly dismissed the project’s content as a “liberal wishlist”.

The paper was distributed by volunteers on the streets of New York and other major American cities on November 12th. Quickly after its release, activist group The Yes Men claimed sole credit for the paper, a point contested by others involved (the group later released a long, if incomplete, list of contributing groups). Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore was intimately involved in the production of the paper, but left five weeks before its release due to disagreements over its direction. As she explains in this interview with Is Greater Than, the utopian New York Times had as tortured a birth as any major daily newspaper.

PMD: How did you get involved with the fake New York Times project?

AEM: Steve Lambert, who sort of started the whole discussion, invited me, originally to contribute. We had been working on stuff together for awhile beforehand–the AAAFFF–and had developed a really good solid collaboration. He asked me to contribute to the paper, and I was like, “uh, but who’s going to edit?” There was this sense that, like, papers come together sort of magically. I was like, that’s not the way it works. How it works is with someone really dedicated to getting that paper out the door needs to do that. And with something like this, where all the different lies have to come together to form a unique whole that is still believable, well, it was going to take some serious effort. So I did it.

PMD:What was the original concept for the project, and in what ways did the finished product differ from it either in tone or intention?

Photo by Flickr user ConwayL

AEM: Originally, we’d agreed that it would be an anonymous project, that no one would take credit for it, because that’s where the power in this was: in the sense that it had genuinely come from an unseen force of “the people”. I think that’s still a really powerful idea that no one’s really explored artistically, and that’s what’s sort of important for me to put out there. ‘Cause the project turned out to be, ‘a couple guys in New York pulled some crazy prank,’–that’s sort of inconsequential in my mind. At least as activism, although also as art. How does that shift any power structures or misconform to any notions of how the world operates? And there’s another way.

Also, of course, the paper itself changed after I left the project. A ton of stuff was cut–much of it the most engaged critical stuff. Maybe stuff that took on the Times too closely, out of fear, I don’t know. Perhaps coincidentally, most content by female contributors was cut. (Because you know, I was making my ideal paper, and my ideal paper addresses women’s issues and seeks out women writers, and also has a lot more comics and editorial cartoons than most papers we see today). This content shift was actually a much bigger problem than, like, who claimed credit for what. This was where writers–original contributors to this vision–started to get screwed. When their work was changed or dropped without consultation, I mean fake paper or not, that’s really exploitive of people’s labor, and just generally kind of unethical. Made more disturbing by the utopic vision and structure of this paper. Because whose ideal vision of the future includes having their contributions ignored or changed without consultation? Which is sort of a great lesson in how supposed utopias operate, I guess.

But originally the paper was a minor part of the plan, in a way. The end goal was this massive street party, this humungous celebration that people could come by and get sucked up into and everyone would kind of accidently be celebrating the end of the war without ever having thought it through. The paper was the originary element–it would be the thing people were holding up while dancing about the end of the war. Which is, again, still a really great idea: massive street parties to celebrate something that hasn’t exactly happened yet, particularly when we’d originally hoped to do it, over the summer when it just seemed like the Bush Administration, and the war in Iraq, would never end. And neither did this really proceed as planned–the party was fairly modest, as I understand it.

PMD: Since there were a number of activist groups involved, I imagine the initial planning stages were rather democratic, but any publication demands some sort of editorial hierarchy, even a fake publication. How was that internal workflow organized?

Josh Bayer’s editorial cartoon for the Original Fake New York Times

AEM: Right, I mean: publishing is a whole different ballgame from, like, artist’s bookmaking. It demands deadlines, oversight, which you don’t know unless you’ve worked in the industry. Especially if you’re expected to be believable as the New York Times. Generally speaking, the artistic temperament is far too ego-driven to conform to collaborative demands like agreed-upon deadlines. So I’d be working with the writers toward these crazy deadlines, and then the date of the paper would change. That was frustrating, of course, and in terms of the last few months, a pretty interesting publishing problem. Every delay allowed for humongous political changes to take place as the election cycle unfolded. It was intense, reading the paper every single day trying to envision a “solution” to it. And then when the economy was pronounced so thoroughly fucked, it was like, acch! The thing that’s going to make everyone want to party now is totally different than it was a month ago! Although by that time I’d left the project.

But the point is, the place for the democratic participation was these street parties. The democratic aspects of the *paper* were: you send in your ideal news or human interest story, the thing you’d love to read or write if the world were to get totally fixed tomorrow, and I will fix all the other parts of the paper so that your vision is viable. Ha ha. I will make that happen. Although only in text.

PMD: At what point did your interests diverge from the direction the project was taking?

AEM: I’d been really cautious from the beginning that my efforts–and the efforts of the many many people I brought on board this project–not be ultimately co-opted to further forward the brand of the Yes Men. I’ve personally had enough of my efforts going toward brand names I don’t actually believe in, and I’d only agreed to to work on this project as long as it would remain an anonymous project. When I was told much later in the process by one of my collaborators that “it was never the intention to put this paper out anonymously,” it became clear that, at least, everyone had totally different intentions and desires.

Well, and the one thing that’s really important to note is that the paper was done: conceptualized, written, edited, laid out, illustrated, when I left. Even if I didn’t believe in it anymore, I wanted to make sure they had all the pieces in place to do this right. Because it’s a good idea. I think the project that resulted is a tenth as good of an idea as what it could easily have been, however.

PMD: On your blog, you note that you felt that the prank had overtaken the purpose. Did you fear that the prank-like nature of the project was overshadowing the intent? Was there fear that the project would be dismissed as an extension of ‘60’s era, whimsical activism — as it has been, in much mass media?

Photo by Flickr user ConwayL

AEM: From the first time I heard about it, this project was about limiting the degree to which people could dismiss this as silly, a prank, some kind of utopic bullshit, or impossible. Separate from our plans to do this anonymously, we’d also planned this crazy triage system for these street parties, where people who were wearing crazy outfits would go off to this other area and only celebrate, like not distribute the paper at all. People who were too much about, like, “we’re gonna screw the New York Times! Those suckers!” Or people who were too interested in engaging this as a power struggle.

So there was always this concept that this could be dismissed, and I think it was, as you say. “A group of liberals released their wishlist for the new administration,” was the lead phrase in most of the news stories I read. Gaaaah! Like, “Kid Writes to Santa Hopes for Better World!” This is not news! What’s news here, what’s interesting, is that thousands of people banded together to work on something truly radical, truly emergent, something that could have inspired genuine change. But those interests were sidelined.

And so what happened, right, is that The Yes Men here first became the symbol that simply replaced the New York Times as the people in power. For a moment, the positions were reversed. Ho ho! It’s not the New York Times that has all the power, it’s these guys that look and act like the guys at the New York Times and live in the same city and have similar economic and racial and backgrounds. Which is a very disempowering way of thinking about power. As Foucault argues, power actually comes from everywhere, and what I was excited about in working on this project was that we’d proposed a way of articulating that. Power seemingly coming from everywhere.

I was talking to Mark Messing the other night, here in Chicago. He was talking about this project, and here it was immediately dismissed as a kinda funny joke. Which itself is really interesting: the shift in power that actually occurred between the election and, what, eight days later when the fake NYT hit, was tremendous. Already, Chicagoans were like, “New York? Why should I care?” Anyway, he was comparing this turn of events to this film he’d just seen of Fred Hampton talking about the Yippies. That all these white dudes went to jail and a ton of “awareness” was raised about the issues they were talking about, and a ton of money was raised to get them out of jail, and awesome! But in the mean time, Hampton’s out creating a free breakfast program for poor students on the South Side, actually out making real change. My point is not that anyone here is Fred Hampton, but how much “awareness” can you raise before you actually try to make change?

PMD: What is the sense among other groups and individuals that were involved about how this has played out. I don’t expect you to speak for other groups, but to the best of your knowledge, was other groups taking their piece of the credit for involvement an antagonistic move or rather an attempt to set the record straight?

AEM: I’ve heard, and witnessed, a lot of frustration with how this went down. A lot of people felt their efforts were misused and misattributed, but there’s also this sense that, as the editor of a culture paper told me, anyone who speaks up about the weird issues here risks being labeled a naysayer, or “not down with the cause”. I mean, that’s ridiculous. I am clearly down with the cause. I just think our means of achieving ends can always be bettered. Here in particular. And here are some ideas for you! Take them and do something more awesome. It’s really much easier than you can imagine.

But thank god for that the Globe and Mail piece that came out that basically said, “Really? We’re gonna believe two dudes put this thing out and raised $100,000 to do it and printed 1.2 Million papers? I mean, they did lie about the name of the paper.” I was genuinely beginning to believe that there wasn’t a single thinking soul in media anymore. So the record’s being slowly straightened. Although I’d be most excited if every single one of the contributors I contacted stepped up, or gave me permission to post their stuff. It’s genuinely amazing how many people, and who, and where, were on board this thing.

PMD: What is your understanding of the current or potential legal implications of involvement in the project?

Raghda, the UnAmerican Girl Doll, an Iraqi who works as a prostitute and comes with accouterments. Unattributed.

AEM: You know, I was out recently with this man who was like, “But since the paper was given away, copyright doesn’t apply!” And it just made me realize that people still don’t get intellectual property rights issues. Of course both copyright and trademark laws apply–like they applied when that grade school painted Mickey Mouse on its classroom wall, and like when the Girl Scouts sang Happy Birthday or the Macarena or whatever it was. So we were really careful–or I was. Consulting lawyers and really getting into that aspect of it. Of course I did. So when I started working on the paper, there was this really big issue sort of sitting there in the room like an elephant that I ignored for a little while until I couldn’t. And it was this: that we were originally using the framework of the NYT to simply make a fake NYT. Like, we were committing copyright and trademark infringement directly, with nothing underlying it except for the desire to use the stature and form of the Gray Lady for what it was, to release our message. That’s not even parody, that’s just mimicry.

So we started talking about it more, trying to get into what it was about the NYT we wanted to say, which was, “you are a part of–and a BIG part of–these problems, because you failed to cover the antiwar movement, you hired all sorts of fake reporters to tell us lies, some about the war (Judith Miller!) and some more generally, just eroding public trust in journalism for the sake of it, and you accept advertising and sponsor things and own a crazy variety of other media outlets and non-media entities, all with an intent to profit from culture, not document it factually.” And that’s when it got interesting, for me, as this long-standing media activist. That’s when we started writing the corrections page, some of which ended up in the final version. I’m going to post the couple of pages we got up on Democracy Guest List, one of these days. Because compiling all of those things, not just as accusations, but as documented facts, was overwhelming. That’s when it was like, “oh shit. The NYT is a teeny bit abhorrent.”

Of course, we were in consultation with lawyers across the country, had a whole class in law school that took this on as the semester’s project, big name lawyers, small name lawyers, one dude who misspelled “libel.” That was concerning. Some of them are starting to get some action: DeBeers, the diamond company, wasn’t so fond of the culture jammed ad on the Special Edition’s website and started demanding their Internet provider pull it, and the EFF leapt into action pretty immediately. And, you know, so far, the “real” NYT’s put on a good-natured face about the whole thing.

PMD: Were you surprised by the Times’ public bemusement to the project? How has their legal/non-official response to the project differed from their public front?

AEM: No, of course they had to go along with the joke, and the final version of the paper, and the fact that it didn’t address the economic crisis at all, I think it made it easy to dismiss on all sides, as non-offensive, and a step or two away from being timely. But the Times is one of the most protective entities in the world — and how I know this I won’t go into — so I’ll be surprised if we’ve really seen the very last of this. But maybe!

PMD: What are you taking away from this experience about the current activist climate in the United States?

AEM: This is totally a good question. I have been frustrated by the activist climate in the US for awhile–I’m sure most thinking people have been–and this project was intended to revitalize the hope that must drive demands for political change. But that even this dippy utopia-realized, C’mon,-guys!-we-can-do-it!, fake newspaper project has been sacrificed to the demands of the market, to this overriding need to put a big name behind it and dismiss it, that’s been a bummer.

Well, but much of activism right now is so focused on raising “awareness.” In other words, focused on attracting media attention. When I was working with Codepink over the summer, my hopes were to build a website for them so that they could really skip the part about attracting media attention and go straight to telling the stories they felt like weren’t being told. Because we know already that the media is a broken system, and will never get our stories right, because it will only tell the part of the story that sells. So as activists, is it even worth our while to try to get attention from a broken media? I mean, even this project–that aimed to question the legitimacy of the New York Times–was measured in media appearances. Or is it better to go straight to making our own, not in putting out one fake New York Times but generating a regular resource for positive news? Or, as Fred Hampton might argue, is it better to improve our situation now. I feel like, we had a chance with this project to do something radical–put out a fake paper filled with all sorts of good news–but do it in a way that established a new model for collaborative work. And while it didn’t work out that way, I’ve seen a way that it’s possible.

Editor’s note: It must be noted, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Anne Elizabeth Moore was my editor at the defunct Punk Planet magazine, remains a friend, and approached me to join in the fake New York Times project, a request I was unable to oblige due to other commitments.

Truth be told, I have no personal investment in the struggle for lgbtq marriage rights. I’m not all that interested in a patriarchal institution historically used to oppress women. I’d rather explore more creative and liberating expressions of queer love, than conform to such a tired old convention as marriage. Yet I do recognize that there are certain privileges associated with marriage, that everyone should have a right to access. Still, this struggle is not on my list of priorities.

Despite this I was yet another of the many people who voted against Prop 8, who were terribly distraught when it passed, and who joined in street protest to express outrage. This is because I was so moved by the obvious and profound level of hate which motivated and fueled the “Yes on 8″ campaign. These people only sought to further poison people throughout our state with hate against our LGBTQ community. They did so in the face of all the work many people have done and continue to do on the daily to make this place safe for LGBTQ people. So that we can one day walk down streets without any fear of suffering attack because of who we are. So when I saw “Yes on 8″ rallies with large groups of kids and children shouting out derogatory slurs and wielding those terrible signs, I could not be but totally overwhelmed by the hate.

So on a Saturday night earlier this month, I assumed I was attending an anti-hate rally. But that could not have been further from the truth. On stage was some white, dinosaur, les-biatch completely berating and tearing down the entire “African-American community”. Blaming us for the passing of Prop 8, she all but outrightly called Black people ignorant and foolish. She continuously used “us” in reference to gay people and “they/you” meaning black people. And to my surprise, all the folks around me were cheering and hollering at her every indictment of the black community. I learned that night that the racist rhetoric at this rally was in response to the divisive reporting propagated by mainstream media that Blacks voted in Proposition 8.

There are two dangerous underlying assumptions insinuated by this woman speaker and all the news reports. Firstly is that homosexuality is White. And secondly, that communities of color are absolutely homophobic. The reason these assumptions are so dangerous, is that they make me and all queer people of color invisible, as if we don’t exist. These assumptions render my perspective and my own life experiences invisible, and they leave no space for qpoc within the lgbtq rights movement. Just like there was no space for me at that rally. If “us” is the queer community and “they” are black people, then where am I? I wonder if you white gays and lesbians could not see the queer black woman beside you, when you rallied that black people had stolen queer rights.

And just to get this out the way, Black people did NOT make the Proposition 8 vote. The media has hyped the exit poll that “2 to 1 black voters supported Prop 8.” Even if that were 100% true, there’s no way Black people made the election. Anyone who bothered to think for themselves, or maybe even look at ALL the facts of the situation, would immediately see the fallacy of that conclusion. While the Black vote may have favored prop 8, the black vote still represents a minority percentage of the total voting population (Less than 7%!).The majority population in this state is still WHITE, and the majority of the voting population is WHITE. Therefore, even more white people voted for prop 8 than anybody else. The total number of black votes for prop 8 alone could NOT have made or broke the election, but 8 would not have passed without white people. DUH.

That this focus on misinformation is an obvious ploy to distract, divide and conquer the lgbtq rights movement, was totally lost on you all. Instead you white gays and lesbians just gobbled up this bullshit and swallowed hard. While I’m tempted to write you all off as ignoramus maximus, I think the fact that white gays and lesbians were so ready to point the finger of blame at Black people, further exposes the racist assumptions harbored within that community, as well as the lack of space for recognition of intersectional identities.

Last I checked the “yes on 8″ people were leading a very successful campaign of lies and misinformation, confusing prop 8 as an issue of child education. Given all the people who voted in fear based on these lies, how is it that the Black community so unanimously voted in hate and bigotry?

And here’s a question, why is it that the most immediate response of the white gay rights movement in this situation, was to start pointing the finger of blame? Are you all in second grade, is this really the most productive thing that could be happening now? Even I know, with my short few years of organizing, that when you come to the end of an unsuccessful campaign, you come together as an organization/movement/etc. and ask yourselves “what did we do well, what could we have done better, and where do we go from here within a larger strategy?” You don’t go pouting in the streets about whose fault it is you didn’t win!?

But this response isn’t all that surprising given that the average gay/lesbian within your movement experiences a great deal of privilege on account of race&class. And typically it is the people with the most privilege that have the most difficulty holding THEMSELVES accountable to anything, and not just blaming everybody else. In fact, the closest any of you have probably ever come to accountability is your white guilt, and Lord knows that’s not even close!

Fox 11 news happened to catch and feature the rally’s ignoramus supreme on the ten o’ clock news. “We (gay/white) people made Obama president, and they (Black people) left us behind! That’s it, we’re the last minority left now!”

This guy (like many of you I’m sure) voted away his white guilt at the polls a few weeks back. And he clearly thinks that the country purged itself of white supremacy in a single vote last week. Now you poor, poor, white gays and lesbians–you are the last of the oppressed! Alas the tables have turned, and it is us Black people barring you from your constitutional rights. We funded the $20 million “Yes on 8″ campaign of lies and misinformation–oh wait, that was other white people? Well, we contributed the largest percentage of total “yes” votes–no? That was white people too!? Well darn, now none of this making sense…

I realize this letter has gotten pretty long, so I’ll finish by saying this. If you white gaze and lesbiannes are so ready to leave Black people out of your gay rights movement, so be it. Who wants to be where they’re not wanted anyway. We’ll take our beautiful brown selves elsewhere, and start a real rainbow movement. And we’ll take all references to our civil rights movement with us. No more appropriating that legacy. Nope, not allowed. Because how you gonna hate on us, and then allude to our struggles in your commercials. I don’t think so.

Unlike some previous Presidents, Bush’s approach hasn’t been to break the law so much as rewrite it to his liking. In the last few months, his legal counsels have been working overtime to do just that. After playing an active role in ruining the global economy, setting American scientific research back over a decade, alienating most of the global community, and starting two endless wars, how can he add a fitting coda to eight years of scorched-earth governance?

There’s strong indication that he plans on ending his stinking shitpile of a Presidency with the kicker of extreme environmental deregulation. Bush has never had an respectable record on the environment–witness the constant silencing during his Administration of NASA scientist James Hansen and government reports that support independent research into global warming. In these final few months, however, he is ramping up the efforts, using the bully pulpit of Executive power to push through policies adding wholesale environmental degradation to his dubious legacy of toxic policies, toxic assets and now toxic environmental policies.

Courtesy of non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica, a short list of last minute rule changes:

In October, the EPA issued a rule that alters the definition of solid waste, effectively exempting about 1.5 million tons of hazardous material from a rule requiring such material to meet strict labeling, transportation and disposal rules.

Another rule, finalized by the EPA late Friday, asks companies that run confined animal feeding operations to voluntarily apply for permits to discharge waste into waterways. But if the operators don’t think their facilities pollute enough to warrant a permit, they’re under no obligation to get one.

The Bureau of Land Management is deciding whether to issue a rule change that would remove Congress’ authority to place a moratorium on uranium mining. The House Natural Resources Committee is currently using that power to slow a flood of permits to mine near the Grand Canyon.
The EPA wants to change rules that determine whether power plants must install cutting-edge technology to control emissions when plants are upgraded to produce more power. Currently, any plant that is upgraded must install the “best available control technology” if they will pollute more than their annual limit. But the Bush administration wants the limit to be based on hourly emissions, which critics say could lead to an increase in air pollution because upgraded plants can operate for more hours a day.

This is all in addition to Bush’s proposal from this summer to roll back many endangered species regulations so fat, lazy bastards can run their emissions-belching, small-penis-compensating SUV’s on dinosaur bones for a couple more years.

Obama’s team has indicated that the President-Elect intends to reverse many of the Bush Administration policies fairly immediately, such as the ban on stem-cell research. There is doubt whether Obama will be able to reverse all of these last-minute Bush declarations, as Bush and his Machiavellian legal team are wily. Politico reports:

While executive orders and rules that are not yet in effect can swiftly be reversed or altered by Obama’s appointees or his own executive orders, rules that go into effect before he takes office will be extremely difficult to undo. Rescinding a rule would require the new administration to re-start the rule-making process, which can take years and prompt legal challenges. Another strategy that has been talked about lately – getting Congress to disapprove the rules through the Congressional Review Act — carries political risks and has been used only once before.

This is, of course, entirely legal action for a departing President to take. But considering what’s at stake, these are impossibly destructive policies being implemented, and will only serve to further tarnish a legacy that is more toxic than a Superfund site. It’s doubtful that Bush cares much, leaving with the lowest approval rating ever while retaining a dogged belief that his Administration will be redeemed by history’s estimation. Instead, it’s far more likely that history will place this Administration in infamy, in which the legacy of short-sighted policy decisions will cast a long shadow over the country–and world–for decades to come.

One of the difficult things to appreciate about California is just how vast it is. There are clear geographical barriers between its coastal blue communities and its predominantly red inland regions. Most who live in the coastal communities tend to forget that the rest of the state exists. This phenomenon comes to the fore every election season, when liberals are shocked that the bulk of the state shows up at polling places. This convenient ignorance is puzzling–as the California popular vote map from the 2004 election shows, you could handily fit three or four smaller red states into California’s sea of red.

In 2004, 5,509,826 Californians voted for Bush, according to Wikipedia. This was only 43% of the popular vote, to Kerry’s 53%, but in comparison to the voting rolls of smaller avowedly red states, 5,509,826 votes is an enormous number. By comparison, in Indiana in 2004, 1,479,438 voted for Bush, comprising 59% of the popular vote. In Texas–California’s rival by sheer size–4,526,917 people voted for Bush, comprising 61.09% of the popular vote. Nearly as many Californians voted for Bush in 2004 as Texans and Indianans combined. I realize that this is in no ways scientific from a pollster’s perspective–plenty of issues of population density in the regions arise–but it is illustrative of one main point: there’s a lot of fucking conservatives in California.

Driving around the country earlier this year, my Californian wife and I were struck by the disconnect between popular perception of regional politics, and reality. The political reality of this nation is far more nuanced and complex than a simple Electoral College map would suggest. Most striking, however, was after four months of sitting in traffic awash in Obama and Clinton stickers in the South, passing Obama placards outside rural farmhouses in the Midwest, just how regressive and conservative California felt upon returning. We saw far more pickup trucks adorned with Confederate Flag stickers and plastic testicles in rural California than anywhere we traveled in the deep South. It’s almost as if the conservative areas of the state feel the need to overcompensate, proudly showing off their willful ignorance.

To wit: I’m Californian born-and-raised. I’m also the only consistently Democratic voter in my immediate family, which includes far more Evangelicals and born-agains than College grads.

It’s convenient for liberal coastal Californians to glibly dismiss the country between California and NYC as “flyover states”, and entirely reasonable that the rest of this enormous country responds by dismissing California as a den of far-left elite with no appreciation for the concerns of the working class. Not only are both perceptions completely off-base, but they suggest that liberal and progressive Californians need to keep their house in order before they cast blame at the rest of the nation.

Look no further than this year’s Proposition 8, which aims to rescind California’s recognition of same-sex marriage. A recent Survey USA poll shows support for the measure by a troubling wide margin, 47% for it as opposed to 42% against.

Far-right Propositions are common in the state’s elections. The Evangelical base loves them–considered direct government by some, a drag on the State’s judicial system by many, they allow big-pocketed Republican operatives an opportunity to push back against the population-dense liberal strongholds of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

For decades, Californians have called for two states, as the cultural gap between the Northern half of the state’s coast and the South is wide–denizens of Silicon Valley and Hollywood consider themselves to be in cultural opposition to one another. The gaudy excess of Hollywood versus the faux-ascetic Prius-driving of the Bay Area is a persistent contrast, but it’s a niggling difference between two areas that have fundamentally similar political beliefs. It’s also a major distraction from the real cultural and political divide in the state.

This is a mistake. The glib NorCal latte liberals, the undergrad anarchists who consider voting to be an endorsement of the evils of global Capitalism, and the wealthy Hollywood kingmakers should be well advised of the Conservative and Evangelical giant lurking in their own midst. As should the rest of the country, which incorrectly–and dangerously–considers California to be eternally blue.

Leland Cheuk

Tonight we are finally the city on the hill.

But tomorrow and come late January when Obama is sworn into the office, will we still be? Will Obama make the right decisions and get us out of Iraq? Will he make the tough decisions necessary to restore fiscal and executive responsibility back to the White House in this economic meltdown? Will he resist the urge to compromise, both personally and politically, as Clinton did? And will Obama lead and inspire as he has the potential to do? Yes he can. And yes he did, for one night. But will he continue to?

Leland Cheuk is a novelist living in San Francisco.

Paul M. Davis

I have never been so proud to be an American citizen as I was last night, as McCain took the stage to deliver a speech that may go down in history as one of the most dignified and eloquent concession speeches ever. Barack Obama — a Constitutional Law professor, a black man in what remains a bitterly divisive nation — became our President-elect. And it is good. For the first time in eight years, we can all hold our heads high as citizens of the world, as people celebrate in the streets — not only in Chicago, IL, not only in the United States, but around the world, from Canada to Kenya, France to Japan.

We have much work to do, and Obama can not possibly fix it all. There are many things that must be done that are not even on his docket. Once again, civil rights for homosexuals in this country have been shot down, with the passage of Proposition 8 in California. We have a Constitution bowing under the weight of precedents set by the George W. Bush administration. We are in two wars that no one has a idea how to resolve.

Let’s not make the mistake that Clinton supporters did in 1992, pinning unrealizable expectations on a single charismatic, yet inevitably flawed, figure. For many readers of and contributors to this site, Obama’s administration will take an at-times-frustratingly centrist approach to governing. There are many inequalities in this nation and this world which the Obama administration will fail to redress.

Still, this is a day for celebration. The good that Obama will do for this nation — and has already done, by sheer glint of winning the office — will reverberate for generations to come. He is truly this nation’s first President of the 21st Century, as opposed to our current lame-duck-in-chief, who seemed to govern as President of the 18th Century. But for all the caveats, with Obama in office, this country will finally move forward.

Paul M. Davis is the editor and publisher of Is Greater Than.

Peter Koht

Halfway through the Chicago speech last night (and three quarters of the way through the champagne bottle) I had the rogue thought that this election represents a new model of activism and a much better approach to building a coalition.

The Clintons and Kerry were representative of the old guard, anti-war 60s ideology tempered by the gradual accumulation of wealth, privilege and habit. But Obama’s volunteer army and his embrace of social media allowed many more people to actively participate in the election rather than criticize on the sideline.

I think the two David’s deserve a lot of credit for expanding the base, and their efforts to target rural “red” areas will continue to pay dividends down the road. I just sincerely hope that Obama realizes that his large electoral college win will be served by governing pragmatically and working with the fiscal conservatives to fix infrastructure and the finance system before tackling health care. In other words, don’t go out and make HR 1 about gays in the military.

Peter Koht is a freelance journalist based in the San Francsico Bay Area.

Levi Fuller

I would not be surprised to learn that there have already been more words written about the 2008 Presidential Election than about any election in history, and that total is only going to increase geometrically over the next days, weeks and years. I don’t feel the need to add too much to that total, but I do want to say that yesterday evening, as it started to become apparent that Barack Obama was indeed going to become our 44th President, I realized that my attitude toward the majority of my fellow Americans (and people in general) could be softened in one fell swoop. For the majority of voters to sit through that campaign – the lies and the slander and the fear and the exaggerations and the guilt-by-association attacks – and to see through it all, and to rise up and speak clearly and say “we choose That One,” instilled a faith in my fellow man that I didn’t think I could ever have. I just hope that the energy and positivity I saw last night – running through the streets of Seattle high-fiving strangers of all ages and colors – can be carried through the next 4 (8!) years and beyond and really bring this country the change and hope it needs.

Levi Fuller is a Seattle-based musician, and the man behind the Ball of Wax compilation quarterly.

Rob Miller

I want to drink from the Kool-Aid, I really do. And, yes, this is a tremendous victory for reasons symbolic and beyond; the rose-colored big media would not let me forget that, and the self-congratulatory mythologizing of America’s story was in its full throated glory. But let us not forget that there were still 50 million plus voters who chose to support the losing party, despite an eight year administration that has piled civil liberties, foreign relations, the environment, science, fiscal responsibility, human rights and reasoned discourse on to a flaming shit wagon and kicked it down a hill. There is, at this writing, only a 6% difference in the popular vote. Let us take the good, verging on euphoric feelings and energy of last night, the culmination of so much activism and political engagement, and keep them stoked. It is only through persistent personal action on a massive scale that the potential of last night will have a chance. The fact of Obama’s election is truly remarkable, to be sure. A victory, yes, but also just a first step.

Rob Miller is the founder and owner of Bloodshot Records.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

My people, we have arrived. And no, I don’t mean my American people. I mean Black folks. You see, I grew up Black in a country started by and run by white folks. I grew up learning at school that the only great achievements of people who looked like me were not being slaves anymore and no longer getting beaten in the streets just for trying to sit at a lunch counter. I grew up being asked to celebrate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slave holders — people who took advantage of their right to own people who looked like me. I grew up in a country where it was understood that Blacks don’t become President. So I grew up Black in America, but I never felt American.

So, Black folks, we have arrived. As I spoke to my 90 year old grandmother tonight, the lady who did the hard work of leaving her homeland (Barbados) to start over in the US, the lady who was at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, I cried tears of joy because my grandmother lived to see the day. Because I lived to see the day. The day when a Black man became President. The day when white folks thought the content of his character mattered more than the color of his skin. The day when young Black men and Black women saw, really saw, that we can and should tear down the barriers put before us and our communities.

So, today I am a different woman. I am a woman who knows that she has a problem with Obama’s Zionism. I am a woman who doesn’t want to bomb Pakistan. I am a queer woman who thinks she deserves equal rights. Who wants universal health care for everyone. Who wants to end sweatshop labor. Who wants and hopes for a lot of change that Barack Obama may not care to make.

But today I have faith that the young Black or Latina or Chinese woman who will commit to that kind of change, the kind that I believe in, now knows that her time is arriving. And I realize that, at 26, I am one of those women. Si se puede!

O, let America be America again — 

The land that never has been yet — 

And yet must be — the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME — 

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Langston Hughes

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American living in Ontario, Canada, working on a PhD in theoretical physics.

Heather West

Why haven’t we heard from Bill Clinton on the election of Barack Obama? Were no journalists camped in front of his office in Harlem the night the first black man was elected president? This seems highly out of character for an attention addict like our former President. After a numerous google searches, I finally found this statement from Hillary, “Tonight, we are celebrating an historic victory for the American people. This was a long and hard fought campaign but the result was well worth the wait.” The full story can be found here. Pretty weak statement on the enthusiasm scale.

Clintonian reaction aside, I am proud to live in a country that elected a black man president. For Christ’s sake, it’s a recent development to let blacks play quarterback in the NFL! Though my fellow citizens are surfing on a wave of rainbows and unicorns, I can’t help but point out that it probably wouldn’t have happened if the economy hadn’t tanked, taking the retirement money of countless Americans down the drain. It’s a shame that it took such tragic circumstances to galvanize us into action, but the end result is the same, the long, ugly era of Republican rule is at an end. The real work is coming, and I’ll put my faith in Barack Obama because I believe he will surround himself with fine statesmen/women who’ll give him honest feedback and help find solutions to our country’s seemingly insurmountable problems.

Heather West is a publicist and freelance writer living in Chicago.

A. Zell Williams

There are three words that have never meant as much to me as they do now.

As I stood in a park smothered by love and fear, a new friend and I watch with an odd feeling between us. She is a foreign student from France fortunate enough to be in a country as they evaluated how they would enter the future. I was born in that country and had long before had become cynical, seeing that the rest of the people I was supposed to call fellow countryperson could naively be tricked, mislead, or feed lies about someone patriotism based on hands held over hearts or coat accessories.

But we shared the experience of it all. Children running from one another as their mother tried to get them to look at the high screen aglow with pundits and analyst. The flyers that littered the ground and hands reminding us that there would, indeed, be a tomorrow with much turmoil and injustice. The man who paced the same fifteen feet over and over for twenty minutes, fist clenched and tugged between his chest and the night in a manner that appeared out of his control.

I told myself I would watch from a friend’s house with the plan of sipping drinks, sheltered in my usual distain for crowds. However, a great teacher reminded me that there are few moments in which time becomes tangible. As much a part of you as your sex or skin and you can wear that moment throughout the course of your life. But time is also fluid. It can pass you by unless you are active in its capture so it can refresh you in days of drought and struggle.

I stood in a park wrapped with joy and hope. I stand at corner, not sure what awaits my turn. But now I can say — fear quenched and hunger fed — I was there.

A. Zell Williams is an award-winning playwright living in Chicago whose works include BLOOD/MONEY, The Woman I Live With, and A Motherless Child.

Kira Wisniewski

“10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1”

And the crowd goes wild!

I spent my election night in our nation’s capital watching the results party in an environmental non-profit office. (Side note: I was wearing an H2Obama shirt, which the enviro-kids loved, thinking it wasn’t legendary NY hardcore band.) The atmosphere was festive, the drinks were plentiful, the food was organic and the cups were made from corn. We watched with high anticipation the countdown until the polls closed in California and Obama surpassed the 270 votes necessary to become our president. Everyone in the room counted down the seconds New Years Eve style and then the room erupted in a moment of absolute happiness. I had chills for over 45 minutes. Then we took it to the streets. Right to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave where we joined by tons of other people jubilantly celebrating at the future home of Barack Obama. As the crowd started cheering “USA! USA!” I felt connected, proud and hopeful in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.

Kira Wisniewski currently lives just outside of our nation’s capitol and continually tries to do her part in fighting the good fight, and is currently working with the Capitol Letters Writing Center.

“I don’t know who he is. I heard he has a grandmother in Africa he doesn’t care for. Just today, he said he doesn’t even know his aunt. What kind of person doesn’t take care of his family? They say he might be Muslim. They say he wants to turn this country into a communist state. We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know what kind of person he is. It’s like he came out of nowhere. ”

To which I answered, “He didn’t just come out of nowhere. He was a senator in Illinois, you know.”

My mother was silent.

“You did know that, didn’t you?”

“Really?” she said. “He was a senator?!”

And so today, my mother, an immigrant and resident of the United States for over 30 years, votes for a President. Her vote counts as much as mine. And today, both of us are taking the same standardized test that we take every four years as part of the “No America Left Behind” test. Whether you are white America, black America, red America, blue America, real America, un-real America, Joe the Plumber America or Joe Biden America, you can choose to take this test and this year’s test is, at least so the reporters keep telling us, a historic and monumental one.

I would agree that this election has been one of the most interesting of my relatively brief lifetime. If you just took the top of the tickets on its own, this election would already be a fine Rob Reiner film. America’s first viable African-American candidate (and first oratorically gifted candidate since Kennedy) versus a war-hero maverick senator who never flew straight or walked straight but always talked straight. And then Sarah Palin happened and suddenly, the campaign seemed to have enough storylines for several reality show seasons. And now, as we come to this test, it seems that the campaign has run as long as Survivor has.

Take away the tassels, the lace, the fringe, the breathless daily storylines and the thrice-a-day poll of polls, and the campaign, judged on substance, has not amounted to anything historic or monumental. Policy-wise, both candidates are proposing tax cuts, all kinds of spending, a way out of Iraq, and ways to increase health care coverage and save social security. Take away the helping-the-middle-class rhetoric from the Obama camp and they might as well be running a Republican platform from the 1980s with a few nostalgic nods to progressives for early childhood medical care or getting out of Iraq. Obama’s platform is coherent, modern, and frankly, relatively moderate. He’s winning in the polls because he’s a gifted communicator, not because he’s had a single original idea.

As for McCain, he must wonder what might have been. What would have happened if he was the coherent Republican, and not Obama. What if he didn’t choose Sarah Palin when she was so obviously ill-prepared? What if he chose to run on the issues instead of choosing to pin his campaign hopes to reminding America who the hell Bill Ayers was? And therein lies the biggest miscalculation of the McCain campaign if he loses today: Steve Schmidt’s failure to recognize that there’s a statute of limitations on the guilty acts of people. If Bill Clinton ran for president again in four years, do you think Karl Rove’s people would be able to energize their base enough to win an election by slinging mud on the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Probably not. No one cares; it was that long ago. That would be roughly twenty years after the fact in 2012. Bill Ayers committed his terrorist act 40 years ago. The only people who care are 1) those old enough to remember the Weather Underground clearly, and 2) crotchety enough to still be outraged by it. That’s not the demographic that’s going to win an election, especially with so many fewer Republicans after eight years of W.

But that said, McCain hasn’t lost yet. Stranger things have happened. I’d put a McCain upset win somewhere between the Giants beating the Patriots in the last Super Bowl and Texas Tech toppling Texas last weekend. In the ”No America Left Behind” four year program, on any given November Tuesday, anything can happen.

So will we pass this test? Will America be left behind by the likes of Germany, Mozambique, Argentina, Liberia, the Phillippines, Ireland, Chile, India, Peru, Fiji, and Bolivia, all countries that have elected a woman or a representative of an ethnic minority head-of-state in the past two decades? The citizens of some of those countries have discovered that while the ethnicity or gender of their heads-of-state may have been groundbreaking, the novelty wears off quite quickly. At the end of the day, it’s still about choosing the best candidate on the question of substance. And on that count, Obama has certainly run a campaign that more than made up for its lack of originality by staying on that little message about CHANGE from the very beginning way back when (oh, I can hardly remember New Hampshire it was so long ago…back when Jeff Probst’s Patagonia shirts were still fresh and crisp).

Now if only I could remember whether Obama is Muslim or not…

After almost a full hour of rehearsed lines and poorly veiled condescension, Obama explained why Joe-The-You-Know-What may have to pay more taxes if he operated a business which earned enough revenue to compensate him with $250,000. Seeing a moment where the socially awkward septuagenarian could fain a bond with a public who was steadily becoming more uncomfortable even contemplating what might constitute a McCain Presidential Doctrine, he looked into the camera, grinned, and said, “Congratulations, Joe. You’re rich.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as though McCain was talking to me. It was like a one-man show when the audience realizes they are the ex-lover, the mother, or whoever else is in the room with the performer. I understood that I was in John McCain’s production of Mister Smith Goes to Washington, except Mister Smith was an anti-hero and Washington was studio apartment in Roger’s Park.

But then he laughed. The scene was over and like a high school drama student, he laughed at the idea that $250,000 a year was somehow not a great deal of money. But what I found more disappointing was that in the middle of an economic crisis that everyone from Nobel Laureates to Barber Shop Lincoln-Douglas debaters have labeled as the worst financial event sense the Great Depression, no one in print, radio, or televised media has mention the fact that if JTP does bring home $250,000 annually, he is indeed financially rich.

The issue is a battle on many cultural and economic fronts. As a writer, I feel the battle over “Richness” is best waged on the field of language. Webster.com defines ‘rich’ as, “Having abundant possessions and especially material wealth.” It goes on to give additional definitions for quality and color, but the first definition is at the heart of the problem with American’s views on economy.

Our culture is built on consumption, most notably proven after 9/11 when the person currently occupying our highest elected office told us to go and shop as though a new washer/dryer combo or plasma TV would bring back the thousands of dead or dying. My generation, which was born when the seeds of the current economic fallout were freshly planted, had grown up with the idea that being an American meant constantly consuming. Our cheap Playmates’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…well, are cheap, so Mom goes an gets another and another and the matching bomb-dropping blimp, and the pizza shooting tank, and the NES to play the game on, and etcetera and etcetera. To paraphrase a common saying, our only tool is a dollar, so every problem looks like a sale.

As art and life are known to flatter each other, we have taken to celebrate being rich in popular culture not as the end of a journey of struggle and work, but simply as a state of being. Then we do our best to imitate this imitation. I have never understood the lore or either Sex in the City or Entourage. In fact, I have found it mildly terrifying that I am part of a generation that would actively observe others doing nothing but constantly consuming or finding other ways to consume. But my peers are not only entertained by this pointless obsession with materialism, they lift these figures up as relatable oracles, asking themselves in everyday situations, “What would Carrie do?”

My hope for the future lies in the fear of what is assured to come. This is only the beginning. There is no “Magic Bullet” bailout package that is ever going to fix overnight what the generations of consumption has done; at least, not a moral one. Our relatively early success in the brief existence of this nation was bought on the backs of terrorized natives, kidnapped slaves, and exploited immigrants. Even our economic dominance in the twentieth century is tied directly to wars and the creation of the military industrial complex and my generation (and at least the following two generations) is going to have to drastically change our concept of “rich.”

To put it bluntly, what our parents and grandparents considered the “American Dream” is about to become significantly less attainable for more Americans. Fewer of us will travel the world, or at least less regularly. Home ownership is not going to be base of our retirement plan (which probably should have happened in the late 1990’s.) Yet, when I tried to express this to a friend and peer recently, they sneered and asked, “So do you expect us to live in mud huts, or something?”

There it is, my fellow Millennials. The issue at hand: Will we be able to stop equating our dominance with ownership?

Unlike our grandparents who experienced the effects of the Great Depression, or our parents who faced and absorbed the effects of the draft, the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, the Feminist Movement, and at least one major energy crisis, we lack a varied picture of wealth and access. Wealth and access were the terms John McCain was striving to describe, and Joe has a great deal of both. But the fact that few have addressed the great difference between cutting consumption, and Scrooge-McDuck-wealthy, tells me that we are astonishingly unprepared for what we are about to go through.

This is, of course, with the belief that my fellow citizens are also unprepared to turn back the clock of social justice we have strived to uphold. Right? Might we be willing to give less food aid and protection to countries that truly know poverty — another term that is rarely discussed but heavily experienced here and abroad. Are we going to maintain our habit of defining ourselves by the size of our IPhones and the bags under our shoulders? Or are we going to do what those who came before us could not; learn to say that enough – or more accurately, the abundance (the wealth and the access) that I already have – is enough?

Even as sweat beads visibly form on his forehead, McCain slaps on that famously awkward grin and tells the cop (who’s now reaching for his handcuffs) that his reckless decision to drive drunk was actually the best move of his career. But even as he says it, McCain appears woozy. He doesn’t seem to believe the claim himself.

John McCain is not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate back in August. His campaign was about as exciting as watching paint dry before Palin stepped onto the scene clad in $150,000 GOP-sponsored clothing. But after the Republican National Convention, the McCain-mobile was zooming through the news cycle with renewed speed and a brand new hot-pink paint job. Some pundits were claiming it was the shrewdest political move the Republican nominee could have made — given his propensity for being boring and old.

But the American people are not so easily fooled, as it turns out. Sure, they fell for the hockey mom act for a short time (who isn’t susceptible to emotional blackmail in the form of a special-needs child being held at the RNC by his 4 year old sister?) but most of America is wising up to the real Palin: a 633-day (312 of which she spent in her hometown Wasilla – population 9,780) governor of a state comprised of 670,000 people with zero foreign policy experience and frighteningly little knowledge of the American constitution. This is a woman who, in an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric, could not name one single Supreme Court Case with which she disagreed (say Dred Scott for crying out loud!) or one newspaper she reads with any regularity (just say the New York Times for god’s sake!) and has now failed to adequately describe what exactly the Vice President does on four separate occasions. It’s almost too much for even Saturday Night Live to handle.

In the face of these embarrassing revelations about his VP pick (and plummeting poll numbers), McCain still asks the electorate to believe that Palin was, in fact, the perfect choice. More than that, McCain wants the public to believe that HE still thinks she was the perfect choice, and will be ready to lead our divided country through wartime and economic crisis if his 72-year old body was to suddenly give way. It’s like some bizarre reversal of Stand-by-Your-Man – but this time it’s Stand-By-Your-Obviously-Incompetent-Running-Mate. Not quite as catchy, but definitely more dangerous.

In an interview with radio talk show host Don Imus on Wednesday, McCain went a step further and actually asked the American people to buy that Palin was “the most qualified VP nominee in recent memory.” The American public can be impressionable, but we are not flat-out stupid. It takes one Google click to figure out that Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense, Al Gore was a member of Congress for 16 years and George H.W. Bush was Director of the CIA before they all became Vice Presidential nominees. Sarah Palin is more qualified than these nominees, Senator?

Yet with a straight face, McCain shamelessly asks American voters to believe pure fiction — or should I say, fairy tale?

You are really pushing your luck here, Senator. Some Americans might sincerely like Palin for being a small-town mayor with conservative values, but few would call her the most qualified VP pick in recent memory unless they are experiencing an staggering bout of amnesia.

But writing fiction (particularly biographical fiction) seems to be the name of the game this election season. The McCain camp has really done a phenomenal job of crafting Sarah Palin’s lofty narrative — the supposed reformer, the purported Washington outsider, the no-frills hockey mom. If only it were remotely true – for starters, none of the hockey moms I knew growing up had tanning beds in their homes, and $27 million of pork barrel spending for tiny Wasilla, Alaska seems like an awful lot for a mayor ignorant to the Washington game. Not to mention that $223 million intended for Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that Palin kept and used for state pet projects. Palin’s extravagant requests actually landed on McCain’s list of “objectionable pork” a few years ago, before the two became soulmates.

But the gig, it seems, is up. Polls suggest that most Americans are no longer buying the Palin myth that is being so unabashedly pitched to them- not even the suburban white woman she was meant to target. The latest MSNBC poll actually shows the “Palin effect” has been more detrimental than the “Bush effect” to McCain’s campaign. Sure, some Americans are still caught up in her catty humor, small-town shout-outs, and folksy rallies, but fewer and fewer are buying the act every day. I even have a suspicion that McCain himself isn’t buying it anymore – just watch his latest interview with Brian Williams. He sounds, well, like a guy who just blew a .32 trying to tell a cop he’s not wasted. But at this point he and Palin are inextricably strapped in, and have no choice but to careen toward the finish line with the entire GOP in tow. This is one crash I don’t want to miss.

This isn’t a letter in support of the superficiality of the Hipster culture. Chicago is home to more hipsters than anywhere in the Midwest; they have overrun Milwaukee avenue with the trendy thrift stores, their clubs dot Wicker Park and Lincoln Park (and are making inroads into Humbolt Park, the South Loop and Pilsen) and their chic, yet totally confusing, band stickers are on every light pole and every abandoned store front up and down Division, Grand, North and Milwaukee for blocks in Wicker Park. Most hipsters in Chicago are refugees from the choking consumer culture of the suburbs, home to more people in Illinois than the rest of the state, who are mostly working and middle class white folks. Contrary to Adbusters’ demographers, Hipster culture is definitely not an exclusively white, upper class phenomenon. Many Hipsters are refugees from oppressive working class cultures. You’ll find that most born and raised Chicago hipsters are people of color trying to build their own identity from the stifling expectations of their parents and importantly, the church (And if you forgot, white people are a minority in Chicago). Chicago Hipster culture has taken from “radical” punk, emo, metal, hip-hop, Puerto Rican, Mexican and many more cultures.

From reading your essay it seems that the reason you judge Hipster culture as the “dead-end of Western Civilization” is because it lacks an ambiguous and undefined notion of “authenticity” and that it lacks an explicit challenge to authority. Hipster consumer culture does not challenge capitalism, but singling out people who wear skinny jeans, bug sunglasses, or shop at thrift stores over those who wear Cubs jerseys and fight after nights of drinking at Wrigelyfield bars seems unfair. Clothing, music taste, etc. seems pretty value neutral. My opinion is that your singling out of Hipsters is a Freudian projection our movement’s secret, collective shame at creating Hipster culture and our subsequent failure to mobilize it politically.

One could say that my own organization, Students for a Democratic Society, is largely an expression of those that helped define the current Hipster culture. Unlike the old SDS, which took flight in college towns in the 60’s, the new SDS has largely exploded in urban centers, from students who live in Hipster neighborhoods. You’ll find more SDSers at an art institute than at a state school; you’ll find more skinny jeans and bug sun glasses at our conventions than blue jeans or Adidas sportswear. SDS however, like the rest of America’s political left (including Adbusters), has largely failed to expand past our own cultural ghetto, and now we have adopted our own past time of jeering our cultural progeny, the Hipsters. But we haven’t asked why most of these people have chosen to opt out of “politics”.

First, we have to drop the double standard. Expecting more from one community over all the other communities we could have singled out is patently unfair. We should ask with the same conviction why sports fans, or why metal fans, or why most women have stayed away from politics. Blaming a lack of political commitment on an entire group’s superficiality is a sorry and dangerous rationalization, especially when Hipsters are becoming the dominant demographic of global youth. We need to break with our traditional excuses that have reinforced our own “radical” elitism. Political organization is a process of building relationships with people and then progressively leaning on those relationships to build a similar commitment towards liberation from those being organized.

Your article is part of our collective, though irrational, set of higher expectations made on Hipsters. Why should Hipsters be more disposed to join the merry-go-round of stale and pointless meetings, protests and police stompings? Building relationships starts with meeting new people, something that has been de-prioritized by our movement behind online debates on the meaning of “violence” and criticizing irrelevant Marxist wing-nuts. If the same energy was put towards throwing parties when most schools start on September 2^nd, where we could meet a hundred new contacts at each SDS chapter, as will be put towards driving all our people to the DNC/RNC and subsequently paying their legal costs, SDS could expand ten-fold. People haven’t come to our protests in front of empty recruitment stations because they know it won’t make a difference. We need to be out in the neighborhoods where those going into recruitment centers live, organizing them to engage in power structures that affect them.

As a movement we need to reevaluate our targets. Sure multi-national corporations need to be toppled, but so do our corrupt local aldermen, who win Chicago elections in student wards (voting districts in the city) with a meager 3,500 votes. Our movement talks a big talk about direct democracy; why can’t we start holding neighborhood assemblies to talk about how to challenge the crooks in local office and local boardrooms? Empty lots in student wards can be used to grow food that can be stored and cooked at community meals at the lofts that Hipsters throw parties at. Hell, why don’t we get in with the best DJ’s in town and make a few jones off those Hipster parties we so despise? All politics are local, and local politics means encouraging people to vote early and often.

Adbusters, you are free to take me up on my suggestions and to call me on my own bullshit if I don’t live up to my own talk. But right now you are in the hot seat and I’m calling out your condescending bullshit. Hipsters are people too, and criticizing them without suggesting a strategy to transform and mobilize them makes you come off as pompous and arrogant as the Hipster connoisseurs of cheap plastic jewelry, thrift store fur jackets in July and obscure emo-core bands we all lament.

This article is crossposted from Next Left Chicago. Photos by Flickr users brainsik and dyobmit, used under Creative Commons Attribution license.

Prior to this year’s close race between Obama and Clinton, this idea seemed plausible. The Republican party has been incredibly skillful in recasting itself as being “no longer the home of old segregationist white men”, defining itself as a post-identity-politics party divorced from the country’s legacy of sexism and racism. The Bush administration has exemplified this new approach by placing a number of minorities in some of the highest positions of power—Condaleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Alberto Gonzales—who have all functioned as strangely race-less and gender-less figureheads of inclusion.

It can be a seductive illusion. Regardless of your take on the individuals’ policies or ideologies (such as Gonzales’ sheer disregard of the Constitution), its undoubtedly historical to have a black woman serve as Secretary of State or a Mexican-American serve as Attorney General. But peel a bit beneath these ostensibly forward-thinking appointments, and you find good old boys hiding behind campaign strategies and reams of demographic and marketing research.

There’s a curious trajectory in the Republican move to portray itself as the party of inclusion. It’s difficult to pinpoint when this became a strategy, as opposed to the blatant race-baiting of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Clarence Thomas’ seat on the Supreme Court is the most obvious marker of this logistical sea change.

Such appointments are merely distactions from the party’s roots—and its continued, hidden, retrograde attitudes. On matters of race and gender, the Republican party has a dismal history, being a place for old white men who still yearn for the days of segregation, for evangelicals who blame victims for rape and abuse, and base their views on same-sex rights, sex education and abortion on superstition, not an alleigance to liberty. This is the party of George Allen and “macaca”, of Trent Lott and his segregationist hero Strom Thurmond, of Orrin Hatch and the “Good Ol’ Boys Roundup”—all relatively recent, racist outbursts from the post-Clarence Thomas Republican Party’s id.

The few remaining members of the party with a meager amount of historical literacy like to point to the Republican party as the party of Lincoln but that’s ridiculous—the Republican party of Lincoln’s time bore no resemblance to the party we now know, and its’ closest modern analogue would be the Democratic party.

The reaction of McCain/Palin audiences in recent weeks to Obama’s candidacy has revealed the racist and xenophobic undercurrent of much of the Republican “base”, if not its inherent sexism—though I’ve yet to meet a woman who isn’t waiting for the rapture who thinks that Palin represents her. Palin stands as an exemplary case of the party’s keen ability to find individuals who abandon the concerns of race or gender to be a beneficiary of the Republican party’s un-Affirmative Action initiative.

McCain cried fowl in last night’s debate about the associations between his campaign and supporters that consider Obama a “terrorist” who should be “hanged”, but this just continues the party’s policy of obfuscating its retrograde attitudes on race and gender. Palin and McCain have skated through these issues relatively unscathed, using proxies to do the dirty work. All the way from anti-Semitic Republican operative Andy Martin’s disturbingly effective efforts to cast Obama as Muslim, to Fox News’ outrageous headline last night that suggested Colin Powell’s “hip-hop dancing” was a sign he would endorse Obama, the racist undercurrent of the party is revealing its scales during this campaign.

As we can see from recent defections of Republican die-hards such as David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, and Ross Douthat,there is no place in the party left for decent, educated and intelligent individuals who are fiscally conservative and socially progressive. All that McCain and Palin have left is the base, the virulent mass of angry white Americans who are proud of their ignorance and blame immigrants and affirmative action for the failed economic policies of Wall Street, global bankers, and the post-Reagan Republican party. They and their proxies have shown the party’s seething underbelly; what’s worrying is what will come now this beast is unleashed.