Revolution, baby

Regime change begins at home. After dropping off a candidate at the airport (5:15am!!!!), and killing time with breakfast--and after having been awake since 3:00 with job-stress related insomnia--Dharmonia and I found ourselves at the polling place at 7:00am. As our vice-provost just said to me "we used to be down the corner in the broom closet. This year, we got the big table." In this county--the reddest county in the reddest state, the place that Junior thinks of as his "base" ("leaders" like Junior don't have a "base"--they're just fencepost turtles who think everything beneath them that put them in leadership positions is theirs by inherited privilege)--over 1000 more Democrats than Republicans employed early voting options. That has never happened in Lubbock County before, but we are, as a result of a whole combination of factors that only have very little to do with the candidates, on the cusp of a historic watershed election cycle.

Barack Obama is not my guy--my guy is out of the race, though probably (like Howard Dean and Jimmy Carter) probably doing even more good now than if he was in the race--and the real Black President, my hero, is long gone.

But he'll do, baby. Standing up against the Pathetic Pygmies and hate- and fear-mongers on the other side, and the war criminals of the outgoing administration, he'll do. I have huge respect for Hillary Clinton's guts, brains, political acumen, and basically sound motives as a leader, but the scumbags running her campaign and the inside-the-Beltway pundits who claimed she was inevitable have been stunningly blind to a remarkable, atypical, and unique historical moment. McCain versus Obama will be an ass-whipping of the first magnitude: the Old Order against the New.

After 500 years of greed, exploitation, hypocrisy, and crime, I think it is distinctly likely that we're going to elect a Black President. And, as a historian, it is my considered analysis that, irrespective of positions, posturing, dirty tactics (on all sides), and the myriad and manifest tragic flaws in the Commonwealth, there is nothing that can stop this particular wave.

I've got tears in my eyes.

This is what democracy looks like.

This is what the Founding Fathers had in mind: