“It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president.”

Oh, that interweb! What a fabulous, seductive, time-wasting mindsuck it is! I can hardly pull myself away from my battered, well-used Mac, my portal to the electronic universe and all its constantly churning, burning, head-turning election-related news, gossip, misinformation, blithering nonsense and shocking exposés. It's like candy, cartoons, a train-wreck and a party all at once. Yes, it's true: I am a political junkie.

Between the things I find on my own and the great links friends send to me, I've been enjoying and passing along URLs like a communion chalice: take, drink, this is the life's blood of the body politic. If you, like I, have an unquenchable thirst for such sustenance, here are links to some of the political news and humor sites I’ve enjoyed most in the past week. See which if any you've missed.

• Seventy-six American Nobel Prize winners endorse Obama according to this article in Salon.com.

• Humorist extraordinaire David Sedaris gives his views on undecided voters in this article in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine.

• You've read stories about voting machines that go out of calibration and show a vote for another candidate even when a voter chooses his or her candidate properly, right? Well, here's a video that shows vote flipping in action, even immediately after recalibration. It's a sight more chilling than any horror movie.

• Slate.com contributors divulge their presidential choices and explain their reasons in this article. The tally? Fifty-five for Barack Obama, one for John McCain, one for Bob Barr, and one for "Not McCain." My favorite entries were by Michael Kinsley, Dahlia Lithwick, Farhad Manjoo, Jack Shafer (whose description of his chosen candidate, the Libertarian Party's Bob Barr, as "a chowderhead's chowderhead" is priceless) and writer Tim Wu, who wrote of Obama, "Most of all, I like his obvious inner calm. It suggests that his decisions will come from somewhere other than expediency, anger, or fear. It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president."

• Want to take a peek at records of political donations given by thousands of celebrities, sports stars, billionaires, politicians, media people and CEOs? Find out who gave how much to whom here.

• Major media have been engaged in a legal battle with the United States Navy over records that they believe show that John McCain was involved in an accident that injured or may have even killed someone. The Huffington Post announced in this article that "Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge 'developed from first-hand sources' of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play."

• Is Sarah Palin going rogue? Here’s what CNN has to say about it.

• Remember the classic "Wassaaaap!" Budweiser ad from 2000? (Okay, I’d never seen it till this week, though I'd heard it referred to many times by Michael and Dwight on "The Office." (Ricky Gervais' original British version of "The Office" even gave it a nod.) You can see the original here, and then see the fantastic pro-Obama parody update to it here. It’s one of the most brilliant bits of two-minute filmmaking I’ve ever seen. (True.)

• Atlantic magazine editor (and noted gay, British-born, HIV-positive conservative—try to get your mind around that combo) Andrew Sullivan lists the Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Obama. They're excellent reasons, too.

• Did you hear Sarah Palin's jeering dismissal of federal funding for genetic research on fruit flies? Or John McCain's mocking of the use of government money to study the DNA of grizzly bears? Their use of those particular examples of supposedly wasteful spending show their shocking lack of desire to understand how scientific research works. Sneering, ignorant anti-intellectualism like this underscores their fear of and contempt for well-educated citizens. In a scathing and spot-on article in Slate, the frequently frightening, usually conservative Christopher Hitchens (who has written books excoriating Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, among other subjects) writes about "The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning." Here’s my favorite excerpt:

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.”

As for the supposedly ridiculous expenditure of $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA, Hitchens goes on to say:

As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

• This is how it looks when Barack is at the wheel of the Democratic Partaaaay.

• Joe Biden does a great job of challenging so-called reporter Barbara West of station WFTV in Florida when she does nothing but mouth McCain’s nonsensical talking points in this Huffington Post video.

• Opie loves Obama! Here’s a charming video in which Ron Howard goes back to his roots with friends Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler. (By the way, if you want to see another side of Andy Griffith and one hell of a scene-chewing, career-making performance, check out the 1957 Elia Kazan film "A Face in the Crowd." Griffith is mesmerizing as "Lonesome" Rhodes, a nobody who becomes a political demagogue by working the media.)

• Finally, here are some inspiring photos of Obama giving a speech in the rain in Chester, Pennsylvania this week. I look at them and think, oh, please, please may I call that guy my president?

"Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes."

That wonderful quotation comes courtesy of the inspiring activist Maggie Kuhn, best known for being the founder of the anti-ageist civil rights group The Gray Panthers. Long before she started her work with them at the tender age of 65, she dedicated her life to fighting for human rights, social and economic justice, global peace and desegregation. She was bold and brave, but far from fearless. She knew that courage is not about being without fear, but about being nervous and doing the right thing anyway. That's my goal. I don't always reach it, heaven knows, but Maggie is a fine star in the progressive firmament to hitch my wagon to.

Last weekend I spoke my mind by way of a political sign which I posted in front of my house. It was stolen in less than a day, in broad daylight, on a busy street and on a weekend, no less! That was one audacious thief. My anger over the incident drove me to write about the importance of speaking up for one's beliefs on my website, www.lauragrey.com. I invite you to take a look at my piece there titled "The Art of Politics."

Don't let the bullies get away with their garbage! And please, friends, vote.

Profits and Losses

This very grey morning I pulled on my old grey shirt, comfy grey jeans and grimy black shoes to face unpleasant outdoor chores. It was a gloomy Pacific Northwest morning, one of hundreds I expect to see between now and the return of regular sunshine around the middle of next year. First I stood on a precariously balanced ladder sawing a ten-foot long crabapple branch off my gangly tree so that I would no longer hear the scritch-scritch-scree of it scratching against my house on windy nights. Next, I dragged and wrestled the branch into submission, all the while discombobulating several of the many giant striped spiders who are currently staking out their territories throughout my garden. Their large webs and long, invisible connecting strands keep ending up across my startled face and throughout my hair; I walked directly into several today. Then, absentmindedly introducing bits of dead leaves into my coiffure while simultaneously pulling cobwebbing out of my eyebrows, I ambled around to the front garden where I cleaned the gutter over my front porch, all the while soiling my coat, hands and face with grimy, slimy gutter debris. For my grand finale, I managed to slosh a great wave of filthy water all over my head while my head was tilted back, which meant I flung a nice big burst of wet putrescence up my nose as well. Lovely!

As I stood in my garden, filthy and dripping and surveying all the decaying leaves and yellowing stalks that I don't look forward to gathering over the coming weeks, I sighed and thought, ah yes, the season of losses has come around again.

At this time of year, it is easy for me to focus on endings and losses, things cherished and vanished, possibilities unfulfilled. Over the course of my life, October has meant experiences of very real pain, fear and loss, including the death of someone precious to me and two friends' motorcycle accidents that ended up changing their lives. It also means the end of warmth and sunshine, of fresh green growth in the garden, and the coming of darkening days, gloom, storms and mess, expensive repairs, and the hunkering down of people in their homes so that happy, random exchanges with neighbors grow few and far between.

This autumn brought additional personal losses and disappointments for me, one after the other, in a melancholy parade of angst-filled events even before and apart from the crushing financial losses we're all looking at. Millions of us will be making less money this fall and winter while expenses remain high and chances for new sources of income dwindle. Savings contract frighteningly, credit is withdrawn, costs rise and fears for the future abound. Like so many people, I've put off home repairs, fixing my wonky computer, scheduling dental work and many other expenses that I would normally take care of with alacrity in attempts to stretch what's left of my money as far as I can. The job opportunities I expected this fall have dried up due to caution on the part of the corporations and nonprofits I had hoped to work with, so the hopes I had for a less gloomy autumn continue to be dashed with some regularity.

And yet—

Grim as the world, the weather, my financial and career forecasts and my home's gutters all appear to be, I find signs of hope, fresh growth and new possibilities in my garden, in my future work, and in the ways in which I look at life. The spiders, huge and looming, will die off this fall, but they're spinning egg sacs and tucking them all over the garden so the darling tiny spiders can pop out in the spring and keep the pests from wrecking my garden and overtaking my home. The plants whose leaves yellow and wither so sadly reward closer inspection with evidence of tiny budlets that will burst into fresh growth next year. Brilliant red rose hips, so popular with birds, dot the tall pine tree to which I've tied tall, thorny rose canes, and purple-black berries beckon other birds to gorge before the frosts come. Hummingbirds still seek out my blushing fuchsias, and yesterday a sleek, silent doe and her adolescent daughter foraged for food a hundred feet from my front door; we stared at each other for a long while, me in delighted fascination, they in wise wariness, before they slipped into the forest.

Much as I'd love to dine in fine restaurants and take my daughter away to elegant weekend retreats, we're enjoying cooking and baking and cuddling up at home. The memory of our week in Québec this summer is fresh and lovely and there are enough exciting books, films and day trips available to us that we can keep our hunger for fresh travels at bay as long as we have to. Libraries and boxes of art supplies feed our hunger for novelty. Pretty new fashions are delightful, but the hunt for hidden treasures at consignment shops (and for forgotten treats in our overstuffed closets) will suffice. We're sewing more and repurposing found objects in original ways. We've cut our expenses and will have to cut even more, but there actually is some pleasure in seeing that it can be done, that discipline pays off, and that, as a society, we are using less and making do with what we have more often, and recognizing the value in frugality and conservation in ways we wouldn't have had we not experienced this international crisis.

As I age, I also recognize cycles and remember going through upheavals, losses, downturns and disappointments before. I sigh to think that I must once again go through the painful experiences I thought I'd worked my way through for good, but I also know that they can be gotten through, that aches and pains and bills and mistakes come and go. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes suffering. Yes, I'm older, so sometimes the aches last longer, the financial losses are larger, the opportunity costs of choosing one road over another are greater, and some options will simply never again be available. Some relationships can never be the way I hoped they would be, for they morph too much, or stay too much the same, or are based in needs or expectations that aren't understood or expressed at the outset and which we can do nothing to meet once we recognize them. We can't always know what we will most need before we need it. We can't always map out the roads we take before we get halfway through our journeys and find that we can't back up without suffering extreme tire damage.

But when the road above washes out, a new one is created further down the mountain. Friends wander away, but some come back. Sometimes we wander off for a while to regroup and rethink, and we hope that the more often we do so, the more compassionate we become as life lessons show us that everyone is scared, everyone suffers, everyone wonders and wanders off at times. The more dark autumns we enter into, the more firmly we hope to remember how inevitably and inexorably spring returns, that while friendships change and grow and die, new ones bud, too, even during the darker seasons. And sometimes the old friendships with their gnarls and scars and ripped up roots put out new shoots when we'd given them up for good.

So we retrench our lives, our gardens, our jobs and relationships, and remember how many promising new starts in our lives grew out of our composted past, and how many losses led to profitable lessons upon which we later planted new hopes, and nourished new dreams.

Liberalism and Morality

My daughter and I drove north to visit the lovely Victorian seaside town of Port Townsend last month, and while we were there we stopped into several antique shops, as we usually do. We’ve discovered delightful treasures this way, some bizarre vintage dreck, and a lot of frighteningly familiar crap from my childhood that I never thought I’d see sold in stores years later for premium prices. It’s hard to imagine how Dukes of Hazzard lunchboxes, poodle figurines, Barbie accessory kits and Hamburglar drinking glasses can pass for something of value, but then a lot of folks would wonder why I found the glass washboard, the nonworking typewriter from the 1920s or the clear plastic stiletto shoes with rhinestones embedded in the heels from 1955 necessary to my lifestyle. One man’s trash is another woman’s et cetera.

In Port Townsend Lily and I found a shop full of ephemera being sold at fire sale prices before the lease lapsed. Among the King Kong postcards from the 30s, the campaign buttons from the 50s and newspapers from the 60s was a Ladies’ Home Journal magazine from January 1938. I love vintage magazines; when I was a teenager waiting for rides home from school with my mom (who taught at the same high school that I attended) I would sit in the library leafing through early issues of Life, Time and Look. Bound in big volumes, these magazines were a treasure trove of detail about the daily lives of middle-class Americans from the twenties to the fifties. The ads, the photos, the news stories, the entertainment columns were fascinating, written as they were in a more formal, eloquent and verbose style that I found both charming and educational. It was surprising to see what U.S. journalists were writing about Hitler in the mid-30s, about the war in the early 40s, about health and communism and packaged foods in the 50s. When I found the Ladies’ Home Journal from January 1938, I wondered how the Great Depression and the increasingly disturbing rise of communism in Eastern Europe and fascism in Western Europe might influence the writing, the subject matter and the tone. I didn’t have to look far before I found something fascinating, impressive and as apt today as it was then.

Think about the context in which my Ladies’ Home Journal was written. In the 1930s, the United States was in the throes of a horrible depression; by 1940 the U.S. Census said the population was still 43.5% rural. Most adults felt lucky if they had better than an eighth-grade education. Most women didn’t work outside their homes, although millions who had never worked before had to try to earn the rent and feed their families when their husbands couldn’t find work or couldn’t earn enough to live on. The U.S. unemployment rate in 1938 was 19%.

I can’t help but consider my family’s connection to this time. Until she married my grandfather, her second husband, in 1934, my grandmother, with her eighth-grade education, had to support her mother, invalid sister, young son and herself on what she made doing assembly line work at a stove manufacturing plant. She did this mind-numbing job for years, and felt lucky to have the work. My grandfather’s work as a master tool and die welder at Ford Motor Company allowed my grandmother to quit and start her second family with him. They were luckier than most, and they knew it.

My grandmother’s first husband had been a copper miner like her own father, a man she never knew who abandoned my great-grandmother when she was pregnant with my grandmother in 1900. My own grandmother’s first husband also abandoned her when she was six weeks pregnant and just 19 years old. She spent the next 15 years as the breadwinner for her four-member household. Working long days and then cooking and cleaning at night, she still managed to read novels and poetry, go to the cinema and occasionally to the theater in Detroit, and to catch up on women’s magazines when she had an extra dime. I knew her as a very shy soul who refused to leave the house without a family member with her; to know that she ran a household of four on her own in a time of economic hardship and rampant sexism when women made a fraction of what men made and divorcées were considered scandalous is almost beyond imagining. She was the gentlest soul I ever met, but she could be a tiger when it came to caring for her family.

With the low education rate, the large rural make-up of the country, the scarcity of jobs and money, and the need to work keeping many people from seeking higher education in the 1930s, one might expect that magazine writers would have dumbed down their writing, or tried to lighten it up to distract women at home. One would be wrong. These magazines took their opportunity to educate and elevate very seriously, and they knew that women like my grandmother, with their eighth-grade educations and blue-collar jobs, were no fools. They deserved thought-provoking essays written by some of the greatest minds of the era. On page 4 of my Ladies’ Home Journal, right across from the ad for Baked Armour’s Star Ham Glorified with Cherries, was an article by the great American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was described by Time magazine in 1939 as one of the two most influential women in America, the other being Eleanor Roosevelt. Thompson was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934, the first American journalist to be so honored and vilified, and she inspired Katharine Hepburn's character Tess Harding in the 1942 film Woman of the Year. Her work was not only important, it was timeless. Here are some highlights from her article, titled “Liberalism and Morality.”

• • • • • • • •

All the political tendencies momentarily raging in our times are antiliberal. That is the outstanding fact about the era in which we live. The movement of the world is away from individualism, toward collectivism; away from freedom, toward order and organization; away from personal responsibility, toward discipline, obedience and acceptance.

This antiliberalism goes deeper than a mere desire to change a competitive economic order for a more co-operative one. In that desire there is nothing antiliberal. Antiliberalism seeks to subject the personality, with everything that the word means—conscience, responsibility, free will, the moral sense—to a pattern of work, conduct, behavior and belief imposed upon every member of society. The result of this tendency, carried to its logical conclusion, is the emergence of nations of slaves.

And, so insensitive has the liberal spirit become, that even people who call themselves liberals confine their main interest and argument to the question of whether or not the slaves are well kept!

And this happens after a liberal century—a century to be sure, in which the ideals of liberalism have never been approximated, but in which the mere aura of them has added more to the wealth, knowledge and possibilities of human beings than has been achieved in any previous century in history. Why, then, is mankind revolting against liberalism, after so brief and incomplete an experience of it? . . .

Above all, we have lost sight of the original purpose and philosophy of liberal democracy. We have come to associate liberalism with a certain kind of economics, and even with a certain stage of capitalistic development. To recapture and revitalize its original spirit woud be, at once, revolutionary and conservative: revolutionary, because such revitalization would radically modify our present society; conservative, because it would link us again to our greatest traditions.

As I conceive it, liberalism is pre-eminently a type of mind, a kind of spirit and a sort of behavior, the basis of which is an enormous respect for personality. It is, therefore, above everything else human and humane. Its premise is that there is good in every nature; that a good society is the one in which that goodness can be given the greatest possibility to expand and develop; that this is the quality in man which sets him apart from other animals and therefore makes him human, and is the source of all social power, a constantly replenished spring of good will.

If one goes back to the eighteenth-century philosophers, who were the intellectual and spiritual source of the American revolution, one realizes that they are permeated through and through with the conception of man as an ethical animal. His business on earth is self-perfection. For self-perfection he needs freedom, because freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. . . .

In any civilization, and under any political system, the simplest mind recognizes a good person when he meets one. Courage, kindness, generosity and the sense of justice are his attributes. They are the perennial adornments of the human race. The very essence of liberalism is the realization that none of these qualities can develop to their fullest except in a fully responsible individual, who is free to act and to choose. A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters. . . .

[T]he universal accusation against liberal democracy is that it has resulted in a society without standards. And yet no political philosophy ever started with so high a conception of the nature of man as liberal democracy. . . .

Liberalism . . . places so high a value on mankind, and, by placing the value, demands its justification. Everybody who has ever brought up a child knows how powerful a force in his development can be appeals to his pride, his trustworthiness, his desire to be thought well of, according to a high standard. The spoiled child is one who enjoys indulgences without reciprocal obligations. It seems to me that in a liberal democracy the overwhelming emphasis in all education should be upon encouraging the ideal of self-perfection and the most exquisite sense of obligation. Freedom, as surely as noblesse, obliges. But actually, the critics of liberalism accuse it of creating whole societies of spoiled children, societies clamorous with demands—demands from laborers, from farmers, and now from youth, who even go so far as to “demand” a creative life! The criticism has influence because it has truth! . . .

But by and large, in every day life, liberalism has never even begun to draw upon the reserves of idealism and good will that are present in mankind. That has been its greatest failure. It moved away, almost immediately, from the original premise that man is a reasonable and moral animal, and that the object of society is to increase his reasonableness and his morality. Another conception perverted that idea, dominated most of the nineteenth century, and has gradually plunged the whole western world into moral chaos.

The idea of self-realization, of self-development . . . became perverted into the idea of self-interest. And for nearly three generations that perversion has dominated America. It is a mechanical conception that the unbridled competition of egoistic self-interests will work out automatically, in the long run, in the greatest good for the greatest number. A profoundly ethical conception gave way to a totally amoral one. The ideal of a society of individuals trying to be something, degenerated into the ideal of all individuals trying to get something. The love of fame—the ambition to be of good repute—degenerated into the love of money, of “success.” . . .

[S]elf-interest has raged through society, and bit by bit has disintegrated it, and the dictatorships are rising in the western world on the corpse of this idea of self-interest. . . . Whole civilizations have fled into the arms of dictators, not only because the world has become technically complicated and difficult to run, but because human beings are lonely, fearful, without confidence in themselves or in one another, uncertain of why they were born and dissatisfied with their own behavior. People are actually welcoming enslavement, in order that, without liberty, they may at least have rest and the sense of being caught up into some purpose, however fantastic, however unrealistic, unhuman and grotesque.

It is my belief that this tendency will be arrested by a new revolt in favor of liberalism. . . . But the new liberalism must rise this time on the firm basis of its original humanism, as a form and mind becoming to man.