LIGHT OF DAY
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
The presidential election is coming down to its final, frantic moments, and one of the biggest shocks in a year of many is that, at this point, I have almost nothing to say.
This is an oddly pleasant shock in a notably unpleasant election season. Why pleasant? The stones I expected to be overturning to loudly describe the slimy creatures underneath have all been overturned.
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
The presidential election is coming down to its final, frantic moments, and one of the biggest shocks in a year of many is that, at this point, I have almost nothing to say.
This is an oddly pleasant shock in a notably unpleasant election season. Why pleasant? The stones I expected to be overturning to loudly describe the slimy creatures underneath have all been overturned.
Racism in advertising, running-mate incompetence, genuine public fury over the government’s weekly scramble to bail out the rich on the backs of the working and middle class (or what’s left of it), shrill charges and counter-charges of anti-Americanism that make McCarthy look a moderate—it has all come to the fore, and not a moment too soon.Overtaken by our own missteps and a sense that we’re approaching a critical moment in our brief history, America is seeing itself plainly in a hall of mirrors it has assiduously avoided for the last several election cycles; we have no choice but to look now and realize that the distortions and grotesqueries are not tricks, but real. We may still be the most possible place on earth, but right now we’re the ugly America. We need a makeover. Bad.
Are we going to get one? Hard to say. Barack in the White House will undoubtedly give us a face-lift, a cosmetic boost to our flagging self-image and far worse international image as a guiding light of democracy where anybody with craft and ingenuity can make it.
Besides being black, Barack is young and handsome, cool and charismatic. He’s a big ego who has nonetheless encouraged people to project onto him their own image of a more perfect or prosperous America, and it’s worked. Unlike the top-down cults of personality led by presidents over the last 30 years, Barack is a tabula rasa that people have gotten behind like nothing and no one else.
I thought for sure his color and all the complex, troubled history it entails would have made that impossible; I was wrong. Oh, he still might lose the election, and he might very well lose it because of color. But his triumph as a new model of politician, especially a consensus-building black politician, is already complete. I thought a year ago that this was the worst time for a black candidate to run, with so much at stake; now I see that this is the only time that made sense.A rookie psychologist will tell you that it’s only when all the crap gets dredged up into the light of day and all the lies people have been telling themselves are laid bare that they are most willing to make drastic change.
But the second and more urgent question is, will there be change, drastic or otherwise? Barack getting there won’t be enough. Looks are important, but they’re only the beginning, the means to an end. We’re almost done with beginning. The end, far from being the Christian apocalypse we’ve come to associate with the word, is what will save us. All of us.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear at KCET, the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Among her many projects, Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book.