Exit, Staged Left

In the heady days of my youth, I played organized sports. Should our team come to the field and find that the other team was down a man, we would do the sporting thing and play down a man as well. Some folks never learned the finer lessons of sportsmanship, and they regarded this type of action as "the nice thing to do" or as a charitable concession on our part. They never quite caught on to the fact that, if we had not put one of our boys on the sideline, we left ourselves open to two equally unpleasant outcomes: either we won with an unfair advantage, and claimed no glory, or we lost, even with an advantage, and reaped an even more bitter defeat. It's not a selfless act, it's a Machiavellian political calculation.

Cindy Sheehan has retired from the protest racket, effective today. If her press release is to be believed, we will never again be subjected to the stomach-turning sight of her being carted off by stone-faced peace officers, the signature mawkish grin of hippie nostalgia plastered across her face. This should be cause for relief among the Forces of Goodness and Light everywhere, because frankly, the woman was terrible at her (self-appointed) job. More even than by the war in Iraq, Sheehan and Bush are bound together by a shared and ghastly combination of basically good intentions, glaring incompetence, and woefully unfettered access to the bully pulpit. Sheehan's agitation for peace, like Bush's attempts to ward off the threat of tourism, ought to have been met with the same response as a five-year-old who attempts to drive the car to the grocery store to pick up milk and eggs: Golly gee, what a very nice thought, don't ever try anything like that again, YOU. ARE. NOT. QUALIFIED. This is a grown-up thing, a tool not a toy.

When offered a position as dreadfully important as "face of the anti-war movement," the first thing one ought to do is engage in some vigorous introspection. The very first question on one's mind ought to be "Am I up to this?" When I first heard that there was a grieving mother camped outside of the president's Texas cowboy playpen, I thought a valid and time-honored statement was being made about the American people's disagreement with the choices of their leadership. And for one brief, shining moment, it was. And then it devolved, predictably, into a peculiarly American variety of celebrity farce. Hippocrates summed it up pretty well when he said "First, do no harm." Because, you see, if you're not up to the job, there's quite a lot of harm to be done. The fracturing and/or discrediting of the (vitally important) peace movement, for instance, not to mention the entire (albeit already rather fractious) left wing of American politics.

So now that Sheehan is bowing out, apparently more from her own exhaustion than from any ability to read the writing on the wall, we here on left are obligated to accept the resignation of an equally embarrassing faux representative from the far right. I will accept Malkin, Coulter, Hannity, or Gonzales, unless anyone has a better suggestion. It's really only sporting of us, you know.

A Brother's Gonna Work It Out

Follow me for a second: you walk into the polling place, present your ID, and stroll over to the voting booth. You look over the options, you select which bond issues you support or don't support, you wonder briefly if this is one of those Diebold machines you read about, and then you get to the screen where you are going to select a presidential candidate. You're a smart person, you've paid attention to the issues, and you're just about to vote for the candidate whom you feel is best qualified for the job, or at least the best qualified among the usual pathetic pool of applicants, and then you stop. When reaching for the screen, you have caught sight of your hand, the back of it, specifically. Wait a second, the skin on your hand is a shade of brown, and not a tanned brown, or a latino brown, or a blotchy liver-spotted brown. It's the color of skin that a certain subsection of the populace has, those who are casually termed "black people."

Oh shit. It's time to rethink things. You're black. You pull your hand away from the voting screen. You've just realized that you're not a person, you're a Black Voter. That means that your vote isn't a normal vote, it's a very special vote, fraught with all sorts of heady cultural horsefeathers. And then, right before your eyes, the other options on the screen fade away, and the only candidates you can see are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. The issues of the day fade from your mind, and all you can think is, "Gee, Hillary spoke in a fake southern patois during that one stop on her campaign, that was pretty great. Obama has the same skin-color, within the strictures of Jim Crow law, as I do, but is he black enough? John Edwards said he would help poor people, and Kanye and I care a lot about poor people's issues ever since every face on the television during the Katrina footage was as dark as mine. WWAlSharptonD?!"

Whoa! That's quite distressing!

If this happens to you, the Fiery Sword recommends that you quickly remind yourself and the Washington Post that there is a dream extant, dreamt often and dreamt before, that one day a man's worth will be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. At which point you are free, once again, to vote your conscience, and not your melanin. This pre-election public service announcement has been brought to you by respect for ones' self and one's fellow human beings.