Hillary Clinton, Beetlejuice Candidate

In case you missed it, Beetlejuice is a quirky Tim Burton comedy released in 1988.  It was only a modest box office hit but was one of my favorite movies as a child.  It is basically a horror movie for gay kids: smart, colorful, a little macabre, and featuring themes of unresolved conflict and interior design.  The plot revolves around a young married couple (the Maitlands) who die and decide they have no option but to scare a very 80s bourgeois family (the Deetzes) out of their (now haunted) house.  As it turns out, they are really bad at being scary, so bad in fact, that their only success is in making being dead seem rather hip to the Deetz’s daughter Lydia. 

The Maitlands, in their desperation, turn to a black market ghoul known as Beetlejuice to contract out their spooking.  By saying his name “Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!” they conjure him up from some from some netherworld and what ensues is way more than what they bargained for.

I believe America and in particular Democrats, much like the muddling Maitlands, will be facing a Beetlejuice election in a couple years.  Republicans have had the House for a while now, and in a few weeks they may control Congress.  In order to keep their White House, Democrats will most likely need their own Beetlejuice, a woman who has come back from the political dead many times over and has shown an uncanny talent for sending Republicans packing.

In 2008, many people of my generation were thirsty for change.  We were full of hope.  Then we watched as the Washington meat grinder took a president we loved and proceeded to eviscerate him.  It still boggles my mind that approval ratings could be so low for a president who has overseen falling unemployment rates, falling budget deficits, 8 years of steady if slow economic recovery, the biggest reforms of Wall Street since FDR, and the greatest improvement to the social safety net since LBJ.

Needless to say in 2016, we will not be hopeful.  We will be desperate – desperate not to lose the substantial if still flawed progress that has been won, and desperate to keep the every-man-for-himself of Republicans conservatism from outlasting the limited solidarity garnered by Democratic progressivism.  Even conservative commentators have bemoaned the lack of vision from Republicans.  Their strategy has clearly been one of delay and conquer, obstruct and overturn.  They must not be rewarded for this nihilism, one that defunds government programs and then rails against bureaucratic inadequacies, one that says government is worthless unless it serves and defends private wealth, and one that says America is meaningless unless it is defined by the conservative imaginary.

The problem with Hillary and the Clintons is that they have not beaten republicans by transcending politics.  They’ve beaten republicans through muddy jujitsu, trench warfare, by simply being the last ones standing.  In electing Hillary we will probably be courting another 4-8 years of death grip partisanship, but more and more this seems unavoidable.  We need Hillary Clinton right now.  We need her tenacity, we need her tirelessness, we need her to make decisions we don’t want her to have to make and defend things that perhaps only she can. 

No, it is true.  We are in a dark hour as a country.  For too long the only lights to guide us have been the glare of the media’s fun house mirrors, a haze of countless tragedies and absurdities trawling across our screens.  We are living in Tim Burton times where the desperately powerful are the only ones courageous enough to be seen, where spectators passively consume political ideology and shuffle numbly from one freak show to another.  Political judgment has been replaced by political calculus.  It’s not what should be done, not even what can be done, but what must be done in order to dislodge ourselves from crisis after crisis.  This is the definition of unfreedom.

Electing Hillary Clinton may be a capitulation of sorts to this paralyzing calculus.  As president she may only have marginal achievements.  She may sell out a progressive agenda at the first sign of trouble.  But I also know that, facing what we are up against and the prospect of losing, when November 2016 arrives, we all should be voting “Hillary!  Hillary!  Hillary!”

“Hyperbole, Hyperbole! Or, What Blood Orange Can Teach Us About Accepting The Human Condition”

C. Martin Caver  2/1/14

I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech this year.  I didn’t even realize it was taking place until after it was over.  The implications of this oversight did not fully set in until several days later when I found myself in the shower listening to Blood Orange’s new album Cupid Deluxe for about the thousandth time in three days.  

I could say a lot about the effect this album had on me.  I could say, for instance, that its mellifluous beauty induces aesthetic reflections capable of carrying the listener to new planes of thought, new dimensions of existential awareness.  And yet I wax rather hyperbolically when a work of art really arrests me, so such encomiums may not be wise. I told a friend of mine after listening to Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, that it was a What’s Going On for a new, subaltern millenium.  Like that somewhat inflamed comparison to Marvin Gaye, I am tempted to compare Blood Orange to other avant-guarde (Prince, PM Dawn, and A Tribe Called Quest come to mind).  But what listening to Cupid Deluxe really does at a fundamental level is not musical at all.  Its real genius lies in the way it conjures haunting memories -- not just conventional memories (of other music, past events), but entire dispositions, outlooks, aspirations and anxieties from days gone by, submerged vestigial visions, carried along despite themselves.

The album takes me back to Nîmes, a town in southern France where I lived for a year after college, a decade ago now.  It reminds me of walking around that ancient town, which, towards the end of my sojourn, had become as familiar as it was foreign.  That feeling of familiarity and relative comfort, yet strangeness, mystery, and possibility characterized not only my time in Nîmes, but much of my early twenties, like a song that’s both terrific and seductive.  Cupid Deluxe is an album full of those songs, full of those memories.  What’s more, it brings them to you in a way that makes you realize that those feelings (of being untethered, caught between worlds, standing outside of normal time), they are never gone.  “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” said Faulkner.  “It keeps on running back.” continues Blood Orange.

That is what is so hauntingly, desperately good about this album.  It reminds us of the possible, the potential that is no more, and the futility of ever reckoning with it, the futility of ever thinking we could choose our fate in a way that was truly intentioned, willed with fully sovereign faculties.  What Dev Hynes, the genius behind Blood Orange, does time and again through the medium of the love song is show how our choices are always constrained, and yet the memories of contemplating and making choices are always bittersweet because they feel so free.  These feelings are destined to haunt us, because our choices, our projects, our lives, remain fundamentally contingent -- influenced and interpreted by others until and sometimes even after the very end.  In “Chosen,” a song that should be go down as the slow jam of the decade, we hear those moments of standing outside of time, the exquisite fecundity therein, and the lachrymose air we gasp at in ruminating on those moments, “Another day and I’ll lose, but I don’t want to choose...Time in your mind, make it right,”   Later, in “Clipped On,” this ambivalence of being outside of time yet constantly reckoning with the contingency we find there is summed up: “And I don’t know, if this is the edge of my seat or it’s the end of my rope.”

Back to the State of the Union, I didn’t watch it.  I’ve watched every one of them since probably the first Clinton administration and I didn’t watch it, nor did I really care much.  I was a die-hard Obama voter, who canvassed for him, phone banked for him, donated to him, and I watched HBO (Girls, True Detective, and Looking -- all stories of and for the self-absorbed) instead of listening to my president. Had I grown cynical? Jaded? Despairing? Had the fervor with which I supported him just simply subsided?  If I had watched would Obama have simply been singing “Always Let U Down” to me?  Or is what Blood Orange telling us, through the lens of love, that our actions always outrun us, are always constrained by others, lead to unexpected consequences, and that thinking we can overcome them will “always disappoint you … always let you down.”  Hope must not be hope for “getting it right this time” either in love or in life.  In “No Right Thing” Hynes sings “On your own and I’m on my own and we were wrong.  There’s no right thing.”  

Hope has to be tragicomic.  It has to be hope for the mere feeling of this inadequate, nonsovereign sort of freedom.  It has to be a longing for the mere feeling of this imperfect, discordant sort of love.  It has to be a hope that when it is all over our lives (and our loves) will somehow imply a story, a character in a story, one that makes sense.  And that the few who will remember us will interpret our series of constrained choices in ways that are generous, perhaps, if not flattering -- that have meaning, at least to them if not to us.  At least we hope.

The final song off Cupid Deluxe is “Time Will Tell.”  It easily feels like a eulogy for the deflated dreams of the millennial generation.  In it, the chorus picks back up a refrain from “No Right Thing.” It feels just like a memory, remembered.  Hynes sings, “Time will tell if you can figure this and work it out. No one’s waiting for you anyway, so don’t be stressed out. Even if it’s something that you’ve had your eye on. It is what it is.” We must accept that the way the world is simply means that our choices, our dreams, our loves, our lives, have been spun of threads we did not choose and interwoven in a fashion we could not fully control nor comprehend. Yet this capacity to try, to hope, to begin again despite the lack of sense, the lack of rules, is what makes us human, is what conditions us as such. We continue to love, to reach out to one another. We continue to tell stories, to pass judgments that make sense of these always-beginning jetties of action -- action that feels free, love that feels right. We must celebrate with near abandon when such stories, such loves, take a form as beautiful as Cupid Deluxe.