I glanced at the
Amazon.com best seller list tonight, for the first time I can ever remember, and was surprised and amused by one development. Books by "the president elect" occupy slots #1, 3, 11, 12, and 24, out of the top 25. I have no idea if that's been the case during some/most of the campaign, of it's a surge this week thanks to the election result, but it's an admirable achievement.
The bestseller list also made me curious about the Twilight Series, by Stephanie Meyer. I've never heard of it/her, but she's got 4 books in the series, and they're sitting in slots 5-8, so clearly she's doing something right.
Book 4 came out in August, and clearly her series has reached a tipping point of public awareness that's propelled the whole series onto the best seller list. From a glance at the description of book 4 I'm not interested in reading them (young adult, romance, occult, love between a gothy-hunk vampire and a human girl), but I try to stay at least peripherally aware of trends in popular fiction. Being as I still harbor ambitions of becoming, or at least surfing, those trends.
In other Obama news,
an astonishing number of videos showing spontaneous outdoor, late night, election eve celebrations have popped up on You Tube. I watched a few and wished I'd been there. That's my main regret about this election; that I didn't have any one to share the excitement and happiness with when the results were coming in Tuesday evening. Every video with some guy hugging an ecstatic woman, (especially when she's hot) made me wistful. I can has politically-aware girlfriend?
Sadly, while there were countless movies of happy people clapping, cheering, and milling around on downtown streets in the wee hours, I couldn't find many of what I wanted to see; footage of people reacting when the announcement was made. (Which happened at 8pm PDT, seconds after the California, Oregon, and Washington polls closed, when Obama's victory could be absolutely projected.) There are a ton of videos of the 100,000 people celebrating in Chicago's Grant Park when Obama was projected the winner, but it doesn't seem like anyone else had a big group in front of a TV, with a video camera running, at 8pm PST.
I want to see the moment when hopeful expectation turns to disbelieving joy and excitement, rather than just the party hours afterwards.
Ones like this, please. Moar!
Also, Obama held
his first press conference since being elected president. He opened with a short speech about the economy, then took questions on a variety of issue for about ten minutes. I watched it out of curiosity, and found it enjoyable. As virtually every blogger I read said about it, even aside from generally agreeing with his policies and approaches, it's just damn refreshing to see the President of my country talk without dreading what he's going to say and how he's going to say it.
After so many years of wincing at Bush's halting teleprompter reading and inarticulate efforts to go off of his prepared remarks, it was almost amazing to see an intelligent, articulate, thoughtful man, in a nice suit, stand behind a podium and without any notes, speak intelligently on a variety of issues. He didn't just retreat to some glib version of his campaign speech either, like a smarter version of Palin. He actually engaged each question, giving it thought and replying honestly. Which isn't to say he didn't spin the answers towards a desired conclusion; he is a politician facing an enormously difficult task, after all. But the difference between this press conference and Bush's infrequent, highly-scripted efforts, was astonishing.
Every time Bush spoke in public, I felt like I was watching a special ed student who had somehow wound up delivering the homecoming address. I didn't want to be there, I really didn't want him to be there, and yet there we were. I had to root for him on some level due to our common origin, and watching him stumble through the English language was kind of inspiring, in
a bear on a bicycle sort of way, but like a session in the dentist's chair, the best part of the experience was always the moment of cessation.
Somewhat improbably yet very predictably, Obama's unremarkable remarks spurred numerous news items. An off the cuff description of himself
as a "mutt" turned into a racial bellwether, an
amusingly tongue-in-cheek reply about the issue of picking out a first dog (that the written reports of
convey in leaden, mangling fashion) became an animal issue, and an amusing aside about not wanting to conduct any Reagen-style seances
could have turned into news had Obama not defused it by preemptively calling Nancy Reagen to apologize.
The seances remark was actually pretty funny, not that the news reports on it share that opinion. Obama was asked if he'd spoken to any previous presidents, and he said yes, that he'd talked to all of them. He amended that after a second by saying with a laugh, (paraphrase) "Well, all of the living ones... I didn't conduct any seances like the Reagens." It was amusing, but probably an example of him being too smart and too self-aware of his own language.
I do that sort of thing myself at times; realize something I've said could be interpretedly weirdly, (like Obama realizing "all of them" could be misconstrued) and then immediately try to cover for or explain it by adding a self referential joke. It's usually unnecessary, since people wouldn't have taken the odd meaning anyway, and probably wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't drawn attention to it with the additional remark. But when your brain is going really fast and you're thinking a sentence or two ahead of what your mouth can keep up with, you realize the import of what you said after the words have emerged. And sometimes you want to amend them, however unnecessarily. And sometimes that amendment gets you into more trouble than the initial comment ever would have.
Besides, as the news articles are scrupulously careful to point out, the Reagans never held any actual seances; Nancy just had a personal adviser/mystic who consulted astrology to set auspicious dates for most of Reagan's major events and initiatives, amongst her other counseling duties. Hillary Clinton, when she was the first lady, came closer to holding seances, when she did some new agey stuff about channeling inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt. It's funny that most people laugh at Hillary's guided visualization technique, or smirk at Nancy's selecting dates based on
an utterly discredited Greek mythology about the stars, and yet no one bats an eye when President Bush (and Obama, and McCain, and Clinton, and...) claim to receive inspiration and guidance from closing their eyes and talking to an invisible Hebrew sky god invented and largely popularized in Bronze Age Palestine. This is the 21st century, right?
Labels: obama, politics, religion
