BREAKING: Obama used the M-Word

Haaaallelujah! Haaaallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! And the Cherubim and Seraphim descended from on high and encircled the south portico of the White House, each one ablaze with Divine Love for President Barack Obama. Nine holy orders of angels alit in Michelle’s vegetable garden, and sang heavenly praises of partisan glory and social justice, for today, only three and a half years into this his most HOPE-ful presidency, Obama has supported gay marriage.

“I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he told ABC News this afternoon. He did it. He used The M-Word.

President Obama, up to his chin in SPECIAL REPORTage.

This afternoon I read dozens of tweets that began, “BREAKING” or “BREAKING NEWS,” followed by this straightforward, if rather reserved, expression of support for gay marriage. Obama went on to describe an “evolution” (cue Intelligent Design outrage, panty-bunching) in his thinking on this issue since the 2008 presidential race.

Now, don’t get me wrong—this is a landmark moment, to be sure. A watershed, even. Obama is the first president in our history to state in no uncertain terms that gay marriage should exist. That is, quote, “same-sex couples should be able to get married,” unquote. Wow.

Joe “The Gaffe” Biden

And yet, I’m stirred to ask, why is this so earth-shattering? Marriage is a right and a privilege afforded to any pair of heterosexual American adults, from the WASPs at St. Patrick’s on 5^th Ave to the drunks at St. Elvis’s (or whatever) on The Strip. Why should it be such an elating shock—and yet, truly, it is—that our president even so much as thinks that gay marriage should be legal? Even Joe Biden was more forthright, poking his head out from wherever they keep him to say on NBC’s Meet the Press, “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.” Rights? Liberties!? Get out!

In response, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney issued an equivocal “Shhh!” in that little blue room they have for just such occasions.

The last Democrat in office, President Clinton, signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, which defined “marriage” as the legal union of one man and one woman. Eight years later, ol’ Dubya advocated further fortifying DOMA—you know, just in case! In 2011, the Obama administration declared that it found DOMA to be unconstitutional, but where it stands now is a sort of legislative Purgatorio—it will continue to be enforced, but will no longer be defended in court. Huh?

In late September of last year, the U.S. Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy—yet another piece of anti-gay legislation signed into law by our 42^nd president—was repealed under Obama. And yet, during the 2008 election, Obama’s stance on gay marriage was noncommittal at best.

I voted for Obama in 2008, for a number of reasons. Not the least of these reasons was the Obama campaign’s marked lack of antagonism, if not wealth of support, toward LGBT rights. LGBT Americans were faced with a choice between certain discrimination—that is to say, future legislation in active opposition to our personal rights and freedoms—and a tacit presidential acceptance of the same discrimination we as a community already face. Many of us found ourselves, as it were, between Barack and a hard place.

And but so here we are, nearly four years hence, and President Obama says to Robin Roberts and the nation, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” It is earth-shattering, whether or not it really should be, and the man has my vote.

On the East Side my pleasure lies.

Every time I walk through Central Park I find something I had no idea was there. Two days ago it was Cleopatra’s Needle.

Rounding a corner just past Turtle Pond on the tail end of my jog, I noticed to my right an enormous stone obelisk. Hm, I thought. Obelisks have always seemed to me an odd sort of monument—more or less a tall, pointy rock—and I find them especially odd, if prevalent, in the West. Obelisks were initially monuments to the Egyptian sun god Ra. If art history taught me anything, it taught me that obelisks are Egyptian, until they’re something else.

Take, for example, the obelisk in Piazza San Pietro in the Vatican—moved out of Egypt to various cities by various Romans, the last of whom was Pope Sixtus V, in 1586. Nearly a century later, Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the Piazza in front of St. Peter’s Basilica with the obelisk as its centerpiece. Four bronze lions were added to the base, as well as a few requisite festoons, and a cross was placed on top, containing a fragment of the True Cross. Top to bottom, what began as a wholly pagan monument has been cloaked in Christianity. Voilà! Instant Relic.

Just add Jesus.

Ra (left) and Wa (right).

Consider also the Washington Monument, which happens to be the world’s tallest obelisk. (We win again!) At the very least it’s indigenous, rather than carted off whole from a sandy nation. Even so, the obelisk’s origins as a monument dedicated to (and by some religious accounts containing) the Egyptian sun god, Ra, lend it a troubling transitive significance, in a Christian nation (sigh), with respect to the president found on our dollar mills. The one god Wa, as it were.

In the park, what stopped me running wasn’t the incongruous obelisk, but rather the four pairs of green metal crab claws I noticed protruding from its base. It was incredibly bizarre. I was reminded of the tortoise columns of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. What are those crabs doing stuck in there? Did they get squished? Is this a Wicked Witch sort of situation?

Ding, dong, the crabs are dead.

The bronze plaque at the base of the monument offered no answers, to my panting disappointment. It read “CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE” and made no mention at all of the crabs, of their purpose, their origin, or their unfortunate squishing. It contained a rather editorialized provenance of the obelisk, from the its birth at Heliopolis, Egypt in 1600 BC to its removal to Alexandria by the Romans in 12 BC, to its being “presented” by the Khedive of Egypt to the City of New York, eventually erected at its current site in 1881, “through the generous gift of William H. Vanderbilt.”

I’m thinking of hosting a “through the generous gift of _______ Vanderbilt” bronze plaque scavenger hunt across the city. It’s in development.

The teensy plaza surrounding the obelisk surrendered no further clues to the crabs’ plight. I looked across East Drive at the back of the Met. Someone on a nearby bench was eating a Subway sandwich. My research on the crabs, such as it was, took some creative googling—“Central Park crabs” yielding little useful and nothing pleasant.

I did learn that obelisks were originally erected in pairs, at the entrances of temples. There are in the West three obelisks known as “Cleopatra’s Needle” (a complete historical misnomer, by the way, since Cleopatra wasn’t born until 69 BC) located in Paris, London, and New York. The latter two are a pair, from Heliopolis, and the companion to what now stands in Place de la Concorde in Paris remains in Luxor. Only New York’s has crabs.

(Clockwise, from top left) London, New York, Paris.

(To that end, with all due snickering, the phallic implications of this monumental motif do not escape me. I shan’t elaborate, suffice to include the following image, of our very own Washington Monument.)

Heh.

Cleo’s crabs were given her by the Romans in the first century BC, upon the obelisk’s transportation to Alexandria. It seems the bottom corners had worn a bit after a millennium and a half or so of standing in the desert. The crabs are solid bronze, the Internet informed me, and weigh 900 pounds each—this from CentralPark.com. They should know, I suppose. Two of the crabs are replicas of the originals, which are in the collection of the Met. The obelisk itself weighs 244 tons, and if New York ever sinks it will be due in no small part to the nigh 500,000 pounds of Bronze-Age building materials exerting themselves on thirty-six square feet of Park.

I thought back to the guy with the sandwich. He seemed unimpressed by the granite history before him, by the chisels and symbology of its genesis, and the nineteenth-century industry of American royalty of which its current location is an object, or perhaps a byproduct. I could hardly fathom the millennia that stretched between the hieroglyphs on Cleopatra’s Needle and the swoosh on my Nikes.

I turned to leave, overwhelmed. I set out at a light jog, cursing myself with every ice cream cart I passed that I hadn’t tucked three dollars into my sock for a toasted almond éclair. (Worse fates have befallen dollar bills, you must admit.) I looked back over my shoulder at Cleopatra’s Needle, rising stoically from its pedestal. Beyond it, past the trees, I could see the tippy-tops of more modern marvels, standing as still against the afternoon sky.

Pnabokov

I often think I should have kept that copy of Pnin I took from a bar in Heidelberg. I’m not sure whether I stole it or whether it was more of a “take a penny, leave a penny” kind of situation. One night after several Hefeweizen, upon spotting it among an odd assortment of books in the back of the bar, I was seized with want. The small, uneven line of paperbacks was an anomaly beside the darts board and beneath the flatscreen TV, playing whatever soccer (ahem, football) match was demanding the continent’s full attention.

This sort of half-assed lending library was in the back of a sort of half-assed bar called The Brass Monkey, named for a nearby statue and Heidelberg landmark. The bar had been the site of one or two orientation events for international students, and had proclaimed itself “the” international student bar in town, probably mostly for its weekly Tuesday International Student Stammtisch.

Whether “the” or merely “a” bar, it had also been included on one of those cursory, touristy “Things To Do” lists, printed on loud yellow or green or magenta paper that welcome wagons are always handing out. (Also on the list was the thoroughly inexplicable i-Punkt, a club whose name seemed to mean literally nothing, and whose nightly playlist frequently included Stevie Wonder’s 1981 single, “Happy Birthday.”)

Up until the night in question, I hadn’t read a page of Nabokov, and yet the moment I laid eyes on this book seemed an opportune time to start. Whether the Stehlenlust that took hold of me was a function of my love for used books or some wee, misguided thrill fueled by alcohol I’ll never be sure, but in any case I picked it up. I tapped my friend David on the shoulder. “Keep this with you, I want it.” “Okay,” was all he said, and tucked it into a pocket.

The Brass Monkey (the statue, not the bar).

And then it was mine. It sat on the shelf next to my desk for the next three months. The most I ever read of it was the back cover, which could never quite entice me to migrate to the front of the book. Still, I thought about it once in a while.

When it came time to pack up my apartment, I was forced to leave behind many of the little treasures and talismans I’d acquired in five months.  With me came three tiny Reclam paperbacks—Goethe’s Faust in two volumes, and Camus’s L’Étranger, in the original French but bizarrely (for me) annotated in German—one particularly charming wooden cheese box, once belonging to an unexceptional Camembert, an empty can of bilingual baked beans—“Baked Beans” on one side and “Gebackene Bohnen” on the other—that I used to keep change, and two small teacups from a set of six, the other four of which, along with the teapot, I left to my upstairs neighbor Tina. Pnin I gave to another neighbor, but I can’t remember who, or why.

Possibly it was guilt that made me leave it—taking it from a bar was one thing, but to leave the country with it seemed quite another. Possibly it was a superficial aversion to the title. Pnin. That ugly, unnatural “puh-nin” collision—unless Pnin’s “p” was like that of “pneumatic” or “psoriasis” (that is, not a “p” at all) and the title was in fact “nin.” I’d never heard anyone actually say the title. Possibly it was self-consciousness that bid me abandon the book, as well as the confusion surrounding its title.

Yesterday I saw a new copy of Pnin at Barnes & Noble, and wished I’d kept the one I kind of maybe stole—or kind of maybe had stolen. Last winter I read Lolita and fell in love with Nabokov’s prose.

“All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and—” (p. 40)

I’m struck by the power certain books have to appear out of nowhere—or from somewhere very specific—and change everything. It’s like using a winning lottery ticket as a bookmark; the prize is there, but you haven’t cashed it in. Probably you had no idea it was a winner.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I’d read him sooner. If, somehow, in those three months I spent sharing a studio apartment with every printed word of Pnin, all the delicate prose stacked and folded and bound together, if I’d had occasion to open the front cover to wade through the ink and imagery, what might have changed in me. My fatalism would have me believe that, despite the opposable thumbs and Bier-soaked sticky fingers, it’s really the books that steal us, and not the other way ’round.

We’ve Got Five Years (My brain hurts a lot.)

Two months ago I received an invitation to my five-year high school reunion. I threw it away immediately. I didn’t even look at the date or the schedule of reunion events—something about a parade, something else about a bar. I saw a picture of four guys I never cared for pointing at a sign that read CLASS OF 2007. What I wanted to throw away was the idea that five years ago I was a high school senior. Stinky! Stinky! Stinky!

Hefty! Hefty! Hefty!

I can’t decide whether 2007 seems impossibly long ago or impossibly not-very-long ago. Somehow it’s both, in that funny perspectival way of conflicting emotions. So much has happened in the intervening years that I shudder to think how old I felt at eighteen. Perhaps I really was old, and now I’m simply older. Or, perhaps age is a function of foreshortened time, hard lessons learned and losing battles fought, that taken together bring about a general resignation to a growing number of things, the exhaustion of which just makes us feel old. I don’t imagine I’ll be sure for another five years, or maybe five years after that.

Part of my hesitation about my impending reunion, I told myself, has to do with an aversion to conversations with near-perfect strangers that begin, “So…what are you up to these days?” This is a well-known opening act for the better-known headliner, “Well I’ve been…” from whoever it is I’m stuck talking to. Perhaps I’d be more inclined to participate if I were living abroad, or the star of my own TV show, or a mule running used paperbacks to Kandahar. Living at home and looking for jobs don’t quite seem schmoozeworthy.

But maybe I’m a cynic. (I am definitely a cynic.) Perhaps my skepticism about the prospect of reliving high school (even combined with the prospect of free beer) stems from the fact that high school wasn’t fun for me. Reunions are a chance to catch up with old friends! you may cajole. You can relive the glory days! I pity the fool for whom grades nine through twelve stand out as “the glory days,” especially just five years out. I’ll fast-forward through the sob story and the trapped-in-the-closet business (the Christina Aguilera kind, not the R. Kelly kind), suffice it to say I’m not particularly nostalgic.

Moreover, why would I bother to catch up with “old friends” when I can simply catch up on them, from the comfort of my laptop? Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I present: Facebook.

This most pervasive of innovations allows me—nay, encourages me—to find out what my old friends (and their friends) are doing without ever having to ask. What’s-her-name is engaged, that girl from my calc class is in grad school in Ohio, God help her, and the jock guys all got fat. Are we surprised? One classmate of mine is pregnant, and just yesterday I spent five minutes on her Facebook page, skipping through pictures of the crib, the ultrasound, gifts from the shower, and a pretty-gross-when-you-think-about-it pile of positive pregnancy tests. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years, and yet I know her baby’s due date. It’s all fascinating, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not sure I need to see any of it in person.

Facebook makes obsolete the grating “What are you up to?” in favor of the much, much juicier “Have you seen what [that bitch you hate] is up to?” At the same time, other, less gossipy activities—calling Information, renewing prescriptions, and checking in to your flight—have been streamlined in a similar way, in that the interface has become electronic. This, truly, seems to be the course of all technology: to replace as many human beings as possible with machines, presumably so that we all have more time to Facebook each other.

Those darn kids!

Even aside from all the good reasons I have to Facebook stalk rather than schmooze over Bud Lites, I sense the biggest reason for my resistance is that it allows me to negate the enormous/tiny amount of time that has elapsed since high school, and all the things that have/haven’t changed. The zany gang from American Pie are getting back together this year in American Reunion—inexplicably after thirteen years (?) rather than a cool multiple of five—so I guess I should feel some degree of pop-culture pathos. Instead what I feel is pressed for time.

My twenties are here, ten years that are supposed to be my prime—my Glory Days, if y’all will. I should be brewing my own beer, or roasting my own coffee, or making my own soap, or somehow otherwise contributing to the culture of my downwardly mobile, oddly survivalist hipster generation. Instead I’m counting down my cash between Starbucks and the Mobil station. Call it American Humble Pie.

Whatever sort of pie it is, if I don’t have to worry about looking good for high school classmates I’ll help myself to another piece. My diet starts before my ten-year—you know, just in case I’m a book mule by then.

Just Tell Me What iThink.

At the gym this morning, I was on the elliptical watching muted, close-captioned news (with that, like, ten second delay between moving lips and scrolling words that really only bothers me when I try and watch The View and Elisabeth Hasselbeck won’t shut up.) when I saw an ad that caught my eye. It was a commercial for CNN’s “America’s Choice 2012.”

iVoices, iChoices.

AMERICA IT’S TIME TO CHOOSE flashed on screen in an attractive, flag-themed graphic, followed by a few YouTube-style talking heads, unmistakably homemade in that poorly-lit, too-close-up sort of way. Following these appeared CHOOSE YOUR ISSUES. Then, CHOOSE YOUR VOICE. This was followed by brief shots of Americans, existing, then more talking selfies, more Americans presumably utilizing their Chosen Voices to voice their Chosen Issues. THE ONLY SIDE WE CHOOSE, the ad concluded, IS YOURS.

I thought about this final assertion for a moment, and it struck me as nonsensical. How could CNN (of all entities) claim to choose everyone’s side? It stunk of that sort of lame agreeability of young relationships, the sort where you say, “I want to watch whatever you want to watch,” when really you’d sooner stare at the wall than watch another episode of Whitney. This line of thinking distracted me briefly, causing me to lose my elliptical footing so that I found my ellipses(?) ellipsing in sudden, awkward reverse.

After recovering, it occurred to me that THE ONLY SIDE WE CHOOSE IS YOURS is fairly representative of our approach to news—that is, we like to hear what we already think. Tucker Carlson gripes to his viewers about “Volvo-driving, NPR-besotted lefties” on Fox, while Rachel Maddow on MSNBC reports, you know, facts. (No, just kidding.) I choose to watch the Rachel Maddow Show, or CNN for that matter, not because I think the news I find there is unbiased and objective but rather because I know it isn’t. It’s skewed, but it’s skewed in a way I agree with.

CNN’s America’s Choice 2012, I later learned, is a part of CNN iReport, CNN.com’s user-generated news site, where anyone can post “news” stories related to any number of sub-categories on the iReport site. The Election 2012 section reads, “Election central. Share your views on the candidates and see what other people have to say, tell us what issues are most important to you in 2012, or just show us the coolest political signs in your town.” And here I thought there was no ‘i’ in ‘news.’

The best iSource for iNews on the iInternet.

The very concept of iReport falls closely in step with the changing face of media. Writers, poets, musicians, and pundits have found new autonomy and accessibility in the Age of WordPress and YouTube, as established channels of information lose grip on their monopoly. In an era when “Double Rainbow” is as likely to meet the LCD of your flat screen as the State of the Union Address, what authority do newspapers, news networks, or news websites have as arbiters of fact and fiction, or of substance and fluff? These days even objectivity is subjective.

My fifteen-minute cardio cool-down came to an end, and after refilling my (effectively recycled) Evian water bottle, I grabbed my gym bag and staggered unsteadily to my Volvo, just a bit buzzed from one too many podcasts of All Things Considered.