As soon as I was old enough to know what a President did or what the Congress is, I have loved the whole ecosystem of American retail politics – it’s my fantasy football league. I would rather talk stats on primaries and seats in the House than argue over whether Deion Sanders should be traded or whether the Buffalo Bills will make it to the Super Bowl. Just because I would have to wait a decade or two before I could vote didn’t mean that I couldn’t enjoy the process, the drama, the agitprop, the propaganda, the exit polls, the whole theater of politicking. And well before I even had formulated a set of beliefs of my own that would govern my decision to vote for whom, I still liked to play the game. After all, I know I’m not John Madden or Herschel Walker, but who hasn’t played them or someone like them on Super Nintendo? I’m radiocarbon dating myself here.
While we’re going down memory lane here, let’s go back to Autumn 1990 in Austin, Texas, to the first “election” that took place after I had a basic grasp of what that was. My mother was a single mom who worked as a nurse, so I went to day care pretty much every weekday afternoon, including “summer camp”, from age 2 through 5th grade. I attended a day care center that was solidly “upper middle class” in vibe and cost – to this day, I do not know how my mother ever afforded it, since we were very much “lower lower middle class”. The original name and schtick of my day care center was so very trendy and aged about as well as a Coleco Adam – Kidz Komputing. Their gimmick was that they were the day care center where the computin’ bug is a feature, and teachin’ kidz how to use a komputer was part of the package, at any and every age. It actually was not a gimmick at all – in an era before widespread computer ownership at home, as a 5 year old boy I was given the chance to dick around on an Apple IIc computer, at any time during indoors “free time”. Instead of scraping my little Caucasoid knees on the pebbles in the playground, I would shove the 5 1/4″ Verbatim floppy disk in the wrong way, and the drive would tsk tsk me very loudly with that electronic “UNH!”
By the time 1990 rolled around, they rebranded with the name “Children’s Network” – their logo was absolutely recession-era at its blandest, with an all-caps serif font, and a minimalist tessellation of stick figure children holding their stick hands together – paper dolls of the late 1980’s. But I digress.
When I entered 1st grade, the execs at “Children’s Network” decided to hire a new woman to be our overseer / teacher / governess – a woman in her 60’s named Judy. We called her “Grandma Judy”. She was actually pretty amazing – she had an unflappable temperment and cared for her kids very much. She was a widow originally from somewhere in the Midwest, and she smelled like “old lady” – I can almost still conjure up that olfactory iteration in my mind to this very day. She had an Ogilvie perm of no-fuss grey curls, wore SAS orthopedic shoes made out of the same foamy stuff as the sides of a waterbed in a swinger’s double-wide. She was also the main political influencer in my single-digit life, and probably never knew it.
Grandma Judy thought I was hella annoying, I’m sure – I was emotionally sensitive, cried a lot, had a tendency to just do what I wanted to do, and usually would rat anyone out if it would earn imagined points in GJ’s book of merit. I really was a difficult but brilliant child, full of drama, always wetting my pants well past the date of toddlerism, and I would mock her nasal Midwestern accent (she was definitely a sunbelt relocatee to Texas). I also mocked her politics, before I even knew the difference between a Republican or a Democrat.
She drove a 1985 era Toyota Tercel hatchback, the 4 door model in white. An absolutely flawless choice of a car for that special widow on a budget. I was obssessed with cars for most of my childhood, even geriatric Tercel hatchbacks from the pre-owned lot at Ancira Motors in San Antonio. Grandma Judy had two bumper stickers on the back – a rooster cucuru-ing on a ribbon-like musical register with the words “DE COLORES”, and a “DUKAKIS / BENTSEN ’88” bumper sticker.
“It says DOOKIE on Grandma Judy’s car!” I exclaimed to everyone within earshot, as us kids spilled out onto the backyard playground for “recess”. I repeated this ad nauseum to everyone. even if most of my peers didn’t have a clue what I was referring to.
Over near the “activities” area in the far corner of the playground, another kid and I happened upon two hammers – (safety, what’s that?), one of which had a black rubber grip, the other being a classic wooden type. I decided that the black one was Clayton Williams and handed it to my classmate (who was a black kid, shocker!) , and then I announced that the wooden hammer was Ann Richards.
We pivoted and gyrated the hammers back and forth, pretending to be Claytie and the Lady (this was a real nickname for the 1990 campaign season). We then would hammer each other playfully and claim that the other one is going to hammer out their opponent and dig a hole all the way to China. Grandma Judy appeared out of seemingly nowhere to witness our weird political operetta using dangerous tools only meant for adults. I resisted and cried when she took Ann Richards away from me – pouting as if the hammer was a Cabbage Patch doll that was snatched from my baby hands while I drooled along in mid-day slumber during tjhe daily worship of the cult of naptime on our facing-Mecca vinyl mats.
“I want Ann Richards!” I shouted back to Grandma Judy. It was then that she sat me down, grabbed my chin in a mild vise of translucent old lady fingers, with skin as porous as a doilie on a dinette set, and she gave me my first political counterprogramming / brainwashing / grandmasplainin’ sesh. “Ann Richards is a very special lady, and she would not like being hammered out!” She then explained that one of the people running for governor cares about ALL people, and the other one only cares about HIS people, and then told me that I should pick the one who cares about ALL people The pointless task of trying to get a first grader to switch his vote still had an effect on me – I took it more seriously, even if I didn’t know any better.
Grandma Judy was the kind of lady that earned the right to brainwash her little pupils – she taught me that it’s not Dookie, it’s Dukakis, and that I should always like the one who governs for ALL people. Or at least, all Texans.
Fast forward to 1992 – I was sitting on the couch with my mom watching an antique relic of a show called ARSENIO HALL (we used to pretend we were Arsenio Hall on the playground and have ad-hoc talk shows with pretend cameras and the like, but I digress again). A grey-haired, but very energetic man named Bill Clinton, puts a pair of sunglaasses on, and starts honking and hoo-ing on a golden saxophone, to a rapt audience and a blue background. My mom thought that was SO COOL. I thought it was SO COOL. So cool, in fact, that in 6th grade, I took up the saxophone, subconsciously influenced by Clinton’s coolness. I have never had the embochure or the persistence of a man like Bill Clinton – and so I put that saxophone out to pasture by the time I was a high school junior.
My mother didn’t even vote for Clinton, but she thought he was “COOL” nonetheless! Wasn’t politics so quaint back then? She voted for Ross Perot, during peak perot-nism in America. I think she even did it twice. I don’t know whether that was a waste of a vote or not, but the writing was on the wall even then that Democrats were becoming an endangered species in Texas. “Now listen here, see…”
I actually used to say I was a Republican for many years as a kid – maybe it was just my attempt at being a contrarian, because other than my mom’s protest votes for Perot, my entire family was solidly Democrat, through and through, even though most of them are from Oklahoma! Once George W. Bush ran against my beloved Ann Richards, I swore off Republican anything ever again from that point forward.
It took my mother a little bit later to come around to the blue side. I know exactly the moment – she had just come home after being on a business trip to New Jersey. “God, I’m embarrassed to be from Texas, George W. Bush is so dumb and embarrassing! I always have to explain myself to all of the pharmaceutical reps in New JERSEY.” She said Jersey as if it was she was a cliché teenage movie character saying “GRODY”. And by disliking how George W. Bush brought our collective perceived intelligence down as Texans, she voted for Al Gore. And John Kerry. And Obama. And Hillary. Sometimes the reasons we vote for a particular candidate are singular and narrow, but the end result is one of moral confidence.
My first vote was in 2004 for John Kerry. I voted at the local library in Hoboken, New Jersey, so my vote had no effect on any electoral college sweepstake, and like all “liberal” college boys of a certain style, I naturally assumed Kerry, in all his salt-and-pepper blandness, with that blue-blood Bassett hound bone structure, was going to win, because he was the one with clarity of thought, the one with higher-minded goals, the one with no stain on his hands from a war that most people had never supported to begin with. But he was swiftboated and swept away like a McGoverning, Mondailing, wishes-he-was-Jimmy Cartah, career Democrat with all the allure of an ochre prismacolor. And, at the time I may not have felt this way, but George W. Bush in retrospect wasn’t all that terrible other than the warmongering, and his wahf Laura just wanted to make sure all the kids had sunblock on their noses!
(Check back for Part II of this endless political Jeremiad/reminiscistrone soup)
