Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(34)

I thought about this in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen won a primary in our village. After the votes were tallied, I took a walk, looking into the windows of people I thought I knew and thinking, You? Really? Those same neighbors unwilling to discuss their own election were, of course, more than happy to talk about mine. After the 2008 conventions it was all we talked about. “So who are you voting for, Obama or McCain?” they wanted to know.

I said to Hugh, “They have to ask?” I mean, really, you’d hope it would be evident.





After my month in the United States, I flew back to France, arriving on the morning of November 4, just as Americans were going to the polls. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, I caught a cab. The driver was listening to talk radio, and during my long ride into Paris, the callers explained why my candidate could never win. “Americans are racist,” they said. “Americans are afraid of anything different.” You’d think that Obama was the French candidate for president of the United States, that’s how possessive and prematurely disappointed everyone was. The cab driver got into it as well. “Who do you think will win?” he asked, and when I said Obama, he told me flat out that it was not going to happen.

So then, of course, it did happen. And everyone was like, “Obama!” Even people I didn’t personally know, cashiers at the supermarket and such who identified me by my accent. “Obama!” they cried, and, “You did good.” I’d like to say that their tone was congratulatory, but there was something else in there as well. Not “How wonderful that you have a thoughtful new president” but “How wonderful that you elected the president we thought you should elect.”





I was in London during the inauguration and watched the ceremony on the BBC, which reminded me every three seconds that Barack Obama was black and would become America’s first black president. At first I thought that this was for blind people, a little reminder in case they forgot. Then it became laughable: Barack Obama, who is black, is arriving now with his black wife and two black children, a group that will form America’s first black First Family, which is to say, the first group of blacks elected to the White House, which is white and not black like them.

It got on my nerves, but then I thought, If America elected its first gay president, I might want to hear it a few thousand times. It might take a few thousand mentions just to sink in. For me, Obama’s race had nothing to do with my voting for him. I liked that he could deliver a speech, this as opposed to our previous two Democratic candidates, both of whom spoke as if they were reading the words phonetically in Korean and didn’t know where to put the emphasis.

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: “If McCain doesn’t win, I’m leaving the country.”

“Oh, right,” I’d say. “You’re going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?” In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers’ dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she’ll have the nation’s blessing.

That’s just me, though, being insensitive. Certain people might brand me “mean-spirited,” though I think that’s the pot calling the kettle black. States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don’t want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Of course, Obama too was against gay marriage. Except for a couple of decided long shots, all the candidates that year were. Being for it was the kiss of death, which, again, can’t help but tick me off. I mean, honestly, that’s the deciding issue? Many of those who have fought and voted against it are Democrats, and that depresses me as well. But you pick and you choose, don’t you? Some things you can sit on, and others you can’t. While waiting for my party to come around, I listened to my French neighbors, all of them joyous and patting me on the back. “Obama!” they cried. “Obama! Obama!” I offered in return an increasingly forced smile, thinking, Oh, get your own black president.





Standing By




It was one of those headaches that befall every airline passenger. A flight is delayed because of thunderstorms or backed-up traffic—or maybe it’s canceled altogether. Maybe you board two hours late, or maybe you board on time and spend the next two hours sitting on the runway. When it happens to you it’s a national tragedy—Why aren’t the papers reporting this? you wonder.

Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is. “They told us we’d leave at three instead of two thirty, so I went to get a frosted-pecan wrap, and when I came back they changed the time to four on account of the plane we’d be riding on hadn’t left Pittsburgh yet. Then I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us that an hour ago?’ and they were like, ‘Ma’am, just stand away from the counter, please.’”