Last week, Printculture commenter Babykong, searching for reasons to turn away from the blinding light of my summary of Watership Down, whose photon-drenched penumbra had laid bare the furthest reaches of his conscience, requested that the blog give him material that would be a little easier on his soul: something, for gods' sake, on the current election. Well, here it is.

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(Before I get going let me say that a particular kind of moralistic obnoxiousness, here eschewed, would have allowed me to go on to respond by discussing the recent elections in Serbia [go pro-EU parties!] and Zimbabwe [booo, Mugabe!], and then to pretend to be all surprised when my interlocutor said that he meant the US election... )

Anyway. Time for some Printculture history. When five spunky kids with nothing in their pockets but a craving for meaning founded this here blog, they did so in response to the dessicated emotional and political landscape of late 2004, conceiving the idea shortly after the Democratic dream deferred embodied (awkwardly) by John Kerry foundered on the shoals of the fear and loathing of fifty-three percent of the American voting public, and meeting F2F (as the kids say) at the Philadelphia MLA to hash out their dastardly program.

Many of our early posts were explicitly about politics--thoughts on Abu Ghraib, parsings of the presidential press secretary's latest run-ins with the media, analyses of news photography. We even, in a fit of joinery and excitement, protested against the approval of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General. Part of this had to do with the times, I think, but also with the structure of blogging, in which the first year or so is easy: an information dump of all the things you'd thought of but never written down.

Lately, as Babykong notes, not much that's political makes it onto the site. Speaking now only for myself, I can't say that's because there's any less interest in politics around here. I actually think I enjoy the horse race more than the other folks, and spend more time reading political blogs than they do. But, despite my profound attention to the presidential contest (and indeed to the more obscure House special elections, e.g. LA-06), I don't really feel like I have much to say about it.

Why not? Well, partly because the political stuff is getting said, faster than I can say it, and just as well, elsewhere. Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and Digby are all very very good; Greenwald in particular writes posts that are the kind of thing I would like to write if I were a full-time political blogger, had researchers, and so on (though sometimes I find the truths he's laying out so hard to take I have to stop reading). That is: there is a professional class of blogger out there, who simply wasn't there in 2004, who is doing the kind of writing that I would like to do, and is leavening it with really interesting discussions of policy issues that I have no time to research. Yglesias and Klein also leaven their blogs with occasional posts on cultural issues or sports, making them more like Printculture than most blogs were back in 2004. (Though the Printculture strategy, which is kind of an n+1 model done without famous people or really any writing that takes time, has failed consistently to build up a constituency of readers; whether this is because we're no good or because in fact single-issue blogs trump flanerie every time I don't know, though I suspect it has at least partly to do with the latter.)

I've actually sat around and wondered: what would a Printculture (tm) post on the elections look like? What kind of take would typify the particular tone/style of this site, and what could I (or one of my cohorts) bring to the table that would actually have the chance to teach one of these folks (that is, the folks I already admire) something s/he didn't know?

Here is the closest I've come:

Waiting it out

It feels right now like the whole country is in a bizarre holding pattern, a twilit stasis that precedes, we hope, another dawn. I feel like we're all waiting for it to end, and that though we agree that Bush has done terrible things, it's just not worth thinking about or complaining about any more: everyone who's convinceable has been convinced, and the last 28 percent, including Bush himself, are basically immune to information.

So here we sit in history's foxhole, waiting out the artillery fire. It's not a position of total hopelessness or abandonment: I have fantasies of having a conversation with Bush in which I convince him, through a combination of persuasiveness and rage, to actually recognize himself as I recognize him, a conversation I imagine breaking him in a fundamental way, allowing him to return to alcoholism, so that he dies, alone, drunk, and furious, but slowly, over the next twenty years. But the very fact that that's my fantasy: and not some program to restore the Constitution, is probably a sign of how far down I'm keeping my head.

That said, the waiting is borne of a basic faith in the apparatus of democracy. Still II believe that come January we'll have a new president. I think I'm just waiting for that, hoping nothing terrible happens, and daring to imagine that things will be different. If the country elects McCain I feel like maybe I'll be done. (Though I felt that way in 2004 and look at me now: not done.) If it's Obama I worry that I'm going to be too hopeful, that he won't be able to fulfill all my dreams and plans for what his administration might be like, rainbow bridges to the future and all.

Anyway, that's where I think we are, where I feel like the country is. Bush is still president, but everyone pretends that he's not, even as the violence done in our names continues apace — does anyone doubt that our government is still torturing people, or detaining them illegally? — and the economy falls apart as the strain put on it by the nation's collective failure to look at reality finally comes home to roost. It's not, then, that anything's improved. It's just that there is only so much reality we can take. I am waiting for something else in the hopes that if certain parts of the reality improve, I can actually attend to other ones in which I might make a difference. It's not pushing colored stones into the cave walls, but it is, it seems to me, the recognition of a kind of collective limit to what we can take. And so, with six months to the election, I'm just waiting it out.

Coda: sometimes I sit around and remember what it was like during the Bush and Clinton years, when all these things mattered that seem to matter very little now. I remember the euphoria of Clinton's election in 1992, the feeling that after 12 years the country was finally changing (being 20 years old helped with that). There was, I think, a sense of epic there. But how small that epic seems now! What was it about? Abortion? Welfare reform? Not that these don't matter, but how easy we had it then...