Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not complaining. Voting is one area where there really is – and should be – a difference between where you come from and where you are. But this week I have felt acutely the strangeness of my situation, which is that I can influence minute local elections in California (I haven’t been in California for two years) but cannot cast a vote here, where I live now.

It’s good to feel this powerless. I forget not to take things – like democracy, for instance – for granted. I have strong opinions about the general election in the UK. But I’m a child again, watching the adults make the decisions. More than that, I have the sense that I’m witnessing an intimate moment that I shouldn’t see. I’m an American voyeur, peering into the British bedroom, watching the politicians strip their clothes off, bare their fists. Watching the people do the same.

This is not the same thing has having no say. I still have a voice. I simply don’t have the right to tick a box. That box makes a world of difference to me, but the freedoms I enjoy would make a world of difference to much of the rest of the world. I know that. I also know that I made the choice to live here.

And I believe this is just, that my own powerlessness is deserved. But I would be lying if I told you that on Thursday, I didn’t feel just the tiniest bit of resentment. In the morning, reading other people’s accounts of stepping into voting booths, my eyes welled up. I always get a bit like that about elections, but this time there was something else. This was not pure love for the democratic system, or a thrill at seeing it in action. There was a sadness, too. Voting brings people together. There’s a whole community out there this week – a whole country – that I’m not a part of and never can be.

There’s something else, too. There’s anger, I think. This is more irrational. But it has to do with the sense that it had just got started. They didn’t left enough time for us to process everything, let alone decide (I say “we” but I mean “them” – and that’s at the heart of it, I hate that there’s a “them” again, just when I was getting used to it being “us”). This election only really kicked off a few weeks ago; where I’m from elections last years. And that can be exhausting, but it’s what I’m used to.

Here, they’re analysts. I’ve watched my friends and my colleagues suddenly become mathematicians, statisticians, logic-minded advocates. They understand marginal seats and tactical voting but there’s not that same idealistic sense of individual power.

What I keep thinking, really, is this: that I may not have a vote but I still have a voice, and how could I have used it? Why didn’t I use it? My own ignorance left me feeling bound and gagged for too long and now suddenly here we are, and the time for action has passed.

I remember going to a rally for a popular gubernatorial candidate in Boston once. A friend of mine, another politics student, met me outside the Hynes Convention Center and we smiled our way past the security and up into the balcony, where we watched the candidate make a rousing speech. It was raining confetti. Oh, it was a spectacle. It was empty. The fact that this man could rally such an enthusiastic crowd says nothing about his qualifications to lead a state. But it felt good, and now I know why: it felt good because I was a part of it. Because the following week I could go out and make my decision, and have that mean something.

So my challenge now is to learn how to make my voice feel more like a vote; to learn how to translate opinion into action in new ways. And maybe, too, I should consider what I said at the start of this post – that this is one area in which it really does matter where you come from, where you’re registered. That sounds so clinical – to say that I’m registered to vote in California and therefore that’s where I should be voting – but maybe it’s only because I’ve forgotten, over the last few years, how important it is to feel involved.

There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

1. I genuinely do not believe that people are, for the most part, concerned about knowing exactly how many people leave and enter the UK each year, or about putting a cap on that number.  What I do believe they are concerned with is knowing how immigration will impact them directly.  It’s not about what will happen to Britain in general; it’s Will I lose my job?  Will crime in my area increase?  Never mind if these are logical questions.  It doesn’t matter what immigrants look like, where they come from, what their stories are.  All that matters is the local and the personal, and no one seems willing, or able, to address this.  The debate has become so curly that it’s impossible to get past the repetitive rhetoric.  Who has the balls to explain, on an individual level, the impact that immigration actually has?  Who has the balls to suggest once and for all that letting people in may not be the worst thing in the world?

2. The points based system.  Bless it, bless it a million times, because it’s the only way that I would be able to live in this country with the man that I love, with my friends, my job, my ambitions.  But let’s be honest.  It’s not a fair system.  It’s a completely ridiculous scheme to allow people of certain social or financial standing entry into the UK.  The fees for visa applications alone are prohibitive (I’m looking at a £500-700 fee to pay in January–my third such fee in as many years); but applicants also have to be able to prove access to a certain amount of funding.  They have to be educated, or highly skilled, or both.  They have to meet rigid criteria.  Students must be able to show that they can not only pay enormous international fees, but support themselves at the same time.

I’m not saying this system should not be in place.  I think that, for what it is, it’s excellent.  It ensures that graduates of UK universities and highly skilled individuals are able to choose where they want to put their skills to use.  And as a middle-class white American girl, the points based system is my only real hope for forging a life in the UK.  I know I’m lucky.  I have supportive and successful parents who have backed me financially–who have been able to back me financially–over the years.  But it’s still been a struggle, and I know how many people are not, and never will be, that lucky.  So let’s not pretend that the points based system in any way addresses the entire issue.  It’s a start, but by indirectly excluding people based on cost and criteria, it still leaves questions unanswered and voices unheard.

That’s it for now, and yes, I’m biased, terribly biased.  But then again, why not?  If the politicians are too afraid to leave their comfortable, circular world of empty oratory, we’ll all have to speak for ourselves.

It’s been rainy and cold lately, but in general, the city has taken on a hue of almost heartbreaking beauty: late autumn, and though dark falls early, to catch the sunlight glinting off the windows is a reaffirming experience.

I’m formulating new ideas on literature and politics (more to come), aided by a quick and almost careless line in Joyce’s The Dead: “He wanted to say that literature was above politics” as well as by various more overt articles. I’m rearranging books and looking forward to making the house nice again. I’m listening to music and buying all my winter clothing secondhand. Next week is election day; so I remember four years ago, being in Boston and walking in a chill November fog to Copley Square where thousands were rallying for John Kerry. I remember going to sleep with the nation still undecided and waking up to dissapointment, and having to change my outfit because I was irrationally afraid that people would think I supported George Bush because I was wearing cowboy boots. Our own minds are very strange sometimes.

Also, my first Guy Fawkes night coming up. It’s going to be a very political week.

All in all, I think I’ll feel better when it’s over and we have a new leader.

In the meantime I’ve started school again. I’m sinking rapidly into the feeling that what I want to do more than anything else is wrap myself up in words and swim in the sea of Academia and sunbathe in the fruits of my research. (Mixed metaphors, anyone?) So I’m formulating a vague plan.

On a happy note, the Man has returned from his sausage-making expedition smelling of pork and bearing 22 lovely-looking sausages. Moreover, he assures me, we have some more in storage, waiting in a friends’ freezer. It’s a good world, all in all.

1) I can pretty much guarantee that Senator McCain’s almost-decision to “suspend campaigning” in light of the current financial crisis was a purely political move, likely cooked up by advisers to make the Senator appear sympathetic to the crisis and more concerned with his country’s plights than his own campaign. But it’s a catch-22: if he had suspended his campaign, he would STILL be campaigning. The very act of suspension would have been an act of campaigning. Once you enter the presidential race, you don’t leave until someone’s been declared victor. EVERYTHING that you do is part of the act.

2) From the Post article:

“Later, McCain’s voice dripped with derision as he questioned Obama’s statement that he would meet with the leaders of rogue foreign countries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“So let me get this right: We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,’ and we say, ‘No, you’re not’?” the senator from Arizona said.”

Oh, I know what’ll help the USA interact with the world at large: cutting ourselves off from it! No, Mr. McCain. I think it takes a lot of guts for Obama to say something like that on national television (in this era of frighteningly instinctive, “gut-based” electoral politics, Obama now runs the risk of being unhelpfully associated with the Iranian President). I also think that he’s absolutely on the right track. Forging relationships–however tremulous–is something we clearly haven’t tried to do as a country for the last eight years; and I fail to see how a simple willingness to meet with other leaders–however terrible they might be–can be detrimental to us now.

But I think it all stems from a fundamental difference in worldview that was highlighted later on in the debate…

3) Also from the Post: “The two candidates had an emotional exchange over the bracelets they each wear in memory of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, underscoring the deep divide created by the war.” I think staff writers Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray are wrong here: this is not a divide created by the war. This is a divide that always was. See here:

McCain wears the bracelet of a 22 year old soldier killed outside of Baghdad. McCain recounts the plea of the soldier’s mother: “But Senator McCain, I want you to do everything — promise me one thing, that you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that my son’s death was not in vain.”

Obama wears the bracelet of another young soldier. He says of this soldier’s mother: “She asked me, ‘Can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I’m going through?’”

I couldn’t help, in my circuitious mind, to think of Euripedes’ play The Trojan Women, which might be the most powerful anti-war narrative ever told. It’s not about the soldiering, or even the war itself; it’s about how it effects the women left behind, and it’s painful. McCain wears a bracelet that symbolises finding meaning in war–a defeatist attitude, as if the act of war is inevitable and all we can do is not seek to prevent it, but merely make sure that it is “not in vain”. Obama wears a bracelet that symbolises the possibility that future generations of mothers and sons, of human beings, will not have to suffer the rigors of battle and its gutting aftermath.

“I have left the gates of darkness where the dead are hidden and Hades dwells apart from the gods, and come to this place,” says Polydorus, son of Hecuba and Priam, appearing as a ghost, opening Euripedes’ play. The candidates are in the “this place” of the play; a place not where the dead are hidden but where the living roam, where “future” and “possibility” exist, where the human mind may still be swayed, or opened. Let us hope that we move towards light, and not closer to the gates of darkness.

Here’s what John Betjeman wrote about it in 1937 (in An Oxford University Chest):

“It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles’ and even Magdalen Street by Elliston and Cavell’s right up to and beyond the War Memorial, at the meeting of the Woodstock and Banbury roads, is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves. Every sort of fairman finds it worth his while to come to St Giles’. Old roundabouts worked by hand that revolve slow enough to suit the very young or the very old, ageing palmists and sinister, alluring houris excite the wonder and the passions of red-faced ploughmen…. Beyond St Giles’ the University is silent and dark. Even the lights of the multiple stores in the Cornmarket seem feeble…. And in the alleys between the booths you can hear people talking with an Oxfordshire accent, a change from the Oxford one.”

It isn’t so very different today, fundamentally: “Beyond St. Giles’ the University is silent and dark…”.

Historical photos of the fair show ladies under wide parasols, in sweeping black skirts and busty white blouses. The men wear caps at jaunty angles and plus-fours, or suits and bowlers. There are striped tents and little girls with ribbons in their hair. The great stone walls of the University are all but hidden. Elaborate, fairy-tale structures have been erected where once was only an empty avenue.

The caption of one photo, taken in 1895, reads: “A large crowd gathered in St Giles during the annual fair to watch the Fair Days Menagerie. A clown and a pelican are entertaining the crowd waiting to enter.”

When I attend the fair, the outfits are t-shirts, scarves, and denim, and nobody carries a parasol, though they wouldn’t need to anyway: it’s a day as grey as they come. A mist settles on my bicycle as I wheel it through the crowd. There is none of the frivolous accordion music you expect at a fair, only the heavy thump of electronic beats and rock bands (the Man, who works in an office on St. Giles itself, came home that evening looking frazzled and as if he never wanted to go near the place again). The only people on the whirling carousels are white-haired women being photographed by their white-haired husbands, reliving the glory of their childhood one musical spin at a time. Today’s young prefer the faster-paced rides: the roller-coaster outside the doors of a college, the things that spin and shake you into a state of blissful oblivion.

I am reviled by the prospect of such things, though a lifelong attraction to bumper cars is rekindled as soon as I see the shiny floor of the Dodgeum ring. Enormous stuffed animals, arcade games, and the universal sweet smell of the fair (cotton candy mixed revoltingly with fried foods) accost the senses at every turn. I have the sense that I have stepped off my cycle and into a Fellini film. I don’t know quite where to look: at the Haunted House? The giddy teenagers in their tiny straight-leg jeans and pixie haircuts, cigarettes protruding from underage lips? The enormous pink polar bears on display, the food stalls, the patient tweed-clad fathers trying to keep up with their eager, bounding toddlers? I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see a clown and a pelican holding court. Part of me is disgusted, but another part of me can’t help cracking an enormous grin.

**

When I get home I check the news, as if there might be something new, but there isn’t. There’s doom and gloom and the circus of the presidential election–McCain/Palin (a clown and a pelican?) making gaffes wherever they go, Obama making speeches, pundits and political analysts making predictions, everyone else making noise. The whole world appears to have been swallowed by the same Fellini film that took over St. Giles for two days in September.

As my father very wisely said: “You could not make this stuff up — it would seem too absurd.” It falls more in the realm of science fiction than public affairs and political analysis. Who stole the politicians’ brains?

“Chuck Norris doesn’t endorse. He tells America how it’s going to be–” so says Mike Huckabee, who seems to be under the impression that Mr. Norris’s presence at the US border will solve all our immigration woes. (yikes) Norris has officially endorsed Huckabee; it’s hard to say which of them is crazier, at this point.

And in this corner, we have headlines like: “Paul ’08 Bid Endorsed by Brothel Owner: Presidential candidate Ron Paul receives endorsement from Nevada brothel owner.” Apparently the kids who run around stumping for Paul have a name: Paultards. The New Yorker had a little blurb about a group of them at Columbia University. I’m paraphrasing, but one of them said something that basically amounted to: “I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t vote for someone who actually wants to lower your taxes!”

In other American news, a four-year-old-boy has been suspended from class for sexually assaulting his teacher. Apparently he buried his head in her chest whilst giving her a hug.

???!?!?!

*sigh*

We need to reframe all of this.
He was an ostrich.
I stamped it too. Consultants can be wrong sometimes.
Turf battles. Office politics. State politics. National politics.
And a man known as “Shrumy”.

I said the city was dizzy yesterday; well, now I’m dizzy.

Quote: “Why not sit on it and wait until it can really strike a fatal blow?”

Why on earth is the election of a powerful world leader occasion to “strike a fatal blow”?

We talk in circles about how to get it out to the press anonymously, because no one wants to be seen as homophobic. Well then, don’t use it! Or perhaps I’m too strong a proponent of honesty, but I’d like to see someone slip it in the papers and have Clinton say, “oh, yeah, that’s right, I did have girlfriend once. It didn’t work out.” I’ve completely lost track of why on earth this is a relevant topic for discussion. When did the foibles of people’s private lives—and we all have them—become the basis of our decision to elect them?

I feel a bit like I’m drinking liquor from the bottle: it burns. It makes my head spin. It tastes awful.