Earlier this fall I posted on one part of my personality, the part that loves irony. Even when irony isn’t in my favor. Besides irony, one thing that I notice a lot of are assumptions and stereotypes. Not all assumptions and stereotypes are bad, because like the guy who started a blog in January on “White People” has noted (and who’s now published a book of his blogs), there’s an element of truth in these assumptions and stereotypes. But as the saying goes, assuming so much about so many can make an “‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.”

Such is the case with two strange stereotypes in this culture, ones in which race plays a role, but not exactly the ways in which most people echoing these stereotypes would expect. Take Sen. McCain’s call a couple of weeks ago for Sen. Obama to “repudiate” Rep. John L. Lewis’ statement drawing comparisons between the McCain campaign’s rhetoric in its stump speeches and the vile reactions of some in its crowds to the late George Wallace’s fiery, hate-filled speeches and the violent acts against Blacks that resulted. Why would McCain need Obama to repudiate Lewis’ comments? If anything, McCain should be able to repudiate them himself, right?

McCain’s call on Obama to repudiate Lewis falls easily into one of the great Derrick Bell’s “Rules of Racial Standing,” where a Black leader or, as some of us would call it, a representative Negro, is called on the carpet to rebuke another Black leader for inappropriately crying over race. To be sure, Rep. Lewis’ comparison of McCain’s campaign rhetoric to Wallace’s is a bit of a stretch. McCain’s response, though, is a strange one even when Bell’s “Rules of Racial Standing” are implied. Lewis himself backtracked on his own statement, and Obama’s campaign had already responded to Lewis before McCain’s call for repudiation. Plus, if McCain’s other statements about Lewis are to be believed, then he should’ve picked up the phone and talked with Lewis directly about his statement or repudiated it himself. It makes McCain look cowardly, actually, for calling on someone else to talk with one of his “heroes” for him.

The recent rebukes from the media neocons on the issue of race in this election cycle are another example of stereotyping. The thought among folks like Bill O’Reilly, Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan is that though McCain’s campaign and his surrogates have implied that Obama is a socialist, anti-American, pro-terrorist, associates only with radical leftists, and has a questionable familial and American background, that this isn’t related to race at all. Yes, it’s going a bit too far to say that McCain and Palin have been running a racist campaign or that they are solely responsible for the violent language used by some in their crowds about Obama, like a recent New York Times editorial suggested.

Yet the response of the aforementioned neocons is as stereotypical as it is strange. Their response is stereotypical because in their minds, racist language or acts can only occur if the N-word is involved or if it’s something that someone White does to some Black. For them, the distance between the implications of the McCain campaign’s language and racist language is a thick white wall of a line, not the thin line that many of us recognize it to be. It is as much a stereotype for neocons to react to any allegations of racism as if someone had an epileptic grand mal seizure in front of them as it is stereotypical from their perspective to have so-called liberal newspapers like the New York Times to raise the issue of race at inappropriate times and in inappropriate circumstances.

All miss the main point. Race and racism is far more complex and far more nuanced than any of these people are willing to admit or understand. Even many Blacks and other Americans of color don’t always see the nuance. McCain’s campaign, regardless of intent, has likely stoked more complex feelings about Obama and race in America than folks like O’Reilly, Scarborough and Buchanan have the intellectual and rhetorical capacity to analyze or vocalize.

On a less serious but still strangely stereotypical tip, one of the things me and my wife often laugh about with TV shows is how almost all shows treat the issue of race when it’s injected into a storyline. Whether it’s CBS’ Cold Case or HBO’s The Wire, one thing’s for certain. If there’s an event in which a large number of Blacks are gathered — especially if there’s any historical context to it at all — gospel music or spirituals become the background sound for the scene. It’s uncanny how often or automatic it is to see and hear with show after show after show. It would be like watching a show based in San Francisco with the only music playing on the show coming from Journey’s Greatest Hits album, or a show in Indiana that only played John Mellencamp’s music. Or a show about Latinos only playing salsa — although the George Lopez show does have some of these elements. Although these shows are attempts at showing the great diversity that is life even among African Americans, they inadvertently reinforce other stereotypes in the process. I just wish that instead of hearing a middle-aged Black woman humming a gospel song after a homicide on a show, that I heard Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel instead.

Given the recent statements of the presidential candidates and their respective candidates, it’s obvious that none of them have a clear understanding of the problems and needs of American education from K to 12 and in postsecondary education. Charter schools vs. vouchers, more student loans and tax credits, early childhood education and performance-based teacher pay, and more parental involvement. That’s it? That’s all we’re going to hear from Obama and McCain during the election cycle? Even Ralph Nader has more to say about education issues, not much more, but more.

As much as I like Obama and have been inspired to vote for him (and I will on November 4), I’m also troubled as an educator by his limited knowledge of education reform issues. Especially given the fact that he did serve as the board chair of Chicago’s Annenberg Challenge in the late-1990s — you know, the one in which Bill Ayres also served. I don’t expect McCain to know much about American public education in any form, and Gov. Palin’s suggestions for more “vo-tech options” puts her at least forty years behind our troubled times. But I would’ve expected more from Obama. Not much more, but more than he’s offered in the general election cycle or in the debates.

As part of his rising crescendo of a victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 3, Obama said, “in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the few, but a birthright of every American.” Strong progressive words indeed. With Obama’s affirmation, it appeared that much has happened in recent years in raising this education reform issue around increasing college access and degree completion to the national level. So much so that it would lead many—including Sen. Obama—to believe that the education revolution that folks have been waiting four decades for has finally arrived. But given his other statements, the reality may well be that a President Obama (most likely) or McCain will need to bone up on the critical issues of education reform and the distance between our current sorting system and the universal postsecondary education ideals that Obama so eloquently spoke to in June.

The nexus between secondary and postsecondary education has been a critical issue in which nonprofit organizations and private foundations have invested and engaged for the past decade or so. Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Goldman Sachs Foundation (yes, the same folks who helped bring us the financial meltdown this fall), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are among many such organizations that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to create pathways so that students who otherwise are unlikely to attend college can do just that. Unfortunately, much of what they fund are small projects that help all too few underrepresented students transition to college successfully, and each has their own methods for weeding out tough cases from diamonds in the rough.

There is an inherent tension in this. The tension is between the fight for universal postsecondary education and training (including two-year degrees and technical certificate programs) and a talent search for underrepresented students who may be successful at earning a four-year degree at elite institutions. It is in understanding this tension that we can understand the truth. That all signs point to postsecondary education as the crucial element in America’s economic and cultural future. That talent search programs do little to get us there, and are more a product of post-Civil Rights era attempts to identify academically gifted students of color than they are in line with other, more universal efforts to address the race and income achievement gap.

Among numerous others, Washington Metropolitan Scholars, Quest Scholars Program’s QuestLeadership and QuestBridge, Princeton University’s Preparatory Program, the University of Chicago’s Collegiate Scholars Program, and The Crimson Summer Academy at Harvard University all have extensive selection processes for identifying low-income students and students of color who have the leadership and academic potential for succeeding in college. But the twenty-year-old Posse Foundation is the creme de la creme of them all. At least as evidenced by the media’s attention, numerous grant awards and the number of colleges willing to pay fees to Posse for the opportunity to provide students a free and full ride toward a four-year degree. Posse’s claim as one of the longest running and most effective programs for finding students of color who are diamonds in the rough helped earn its founder Dr. Deborah Bial a MacArthur “genius” award in 2007.

Yet there are some ironies even in Posse’s work. Only one out of every ten high school students who apply to be a Posse Scholar end up as such at the end of the selection process each year. That may not sound all that bad. But in New York City alone, this means that about 1,000 students are unsuccessful in earning one of the 110 or so slots. This is much more than a process of filling out an application, writing an essay or obtaining letters of recommendation from a teacher or principal. Posse has several points of contact with the applicants prior to the final selection. Group interviews and projects, along with conversations, tasks and tests designed to explore each student’s leadership potential, interpersonal skills and motivation for attending college, are all part of the selection process. A final meeting occurs with representatives from member colleges in attendance before the final groups of Posse Scholars are selected. Each group of 10 to 12 students is sent to a college or university as a cohort or “posse.”

It is an intense process for all of the students, yet only a handful make it to the end of the process successfully. Granted, those 110 students are guaranteed free tuition, room, board and books at elite selective colleges and universities for four years. On the other hand, 1,000 others— many of whom had never seriously thought about attending college until they had heard about Posse — are left with few options as ideal as Posse after the American Idol-like selection process.

To be fair, programs like Posse’s recognize their necessary limitations, as these are expensive programs to run and even more expensive for colleges and universities to support. Yet there are other and better alternatives to bringing opportunities for postsecondary education to underrepresented students. The idea of a single-track, college-prep curriculum from pre-kindergarten through high school, such as the one that exists in Chattanooga-Hamilton County public schools, is one promising option. Early college high schools—high schools connected to postsecondary institutions, many with funding from the Gates Foundation—provide students dual enrollment options that enable them to earn a diploma and a two-year degree at the same time.

As someone who graduated Mount Vernon High School (and it’s defunct gifted-track academic Humanities Program) in ’87 (only a couple of years before programs like Posse came along), I understand how necessary programs like these are in making the dream of better lives real for thousands of underrepresented students. But I also know how exclusionary such programs can be. As these programs highlight the reality that talent and other intangible qualities exist in young folk across socioeconomic and racial lines, they also demonstrate that this path is one that only a few disadvantaged youth can possibly take advantage of. It makes me wonder whether I would have made the cut in these competitions. And if I had been rejected, what it would have meant for my motivation to go to college?

There’s no way that anything that any of the candidates have proposed would move us significantly closer to universal postsecondary education or even significantly higher high school graduation rates. Obama can say what he wants about parents who need to “turn off the TV.” This is as much about creating systems so that community involvement and just parental involvement is high, and that can happen only when we decide that a good American education shouldn’t be up to individual decision-making alone. That’s the problem with academic competitions like Posse’s, and that’s the problem with many of the prescriptions proposed by the major candidates. As educators, politicians and social justice folks alike, we must work to make college—or some form of postsecondary education, at least—a right and the responsibility of communities, not a privilege and certainly not a zero-sum individual competition.

It’s always amazing to me when people discount when someone — especially a big name — supports or endorses a candidate, as if the endorse is worth less than used toilet tissue. Such has been the case in the past 32 hours since General Colin Powell’s endorsement of and support for (however limited) of Obama. Rush Limbaugh showing his true colors by yelling that Powell’s support of Obama was “ALL about RACE!” Republican surrogates expressing skepticism about the impact of Powell’s endorsement on the election or any voters at all. Funny. I know full well that if Powell had endorsed McCain that folks from the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party would’ve minimized it. But they also wouldn’t have been folks yelling that this selection was all about race, as if Blacks are somehow irrational when other Blacks are running for office. If that were the case, then Lynn Swann would be governor of Pennsylvania and Michael Steele a Republican senator from Maryland. The train of thought here is disgusting, plain and simple.

Endorsements and support are always significant, for the person being supported or endorsed if nothing else. It provides a psychological boost, a sense that even in the midst of the work that one is doing that someone was inspired by it or by you. An expression of support can provide the energy necessary to redouble your efforts in fulfilling a goal, in seeing through a cause.

For me, endorsements and other expressions of support have been few and far between in my life. Most of them have come from Whites. Blacks in some position of authority have either seen me as insignificant or as their competition for a crumb of money or power or influence. That’s not to say that Whites have been remarkably supportive either. Given the circles I’ve been in most of my adult life, I have met all too few African Americans in positions of influence who’ve had the opportunity to endorse or support me in some way or another.

As I’ve said in previous blogs, most of what I’ve accomplished in the past thirty-eight years and ten months of life has been in spite of many in my life, not because of them. My guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo was one unsupportive authority figure. She asked the “Are you sure about this?” question about the courses I wanted to take at Mount Vernon High School so many times that it seemed that she thought that I was severely mentally retarded, like I had only been mainstreamed to public school last week. Even when I visited Mount Vernon High School in the middle of my junior year at Pitt in December ’89, she pulled me aside to warn me against going to law school, because “lawyers work lots of long hours, and I’m not sure you can do that.” Thanks a lot. I only graduated fourteenth in my class in high school and finished Pitt with a 3.4 QPA.

My dissertation committee was almost equally unsupportive, especially my former advisor Joe Trotter. I learned about six months into my Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship from a selection committee panelist that his letter of recommendation “didn’t exactly help me” as far as the selection process was concerned. They somehow had put aside my advisor’s weak letter and awarded me a fellowship in April ’95 anyway. In addition to Professor “Running Interference” (one of his favorite catch phrases), I had Dan Resnick, a man who once subtly accused me of plagiarism because of the quality of my writing. He also called my doctoral thesis “average” and suggested that I “should think about a career as a journalist” as his signed off on my manuscript. I guess that it was supposed to be an insult. My unofficial advisor, Bruce Anthony Jones, left Pittsburgh for Missouri and Florida right at the end of my graduate school days in ’96, cutting off all ties with me in the process. With senior professors like these on my committee, I would’ve been better off picking professors who didn’t like me.

In the world of work, I’ve worked with superiors whose competence has varied from solid but somewhat scattered to just plain lost in the cobwebs. Most of them fall in the incompetent category. In working with folks from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, I’ve learned that general incompetence and mediocrity is universal, especially in my dealings with senior staff. Most of all, I’ve learned that Black senior staff in predominantly White organizations are so afraid of any appearance of favoritism or that a younger or less experienced Black staff person might steal their thunder. Over the past decade or so, I’ve met only a handful — maybe three or four — African Americans from the nonprofit and academic worlds who’ve been willing to share experiences or expertise in helping me in my career in some way or another. It’s hard to know who to trust in these situations when it’s obvious that most workplace colleagues possess some level of distrust toward one another.

The silver lining here is that over the years, I’ve had some support from folks across various backgrounds. Most of the support has been unexpected and without any special work on my part. I wasn’t networking or looking for a mentor or in obvious need of an endorsement in these cases. I was just being my sarcastic, deep-thinking, weird and funny self with these people. From my late AP American History teacher in Harold Meltzer to the late Barbara Lazarus of Carnegie Mellon University and from my Western Civilization II TA in Paul Riggs to the now retired Catherine Lacey of the Spencer Foundation, I’ve come across a number of folks who gave me their stamp of approval. Often without me having accomplished anything to earn it. But that’s the key understanding of an endorsement. This support isn’t necessarily because of something you’ve actually done. It’s an endorsement based on faith, on the possibility or probability that you will do something great in the immediate or intermediate future.

Meltzer believed in me, not only for high school and college, but as a writer, and long before I realized I was a writer. Paul saw my intellectual curiosity as a historian years before I saw myself as a historian. Barbara Lazarus thought of me as someone whose work on multiculturalism needed to be recognized even as it was in the early stages of development, and serves as my academic protector at Carnegie Mellon even when folks like my advisor were proposing to delay my graduation by at least a year. Catherine Lacey saw promise in my work, and ambivalence about my career choices years before I fully understood why I was ambivalent.

The important thing was that they were all there for me when I needed them, even if the way others saw me didn’t change as a result of their official endorsement. Their support is why I’m the writer, teacher, historian, researcher, and worker that I am today.

In the midst of my zeal to blog about the latest edition of the presidential campaign fear factor, not to mention recent happenings on the job search and teaching fronts, I almost completely forgot about a major milestone yesterday. Tuesday, October 14 marked thirty years since my mother married my ex-stepfather Maurice at Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York. Thirty years! My wife had the nerve to suggest that I remind my mother of the forever dreaded event.

It wasn’t dreaded thirty years ago, at least for her. It was probably the happiest day of my mother’s adult life. That’s not to say that my mother was happy or joyous or in ecstasy or anything along those lines. But she was smiling, content, seemed at peace, ready for the next phase of her life. She attributed my sadness to jealousy. She thought that I thought that Maurice was cutting me off from her. In a way she was right. I was worried alright. About this guy who constantly acted like he was my father when there was my real father to turn to, inebriated or not. In the eighteen months between the time we all moved into 616 East Lincoln and the wedding day, he had assigned us chores like picking up his clothes from the cleaners and buying his cigarettes. His form of discipline for me and my older brother Darren consisted of having us stand in corners with one leg in the air and balancing books with our arms. Or what he called “whuppins.” I hadn’t been won over, and neither had Darren.

That didn’t matter in the long run. What did matter was the fact that less than three months after Jimme had finally signed off on the divorce, my mother had married the guy she had an affair was as the first marriage was circling the toilet bowl. It’s not the smartest thing to do in your love life, as many a pop psychologist has noted over the years. I’d learn later on how my mother’s friends had warned her about Maurice. His attempt to cut a womanizing swath across Mount Vernon Hospital in the nearly two years before their affair. His constant boasting about his alleged higher intellect and his penchant for unrealistic ways to make lots of “ducats,” his favorite word for money. Maurice himself came from a failed first marriage — reportedly his fault because of his joblessness, penis, and temper.

Still, on Saturday, October 14, 1978, at approximately 3:08 pm, I played the role of ring bearer and handed my mother and Maurice the rings that they would exchange to begin their nearly eleven years of disastrous marriage. They were relatively happy and more or less in love at that moment. Not knowing that they were both making the mistake of their lives.

Darren and I didn’t know all we needed to know either. That a screwed-up and possibly bipolar womanizer with serious identity issues should’ve never married a woman on the rebound from a marriage to a hostile alcoholic. That a father of at least one child who refused to pay child support for his own daughter shouldn’t become involved with a woman who tired of children after they turned two because “that’s when they learn to talk back.” That two people in search of their spiritual center shouldn’t involve their children or stepchildren in their personal quest for God. That a man who acted as if God didn’t exist shouldn’t marry a woman who called her first husband everything but a child of God, even when she herself had become a child of God.

Maybe I’m being a bit tough on my mother and stepfather. After all, it was thirty years ago. But given their respective failed marriages, and having been married for eight and a half years myself, I don’t think I would’ve jumped back into that kind of relationship so quickly, and with two kids in the mix.

Still, it was a good day. I had what would be my last professional haircut until I left for Pittsburgh that morning. We had a monster reception that my mother borrowed $3,000 to throw at the late Jeannette Martin’s house on Mount Vernon’s South Side. My mother and stepfather went on a short two-day honeymoon while we stayed with our babysitter Ida (and one of Jimme’s drinking buddies). As an eight-year-old, there was a part of me that the honeymoon atmosphere that broke out between the Ohio Players and Earth, Wind & Fire playing on the dance floor would last forever.

Forever barely lasted seven Saturdays after the wedding. Because my stepfather had pissed me off with another one of his rules, and because I knew that my guardians had already started to argue about money, I ran away from home. I packed two days’ worth of clothing and walked out with the plan that I would get to New Rochelle, find a boat, stowaway and eventually get to Europe or France. I was found three-and-a-half hours later by the Pelham Manor Police, received the belt-whipping of my life (at least until Maurice began beating me up in the summer of ’82), and was on lockdown in our bedroom for six weeks.

It was during those six weeks of no TV and no going outside that I decided to punish my mother and stepfather by ignoring them with books. I cracked open the “A” volume of the ’78 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia and began reading. And reading. And reading. Pretty soon I didn’t miss TV. I didn’t have lots of friends, so going out to play became less and less of a hardship. I noticed that my grades and test scores started going up. So I kept reading. I became a straight A student indirectly because my mother remarried and my dreaded stepfather drove me to books. Talk about irony!

You know, I wrote and published a book four year ago titled Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience. I described how fearful many Americans, White, Black and Brown, are of our multicultural and demographic shift that has been underway since the late ’60s. One that will leave America with no racial or ethnic majority by the time I’m old enough to think about retirement. Which was why White neoconservatives, xenophobic Blacks and homophobic Latinos equated multicultural education with the end of American culture, the “disuniting of America,” Afrocentricity and Black Power, and the takeover of illegal immigrants, “femi-Nazis” (that’s Rush Limbaugh for ya) and sodomizing gays. With the Reagan Revolution in the ’80s and the Republican Revolution under Newt Gingrich in the ’90s came a screeching halt to efforts to bring a serious multiculturalist philosophy to K-12 public education and a backlash to multicultural curriculum at some universities (Dartmouth and Stanford come to mind).

With the wonders of a mismanaged political campaign and a multicultural candidate for President of the United States have come a re-ignition of the ’90s “Culture Wars.” Obama has been called everything short of a child of God in the past two weeks. “Kill him,” “Off with his head,” “Who is the real Barack Obama?,” Terrorist,” “Traitor,” are all things we’ve heard watching McCain campaign and audiences unravel like a falling ball of string since October 3. The racially-transcendent candidate has become “Black” once again because of the attempt to label Obama as an unpatriotic, un-American terrorist sympathizer who also has no trouble with market socialism and radical liberals. And being “Black” in this country normally equals “unpatriotic” unless we die for this country or get our heads bashed in attempted to make the country live up to its ideals.

Most important, though, is this assumption that Obama is neither American nor a Christian (hello, Rev. Jeremiah Wright?). The so-called Culture Wars of the ’90s never made sense to me, and this brush-fire of a culture skirmish in recent weeks doesn’t either. Unless you look at it with the perspective of a social psychologist. Fear, loathing and skepticism (the last two derivatives of fear) are all part of the current set of controversies over McCain’s campaign tactics and his surrogates’ and crowds’ responses to them. I’m hardly suggesting like Rep. John L. Lewis (D-GA) that what McCain’s campaign has done is in any way equivalent to the late George Wallace. But to make it sound as if this is normal in the course of attacking another candidate’s character — as folks like Joe Scarborough (formerly of the “colorblind to race” camp) and David Frum (who couldn’t spend five minutes having a civil conversation with Rachel Maddow yesterday) have suggested — is insulting to any thinking person’s intelligence. The financial collapse on Wall Street is usually the last sign of a recession or economic downturn, not the first. And what happens with every significant downturn. Increased stress, fear, anxiety about the future, a need for scapegoats whom we can blame for our troubles.

McCain’s campaign attempted to give us one scapegoat in the form of Sen. Obama. Despite his almost constant national presence since the Democratic National Convention keynote speech he gave in August ’04, the publication of two bestselling memoirs, thousands of speeches and appearances, Obama’s the great unknown? Give me a break! It might be race-baiting per se, but McCain’s campaign has used some not-so-subtle inferences to imply that Obama wasn’t a typical American. Heck, if you listened closely to Gov. Sarah Palin’s rebukes of Obama, he might not be American at all. In this process, Obama has become more “Black,” possibly more so than even Obama would admit. Long forgotten for most Americans is the fact that Obama is a biracial Black male (based on how he defines himself and how most of his supporters see him). That’s what the exploitation of fear, loathing, and skepticism can do in two weeks.

The question that I think needs to be asked is whether America is ready for its multicultural present and its need for a future based on a philosophy that embraces multiculturalism, and doesn’t just treat it as a “Black,” “Arab,” “illegal immigrant,” or “gay” thing. We’ll learn a lot about the answer in the next three weeks. But even if the answer is “Yes” to Obama, it will be a somewhat shaky yet hopeful “Yes,” one that need to be reinforced over and over again as we move forward in the midst of all of our uncertainties about America’s future.

I’ve never seen myself as middle class. I’m sure that for those of you who read my blog every week, this is about as much a surprise as my constant linking of my posts to my Boy At The Window manuscript. Almost every person I’ve ever met, regardless of income — and especially as an adult — has seen themselves as middle class. This despite the growing gap between the affluent and the rest of us in the past couple of decades. This middle-class delusion defines how our nation’s economic crises affect each and every one of us, and not for the better.

If someone had asked me what my career and financial goals were in 1987, I would’ve said that I wanted to be a computer programmer making at least $25,000 a year. That’s it. No thought of retirement or health care coverage or investing in the stock market. I certainly didn’t care about a truly middle class income or a living wage. Besides having the naivete of a 17-year-old, welfare-poor Black male, my thinking was based somewhat in realism. A standard programmer job with a bachelor’s degree and limited work experience was between $25,000 and $40,000 a year back then. Having a $25,000 per annum income in most parts of the U.S. as a single person would’ve given me middle class status. After all, I spent my teenage years as one of six kids living in a household with an annual income of $16,600. $25,000 might as well have been $200,000 given what I lived with prior to college. Thinking about benefits, investments and
retirement? I might’ve worried about that when I turned 30, assuming that I would make it into
my 30s at all.

So much has changed about my understanding of class and money since the days before the Wall Street crash in October 1987. Including the distance between my and our perceptions of middle class status and the reality of middle class living in the U.S. For starters, even mediocre computer technicians make between $35,000 and $60,000 a year without a degree, and web
designers $25,000 per contract. A job paying $25,000 in most of the country qualifies someone
with a family as working poor and in need of some form of public assistance. In some parts of the
country, including where I live—the Washington, DC metro area—a $50,000-a-year income is
hardly middle class at all. I made nearly $80,000 last year, yet struggled to pay down my student loans and credit card debt. Face it, folks. Middle class isn’t we think it is anymore.

With the current mortgage/credit/debt/financial crises unfolding before us, it’s time to
recognize that most of us who see ourselves as middle class are there because of debt. My income from last year didn’t keep up with my level of debt. Student loans, credit cards, and a car note, about $95,000 in total debt. I would’ve needed an income of at least that much last year in order to successfully service and reduce my personal debt. But to truly be middle class, my income would’ve needed to be at least $115,000, in order to significantly reduce debt, build up savings and have a disposable income not dependent on lines or credit or charge cards. Of course, living in the DC area, my levels of income and debt were probably typical. Many of us, though, have my level of debt and more—and with less income—living in places like Huntsville, Alabama, Des Moines, Iowa, and Spokane, Washington.

Between popular culture and the press, the commercials, videos and ads, we have this impression that anyone making between $20,000 and $1 million a year should see themselves as middle class. Anyone with a job is middle class by this all-encompassing definition. By any realistic standard, a family would need an income of between $150,000 and $200,000 a year to live a middle-class lifestyle with relatively little debt, whether living in Bradley, Arkansas or on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Not good news for most of us.

This is more than a perception problem. It’s a recipe for economic and social disaster. One that cannot be remedied with an economic contact lens like making more credit available. Most of us need radical Lasik surgery to correct our debt-ridden middle class visions. We must restore
balance to our incomes and debts before we are all too blind to see our way into a middle-class
quality of life.

It’s been on my mind now for a few weeks. This whole Sarah Palin phenomenon has me somewhere between disappointed and resolute. Disappointed in that it is unbelievable that with so much going on in our world, with so much at stake in our country, that this shrewd, ambitious, and wholly unprepared politician could be VP in four weeks. Resolute in that I really hope that voters on the fence come to their senses and vote for a candidate based on what they know rather than their ability to sound like they’re from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

But my blog today isn’t so much about the election as much as it is about my goofiness and my knowledge of goofy music. Since the ’84 campaign, both parties have used music to help structure their themes around patriotism, prosperity and peace. Campaigns have made use — or rather, misuse — of songs like John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” and even U2’s “City of Blinding Lights” over the past 24 years. The McCain campaign went with Heart’s “Barracuda” at the beginning of September. A song about uninhibited sexual desire was used to pump up the volume for the hockey mom who is also an evangelical Christian? Weird, just weird.

There are more appropriate songs for McCain-Palin. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all “Sara” songs. Hall & Oates has “Sara Smile.” Gov. Palin is extremely good at smiling, even when she’s calling Obama a terrorist sympathizer or talking about the issues of climate change and nuclear proliferation. The song, though, about love and inspiration from a loved one, and would only be appropriate for Palin and her husband to use. There’s also Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara.” It could be of use in the case of Gov. Palin, but given it’s connection to Stevie Nicks’ experiences of love and loss — not to mention the song’s ’70s-style slowness, it also wouldn’t be goofy enough.

So I’m left with Starship’s “Sara” from their ’85 album Knee Deep in the Hoopla (I unfortunately used to own it). Starship, formerly part of Jefferson Starship, which was Jefferson Airplane even before that, had former and reformed and split into two different bands over a fifteen-year-period because of the usual issues of sex, drugs and creative differences. A bit erratic I’d say, kind of like the McCain-Palin ticket itself.

But it’s the lyrics and their meaning that make Starship’s “Sara” work well in describing what
Gov. Palin has brought to the McCain campaign and could bring to our country. Let’s take a quick look:

First Verse:
Go now, don’t look back, weve drawn the line
Move on, it’s no good to go back in time

I’ll never find another girl like you, for happy endings it takes two
We’re fire and ice, the dream won’t come true

Chorus:
Sara, Sara, storms are brewin’ in your eyes
Sara, Sara, no time is a good time for goodbyes

Second Verse:
Danger in the game when the stakes are high
Branded, my heart was branded while my senses stood by

I’ll never find another girl like you, for happy endings it takes two
We’re fire and ice, the dream won’t come true

This easily could be McCain singing this in the shower as much as it could be the majority of the electorate singing in their heads about the McCain-Palin ticket come Election Day. Especially if you add the additional line “hurt me, no one could ever hurt me more.” This would definitely apply to all of us if McCain becomes president. It already applies to McCain, Obama and my ears.

Of course, to use Starship’s “Sara” as an electorate, we’d have to change a few words here and there. Like I’d change “I’ll never find another girl like you” to “I hope we never find another girl like you.” Or “We’re fire and ice, the dream won’t come true” to “We’re fire and ice, your dream wont come true.” I know that this is goofy, but trust me, it works. Work with me here. Think about the synthesized drums and acoustic card, not to mention Mickey Thomas’ voice and Grace Slick’s background vocals. I guarantee you Gov. Palin owns this song or the album.