52 Essentials: No. 4, Indecision 2008 - Election Night (November 4, 2008)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

They say our country is divided, maybe more so now than ever before. It may be easy to believe, watching a historically unpopular President enter the White House while protests break out throughout the country. But then, they've been saying we're a divided country for some time--for the better part of my adult life at least.

Personally, I don't really buy that we're any more divided now than the country was when my parents were my age, when the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam were in recent memory and the highly polarizing Ronald Reagan took office. Or during the Depression that my grandparents lived through, right before the world nearly destroyed itself over its divisions. Or the Suffragette movement before that. Or--for that matter--the Civil War and Reconstruction era before that. For better or for worse, the country was probably always divided and will be just as much when our son Max is our age, too.

If anything, I believe that widespread consensus is rare and always has been. We may romanticize iconic moments in history, like the first moon landing or the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.

But then you realize that a lot of people (indefensibly) believe the moon landing was a hoax, and that a lot of people (defensibly) saw Beatlemania as White musicians receiving the credit for a sound developed by Black musicians left out of the history books. Maybe that's why those singular moments when it seems we're all the same page, when we all saw the same thing and felt the same thing, when we can all remember "where we were when", tend to be disasters. Maybe it takes a real tragedy to shake us out of our subjective frames and find our common humanity--if only for a brief moment.

Where were you when you heard JFK was shot? When the Challenger exploded? When the buildings fell on 9/11?

There's a certain comfort in having these external, objective points of reference. Something so clear and undeniable that, all of our other disagreements aside, we can agree that we share this world together, even if we're only sharing the pain.

And yet, on closer look, even these objective points of reference are anything but. Consider the Challenger explosion. It occurred live on TV, with the eyes of the entire nation all focused on the same point of reference. But as Maria Konnikova wrote in the New Yorker a couple years back, our memories are highly fallible even when it comes to an incredibly momentous event such as this:

R.T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

The bottom line seems to be that important events--emotional events, that is--can wreak havoc on memories of the details surrounding that event. That is, "We experience a sort of tunnel vision, discarding all the details that seem incidental to the central event." But it's often the details that cause the greatest disagreements among us. We may all remember President Obama signing the Affordable Care Act, which is a written document that anyone can read. It should therefore be an objective, factual event immune from our subjective interpretations and fallible memories. And yet...

The evening of November 4, 2008, was a singular moment in my life. After years of speculating whether we would ever seen anyone other than a straight, White, Christian male in the White House, we were all witness to the first crack in that ceiling. And of all people, by a Hawaiian-born, second-generation, mixed-race constitutional lawyer named Barack Hussein Obama. I can tell you exactly how I experienced the very moment that his victory was announced. I was sitting on a couch in a SoHo apartment in Manhattan with friends, watching Indecision 2008 on Comedy Central:

It may be hard to explain importance of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to Max when he's older. It seems like such a product of its time, even just a few years past its heyday. Max will grow up in an age of commentary-upon-commentary-upon-commentary. But when Jon Stewart took over the reins from the Craig Kilborn in January 1999, it filled a real void in the news media landscape. The show was transformed from a milk toast goof on local news broadcasts to a deep and searing critique of mainstream news media in general, and the typically Center-Right consensus of cable news pundits in particular. The Daily Show, ostensibly a comedy show sandwiched between South Park and puppets making crank calls, became an essential source for checking facts and calling out bullshit.

Above all, The Daily Show was a counterbalance to FOX News--the Kingpin to The Daily Show's Daredevil. I'll be surprised if the media will have as clearly defined a "hero" and "villain" in the news media when Max is old enough to be paying attention, given how diffuse news sources have become and how everyone seems to be in on the snark game these days.

Stephen Colbert's "Stephen Colbert" character on The Colbert Report was even more a creature of its time and place. Modeled specifically as a caricature of a blowhard FOX News broadcaster (and, in particular, Bill O'Reilly), "Colbert" was the collective embodiment of everything Right Wing during the W. Bush years. And yet, he maintained a conscience that seemed missing from so many of his targets. He was never snarky for its own sake but to highlight that the policies advocated by O'Reilly and his FOX News colleagues had a real impact on real people. It's what made Colbert so essential.

It was such an effective routine that he could stay in character even before a Congressional Hearing and still get his point across on the need for humane immigration policies, for example. He dissected his rivals at the same time that he made a compelling case for the opposite position:

When I first watched the clip above from Election Night 2008 in real time, what I saw was "Colbert" the character ready to jump immediately into a bit in response to Obama's victory. He pulled out a pair of blacked-out goggled and noise-cancelling headphones in order to shut out reality in a way that wasn't all that different from what was going on across Conservative America that night. But then I saw him pause, look down, and rub his eyes. He put the bit on hold as his eyes welled up. I saw him break character and take in the moment, letting the significance wash over him. As I remembered it, it seemed he dropped the bit entirely and never went back to it. 

I always went back to that moment whenever I thought of that night. It seemed to sum up the significance of the event to me, that even in "divided" times, something could break through all of the snark and be a singular, objective point of reference that we could all share. That the significance of the moment transcended whatever commentary we might want to lay on top of it.

Years later, when Max's mom and I attended a live taping of The Colbert Report, I took the opportunity to ask the host about that moment in the Q&A portion before the show. And I did it in the worst possible way. I basically called out a professional comedian for screwing up a joke in front of an audience, saying something like, "You started to go into a bit but you didn't pull it off." It was a terrible way to word it, and it led Colbert to respond (verbatim): "Well, f*ck you, too! Just kidding, I love you like a brother." (Clumsy as my lead-in was, I'll always cherish getting cursed out by the Stephen Colbert to my face as a result.) I tried to recover by explaining what I remembered from that night, and how it moved me to see him break his routine to take in the moment. He then responded by saying I must have been high because he did go right into the bit, and then he moved on to the next question.

And I realize now that he was right.

Or so it seems to me when I re-watch that clip. Yes, he did pause after Obama's victory was announced. Yes, he looked down briefly, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. But it's nothing like I remembered it. He wasn't clearly welling up (he might have a little, but he wouldn't cop to it when I asked him about it), and he went almost immediately into the bit. He put on the goggles and the noise-cancelling headphones. He stayed in character.

It's the sort of thing that could lead you to despair, like the shaken priest at the end of Rashomon. How can we ever possibly find peace with each other if we can't even agree on what we've seen right before our eyes? If we can't even agree with ourselves at the end of the day? Max can watch the very same clip from Election Night 2008 that I saw, but he can't experience it the way I did. In fact, it seems I can't even re-experience it myself the same way that I did that night.

These times we've just lived through...

... all these objective points of reference ...

... even if we could agree on the facts ...

... we'll never agree on how we experienced them, what they meant to us, how we remember them. We may not even agree with ourselves as time passes and memory fails.

But then maybe agreement isn't the point. Maybe identifying what "actually" happened is just a means to the end, a starting point for the real discussion to begin. Maybe the best we can do is try to understand, not what each other sees, but how we see it. Even if we disagree. Even if, at the end of the day, we're still divided and maybe always will be.