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Not Too Late
Planet Waves for October 30, 2004 | by Eric Francis Yesterday, Planet Waves Weekly was running late. This happened for a few reasons and, as often occurs, they started to pile up on one another, culminating with our server being infiltrated by a spammer who dumped in 1,800 pieces of corrupted email that took about two hours to fix. It began with my visit to L'Observatoire de Meudon Thursday to learn something new about the Cassini Space Probe, the Huygens Titan Probe and Titan itself. This became a good [legitimately working] excuse for a rare day off, even a mid-week day off. I know some people confuse my reality with that picture of me on the beach in the south of France that you see everywhere, and think I live a life of leisure writing the occasional interpretation, but good week is one in which I get a full day off after about 60 hours. So, after a rushed session of work Thursday morning, I left the house at 10:45 with two friends, who were serving as navigator and helmsman, and headed out of the city to the observatory, and explored the cosmos known as France for the rest of the day. This is usually my day to write the Planet Waves essay. I could have written it ahead, but was not going to write the post-eclipse essay before a total lunar eclipse. I feel it's best to wait, if possible. By Thursday night I wasn't writing anything and by Friday morning I went to work on the rest of the issue (besides the horoscope). This was obviously, per editorial convention, going to be a wrap-up my of pre-election coverage, which began nearly a year ago. A reader sent in that AFP article about Indian astrologers predicting a Kerry win, and I had a good news peg to begin working off of. I wrote my piece and sent it to Tracy, who proofs and formats it before you get it. Wrote the birthday report. Then got back a proof edition of the final text, which Tracy posted online to our new mirror site. And, reading it over, I realized I had written a bad ending to all that election coverage. Basically, I said, okay, it may be a dis-aster (going against the stars) but Bush may walk off with it again. Now, I admit openly to being extremely cynical about this election, which is the result of 20 years of watching American politics with some dedication. Long before there was a second candidate, it seemed inevitable that there would be another round of election fraud, fraud to dwarf the first. I have felt fairly well weighted down, and at times crushed, by four years of horrid news one day worse than the next. I am not someone who can just ignore it, or not for long. My way of dealing with the world situation is to interact with it in some way, usually by reading, reporting and writing. But I could not get a good attitude about this election. I realize now that this had a few components. One was feeling demoralized by how Al Gore won and then threw in the towel last time. His performance in Fahrenheit 9/11 drove that home. Perhaps he was well-advised to bow out; perhaps they would have killed him had he fought. I don't know. Another factor was having no great love for any of the candidates. Howard Dean would put a little knot in my stomach (for example). But lately I have moved into an apartment with a TV and I've been using it. I've spent a lot of time watching news channels I haven't studied in years, listening to idiotic commentaries, comparing BBC to CNN, and watching the debates. And over that time, John Kerry has seemed more and more like a decent human being. You cannot usually tell from TV, but you can tell from pressure. He is under a lot of pressure, and he seems steady, clear and intelligent no matter what gets thrown at him. Good thing, too, because if he winds up president, the next four years will demand the highest level of strength and integrity -- maybe more than was demanded from any president since Lincoln, who stewarded over the Civil War, or Roosevelt, who presided over World War II. Part of my cynicism came from not being able to see a third way. That is, a way between Kerry simply winning and Bush simply stealing the election. But lately that third way has dawned on me. I expect, from reading both legal analysis and astrology charts, that there is a fight ahead. It is more than an election: it will be a legal battle and possibly a battle in the streets for control of the United States and its resources. True, in any case, the Big Boys will be in charge. But finally, under the current scenario, we have reached a moment in history where what is bad for Joe Voter is even bad for Joe Corporation. No, not Halliburton, but your average, big non-military kind of company that is feeling the same squeeze as everyone else, that needs a measure of freedom and a healthy economy to function. I speak not of the 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq as a result of the war, news of which broke this week. Recognizing that they are people is something that a lot of us here in the States struggle with. The third way is that Kerry wins; Team Bush again attempts to steal the election; and we don't let them get away with it. We fight, we scream, we email, we call, we march, we yell, we fax our senators and the Supreme Court, we argue with our neighbors, we get real, we feel the passion and the anger, and ultimately we don't let it go down, and if perchance the election is stolen, its stolen after a fight we all remember well and keep going with. And as it happens, I figured out that this was the ending that I wanted while yesterday's edition was moments away from going out, sparked by a reader who just happened to Instant Message me at the moment I was going over the final text. I read to the end and thought: Hey, that's not the ending I want!! As a writer this is an important moment. I am not saying to you that how I end an astrology essay determines the fate of anything. But it is my way of stating clearly what I want and need, and being open to accept that -- even if it seems a bit unreasonable. It's my way of voting for the reality that I want. I am learning how important that is. I am not much of a baseball fan these days, but I found this article by Will Pitt to be really touching. It's callled "Believe." Also -- I want to thank Tracy Delaney, my amazing web assistant, for programming this instantly-updating blog from scratch, and for making many other changes to the site that are slowly appearing (like that cool little PW logo that appears in the subject header, rollover links, and many other improvements). Tracy, THANK YOU. | ||||||
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