Political Partying

I can watch CNN and read the news online until the cows (or in this case, the elephants and the donkeys)come home, but there's nothing like being in a country while its elections are taking place. So not being in the U.S. during the presidential elections is kind of like being amidst palm trees and sunshine during Christmas. It just doesn't feel right.

In any event, I attended my first meeting of Democrats abroad. A life-sized statue of Obama stood in the corner. The leader of the group had recently returned from the Democratic Convention and schlepped an entire suitcase full of Obama paraphernalia home with him: boggle head Baraks, a copy of Goodnight Bush (a spoof on the famous children's book Goodnight Moon) and of course those snazzy t-shirts with Obama's face fading from red to white to blue with the word progress underneath. I socialized. I felt inspired. I developed a heat rash due to the extreme weateher and bad white wine.

The majority of the meeting was spent discussing the nitty gritty. The process of applying for absentee ballots and mailing in new ones. Where to watch the candidate's speeches online. While you can request an absentee ballot via snail mail for your state, there is also a generic emergency ballot for the presidential election only, just in case the one from your state gets lost in transit (which is not such a stretch with the postal system here being a black hole with cute postage stamps.

"Last election bush won by something like 500 votes. I really think it will be up to Americans abroad to bring home the vote," said our fearless leader. I kind of felt like I was back in college, back in the days when I felt one person really could make a difference.

There was a collective look of surprise when it was mentioned that a Republicans Abroad group actually existed. Wasn't it the progressive, open-minded people who value cultural diversity that went abroad in the first place? How could you live in another culture, glean a global perspective on the world, and not see that our country is having having a political crisis of confidence as we sink deeper into an economic quagmire? But that's the thing about the illusion of the American security blanket. Its like a nasty little cartoon storm cloud that hangs over your head and follows you wherever you go -if you let it. Its so easy to be subsumed by it, but so hard get rid of.

So in a way I was hesitant to reenlist in the ranks of my fellow countrymen (albeit for a good cause) simply because there is a way of doing things that is so quintessentially American;a way of doing things that I have come to be quite critical. I haven't been in a room with so many Americans since I've been here either. The lack of extreme formality, the joviality, the rabble-rousing, the gesticulating and verbosity, all these struck me as strange and yet oddly familiar. Then there was the modelesque woman carrying her miniature rat dogs (who happened to be wearing doggie Obama shirts) in a Louis Vuitton carrying case (screaming I am absolutely desperate to feel absolutely fabulous), the middle-aged woman on a Fulbright to study Nationalism who had lived in Turkey on an off for over thirty years, and of course a hefty contingent of teachers, some of us whose return to the states will be determine by the results of the upcoming election. As we fraternized with many others who had come for the first time, my friend remarked that we were motivated by fear. We laughed knowingly, perhaps forging the sort of solidarity that grows from a fighting against the same force.

The gathering spilled into the cafe downstairs, where we were joined by Turks, Canadians, and Aussies. For a brief moment, I thought that maybe things really could change.