Trading lots of cynicism for a few fine sentiments.
Two little-known facts:
1. Cynics are discouraged, rudderless idealists.
2. Cynics are marshmallows in search of a messiah.
No matter who you voted for, if neither McCain's concession speech nor Obama's acceptance speech moved you, you're not just terminally jaded, you're clinically dead. If this country's stirring affirmation of its ideals—nudged along, yes, by a really lousy economy and a really unpopular party headed by a really unpopular president running an honorable but uncharismatic candidate hampered by an uninspired campaign—if that bell-ringing affirmation didn't penetrate whatever cynicism calluses your soul, you've missed the point: not only is this country far more than the sum of its obvious imperfections, the easy targets no one misses, it's about more than sitting back and hitting the easy targets.
But I wonder how many of those hugging and crying on election night really believe Obama can make everything right. Maybe I'd be surprised, but I bet most voters sensed that here was someone whose best contribution might be to elevate the tone of public discourse. McCain's biggest mistake may have been to go negative in the last weeks. After years of ideological street fighting, years when anyone willing to hit below the belt had an audience, maybe enough of us have had enough. The frenzy is spent, the venom purged. We can still disagree, but the brass knuckles go back in the attic.
Even if all election night means is that we're in for four years of fine sentiments, what's wrong with fine sentiments? We can use them, especially on the subject of real estate, where the discourse has all the integrity and elevation of a Swift Boat ad. How could real estate—frumpy, staid old real estate—ever become so polarizing? How could real estate become another lightening rod for the disaffected, just as quotas, "welfare queens" and forced busing have been for a generation? Are we really that desperate for issues? It's like watching the Miller Lite "less filling, tastes great" debate spill out into the street and turn into a riot.
Is modern life really that meaningless? Guess I answered that question.
Republican über-strategist Lee Atwater said you win elections by tapping into voter anger, but exploiting anger takes you a long way in more than politics. It's intriguing to recognize the parallels between politics and the online trash-talking apparatus that's attached itself to real estate.
For example, we have the Internet's version of the Southern Strategy Atwater perfected, a strategy honed over the past four decades into a winning national strategy, one with all the bells and whistles guaranteed to snare the disaffected: old lies, new lies, Big Lies, name calling, character bashing, the usual suspects and all the other trimmings of demagoguery.
We have online Newt Gingrichs, riling up the Internet's version of the angry white male, trafficking in ignorance, speaking in non sequiturs and sound-bites, capitalizing on alienation so profound and unconscious that even the alienated don't know what ails them.
We have online pundits who "go negative", not as a last resort, but as a fool-proof full-time strategy.
We have mobile hit squads, Brownshirts marching across the Internet looking for articles to jeer and writers to intimidate.
We have "think tanks" for X-treme theorizing called Departments of Real Estate Economics, staffed by highly-educated idealists unconfined by the narrow bounds of reality—"they will greet you with flowers"—and that's their appeal.
We have "social conservatives" who've turned homebuying into a highly-charged moral question, blasting the alleged uppityness of those who bought "McMansions" that, at least in this area, are anything but mansions, ersatz or otherwise. "Welfare queens", anyone?
We have the leaderless and the rudderless, searching for a messiah to tell them they aren't, rejecting sham where it isn't and falling for it where it is.
And tell me why not? Not only is all this the eternal base element of human nature, brought to you at max decibels these days by the online pundits. We've also been inundated by it for a generation from the top down. The barbarians haven't just reached the gates; they've been elected to high office. Think there might be a connection? Gosh, who knew demagoguery had consequences?
Sounds like a swell time for some of that change everyone's been talking about.