Trading lots of cynicism for a few fine sentiments.
Two little-known facts about cynics:
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 idealsnudged 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 campaignif that bell-ringing affirmation didn't penetrate whatever cynicism calluses your soul, then you've missed the point: not only is this country far more than the sum of its obvious imperfections, the easy targets no one can miss, it's about more than sitting back and sniping at 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 can go back in the closet.
Even if all election night means is that we're in for four years of fine sentiments, what's wrong with fine sentiments? We badly need 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 estatefrumpy, staid old real estateever get 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 waking up one morning to find that the Miller Lite "less filling, tastes great" debate has spilled out into the street and turned into a riot.
Is modern life really that meaningless? Guess I answered my own question.
Republican super-strategist Lee Atwater said you win elections by tapping into voter anger, but exploiting anger takes you far in more than politics. It's intriguing to see 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 that Atwater perfected, a strategy honed over the past four decades into a winning national strategy, one with all the trimmings sure to snare the disaffected: old lies, new lies, Big Lies, name calling, character bashing, the usual suspects and all the other bells and whistles of demagoguery.
We have online Newt Gingrichs, riling up the Internet's equivalent 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 full-time strategy.
We have mobile hit squads, Brownshirts marching across the Internet in search of 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 unhindered by 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, were anything but mansions, ersatz or otherwise. "Welfare queens", anyone?
We have the leaderless and the rudderless, looking for a messiah to tell them they aren't, rejecting sham where it doesn't exist and falling for it where it does.
And why not? Not only is all this the eternal baser element of human nature, brought to you at max decibels by the blogs. We've also been deluged with it for a generation from the top down. The barbarians aren't just at the gates; they've been elected to high office. Think there might be a connection? Who knew demagoguery had consequences?
Sounds like a good time for some of that change everyone's been talking about.