Electoral Collage
By the time this issue of The Bollard hits the stands, It will be over — or at least almost over. “It,” of course, refers to the protracted bilious barnstorm of bloviation otherwise known as the American election season. As a columnist, I’ve had to restrain myself from pulling out my hair, pounding it into a powder, mixing it with my vitriol and squeezing it through the nib of my moral outrage into an invective-laden screed.
Why? Because that sounds like it would hurt. Plus, rants are boring.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking: It’s so easy to be cynical, to say all politics are rotten and to cop and crap out. And you’re right, it is. But, Gentle Readers, there was a time, long ago, when this jaded skeptic was as starry eyed about possibility and change as the rest of you.
My first twinge of activism started in grammar school, when I convinced a few classmates to walk the streets of Bath with me collecting garbage while I carried a hand-painted, drippy sign that read: “We can save the world.” Being the young political operative that I was, I even called the Times Record and reported this event, hoping they’d send a photographer out for a cover shot. Instead, we got a two-sentence mention buried at the bottom of an inside page that read something dismissive like, “Newell schoolers pick up trash.” I remained undaunted.
In high school, I worked on the Congressional campaign of Bill Cohen, the closest thing Maine had to my then-crush, the dreamy Chad Everett. I was secretary of Morse’s Student Community Liaison Council and attended City Council meetings, speaking up when school arts funding was slated to be cut. I served on the state youth council of my church. At Dirigo Girls’ State, I earned the Most Outstanding Participant in Government award (I still have the trophy), which led me to be selected to attend the Maine City Managers’ state conference later that summer. I was planning on a career as either a broadcast journalist or environmental lobbyist.
In other words, I was on a one-way train to wonkville.
But by the time I had finished high school, I was done. By working with so many disappointing adults behind the scenes (“Wow,” I thought, “serving on a committee is just like being in junior high school”), I had pulled back the curtain on the inner workings of the democratic process and did not like what I saw. Instead of boring you with the particulars, perhaps an analogy will help:
Back in my earliest days of protest, I determined I needed a look to match my message. And like all good revolutionaries, I wanted boots. That’s where the Auerbach Shoe Company warehouse sale in Brunswick came in.
You have to understand, this was in an age before Maine became an outlet-vacation destination, so this sale was a pretty big deal. I still marvel at the fact my mother took me at all. As I recall, these were mostly grown-up shoes. We normally didn’t indulge in something so unsensible as boots that were not suited for winter. But there we were, and the prices, she said, were very good.
We wandered through the cavernous factory “showroom,” where rickety metal shelving went on for rows and rows under dim lights. This was the first time I had shopped for a pair of shoes that had not been ushered to me from the stockroom of our local shoe store, Endicott Johnson, by a clerk who had just checked my size with a Brannock Device (one of those metal foot-measuring gadgets that looks like a brace or instrument of torture). When the female clerk would appear from out back with a stack of boxes, it was as though Carol Merrill herself was presenting me with a prize on Let’s Make a Deal.
But in this warehouse, there was no clerk. No shoehorn eased in between your heel and the P.F. Flyer or patent-leather Easter shoe. There were no chairs. You had to bend over between the racks or sit on the rough plank flooring and get into the footwear yourself. I can remember pulling the oversized box off the shelf and beholding the boots that instantly spoke to me: fake crinkled-leather, zip-up jobs with stacked wooden heels. They had my vote before I even wiggled into them, and when the zipper purred up the side of my calf, I was sold. No longer an awkward sixth-grade activist, I was Julie from The Mod Squad, Laurie Partridge, Mary Richards. Although I slipped on the ice and my feet froze that entire winter, I was hot.
I clip-clopped around the halls of Newell School in my boots until spring came. And then I noticed something. The punishing Maine winter had taken its toll. The faux-wood adhesive covering on the heels had started to peel away and curl up, exposing the white plastic underneath. I was shocked. “Not wood?” I cried. “Duped by a cheesy veneer of integrity and authenticity?” These boots became a gyp to me. They were fakes, a lie, all surface show with no substance beneath. “Oh,” I thought, picking at the peeling adhesive, “so this is what the world’s about.”
And that, my friends, is how politics came to lose its luster for me.
Yet, disillusioned as I may be, I still participate in the process. I watch what I can bear of the debates, I argue the issues (“They’re wrong!”), I write my letters and have never missed a major election in the past 30 years. (Are you nodding off yet?)
Still, my real political platform (duck, here comes my rant) is that we vote with our deeds. All the rest is just so much seventh grade.
I’m Elizabeth Peavey, and I approved this mess.
