Sometime in January, we were driving Dybbuk, then just about to turn five, home from his Aunt Feygeleh’s when he blurted out, “What about Obama?”
Nonplussed, Domestic Partner and I reacted exactly as we had when my youngest brother’s daughter informed us she had just had her First Holy Communion—we fell silent, gave each other a quick glance, and simultaneously yelled “Congratulations!”
In this case, after the silence and the quick glance, we simultaneously said, “What about him?”
As I’d reported earlier, Dybbuk had been transformed by Feygeleh, who essentially acts as his third parent, into a raging, Hillary-hating Obamaniac.
Dybbuk had been a wiseass for as long as we could remember. One day during his second year, I found myself covered in regurgitated milk, I asked him whether he’d just spit on me, or if he’d actually thrown up. He answered, “I threw down.” Days later, I stopped him from pulling his mother’s hair and said “that hurts, how’d you like if I did that to you?” I gently gave his hair a yank. He responded by pulling it himself and laughing while repeating, “Daddy, ouch!” His latest forum for mischief was Hebrew school. The teacher had asked the class to improvise a play about the Sabbath, and Dybbuk asked why the topic had to be something Jewish.
Although there was no turning Dybbuk back before the nomination was settled, in the aftermath of his Obama endorsement, I immediately went to work on securing Dybbuk’s support for Clinton in the event she was the nominee.
“You see, we’re Democrats, and we’re all on the same team, and the other team is the Republicans, and right now we’re choosing our candidate, and we like both of them, but we can only chose one, but I promise you, if Obama is chosen, he will be our choice, and if Hillary wins, you’ll have to support her against the Republican.”
“But, I hate Hillary.”
As it does with many Democrats, it took exposure to a blood-red Republican to bring Dybbuk around to party unity. In this case, the Republican was Patrick, next-door neighbor to Feygeleh and alternate-weekend father to Dybbuk’s friend Erin, the results of Patrick being tricked out of his virginity at age 33 by a woman who had promised to marry him and reneged.
Patrick was nominally a Republican, but his family’s real affiliation was Phalangist, his father having served on the NYPD Red Squad. The prior summer Patrick had informed me that Dybbuk‘s day camp was founded by the Communist Party, which made me wonder about their market-rate prices.
In 2004, Patrick erected a religious shrine to Dubya in his front yard, complete with a top ten list of reasons to vote Republcian, focused mostly on abortion and gay rights; offended more by his lack of political savvy than his reactionary views, I helpfully suggested that Patrick alter the sign to emphasize economic issues, as the average swing voter in Park Slope was a gay libertarian who works on Wall Street.
It is a measure of the state of the economy that this year, being anti-choice and homophobic are probably stronger selling point in Park Slope than supporting economic deregulation.
Dybbuk was wearing his Obama T-Shirt when he got into the argument with Patrick. “You and Erin are Republican, my family are Democrats, Feygie and I want Obama and my daddy wants Hillary.”
Like most wingnuts, the mention of a Clinton set Patrick off, “Obama is inexperienced, and Hillary is evil.”
Dybbuk’s anger was roused, he may have hated Hillary, but like Otter and Boomer, he was adamant that Patrick couldn’t do that to his pledges, only he could do that to his pledges; “That’s not true, my daddy met her and she’s nice person, but a crow stepped on the side of her face.”
Matter of factly, Dybbuk returned home to tell me that Hillary tried to kill Erin’s family. This assertion turned out to concern Hillary’s role in the Northern Irish Peace Accords, which probably helped save some of her family’s lives.
Dybbuk now hated something more than Hillary, and that was Republicans. Alarmed by this premature partisanship, I tried to explain to him that Republicans were not all bad people, they were just wrong. This was followed by a lecture on democracy and how great it was that we lived in a country where people were allowed to chose their own leaders. It was good we had Republicans, so we had a choice, and it was good we had so few, so we could beat them.
Dybbuk attempted to evolve a detente with Patrick, but was often stifled by having to deal with someone who had not reached his own level of emotional maturity. After the convention, I gave Dybbuk a state-shaped pin given to me by members of the Alaska delegation, which he passed on to Erin in the wake of the Palin nomination. “This is yours, it’s for Republicans, and I won’t wear it.”
But Patrick could not be bought off. Erin told Dybbuk that Obama wanted to take Patrick’s money away and give it to the poor. Dybbuk, who’d just been told I could not afford his shopping list of Maltese puppies, fish tanks, seahorses and retired Thomas trains, decided that he was poor, and despairing our shortage of what he called “Expensive Money,” became even more convinced of the necessity of Obama’s election so that he could acquire what he wanted for Chanukah, if not sooner. Told by Patrick that Obama liked Marx, Dybbuk decided that he did as well, and re-planned his Halloween to go out as Groucho.
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“Because, he really believes he can do a better job.”
“But, he’s wrong.”
Later Dybbuk conveyed this conclusion to Patrick who told him that Obama's friends had tried to kill policemen.
"Oh yeah," screamed Dybbuk, turning red with fury, "If McCain wins I'm going to kill him!"
"No, no Dybbuk," said a horrified Faygeleh, "then Sarah Palin would be President."
After another lecture about democracy, the peaceful transition of power in a government based upon law, and the ability of the Secret Sevice to adminster spankings with a hairbrush, a duly chastened Dybbuk jettisoned negative campaigning. Abandoning Thomas and prospective pets, Dybbuk put all his efforts into acquiring Obama memorabilia–buttons, t-shirts, action figures, jacks-in-the-box and chocolate brownies accumulated in piles around the house. The Obama action figure even acquired executive experience by taking over management of the Sodor Railway from Sir Topham Hatt.
Dybbuk even put in turnaround his plans for a film about a caterpillar named Aloysius, for which he had made me set up a pitch session with filmmaker Justin Sullivan (director of the Paul Newell documentary). It was more important that he split his time between trying to persuade his grandparents how to vote, and walking around in dark sunglasses and an Obama t-shirt showing people how cool his candidate was.
The Gatemouth/Domestic Partner clan was walking down Remsen having danced in the streets with two different congregations to celebrate Simchat Torah. Dybbuk, wearing an Obama button and a kippah. was in high spirits, having grabbed and downed part of a small cup of Slivovitz before spitting the balance in the direction of his father, ruining a Brooks Brothers tie Domestic Partner had purchased for him at the PS 321 flea market from the African Lady who was now claiming to be a 1/4 third cousin of Senator Obama.
“Shalom Aliechem” said the Cantor to Dybbuk, as she saw us depart.
“Bonjour mon ami,” he replied, “Spaciba; das vadanya.”
We were approaching the building which Domestic Partner referred to as the Bundestag. Not so many years ago, renovations had caused the cupola of Borough Hall to be sheathed in blue plastic resembling a condom, which caused some wags to make jokes about there being a schmuck inside.
Neither gentrification nor Markonizing had changed the dark night in Brownstone Brooklyn as much as the hype has reported, so once having crossed Cadman Plaza, our thoughts were not on the schmuck inside Borough Hall, but rather upon the schmuck outside it.
An apparently homeless man was walking across the plaza screaming. His hair was dirty, his clothes were tattered, his teeth were missing and he smelled bad. If he were not black, I would have thought it was Gary Tilzer. He lurched back and forth in a threatening manner, and I held back the Dybbuk from going any further.
“Fuck Obama”, the man shouted. “Don’t vote for the Democrats or the Republicans; there’s no difference between them; vote for Nader, or McKinney, or write in Kucinich!”
Dybbuk sighed in exasperation, “What an idiot.”