Guess Who's Coming to the White House

01/23/09

Last night after wresting with some code, around 10:30pm, I decided to watch a movie. Being all out of my netflix, I was left with a small stack of DVD’s deposited by my girlfriend, who is always trying to help out. We really don’t have the same taste in movies. No doubt that is because I am terribly picky and susceptible to bristling at the mildest Hollywood intonation of melodrama or sentimentality. But I seem to be getting soft in my middlish age, and as I looked at the jacket for ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’, I felt it was the appropriate entertainment for this inaugural week.

I actually got weepy during the inauguration. It happened when my girlfriend told me that Obama was being sworn in on Lincoln’s bible. Then I leaked again when the small bible was actually produced and held by Michelle for Barack’s hand. I have never cried at an inauguration or on election day for that matter, so I was heartened when 3 minutes into his speech, I started mocking him. I felt like my old cynical self again, and got impatient for the end of his talking, so I could go back to work.

The movie starts in such a way as to immediately date it. Oddly it was not the race relations, which are still sadly relevant. The opening shot was a polluted and hazy sky with an airliner farting out a stream of brown exhaust. It gets closer to the camera, sweeps over San Francisco, my beloved neighbor country, and then spits out the giddy interracial couple. Then the melodrama begins with the unlikely setup: a handsome, gentle, 37-year old physician and public policy giant has fallen in love with a 23-year-old, brainless imp. If she had a surfboard she could have been Gidget, but she didn’t even have that going for her.

Yeah, I know the whole point is that America needed someone that was far too good for their daughters to make the interracial couple point. Here is the deal though: It occurred to me when the movie was discussing the possible presidential fate of the couple’s children, that the movie was behind the times before it was released. Set and released in 1967, the interracial Barack was already 6 years old. John Lennon had already declared himself ‘more popular than Jesus’ and Martin Luther King Jr. had marched through an angry white mob throwing rocks in Chicago, Obama’s future political stomping grounds.

So, this was a movie for the lagging middle of the country. It was one of those coping tools to deal with the cultural changes that had already happened. It has gotten me thinking a little broader about an idea that has lately been on my mind: Large social entities seem to deal with change and innovation by lying.

I have been looking for work. Although Ruby work is plentiful, I have been looking for really good Ruby work. I have been looking for work where I can continue to learn and more importantly not deal with office politics. Everyday I see job postings for startups ideas that are stale in their cans. They are going to replace #{your_big_website_name_here} and revolutionize the world. That is like this movie, breaking the big news half a decade after its greatest relevance.

Yesterday, I also ran into some startup ads that divided up their work load into a series of very limited little peg holes. It was such the corporate goliath way to look at the problem that the self-congratulatory, opening paragraph about startup culture was meaningless. I do a lot of reading between the lines these days. Next week, I am interviewing for a thee month gig with the government. I recoil at the potential bureaucracy, but what appealed to me is the lack of hype. The ad knew they were a stogy bunch of uninnovative cogs. That refreshing honesty appealed to me, but I probably won’t be able to stomach the job.

Somewhere in the middle of the movie, the partriarch played by Spencer Tracy rails about the lack of time to adjust, and he almost looks into the camera, saying “I know fellow American’s that this is happening too damn fast, but we have to keep up.” Then the movie ends with Tracy’s charachter making a big funny speech confessing his transformation and sudden acceptance of this bygone issue. Everyone follows him into dinner, adopting his world views. It was like Hollywood was aiming to open and close the cultural book on this issue in less than two hours.

I wish it were that easy. Last week when I was surfing the web wanting to know what amazing things Michelle Obama had herself done in this life, I came across an image where someone had superimposed a chimpanzee’s face on to her own. I wasn’t looking for this horror show, it showed up on a google search for her name. So while we have a half-black man in the presidency, his fully African American wife is still struggling to assert her humanity. Just to bring some perspective to my editorializing, it has been 41 years since Spencer Tracy tried to usher America’s racism off stage. I feel myself getting weepy all over again.