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The french have a wonderful phrase “l’esprit d’escalier” – literally, “the spirit of the staircase” – which describes that feeling of thinking of just the right way to respond, after it is already far too late. I’m sure you’ve been there: You wake up at three in the morning, your friends all gone home, the bar long closed, when it occurs to you – that perfect clever comeback that you didn’t think of earlier in the evening. Now of course, lying there in your jammies, it is far, far too late.

Thinking back on the third and final presidential debate this last week, it occurred to me that there was a quality to Obama’s performance – a quality totally lacking in McCain’s – that brings “l’esprit d’escalier” to mind. Perhaps a small digression would help here…

Suppose you had a magic stopwatch (bear with me here) that you could click every time you said the wrong thing instead of the right thing. Like all good magic stopwatches, this handy gadget would freeze time – that is, everything except you – giving you plenty of time to think over what you should have said. Then you could just rewind the watch by, say, twenty seconds, click on it a second time, and replay the moment, this time getting it right. Voila – no more “l’esprit d’escalier”.

I think of this when I think of the real battle that McCain and Obama were waging. They both knew that it wasn’t a battle about the issues – we know their respective positions on the issues, and by now they’ve pretty much both locked those positions down to familiar talking points. No, it was more of a contest to see whether McCain could get Obama mad.

Nobody cares all that much if McCain gets mad. He’s almost supposed to get mad. He’s the war hero, the old curmudgeon. Many of his supporters even like that quality in him. But for Obama it could be fatal. In the minds of millions, he would instantly transform from this fascinating figure of mystery – the mixed race intellectual, the multicultural orator – to an altogether different figure – the angry black man. As unfair as that is, it is a reality, one the Republicans are all to eager to exploit if they can just find the right button within him to push.

So McCain said one incendiary thing after another, trying to locate that button. Some of it, like the silly Ayers stuff, sounded outright ludicrous coming from the mouth of a presidential candidate. But what fascinated me wasn’t the tone of McCain’s attack – belligerent, insulting, dismissive – but rather Obama’s response.

Almost any of us ordinary mortals (myself included) would have sooner or later blown up at this kind of stuff, gotten angry or adopted a tit-for-tat tone in response to such below-the-belt taunts. But that’s not at all what Obama did. Through it all he remained calm, collected, almost relaxed, no matter what was thrown at him, methodically dismantling McCain’s attacks with clear and well articulated factual responses.

And I have come to realize that I was witnessing the kind of performance somebody like me might have turned in if I’d had the chance to try it over and over, had time to put aside my anger at being attacked, to regain my composure and my center, and maybe to play the tape back to see whether I was getting it right. In other words, if I’d had that magic stopwatch.

But Obama did it in real time, with no retakes, no magic stopwatch. He understood the game the Republicans were playing – the game of “let’s try to show America an angry Obama” – and he ran circles around them. Yes, from time to time his answers slowed down – you could see the wheels turning in his head, the care with which he picked his words to avoid the rhetorical landmines they were expecting him to stop on at any moment – but he did in fact get through the entire debate without stepping on a single landmine, without uttering even a single string of words that the Republicans could later take out of context to say “behold America – the words of an angry black man!”

How Obama manages to stay so calm and collected, to summon such presence of mind in the face of such a persistent and high level of hostility and goading, I have no idea. But I do know that he has the kind of presence of mind that I want in my Commander in Chief.

If you ask yourself what time periods are the most fundamental to how humans keep time, two jump out at you: a day and a year. Wherever you are in the world, at whatever time in history, you could always be sure that it would get dark and then light again in the time period of a day, and in most parts of the world you could be sure that it would get cooler and then warmer again in the time period of a year.

So it would seem that these are the most natural intervals for humans to use in measuring the passage of time. But I would argue that this might not be the right way to look at it. One day some intrepid humans may very well leave our little earthly sphere and explore the universe, perhaps settling onto other planets. When they get there they will undoubtedly find that our earthly day and year have no particular meaning, other than as a kind of nostalgia.

I would suggest, should the situation arise, that we humans replace these merely geological temporal units by one that we will be taking with us wherever we go – a unit of time that is built into our very DNA, and that we can be sure will travel with us to the farthest reaches of the Universe.

There is only one logical candidate for this distinction: I propose that humans adopt, as one interplanetary year, the time interval of nine months.

There has been much discussion recently about the proper role of government in regulating financial markets. As we know, the regulatory doctrine of the Bush administration was an absolutist “less is more”. And as we know, this doctrine has led to catastrophic failure.

Specifically, there was no mechanism whatsoever for any regulatory agency to even be aware what transactions were taking place as one entity made a deal with another to take bets on the outcome of some financial indicator or stock movement. And as bets were built on top of other bets, and those deals started to build upon previous deals, there was literally no record available to flag an alarm as the entire edifice started turning into a very tall and very rickety house of cards.

If you look at a thriving capitalist society as a healthy organism – one built upon competition – it’s possible to view a government that supports and encourages capitalist trade as a kind of immune system. As long as the system is functioning properly, the immune system is quiescent. But when the system is subject to attack, the immune system is supposed to be responsive, to swing into action, so that the market can go back to healthy functioning.

What the Bush administration did, by dismantling even the possibility of detecting any irregularity in the system, was essentially to induce a kind of economic auto-immune deficiency. In effect, in the last seven years our government’s policy rendered our financial trading system EIV (Economic Immunodeficiency Virus) positive.

A system can go on for years in EIV-positive status, without even knowing that anything is wrong. But of course as soon as the system suffers any sort of viral breakdown, the lack of a functioning immune system can quickly prove fatal.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The last time I was in the University Cafe in downtown Palo Alto was the height of the Dot Com era. The cafe has really large white paper placemats – it lays down clean new sheets of white paper every time another table of customers sits down to order.

Back in 2000, at the height of the internet mania, it seemed that every table was filled with very important looking people busily sketching business plans on those sheets of white paper – structured stock offerings, returns on investment, phased rollout strategies, and all of those other great Dot Com phrases. By the time any meal was done, diners would have filled their white paper placemats with lots of little diagrams and charts, scribbled profit/cost estimate curves and projected timelines.

And at the end of every meal there was the all-important ritual of folding up that piece of paper, no matter how coated it may have become with coffee rings or gravy stains, and putting it in one’s pocket. What had once been a clean expanse of white was now a road plan, a treasure map, a guide to the Holy Grail, the key to the next big IPO.

As we know, most of those placemats ended up not being worth the ink scribbled on them. Plans came to naught, companies went belly up, and a chastened Silicon Valley fell back down to earth with a resounding thud.

Today, sitting in that same cafe, my friends and I ended up discussing some cool research ideas. At some point I took out a pen and started to make sketches on the big white placemat before me. We all got excited looking at it, we brainstormed a bit, adding things here and there, and by the end of the meal we all felt that we’d really made some progress, and even had a kind of game plan for what to do next.

When we left, it never occurred to us to take the placemat with us.

Love is not a rose
Nothing so easy, so trite
No, nothing like that

No rose, red or white
Could ever say what I mean,
What is in my heart

Please don’t get me wrong
A rose can be nice, but that’s…
Not the point, is it?

Love is an orchid
Wild, free, as deep as the night,
And perfect, like you

 

Today a woman I know was telling me about her brother, who – to her distress – embraces decidedly right-leaning values from down home where they grew up. Recently, when their dad needed a coronary bypass operation, the doctor assigned by the hospital was, by all accounts, learned and brilliant, with a long track record of success. But her brother didn’t approve. After meeting the doctor, he felt that this man, who’d been educated at Harvard Medical School, was too “elitist”, and so he demanded that the hospital provide somebody else.

The hospital obliged, and so their dad was operated upon by somebody else – somebody white.

Yes, it’s an ugly story. Don’t kid yourself, this election is about the very soul of this country. Someone can wear a euphemism on their sleeve because they find it unseemly to call it a swastika, but they are still wearing a swastika. I guess it’s time for me to stop trying to make excuses for this hate, so I’ll just lay this out plainly:

These racists are disgusting, and they are a disgrace, a betrayal of everything that our beautiful nation stands for. Every time someone says to you: “Oh, I’m sorry, I could never vote for a black man”, they are attacking your country. They might as well be cutting up the American flag into little pieces and urinating on it.

If you have any love at all for the United States of America, and the ideals that have instilled so much pride within you since you were a child, you have a solemn duty to fight them.

Today they say “black” is un-American. Tomorrow they will say “Jew” is un-American. The day after that they will say “Catholic” is un-American. And it won’t stop there. Once unreasoned hatred takes hold – hatred that literally makes no sense and is based upon nothing – it consumes everything and everyone in its path.

I’d never been to Monterey until now. There is something about the place – the sparkle of the sun on the water, the salt breeze off the ocean, the sea lions and their unending conversation, that gives this little town the sense that it is just a bit removed from the rest of the earth. Time is slower, faces more relaxed. It’s good to be somewhere like this for a little while. Just a pause really, to catch my breath.

And then I must be on my way.

I just saw “Notting Hill” on an airplane flight – the love story in which Julia Roberts plays a movie star and Hugh Grant an ordinary bloke. Yes, I know that everybody in the world who will ever see this film already saw it several years ago, but I hadn’t. And now I have, so there it is.

The thing that I find most notable about this film (which was, on the whole, quite entertaining to watch, although the plot mechanics creaked rather painfully at times), is the way it speaks to its audience on a meta-level, almost as an essay on the topic of “casting is destiny”. Of course Hugh Grant is not an ordinary bloke. He’s Hugh Grant. Meanwhile, the film makes a big deal out of breaking the fourth wall with Julia Roberts’ character: Because she is pointedly playing a famous movie star, we cannot help but think that we are watching Julia Roberts playing “Julia Roberts” – this wall-breaking is clearly intentional.

Casting in romantic comedies is always absurd. It’s absurd by definition. In order for an audience of millions to believe that two people represent ordinary people in love, that audience insists that these two people be represented by two movie stars – larger-than-life idealizations – genetic royalty.

And so the spectre of Hugh Grant, in the same fictional space, living in what amounts to a council flat with all of his looks and charm intact, both conforms to the conventions of the genre, and simultaneously underlines the absurdity of RomCom casting – since the continued presence of Julia Roberts as “Julia Roberts” makes it impossible for us to suspend our disbelief.

And so I found myself, for an hour and a half, waiting for somebody in the movie, maybe one of his friends in the council flat, or a waiter in a restaurant – anybody really – to suddenly turn to Hugh Grant and say “Hey, wait a minute, aren’t you Hugh Grant?”

In the end it didn’t happen, and somehow I felt vaguely disappointed.

But I suspect most people who watch the film were not at all disappointed. After all, they knew perfectly well, when they saw that gorgeous couple together at the end, that Julia Robert’s character did what she must, as RomCom convention demands (but nobody ever questions, because it would raise way too many questions about why we watch these things), to marry not an ordinary mortal, but within her own elite class. This seems to be what audiences really respond to: Movie star marries fellow movie star – an affirmation of genetic royalty.

Today I spent time with somebody I like I lot, a friend from out of town who happens to be a conservative Republican. The last time we got together, we had a rather tense and careful conversation that led to some awkwardness and a certain amount of mutual disbelief, the subtext going both ways being something like “I can’t believe somebody as intelligent as you believes such things.”

This time though, the elephant stayed politely and invisibly tucked away in a corner of the room. The subject of politics was not raised, and it was clear that neither of us had any interest in raising it. Given the recent turn of events, I’m sure my friend would have agreed that Barack Obama is much closer to becoming our 44th U.S. President than is John McCain. But I didn’t have the slightest interest in pointing this out. It would have felt smug and condescending, and would have served no purpose other than to drive a personal wedge between us.

I think that part of the reason the topic was off-limits – much as I hate to admit this – is that Obama’s advantage is not primarily due to his political views (which of course are far more similar to my own than are those of his opponent) but rather to the fact that he has run an excellent and professional campaign, whereas McCain and his advisors have made just about every mistake imaginable – the largest being the rash choice of Sarah Palin, which has removed any hope of the G.O.P. reaching the numbers it needs among the all-important undecided voters.

It is not so much my friend’s beliefs that America is probably about to vote against, but rather the incompetency of his party’s campaign. And so, agreeing to ignore that elephant in the corner, my friend and I had a wonderful time. We discussed music, movies, family, and all of those mundane yet comforting things that will continue on beyond November 4, no matter who enters the Oval Office this coming January.

Today I spent some time in a place where a tape was playing of old songs from the 1980’s. I happened to strike up a converation with a woman in her twenties, and we both realized that song after song was going by without her recognizing a single group – the Thompson Twins, Madness, Duran Duran. Of course this didn’t surprise either of us. Most pop music is ephemeral, something that speaks mainly to its own time and to momentary fashion.

But then, curious, I asked her about the Beatles – a group that had burst on the scene not a mere twenty years ago, but over forty years ago. “That’s different,” she said, “that’s the Beatles!” Point well taken.

As it happens, the other day I had finally gotten around to seeing Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” – a film that is clearly a thinly disguised love poem to the genius of the Beatles’ songbook. The plot of this film is mainly an excuse for the spectacle of beautiful young people singing Beatles songs that have mostly been reworked into contemporary arrangements. It was all very sweet and entertaining, and it really underscored just how powerful and timeless those songs are.

In contrast, I cannot imagine doing something like that with, say, the Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now” – a song whose appeal cannot really be separated from its era-specific vocal performances and production effects. In contrast, a Beatles song like “Yesterday” or “Let it Be” may be as timeless as “Happy Birthday” or “Greensleeves”.

It fascinates me how some things start out as pop, and yet outlast their era, while other things fade away. I’m sure that the young woman I was talking with would have recognized a Sinatra performance, but probably not Vic Damone, Steve Lawrence or Mel Torme. Jerry Lewis, but not Peter Lawford. “Gone with the Wind”, but not “Ninochka”. Charlie Chaplin, but not George Jessel.

I find myself wondering if we can ever know, while something is still new, whether it will become a classic? I’ll bet that when the enormously popular Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians were dominating the radio waves in the 1930s, most people assumed his fame and music would continue to last down through the ages. But now he is remembered mainly for his patented blender.

And so I look around now at all the bright shiny new things in today’s pop landscape, and I wonder – who will still be known in another fifty years, and who will simply fade away from the collective cultural memory? Is there any way to tell the difference?