Writing about Spencer Tweedy is an impossible task.

There are two main difficulties. First, Spencer’s father is Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, so you have to simultaneously deal with that and leave that alone, which is to say that you don’t want to dwell on his lineage, but you don’t want this fact to be glaringly absent, either. Second, Spencer is fourteen years old, and given how gifted he is in a variety of areas — writing, photography, and music, as far as I know — it’s hard not to return to how good he is at things at such a young age (and/or how bad you are at things at 14 + x age by comparison).

Also, what do you ask a teenager who doesn’t yet have a particular specialty? Typically, one interviews experts because they have an impressive depth of knowledge about a particular area. But Spencer is interested in several things, as one probably ought to be — get ready — at his age. He maintains a top-shelf, well-written blog. He has the keen eye of an intuitive photographer. He plays drums well enough to have been in a band for quite some time. But it’s not as though his blog will win a Pulitzer, or his pictures will get displayed in a museum. I don’t even know that his drumming is that virtuosic; it doesn’t make sense to focus on any one area of Spencer’s skill set and declare him an expert.

So why would you want to read about him, other than that he’s his father’s son and he’s an articulate, precocious youth? I guess our collective interest in celebrity can’t help but stare, but our best selves want to believe that we’ll like him for other reasons. It’s like rubbernecking, but then, upon reaching the scene that caused all the traffic, discovering that it’s something spectacular instead of horrific; a unicorn giving birth, or something.

His isn’t the type of celebrity you’re used to witnessing, though. Spencer goes to summer camp. His family vacations in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. He attends a public high school. Maybe that’s what especially compelling about his blog: its normalcy.  

Spencer would tell you himself that he’s not quite sure what he wants to do, ultimately, with his accumulated powers: “I’m not as interested in writing as a career as I once was, but it’s certainly something I like. If I were to go into a writing profession, it’d probably be journalism. I don’t write too much fiction.”

In the time we spent emailing back and forth while six months passed, Spencer wrestled with both the voice and format of his eponymous blog. Since our conversation concluded, he made the switch to Tumblr, promising, “I’m trying to keep this exactly like it was, plus smaller posts.”

The blog came about in 2008, when Spencer was twelve.

“I got the idea of combining my then-budding love for writing with that of tinkering, and a blog seemed like the perfect thing for that. I had pretty avaricious goals in terms of what it would be (besides an expression outlet). The only things I wrote back then were either for school, or reviews of things. I thought people would read them, and the little Google AdSense box would make me millions. So my initial goal was definitely ‘child entrepreneur.’”

At the end of that year, for his birthday, he sat in with Wilco for “The Late Greats” during a performance at Madison Square Garden.

“A few people found out,” he said, and his audience grew precipitously. “Every once in awhile after that, I’d have a super crazy, ‘Wow, I have a decently popular blog’ moment. I still do sometimes.”

At its most popular, last year, his blog averaged between 1,000 and 1,500 hits a day. Since he’s been posting less often, “it hovers around six or seven hundred.”

We know what it means as readers to visit a decently popular blog. We bookmark it, we share its best posts, and we wonder what it is, exactly, about that blog that attracts us to it. Spencer writes with the voice of someone who is — sorry, again — older. (But maybe it’s not age? Maybe we just don’t expect a 14-year-old to be so interesting? Or to care about language?)  There are some great sentences that show up effortlessly, like a regular at a pub who just happens to live upstairs:

• “I finally went and slaved over a hot Walgreens to get my Mexican winter break photos developed.”
• On braces: “I ate a sandwich with a fork and knife at lunch today.”
• “Our senses were dealt a final debilitating blow when some kid threw up in the hallway. The entire building was broken.”
• On the passing of Captain Beefheart: “One of my strongest memories has always been listening to Safe as Milk with my dad on our car rides to preschool.”

When I asked about his online persona versus the regular him, Spencer said, “My friends have told me before that my writing doesn’t sound like ‘me,’ and I think there’s definitely some dissonance. That’s probably because, when I write, I either think in the voice of my rabbi, or in Amir’s from Jake and Amir. When I talk, I guess I think in the voice of… me.”

As a blog’s popularity grows, so must that consideration of voice.

“I’d like to say that I’ve never really changed anything because of my audience, but that would really be selling them short,” he said. “A more realistic thing to say would be more like I make my blog what I want it to be, but I also care about the people who read it.”

To that end, Spencer is earnest, frequently responds to comments, and seems incapable of snark. For a while, he posted questions and answers from his Formspring. Even the most inane comments — “today i had cranberry scones and tea for breakfast, walked my dog, did yard work/gardening, read a short story in the new yorker, went to the gym and now I will take a shower. Today was a good day, the gardening thing is very zen and makes me very calm and balanced and happy.” — got a thoughtful, personal response: “That’s just wonderful. Those days are nice (when you get a lot of stuff done). I don’t like cranberries.”

Through words and pictures, Spencer also gives us a window into a world where someone with a public face — his father, mostly — occasionally wanders through, but then carries right on. It’s like watching a scuba diver swim amongst, I don’t know, talking walruses, without making a big hairy deal about it. You’re treated to glimpses — the back of Dad’s head from the backseat of a car, or walking hand-in-hand up a sand dune with Spencer’s younger brother, Sam.

When I asked him about his own greatest experiences as a fan, he said, “I regret — as if there’s anything to regret — that for the most-part over the years, I’ve been too young to realize who or how awesome the people I’ve met were (i.e. I sat next to Jody Stephens at a thing like a year ago and totally didn’t get it).” Another time, they got to meet the Rolling Stones. “Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards scared the crap out of Sam.”

I asked Spencer to compare his Madison Square Garden moment with the smaller venues he plays around Chicago with his band, the Blisters. 

He said, “The more intimate, the scarier, and fifteen people is obviously a lot more up-close-and-personal than fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand people are not people. They’re dots in a ginormous room. A really good band should be able to make a stadium feel as good as a living room.”

Maybe that’s the crux of what makes Spencer so readable: writing a blog is simultaneously like playing a stadium and being alone.  

Of course, playing music in front of a small or large crowd is also like playing music in front of people, and Spencer has been doing that for most of his life.

“I started the Blisters with a friend (no longer in the band) when I was seven years old. It was originally meant to be just us two, him on turntables, and me on drums, but through a series of events — price of turntables, impracticality of turntables — we ended up going with the standard rock n’ roll lineup with my friend Henry on keyboards. We played ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ by my dad for our first show at Second City.”

They later found a guitarist, Hayden, by putting up posters at school, and have recently added Alaina, Henry’s girlfriend, a configuration that’s called the Hungry Pilgrims. Here’s a song they wrote, which sounds as authentic as anything an adult might write about love, frankly.

When I asked about influences, he didn’t name any musicians, maybe out of self-consciousness. Rather, he wrote about “a whole bunch’a blogs and things in my Google Reader subscriptions. Some of my favorites: but does it float, Frank Chimero, Jakob Nylund, Friends of Type, Chromogenic, and TED, to name a few. I like BOOOOOOOM, but sometimes it can get to be a little too much.”

Given how fondly he writes about family trips, it’s obvious that he enjoys and appreciates his family, too. (In his bar mitzvah recap post, he thanked his mother, who “was/is, undoubtedly, a beast party-planner and overall mom.”) 

Like anyone — sorry about this — his age, Spencer is also establishing his discerning palate through comparison with friends’ cultural appetites.

“It’d be an understatement to say that my tastes in things differs from most of my friends,” he said, though going to high school and thus having more than forty-five classmates has exposed him to more people who are aligned with him. “They like good stuff, for the most-part. Some don’t, though, and that’s where I have had trouble staying off a high horse. It’s too easy to say, ‘You suck. That music sucks,’ when, really, there is no such thing as bad music (ref. Merzbow, dammit). That said, most of my friends nowadays are open-minded, non-Neil-Young-bashing people (who may or may not happen to listen to Wiz Khalifa, too).”

And Spencer, for his part, is open to Top-40 work as well.

“Beyoncé, for instance, I think she’s amazing. Kanye’s pretty amazing. Jay-Z rules. I try really hard to not close myself off to anything mainstream or ‘non-indie.’ Why should you?”  

Really, the reason to interview Spencer Tweedy is because of who he is already — a self-aware reporter embedded in adolescence. One imagines that he will be just as interesting — differently interesting — to read as he gets older. For now, though, it’s tempting to transpose our own teenage experience on his, to compare him with us. If you’re a regular visitor to Spencer’s blog or his photostream — and I’m sure if you were a groupie of the Blisters or the Hungry Pilgrims, too — you can recognize what he does as his. Could any of us say the same then? Can we say the same now? Will we be able to see this version of Spencer when we see his work years from now?

Spencer says, “I think that when I’m sixty (god willing), I’ll be a different person, but not fundamentally. We change as we grow, but not totally. Something about [this question] made me think of Benjamin Button, which (a) doesn’t really make sense, and (b) is a movie I’ve never seen.”  

Here’s to the future, then.

All photos taken by Spencer Tweedy

It’s easy to view ski jumping as more spectacle than sport, but seven public high schools in New Hampshire currently shun that perception, fielding ski jumping teams that, together, like Voltron, form the only interscholastic or intercollegiate ski jumping league anywhere in America. While other winter sports — ski and snowboard cross, halfpipe, freestyle skiing aerials, skeleton — have gained purchase by being “extreme,” ski jumpers here are trying to cultivate interest in their own sport by making it seem as normal as possible.

On a still, snow-covered night in the middle of January, a few dozen cars line the shoulders of a short stretch of the Kancamagus Highway near Conway, New Hampshire. Just in from the road, people huddle around a bonfire that often gets too hot to stand near; it’s manned by pyrotechnic teenage boys who toss wooden palettes on top to make it rage. A pair of parents are focused on cooking up free burgers for the crowd; hot chocolate is also available.

It’s jump night in New Hampshire, and all seven teams — Concord, Hanover, Hopkinton, John Stark, Kennett, Plymouth, and Sunapee — have gathered to compete in one of six weekly meets leading up to the state championships. 62 students are jumping at this meet, where the 45th anniversary of the site was marked with a brief speech from atop a snowbank. A sizable and enthusiastic crowd — 100 or so, maybe more — of students from Kennett, the host school, and parents, gasps and cheers as the first kids launch themselves with varying degrees of confidence into the air. One reason it looks particularly impressive here is the viewing angle. From below, we can’t see much of the 30-meter inrun, where the jumper tucks down, gathering speed; we just see him (or her — more on that in a minute) explode from the takeoff. Some come off stiffly and coltish, just hoping gravity will return them safely to the slope as soon as possible, but the best are easy to spot — their skis form a V, and they lean out over the wedge, quiet, their arms tucked politely behind them.

In New Hampshire high school ski jumping, each competitor is given three attempts at the hill. There’s a distance score, as measured by a row of parents who balance precariously along the side of the landing hill and offer their best guess about where a jumper’s boots landed, and a style score, awarded by two or three judges who take into account a skier’s inrun, flight, and landing. The worst of the three jumps is thrown out; the other two scores are added together.

It’s easy to see why ski jumping got itself a bad rap, and it’s even easier to blame Jim McKay. During the entire run of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the show he hosted for over twenty years, the opening montage featured the horrific crash of Yugoslav ski jumper Vinko Bogataj, coupled with McKay’s disappointed-father voiceover: “…and the agony of defeat.” It’s essentially a Pavlovian response now; hear that line, and you think of ski jumping.

Chip Henry, a former World Cup jumper and Kennett’s coach, says that the sport has transitioned in the last ten or fifteen years from a power sport to a “graceful, flying sport.” At six foot two, Chip found himself competing in Europe against jumpers who were up to a foot shorter than him, and lighter.

“The equipment’s changed, the technique’s changed, and the hills have actually started to change. They’re flattening the hills out so they’re longer and not as steep.”

Regardless of the shift from power to flight, however, ski jumping can look to the unaccustomed eye like something Evel Knievel might have done (in fact, several of his motorcycle jumps were also featured on Wide World of Sports). But ski jumping’s closest athletic kin is probably rowing: the perfect execution of a single, fluid motion. There is the same monastic devotion involved, too. Meets take place at night, at clearings in the middle of the woods, a few floodlights strategically lighting the way. Suits and equipment are often hand-me-downs, many bought secondhand from Lake Placid. Maintenance of the jump — shoveling and packing snow, grooming trails on the inrun, raking divots on the landing hill — is a routine part of practice. Hopkinton High’s coach, Scott Zipke, says, “There’s just nothing flashy about it, and I think that that appeals to the right kid.”

One of the right kids is Kennett’s Michael Larson, a senior, who narrowly wins the meet over Concord’s top jumper, junior Matt Bengtson. Michael’s father is an active rock climber and alpinist, so Tricia Mattox-Larson, his mother, doesn’t fear much for her son’s safety: “My kids have rock climbed since they could walk, so it seemed fine to me.” Michael’s only injury in four years of jumping was his freshman year after ski practice, when a truck ran him over in the parking lot, breaking his leg.

“Our team has had its share of injuries, so you can’t say it’s injury-free,” she says, “but I mean, Michael plays football, too, and it seemed like every game, they were carting kids off.”

As high school ski jumping involves eight-foot-long skis, steep slopes, and inexperienced athletes, there are some miscues. The outrun — the flat plane immediately after the landing hill — is short here. Hunter Haynes, one of Kennett’s best jumpers, doesn’t slow himself quickly enough and runs straight into the safety netting, his momentum carrying him with it into the woods. Athletes and coaches from several teams race to the scene, but he’s fine and takes his next jump; he finishes third overall. Another jumper tweaks his knee. A third suffered a sprained wrist before the meet started.

This league bears little resemblance, however, to an Olympic event. Zipke says it’s “like watching two different sports.” In Vancouver, the normal hill event took place from a 90-meter jump, and the large hill launched competitors off a 125-meter jump. The first meet of the high school league was on an 18-meter jump, and the state championships took place on a 38-meter jump. There’s not much time for athletes to get twisted in the air in a way that would result in more spectacular crashes. That said, Chip Henry explains that Olympic athletes would likely hurt themselves if they competed in these high school meets.

“Probably the smallest hill those guys would jump would be a K70,” he says. “They have such a direct move out over their skis; on the smaller jumps, there’s not so much air pressure to keep them out like that.”

Dan LeBlanc, Plymouth’s coach, tells me that in the 30-year history of his school’s jump facility, he’s only seen two broken bones.

“I’d stack that record up against any other sport at the high school here,” he said.

While there are injuries — concussions, mostly — spills usually occur once an athlete has landed, so there’s less distance to fall. I attended all but one meet this year, plus a practice, and I saw just one person fall on the inrun itself, à la Bogataj, and he managed to stop himself before the takeoff.

Still, you’d think that parental anxiety would be the biggest obstacle to this league’s existence, but several of the mothers I spoke with said that they were the ones who encouraged their children to try ski jumping in the first place. They’ve become convinced of the sport’s safety by the careful progression that the coaches require of their athletes. First comes dryland training, when jumpers learn the basic positions. Then, they start skiing down the landing hill. The first jump is usually no bigger than a step. From there, they move to a ten-meter jump.

Zipke says, “I don’t really think of it as my job to convince the parents [to let their kids jump], and it’s not really something I have any interest in doing. It’s their job to parent and my job to coach.”

Kids who aren’t coaxed into jumping by their parents seem to come to the sport through friends or older siblings. One of Michael Larson’s friends’ brothers was jumping, so “I think that put the bug in his ear,” his mother says. Julia Finch, a wispy freshman at Concord, joined because of her brother, Parker, an affable senior captain. “He had only good things to say about the sport, and he really encouraged me to try it. It’s helpful for me to have someone I’m close with to be able to give me tips and help me improve.”

Tira Hastings, a senior at Hanover, joined the team last season “because a bunch of my girlfriends were doing it.” It wasn’t because of her father, Jeff Hastings, who finished fourth on the large hill in the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, the best performance by any American ski jumper.

“Actually,” Tira says, “it’s kind of a bummer that my Dad’s an Olympian, because people assume it runs in the family, which it certainly does not, as it turns out.”

While women are still shut out of ski jumping at the Olympics, they’re an established part of the league in New Hampshire. There’s a separate individual title for girls, but their leaps can and sometimes do count toward their teams’ scores, too. Contrary to her self-deprecation, Tira Hastings and her Hanover teammate, Sasha Kahn, are often Hanover’s third and fourth jumpers.

“I definitely see ski jumping as a male-dominated sport,” says Finch, who’s one of two girls on Concord’s squad. “Our team hadn’t had any girls on it since this year in quite a few years. But I’m okay with that. I don’t mind being different.”

There’s a sense of both independence and tradition that pervades the league. Three of the coaches — at Kennett, Hanover, and Plymouth — now coach at their own alma maters. A fourth, John Fulton, was classmates with Hanover’s coach. After graduating, Fulton jumped for four years at the University of New Hampshire, and served as one of UNH’s coaches in 1981, the last year that ski jumping was a sport at the college level.

Fulton has his theories about why it ended. In 1975, a member of the U.S. Jumping Team named Jeff Wright was killed when he fell during a jump in Brattleboro, VT. (Like Bogataj, who escaped his crash with a concussion, Wright wasn’t wearing a helmet.) College ski team coaches, who had been disgruntled about having to recruit Norwegian athletes in order to maintain a jumping team, used Wright’s death and concerns about safety as a way to eliminate that component of their programs. It worked, which is too bad, because Fulton seems like the kind of guy whose enthusiasm for the sport could have allowed him to carry all of interscholastic and intercollegiate jumping on his back. His mother was a home economics teacher and made jumping suits for the Hanover High and Dartmouth College teams in the ‘70s. Coaching the sport, as he does now at Concord, is his calling.

Despite all the family connections and rich history, ski jumping doesn’t necessarily resonate much outside of its community. One Hanover jumper, Andrew Kittredge, joined the team this year because his friend, Sasha Kahn, told him about it; he hadn’t known that Hanover even fielded a team before the season began, and as a snowboarder, he’d actually never been on skis before. Jumpers don’t get the recognition that more mainstream athletes like soccer, football, and hockey players receive. They are jumping for other reasons, often personal: a sense of self in the air, the thrill of flight, the satisfaction of landing.

The schools take turns hosting weekly meets at the five ski jumps around the state. Two weeks before Kennett’s, the seven schools gathered at Plymouth, the only school with a jump on its property, just down the hill from the football field. Although Plymouth’s meet was early on the schedule, their jump was not much fun for novices: a bump about twelve meters down the landing hill meant that anyone who touched down before it got a double bounce, making it technically more difficult to navigate on long skis.

Parker Finch, Concord’s co-captain, explained, “Now that I’m able to jump over it, the ride isn’t so bad, but there’s still that risk of catching your tail and being thrown headfirst.”

This happened to one girl during the meet, who was shaken up enough that she chose not to do her second or third runs, but all the other carnage that night consisted only of minor wipeouts.

Given the jump’s proximity to the school, a coterie of students was there; they gathered around the takeoff and cheered loudest for Jake Ross, for whom the words “spark plug” and “dynamo” are both apt. While he’s built like a Lego man — compact and blocky — and was not a factor in the team scoring for Plymouth at their home meet, he jumps with gusto. As with most meets, the crowd’s excitement dulled during the second and third runs, as standing out in the cold became less and less fun. Plymouth wound up second, behind Kennett. Plymouth coach Dan LeBlanc was impressed with the victors’ adaptability.

“A lot of kids tend to jump well on certain jumps and poorly on others, because they’re intimidated by, uncomfortable with, or unfamiliar with certain jumps. The Kennett kids don’t grow up ski jumping, but they always seem to be resilient and adaptable enough to do well on all hills.”

Kennett’s coach, Chip Henry, said, “I just try to teach kids to be aggressive. That’s kind of my big word, and that’s been the difference for my kids over the last couple of years.”

Henry also benefits from a team full of seniors who’ve jumped all four years.

I spent the Plymouth meet on the landing hill, helping to measure. On one side of me was Ryan Erlich-Mitchell’s mother and brother. It’s Ryan’s first year jumping, for Concord, and it was his mom’s first time at a meet. His brother told me that Ryan “loves it almost as much as Civil Air Patrol.” On my other side was Steve Larson, Michael’s father. As measurers, we were each responsible for one or two meters of space, marked by a long tape measure. It’s tougher than you think to determine whether someone’s boots have landed in your zone. The impact of the skis confused us on occasion. While we were standing there, trying not to slip and take out all the judges downhill from us, Larson told me about one of the jumps at Lake Placid, the old Olympic training facility that some teams chose to visit during preseason.

“It’s just amazing — like sculpture. You go to the top and it’s like, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ You’re in a tower. You’re on the top of a hill in a tower.”

Michael won that meet, too; Ryan finished in a tie for 40th.

The next week’s meet was at Hanover. The evening was warm, and the snow was sticky. It slowed the inrun, shortening the jumps’ distances. Hanover coach Tom Dodds, a soft-spoken anesthesiologist whose son was a three-time state champion and spent the summer on the jumping circuit in Europe, told me that his team was pretty despondent about their performances. “The other night, when it was cold, we were going down to thirty, thirty-two meters. You’re not gonna see anything close to that tonight,” he said.

The top jumper — Michael Larson again — hit 28.5 meters. Kennett was the winning team again, too.

I hung out with the two judges at the Hanover meet. One was a grandfather named Will Smith; the other was Chris Hastings, a two-time national champion himself, whose brother is the Olympian and whose niece is Tira, one of Hanover’s captains. Hastings explained his scoring process: “If I see a kid jump, right away, I’ll see, say, 11 or 12 points right off the bat.” He then finds ways to fine-tune his score from there. “If they keep their legs straight, for instance,” he said, he’ll award another point or so. “I’m looking for something that looks aggressive and in control. Really not seeing a whole lot of that here — a perfect score is basically impossible on a hill this size.” Smith and Hastings both got more than a little excited to see telemark landings — one stylish foot in front of the other — from the occasional jumper.

If the U.S. is going to compete for medals in ski jumping, it’s not likely to be as a result of any increased participation in high school leagues, since there aren’t college teams to graduate to, and since — pardon the pun — it’s a big leap from high school state champion to Olympic hopeful. Interested jumpers join up with a club, and then try to make various elite age group teams on their way up to the national squad. The U.S. Ski Team doesn’t even provide funding for the jumpers, so they rely heavily on family and community support.

Nick Alexander is one jumper who briefly jumped in this league and was, this year, one of three U.S. jumpers in Vancouver. He grew up in Lebanon, a town just south of Hanover. Before attending school in Lake Placid to train more seriously, he spent his ninth grade year competing for his high school, which no longer has a team. His father, Jim, Lebanon’s Chief of Police, was diplomatic about its impact on his son’s ambitions.

“Nick was actually heavily involved in the Eastern Ski Jumping program before he got to high school. Still, he enjoyed being involved. It gave him time to compete in a different group. He has many friends in the league,” some of whom showed up for the local Olympic send-off arranged for him.

A week before the state championships, I watch John Fulton conduct a practice for his Concord High team. Teams typically jump just three times a week — two practices and one meet — which Fulton feels isn’t quite enough for anyone to see substantial improvement. Nonetheless, the bus dutifully arrives at the tiny ski area that serves as their home facility, a 40 minute journey from school. The kids emerge already dressed in their ski suits, and they start stretching. Parker Finch leads some of them on a brief warm-up run, and then they pair up to work on their takeoffs and flight positions. One jumper crouches and then springs up; his partner catches him in the chest and carries him that way for a few feet. Fulton is a deft coach; he has an innate sense of what each of his athletes needs to hear.

“I took one of those sports psychology classes years ago, where they talked about immediate feedback,” he tells me, as we station ourselves just below the jump, at the top of the landing hill. “By the time they jump, and they come back up, the feedback’s not immediate enough.”

That’s why Fulton has a walkie-talkie hanging around his neck — the other one is at the end of the outrun. After each kid has jumped, they radio up to him to discuss what they felt and what he saw.

“Who’s there?”
“Shane.”
“All right, Shane, looks like you had trouble getting set up top.”
“Yeah, it was a little weird.”
“Well, let’s call that a re-do, then. Get yourself set, push off the bar, whole foot, then get in your good in-run with a nice, relaxed upper body when you jump.”
“Okay.”

To the girl who needs to tuck her body in tighter as she gathers speed: “Caroline, what’s for dinner?”
“Ribs and thighs, Coach.”

“That was a nice ride.”
“Yeah, I thought it was my best one so far.”
“All right, I want you to keep stretching, though. Keep stretching with the chin.”

“What’d you feel on that?”
“It felt bad.”
“Well, it was an ugly jump, so I’m glad it felt bad for you.”

Concord has three strong jumpers, but the top four jumpers count in a meet, so Fulton’s main focus is to coax a little more distance out of a few kids whose bodies pop straight up when they come off the jump, making them drop faster. It’s a disconcerting feeling to many beginners when they start trying to lean their bodies straight out over their skis. It looks to them like their ski tips are coming up towards their faces, and that they’re going to start tumbling. At this point in the season, the coach wants some of the kids to at least bend at the waist. Fulton, whose team won their first meet of the year two days before, seems optimistic that a state title is possible.

A day after the state meet, John Fulton doesn’t have a way of describing what happened to his Concord team. During their next practice after the one I attended, their #2 jumper fell badly; he got a concussion and broke his collarbone. The next day, Parker wrote, “That essentially eliminates our chances of winning, so now we’re just hoping for second.” The night before states, their #4 jumper had an unrelated medical emergency and was unable to compete. During warm-ups on Friday for the meet, while Fulton was being interviewed by a local TV news station, his #1 jumper, Matt Bengtson, fell and got a concussion, too. Two of Concord’s other jumpers, having seen all the fates met by their teammates, decided that they didn’t feel comfortable jumping in the meet. Left with three jumpers, Concord came in sixth out of seven teams. “I have always told the kids from the first day that I meet them, that jumping has to be fun,” Fulton writes. “If you don’t feel comfortable, just say to me, ‘It just doesn’t feel right today, Coach.’ I have never criticized an athlete for not jumping, and last night was no different even though it was States.”

Fulton is clearly upset by this sudden reversal of fortune. “We put fifteen years worth of bad luck into a two week period,” he says. But his refusal to push those two kids who pulled out says more about the safety of high school ski jumping than a pair of freak accidents to his two best jumpers does. The jumpers progress so deliberately that they become acutely aware throughout the season of what feels right and what doesn’t, and their coaches trust them enough to let them make their own decisions. Chip Henry of Kennett says he lets kids jump from the smaller of the two hills they practice on until they tell him they’re ready to move up.

“It takes a while for the beginners to get comfortable, so you try not to overwhelm them,” he explains. “You keep it fun for ‘em, let ‘em get some confidence. That makes them more coachable.”

Kennett defended its state (and national) championship easily. Michael Larson comfortably won the individual title; two of his teammates were second and third. Parker Finch came in just a half-point behind them. His first jump was his shortest, which he attributed to his injured teammates.

“Matt’s fall really freaked me out, so I went more easily. After that, I realized that Matt and Chris wouldn’t want me to hold anything back because of their falls, so I jumped a lot harder.”

His best distance was only two meters short of Larson’s.

Hanover dominated the girls’ competition, sweeping the top three spots. Tira Hastings finished second. Julia Finch, whose brother Parker helped convince her to jump in the state meet after she expressed some anxiety after warm-ups, came in 29th overall. Later, reflecting on the season, she writes, “I was surprised to learn how brave I can be. I never would have expected to be doing this, but I definitely do think I will continue ski jumping throughout high school.”

There was also a Rookie of the Year award to give out. It was a big cup, larger than the team title plaque, and it was named for Gene Ross, who coached Plymouth for a number of years before dying in a construction accident seven years ago. As John Fulton introduced the prize, the Plymouth jumpers gathered around Jake Ross, patting him on the back expectantly. They assumed he would win it. How could he not? It was named after his dad.

But numbers trumped legacy. The award went to a kid from Hopkinton, their top jumper, who finished four places higher in the overall standings at the state meet than Jake did. Jake was crushed, and rushed away to shed some private tears. He won’t have another chance to win his father’s award. Dan LeBlanc, who was helping John Fulton distribute awards, seemed a little crestfallen, even though his Plymouth team was second overall.

Later, he says, “Feeling bad doesn’t really scratch the surface of how I felt about it. He really felt good about how he jumped because he did jump very well. I tried to downplay expectations, just because you never know with the judging. The kid’s whole family was there — aunts and uncles who’d never been to a jumping meet, even when Gene was coaching. It meant so much to him and the family and to be so close…” Dan’s voice trails off. “Afterwards, I let Jake know what his dad meant to me. He was my coach, he was my boss in the summer, his dad and my dad were really close. Being the kind of kid he is, by the end of the night, he was already talking about next year.”

Tradition matters here. There is little to no institutional memory of high school ski jumping in any other state. When I called the Colorado High School Activities Association to see if they’d ever sanctioned the sport, I spoke with a dispiriting woman named Audra, who told me, “We’ve never had it, and to be honest, probably never will. It’s just too dangerous.”

In New Hampshire, the sport is alive, but so is its aesthetic — people are kind as can be to each other, but you work hard to earn what you get.

That ski jumping is so unique is also a point of pride. Tricia Mattox-Larson says, “Outside of our door, we have three pairs of alpine skis and then Michael’s jumping skis. People come over and say, ‘Have you got Herman Munster here? Who the heck skis on those things?’”

At the end of the meet, after Fulton wished everyone a safe drive home, I hiked to the top of the jumping tower with Parker and Julia Finch’s mother, where the whole family goes each year at the conclusion of the season. We climbed up a slope beside the idle rope tow until we were underneath the wooden structure. From there, it was a couple flights of stairs until we emerged, to check out the view.

Parker, the only jumper who remained in his jump suit after the meet, for the awards ceremony, was still in it, as though changing would break the final bond he had with this league. You could see the lights of the nearby private school, the constellations above. And you had a breathtaking view of the path down that all these jumpers had spent the season taking. Everything looked so far away from up there, but the further you flew, the closer you could get to being somewhere.

Photos courtesy of Ken S. Kotch Photography.

Protester #1: What I want to know is, I heard the Jews will all be covered for free under this plan.  Why are you allowing the dirty Jews free health coverage and denying it for my blond and blue-eyed friends and family?!  

Nazi Rep: Thank you for that question.  You may have heard tall tales like this from various media outlets.  Let me tell you — they are being spread by the Jews themselves.  It’s true!  The Jews are not even mentioned in the reform proposal.  We don’t want any part in caring for their health—

Protester #1: Oh, really?  Then why did you whisk them away on luxurious trains to special spas and health clubs to which the rest of us are denied admission?!

Nazi Rep: Look — that’s — it’s not what you think.  

Protester #1: I’ve heard they’re losing weight.  Are they losing weight where they are?  Yes or no?

Nazi Rep: Well, yes, but it’s because of—

Protester #1: Why are they getting special access to preventative care?  

Nazi Rep: It’s not really like that.  Trust me — we don’t like the Jews.  There is no plan to provide them with free health insurance.  Next question.

Protester #2: Yes, I’ve heard that your Brats for Bunkers program is already broke because so many people were willing to allow Nazi leaders to live in their bunkers in exchange for lifetime supplies of bratwurst.  How do you expect to be able to manage health care when you can’t even manage Brats for Bunkers?

Nazi Rep: Look — we didn’t anticipate so many people being so willing to give up space in their bunkers.  The Führer has already proclaimed that more money will go towards funding that program, and you will all get all the bratwurst you could possibly want — as long as you’re Aryan, of course.

Protester #2: So you expect us to believe that you’ll be able to make our health care system better after you just blatantly had to scramble to fix Brats for Bunkers?

Nazi Rep: I don’t — I’m not sure I see what the big deal is.  We created a program that helps our beloved German sausage makers get rid of some of their excess bratwurst, and it’s become wildly popular.  So popular, in fact, that we have to expand the program.  And our program-expansion is going to be successful — that’s not a question.  So I think it’s fair to say that the Führer has run Brats for Bunkers well enough that its success doesn’t mean that his health care reform is going to fail.  Next question.

Protester #3: I’ve heard that Hitler wasn’t born in Germany.  

Nazi Rep: You’re right — he was born in Austria.  You don’t need to have been born here to lead the nation in our glorious battle for racial purity and also health care reform.  

Protester #3: Then why won’t he show us his birth certificate?

Nazi Rep: I don’t think anyone’s asked him to.  Again, it’s not illegal for the leader of Germany to have been born elsewhere.  We welcome the leadership of anyone who thinks Germans are the perfect race of people.  Flattery gets you everywhere in Germany.  Well, that and not being Jewish.

Protester #4: Hey, what about the fact that Hitler combs his hair over to hide his democratic sympathies?

Nazi Rep: Well, I have to admit that that would be an extremely odd way for the Führer to hide something like that.  But you can rest assured that he has no such predilections.  He believes in totalitarianism and the power and judgment of the state.  It’s a wonder I’m even here right now, soliciting opinions and questions from you all.  You can rest assured that nothing you say will make it back to the Führer.  

Protester #4: What about the secret holes he has in his nose where he hides his boogers?

Nazi Rep: Those, sir, are what I believe are referred to as nostrils.  Everyone has them.

Protester #4: And if someone doesn’t — are they entitled to free health care under Hitler’s crazy plans for reform?

Nazi Rep: No, it’s my understanding that people without exactly two nostrils will likely be shot.  Now, does someone have a question that’s a little more on point?

Protester #5: I do!

Nazi Rep: Oh, thank goodness.

Protester #5: Yes, I want to know why Hitler took the death panels out of his reform proposal.

Nazi Rep: Where on earth did you hear that?  The Führer has been very clear throughout this process: death panels are a crucial and integral part of any health care reform.  Germany doesn’t want any dying individuals being allowed to siphon off any resources from the healthy among us.  Those are absolutely in the legislation — they were there in the first draft, and they’ll be there in the final draft.

Protester #5: What about this public option for the millions of uninsured Germans?

Nazi Rep: The public option has been largely misunderstood and misrepresented in the media.  Here’s what happens with the public option: If you’re healthy and you don’t need a doctor, great.  Nothing changes for you.  If you’re a Jew or a gypsy or developmentally disabled or gay, the public has the option of reporting you to the local authorities so that you can be sequestered in your appropriate ghetto or camp and receive the poor treatment you deserve.  Before, it was only members of the SS who could ask to see someone’s papers.  With the public option, anyone can.

Protester #5: I’m suspicious of the true purposes of the public option because Hitler’s not even from this country!

Nazi Rep: Those two things — your suspicious nature and the Führer’s foreign birth — have absolutely zilch in common.  

Protester #5: But don’t you see?  If he’s from Austria, that means he’s probably here illegally, which means he sympathizes with other people who are different like him, and he wants them to have health insurance just like he does.  And what if he gets sick?  If he gets sick, aren’t chances good that he’ll sympathize with other sick people?  Do you have proof from his doctor that he’s healthy like us?

Nazi Rep: I can assure you that the Führer is in excellent shape and that, if he were to fall ill, he would pass on his command to another member of his cabinet.  

Protester #5: Don’t you mean one of the Jews in his cabinet?

Nazi Rep: In fact, that’s not what I mean, because the Führer does not have any Jews in his cabinet.

Protester #1: That’s because they’re all in their free health care spas!

Protester #2: All those Jews who are doctors — they’re trying to resist Hitler’s health reforms by disguising the fact that people are sick by making them better! 

Protester #3: Release the results of Hitler’s own physical — it’s the only way we’ll know he doesn’t sympathize with the sick!

Protester #4: But what if he was seen by a Jewish doctor who cured him of some ailment by grinding one of his Jew-horns into a fine powder and creating a magical elixir for Hitler?  Then, he’ll have turned his heart away from the Fatherland and instead toward the Jews and the sick and we’d never know it!

Protester #5: It’s so clear — why don’t you see that Hitler’s health care reform is actually for people who need it instead of for us?  They’ll drain all the money and resources to themselves and their actual health emergencies!

Nazi Rep: Listen to you!  You’ve talked yourselves into believing that Adolf Hitler, the totalitarian leader of a political movement that’s trying to wean the weakest and least desirable from our population, is actually promoting a health care reform plan that would not only help, but disproportionately benefit the weakest and least desirable.  Hitler is not a friend of the Jews or the sick or the dying or any of the other special interest groups that you claim he’s a friend of, nor will he be.  The Führer will deliver to Germany a health care plan that protects only the healthy.

Protester #1: Ah-choo!

Nazi Rep: Gesundheit.  My saying that, by the way, is pretty much the extent of your new health coverage.

Protester #1: Wait — but, it’s only the sniffles.  And look at me!  I’m of pure Aryan stock.

Nazi Rep: Apparently, you’ve not been bred as perfectly as we’d like.  Suffer the consequences!

Protester #2: But what if we catch what he has?  

Nazi Rep: Then you’re too weak, too.  You only deserve medicine if you don’t need it, and if you can get sick from a puny virus, you clearly need medicine.  And if you need medicine, we’re not going to give it to you.

Protester #3: We’ve changed our minds.  We want health care for all of us.  

Nazi Rep: That’s precisely what you’ve been protesting against, you realize.

Protester #4: Oh, we don’t actually mean what we’re saying — we’re just out here exercising our right to free speech.

Nazi Rep: Which you don’t have, since we live in 1930-something Germany.

Kennedy, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia Law, could have been a bright, fresh face in the Senate, knowledgeable about a variety of issues, including civil liberties (she co-authored two books on that) and education funding (she raised $65 million on behalf of New York City public schools as the Director of the Office of Strategic Partnerships).  Couldn’t she have developed laws with her staff to encourage private donations to fund the vast public works that Obama supports for job creation?  Just because she doesn’t have a voting record doesn’t mean she doesn’t have strong opinions.  

There are some people who have spent their lives out of the public eye, who get motivated by a person or a cause, and who need a hand up to a position from which they will be most effective.  They don’t have the self-promotion skills of a typical candidate. When the occasion comes along to appoint that sort of person, those in power have a special opportunity to change the face of leadership.  Colorado’s governor did it: when looking for Ken Salazar’s replacement in the Senate, Bill Ritter looked beyond the popular elected officials in his state and instead chose Michael Bennet, Denver’s superintendent of schools.  Much less of a fuss is being made about that move; maybe it’s because Michael Bennet didn’t say “you know” quite as much in interviews or because his last name isn’t Kennedy.  

The cry of nepotism rings hollow to me—nepotism is more pernicious when the close friend or family member has been gunning for a top position.  Caroline Kennedy hasn’t shown that tendency.  When she launched her initial salvo on Obama’s behalf—an elegant editorial in The New York Times—I doubt she was aiming for a position of power in exchange.  She became involved because, like her father had been for a generation, Obama was an inspirational figure to her.  It’s cynical to think that her desire to be in the Senate was merely a desire to further a family legacy.  I didn’t vote against Hillary because Bill is her husband, and I wouldn’t vote against Jeb Bush because his brother is George; there were and will be better reasons than that.  

I also bristle at the idea that Caroline Kennedy and Sarah Palin should have gotten equal treatment.  Being elected the governor of Alaska does not make you smart—obviously.  Getting a great education, growing up exposed to the world, and getting involved in a cause before it is thrust upon you (as in, when you give birth to it) are all ways to make yourself broadly qualified for positions that have no clear requirements.  Having an unfortunate verbal tic does not begin to compare to being unable to name more than one Supreme Court case or a single newspaper that you read.  I know it’s not true that Governor Palin thought that Africa was a country, but the fact that it was at all believable speaks to the horrible danger of her ignorance, should she ever hold higher office than she does now.  The only similarity between Palin and Kennedy is anatomical.  

The sexism here doesn’t lie in the differences between those two; it lies in the different treatments of Kennedy and Timothy Geithner.  Geithner didn’t pay $34,000 in taxes, and had a household employee of questionable immigration status.  Neither of these appear to be disqualifying to his confirmation, nor should they be.  But the rumored reasons for Governor Patterson being allegedly cool to appointing Kennedy were precisely these same reasons, the ones that made him pass her over.  

If the only people who can make it to elected office, by appointment or election, are (a) those who have been previously elected or (b) those who seem most like us Average Joes, then we’re at serious risk of dangerously limiting our pool of potential candidates.  I want the people working on policy, especially right now, to be freaking geniuses—people with advanced degrees, people who have published papers or shown competence in areas outside of politics, people who have had a greater interest in being experts than in accumulating power.  New York missed out on a chance to have that kind of person in the Senate, and I’m not sure it’ll get an opportunity to correct its governor’s political choice.

I’m not sure what I expected to feel when Obama was elected. I didn’t find myself amid any jubilant throngs; instead, I went to a low-key party until Ohio was called for Obama, and then came home and stayed up to watch coverage all the way through Obama’s speech in Grant Park. My wife went to sleep earlier because she had to teach all four classes the next day. Part of me wished I’d been celebrating with strangers in the streets, crying deliriously, raising my arms in victory as cars honked their horns in agreement. But part of me—probably more of me—felt just fine watching by myself, not getting too caught up in that moment, lest I experience that sinking, sober moment, like the thru-hikers who didn’t realize that getting to the end of their journey would only lead to more questions.

Instead, I’ve taken satisfaction in saying “President-Elect Barack Obama.” The biggest quasi-rally I went to was two days after the election: a taping of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, the NPR news quiz, where the entire blue audience cheered wildly every time Obama was mentioned. And in watching him make what I think and hope are pragmatic decisions about dealing with the crises that Bush has thrown down in front of the next president.

More than that glazed and frightened expression that comes with finally realizing a dream and then realizing it didn’t provide any answers, I worry about complacency. I worry about hubris, too. Our recent history is littered with bad examples of one-party rule. Will the Democrats have learned their lesson, that incremental change is necessary to shifting our political center back to something approaching a moderate viewpoint?

I like to think that the success of Proposition 8 in California actually served as a wake-up call at the same time that we were celebrating Obama’s election. The opponents of same-sex marriage are on the same side of civil rights as George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Orval Faubus. Among my group of friends, it universally tainted the joy of Election Day.

The answer, of course, is not in protesting the Mormon Church, which poured millions of dollars from out of state into the effort to ban same-sex marriage. Action that seems extreme or vindictive isn’t going to win any battles for public opinion. Shifting perceptions of gay marriage—which could have worked had the ballot initiative come an election cycle or two from now, when people had time to see that gay marriage wasn’t harming anyone—will be important. I listened to a Focus on the Family broadcast about the election, in which one of the participating pastors said of the so-called homosexual agenda, “The things that are stake are just as key to the survival of Western civilization as World War II was when we were facing down Nazism.” That statement obviously seemed horrible and offensive to my ear; I want it to seem shocking and dumb to a healthy majority of voters; then, we’ll have a big vote on gay marriage and justice will win.

But justice won’t win if we think Obama’s victory is the end of our struggles with a myriad of issues. He is, perhaps, a catalyst, but he himself is not a solution. I’m reminded of a song from a terribly sad movie I just saw, Synecdoche, New York, called “Little Person”:

I’m just a little person
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me.

I do my little job
And live my little life
Eat my little meals
Miss my little kid and wife

And somewhere, maybe someday
maybe somewhere far away
I’ll find a second little person
who will look at me and say, “I know you.”

Obama’s victory came on the backs of countless volunteers who felt like they had something to offer, that together, we could build a re-birth of our country and its actual values. But in the end, we’re all still little people, and it will remain tough but essential to continue to press and criticize amidst the cacophony of empty praise.

For Better or For Worse is a Canadian strip, and thus has always felt slightly foreign to me. It revolves around the Patterson family, based not loosely on cartoonist Lynn Johnston’s own family. I’ve always imagined its most faithful readers to be jolly women with inspirational posters at work and embroidered throw pillows at home—the type of woman who could have ardently supported Hillary Clinton, but became a fierce devotee to Sarah Palin.

I read it because it’s the equivalent of rubbernecking on a highway, but without, you know, the actual tragedy. While it used to be relatively harmless—sort of a Cathy meets Calvin & Hobbes, with puns for punch lines—For Better or For Worse years ago jumped the shark to tackle serious issues (a tertiary character comes out, a beloved dog dies after saving the youngest Patterson from drowning; there’s divorce and attempted sexual assault and a house fire and copious teenage angst), with a precious helping of treacle. The family members—parents John and Elly, and kids Michael, Elizabeth, and April—seem as untouchably righteous (and, if it’s possible, less funny) as the characters from TV’s Full House.

Imagine my horror, then, when I read an interview with Johnston in which she said that Elizabeth would get married in the strip on August 23, 2008. Had we not already sent out invitations, I would’ve tried to change the wedding date. I guess it’s akin to my hypothesis that the least popular day for procreative sex is December 11, because no one wants their kid’s birthday associated with terrorist attacks. In the same way, I feared that my own wedding would be forever linked with the queasy coupling of Elizabeth Patterson and her insufferable beau, Anthony Kaine.

A quick review for those who don’t know: Anthony has hungrily lusted after Elizabeth since junior high; they dated briefly here and there, but nothing ever really worked out, and after a while, Anthony gave up and married Marie-Thérèse, a hateful bitch whose presence in the strip served no other purpose than to divorce Anthony, largely because of his fanatical attachment to Elizabeth. In the series of strips of their wedding, Marie-Thérèse is shown immediately post-ceremony asking a mustached Anthony, “Your friend Elizabeth is with a very handsome man. Are you jealous?”, to which her new husband lamely replies, “Thérèse, don’t. Not now.” Their relationship was about as romantic as watching Emperor Palpatine court young Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side. Somehow, it produced a daughter.

Once Liz had returned to her hometown—after breaking up with her part-Indian, all-hunky policeman boyfriend from northern Ontario, Paul Wright, and refusing to get back together with her old, debonair helicopter-pilot ex-flame, Warren Blackwood, the wheels were set in motion for Liz to make the safest, lamest choice she could: Anthony Caine. Anthony, who manages the garage of yet another Patterson Family friend, Gordon Mayes—a made-up character who could have any job, and he is the manager of a garage. This sort of thing earned him the nickname Blanthony from readers of the snarky website The Comics Curmudgeon.

Anthony is actually representative of the biggest problem with For Better or For Worse: it’s petty and infuriatingly boring. John Patterson is a dentist and a model railroad enthusiast. April martyred herself for Shannon Lake, her special needs friend, by announcing in the school cafeteria, “Quiet, everyone! Shannon Lake wants to say something!” Shannon then takes three days worth of strips to say this (I’ve removed the ellipses in the interest of space):

“I want to say stop! Stop making fun of us! We’re dif’rent from you but, so what?!! Don’t give us a hard time. Give us a chance! You tease me about the way I talk! I was born with a cleft palate! They couldn’t fix it until I was four! I had to learn how to speak all over again and that is why I talk like this. I can’t change the way I talk, but you can change the way you listen!! Kids with special needs are people, too! We have a lot to offer! Get to know us! Don’t tease us! Please! Enough is enough!”

Implausibly, this is met by rousing applause and cheers of “Woohooo!!”, “Yesss!”, and “Yah!” from the Canadian adolescents.

This, my friends, is boring. I don’t enjoy reading a comic strip that tries to make me feel guilty for pleasure; like a devoted liberal listening to Rush Limbaugh (which I am and which I do), I only read it to enjoy the anger it inspires.

What’s worst is that, of all the Pattersons, Elizabeth had a chance to be more exciting. Lynn let her out of the exurbs of Toronto long enough for her to travel north to teach in Mtigwaki, a native village—sure, the stories from up there could be equally hokey, but it was something different, at least.

O, how mortifying to share our wedding day with characters in the most predictable, terrible comic strip ever committed to ink! What would people think when we told them the date of our anniversary and they recoiled, ever so slightly. “Oh,” they’d say, searching each other’s eyes for diplomatic words. “That’s the day—Isn’t that when—?”

In the weeks leading up to our wedding, I read For Better or For Worse closely, searching for ways to differentiate our nuptials from theirs. Here’s what I found out about the Patterson/Caine proceedings:

• Everyone started getting dressed for the ceremony and reception on August 4, 2008, a full nineteen days before they needed to.
• John Patterson hates the very idea of wearing a tuxedo. “I look like a clown in this bow tie,” he whines to his youngest daughter. April explains that he has to wear one because “Anthony’s uncle owns the business!” Really? The uncle can’t be, like, an assassin? Maybe a moose?
• Everyone seems to contribute something—Lawrence, the token gay man (and, as it happens, token African-Canadian) does the flowers. Gordon’s garage arranges for six (six?!) limousines. Weed, Mike’s childhood friend, who happens to be a professional photographer, takes pictures. Anthony’s mother makes the freaking cake.
• One of the bridesmaids suggests before the wedding, “Let’s make a pact, girls. We are gonna be friends forever, OK? No matter what happens…” They respond in unison, “Friends forever! Forever! Forever!!!” This strikes me as a terribly weird thing to do before the wedding, especially if all the bridesmaids knew each other before. Do weddings usually mark the end of friendships, since the wives reconcile themselves to living only for their men?

Exactly a week before the wedding, Jazzy Uncle Phil (so named because he is a jazz musician), phones from the hospital that Elly’s father, Grandpa Jim, has had a heart attack. Finally, I thought. Something to prevent the wedding from happening!

I was briefly gleeful. Then, my mother called me up to tell me that my grandmother, Beatrice, was in the hospital—she’d fallen and cracked her pelvis. Well, shit. Not only was my grandmother—the Feisty Old Lady, as she enjoys being called—suffering, but we seemed to be helplessly merging with a terribly crappy story line. Fortunately, Bea’s injury ended up being non-life-threatening; unfortunately, so was Grandpa Jim’s. His heart attack was a red herring, an excuse for the newly married couple to rush to the hospital and hear generational advice from Jim’s second wife, Iris: “We made a commitment—just as you did today—and although it’s not easy,” blah blah blah.

Still, the synergy of events made me wonder if a lot of weddings are doomed to fall into familiar patterns, something The Bygone Bureau has railed against in the past.

I was relieved, though, that the actual For Better or For Worse ceremony—which, requiring the space of the Sunday funnies, took place on Sunday, August 24—adhered to the strip’s form, providing enough distance for me to feel comfortable. Their minister offered nothing but platitudes. “Marriage is a challenge, but so, too…it is love. Marriage is patience and giving and caring and faith,” etc, etc.

My wife and I got married in her grandparents’ backyard, overlooking the ocean. We made a chuppa out of driftwood that we found on a beach in Maine. A man played the Dobro for us during the ceremony, and we replaced readings from 1st Corinthians with a one-page Dave Eggers story and two poems we found by skimming the poetry section at a Barnes & Noble for an afternoon. Our guests drank sangria we’d made earlier that afternoon before the ceremony started. We arrived at the reception wearing aviators and entered the tent to “Sabotage.” Sure, plenty of staid traditions made their appearance—we largely kept to the usual order of events, and I stepped on a glass to seal the deal—but it felt so much better because A) the ceremony felt very much like our own and B) unlike Elizabeth Patterson, I was marrying the right person.

Lynn Johnston didn’t even give her readers the opportunity to become more comfortable with her ill-conceived union; the strip ended its story line with Elizabeth and Anthony’s visit to Grandpa Jim at the hospital. We didn’t see them celebrating at their reception, or going on a honeymoon; presumably, finally free of the inevitable march of events, Johnston could have relaxed their relationship and maybe even made it seem easy, unforced. Instead, they merely fulfilled their gloomy obligations and were left in perpetual tuxedo and gown, as though trapped in a snow globe, unable to escape their perfect boredom.

On the last Sunday in August, Lynn produced one more long strip, telling us what became of her characters down the road. “Elizabeth,” she wrote, “continues to work as a teacher. She’s devoted to her work and to her family, loving Anthony more each day.” This seems to imply that, even though she and Anthony have been friends and/or more-than-friends for nearly two decades, it’s taken some work to figure out that her marriage to him was anything more than a desperate impulse on her part. “Anthony,” Lynn concluded, “manages the Mayes Motors empire, has drawn his bride into ballroom dancing [which is how he met Marie-Thérèse, incidentally], and looks forward someday to opening a small bed-and-breakfast.”

I take solace in the fact that my future might not be so pat as to be able to be described in a single panel of a comic strip, and I take an equal measure of satisfaction in knowing that this iteration of the international nightmare that is the Patterson family’s lives is no longer.

Right now, the bottom is appalling.  A few years back, I spent a year living in Brooklyn and working at an independent school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; my three housemates were New York City Teaching Fellows.  Only one managed to stay in the same classroom for the entire year, and he aged about five years in the year I knew him.  The others were chased to other schools by impossible bureaucracy, incompetent leadership, unruly kids and parents, and a lack of supplies and discipline. For example, whereas I grew accustomed years later, at a boarding school where I taught, to finding something I wanted to teach for the next day and running down to the copy room to make copies for everyone, my housemates had to submit work requests weeks in advance in order to use the copiers at their schools.  Most of the time, they just went to Kinko’s and paid for it themselves.

Their supervisor could walk into their classroom at any time and demand to see the next two weeks of their lesson plans; if they couldn’t provide them, it was grounds for dismissal.  One’s girlfriend, also a fellow, was threatened one day by a student.  She ordered him to leave the room.  He refused.  She called for security, and they all sat there, waiting for security to arrive.  No one came.  She quit the next day.

The anecdotal evidence is unfortunately backed by statistics.  Last year, twenty percent of all elementary school students in New York City were absent from at least a month of school.  Current Education Secretary Margaret Spellings only recently announced rules tied to No Child Left Behind meant to curb staggering high school drop-out rates, especially among poor and minority children, half of whom never make it to graduation.  A 2006 survey of 18- to 24-year-olds by National Geographic found that geographic knowledge among that cohort was particularly abysmal: 75% couldn’t find Iran or Israel on a map of the Middle East; 65% couldn’t point out Great Britain.

So why isn’t education the runaway #1 issue on the campaign trail?  Success in education would lead to better outcomes in all the other areas of concern to voters—a better-trained workforce could come up with more innovative solutions to our energy crisis, for instance.  If we taught our students more about personal finance, there wouldn’t be so much debt in the U.S. and people might not have entered into sub-prime mortgage arrangements.  There’d be fewer people in prison, since there’s a direct, negative correlation between education attainment and time spent behind bars.  Education is the linchpin of solving pretty much all of our problems.  Why are we stuck on talking about standards and school choice?

One of the most upsetting reasons is the anti-intellectual tenor of the campaign.  We’ve learned over the last several presidential cycles that book learnin’ makes you a dope-smoking hippie or aloof and out of touch or an elitist.  Al Gore may have gone to Harvard, but you wouldn’t want to have a beer with him (possibly the worst measure ever of a candidate’s presidential qualities, by the way).  Sarah Palin is the leader of the current know-nothing charge.  She attended five colleges and distinguished herself at precisely none of them (the top of her ticket was near the bottom of his class in school, too).  Her husband never graduated from college.  Her oldest son dropped out of high school, and her oldest (and pregnant) daughter seems headed that way, too, as does that daughter’s fiancée.  Might I add that the targets of Palin’s most hateful venom—Bill Ayers and, within the last few days, Rashid Khalidi—are both respected college professors?  

Obama and Biden are both better educated, and Obama’s speeches—particularly his address on race in Philadelphia that successfully deflected the spotlight from his association with Jeremiah Wright—have demonstrated his thoughtfulness.  In debates, he was willing to cede points until the McCain campaign released a rapid response ad in which they spliced together every time Obama said he agreed with McCain.

But the fact that the White House could be filled with scholars or nincompoops doesn’t really matter.  Fixing education can’t really be primarily a federal issue.  No Child Left Behind will ultimately be seen as unsuccessful because it’s not based on outcomes.  It has dictated that schools must test, often, and must teach to that test, when it should have set goals that every school in every state must meet and then allowed each state or district figure out how to get there.  The federal government’s role should be to examine innovations occurring at the local level, and then figure out how it can expand the reach and impact of successful models.  An administration should also promote creative reform, which is why I’m drawn to Obama’s plan to promote mentoring programs between teachers.

School funding is most effective at the local level, because voters will support things that increase their property values. Good schools are right up there (I’m getting this mostly from my father, who wrote a book on the subject and is writing another one now, but I agree with the idea).  If the federal (or state) government funds schools, and disperses monies equally to every school, it diminishes the competition between districts to attract the best and brightest to their community.

One thing the federal government could throw money at is special education, often underfunded at the state or local level.  Sarah Palin, who is, according to her ticket, a sudden authority on special education because of her months-old Down’s baby that’s probably hers but might not be, gave her first policy speech (one of two she’s given at all—she also hasn’t released her medical records or given a single press conference… but that’s not what this column is about) on special education. 

I forwarded the text to a friend who’s worked on special education issues for years for New Hampshire and asked for her reaction.  The initial one came quickly: “Ohmygoshyoudon’twanttogetmestarted!!!  I’ve read only the first bullet point and I’m ready to rant.”  Her later response was a little calmer, but her overall reaction was that the whole thing was “politically opportunistic.”  And this is from someone who lauded the efforts of Judd Gregg, New Hampshire’s last Republican standing in the Senate, in pushing for special education funding.  It seems she didn’t take issue so much with the substance of the speech, but with the timing of it.  McCain, to our collective memory, didn’t make a big deal about standing up for special needs kids before he selected Palin as his running mate, and it’s not as though the GOP has been historically strong on education-related issues.  It seems a lot like pandering, mostly because it is.

My hope is that a President Obama—or, God forbid (at this point), President McCain—will be able to set the tone for a return to excellence: critical thinking, a healthy skepticism, and an enthusiasm for learning beyond studying for bubble tests.  I think that’s probably the best we can hope for. 

Unless, that is, we get some college presidents or city school superintendents to run for office.  They have more executive experience than the average bear, and often come from academic backgrounds, meaning that they know how to collaborate, how to conduct research that cuts through the usual bull, and are well-versed in a host of education issues.  Some people in this category who could run convincingly for president—yes, president—in 2016 would include:

• Richard Levin (Yale)
  The longest serving president in the Ivy League, he has a PhD in economics and was appointed in 2004 to the Iraq Intelligence Commission.

• Marvin Krislov (Oberlin)
  Prior to leading Oberlin, Krislov served as the vice president and general counsel for the University of Michigan, defending the University against attacks by affirmative action opponents.  There, he also served on the President’s Task Force on Ethics in Public Life.  He spent time in the counsel’s office during the Clinton administration (getting out pre-Lewinsky), and was a freaking Rhodes Scholar back in the day, too.

• David Leebron (Rice)
  A Harvard Law graduate (and the 1972 president of the Law Review), Leebron was Dean of Columbia Law before taking over the presidency at Rice.  He served on the Council on Foreign Relations, and specializes in international trade, human rights, and corporate finance.

• Michelle Rhee (DC Schools Chancellor)
  A Teach for America recruit and founder of The New Teacher Project, she’s been off to a great start in DC, raising teacher quality.  If she succeeds there, she’ll be a political force down the road.

You get the idea.  Obama has shown that we’re open to different profiles and experiences in a president if the candidate demonstrates enough leadership and dynamism.  Let’s not forget to cast our yearning eyes toward the ivory tower, too.

“Don’t ask people for their vote,” one told us, “because military people tend to bristle at that.”

Instead, we were instructed to ask whether Barack Obama could expect their support on Election Day.  Also, we were supposed to gauge each resident’s level of support down the ticket, for Democratic Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen and incumbent Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter.
 
In line to receive our packets of addresses, I paired up with a guy named Vinnie, in his last year of college in Boston and originally from New Jersey.  He had a lip ring, and I briefly worried about whether people who answered the door would be turned off by it.  Residential Manchester is not necessarily the most progressive of places. 
 
Vinnie was just fine, though—he drove a Smart Car, the worst thing about which you could say is that it’s a glorified golf cart.  He had a bumper sticker with a picture of a Hummer, an equal sign, and the words “small penis.” 

And so we drove to the neighborhood we’d been assigned, steeling ourselves for what we might encounter.  What would we say to the middle-aged woman who told us she was undecided, and what could we say to convince her?  How would we handle the buzz-cut man with a truck in the driveway and a Rottweiler just barely restrained behind the screen door?  Which perfect rejoinder would sway the people slamming the door in our faces because they think Obama is an Islamic terrorist?  What if people wanted lawn signs or bumper stickers, when we had none (indeed, the Manchester office was out of bumper stickers entirely)?
 
Unfortunately (or fortunately), Vinnie and I didn’t get much chance to work our canvassing magic on many people.  The disheartening truth is that we knocked on the doors of a lot of empty homes.  Of the forty addresses we were assigned, maybe thirty-five had been abandoned for the day.  Vinnie was convinced that several people were hiding from us until we went away, which may have been true a few times, but in most homes, the blinds were drawn, cars were gone, and lights were out.

Of course, there were a few notable exceptions.  One man detained us for a good twenty minutes to tell us How Things Were.  Standing in his boat, dry-docked at the end of his long driveway, he pontificated on the futility of our mission.  He didn’t trust anyone in politics, an opinion that he seemed to base on two things: 1) Barack Obama’s parents were immoral for conceiving a child, in spite of having been of different races; 2) ten years ago, Carol Shea-Porter apparently squeezed her car into a space behind his by nudging his car with hers, and when he confronted her about it, she asked him, “Do you know who I am?” 

“I wouldn’t be able to tell her from an asshole,” this guy said.  At first, he’d seemed eager to talk, but it turned out he was just eager to swear and mock us.  It should be noted, of course, that when we left him, he was leaning Obama.  He said he probably wouldn’t vote at all, but he sure wouldn’t vote for McCain.  If even that guy isn’t voting for McCain, the Republicans are not going to win the White House.

The other people with whom we actually spoke told us in no uncertain terms that they were getting pretty tired of Obama supporters knocking on their doors. 

“I just want it to end,” wailed one woman, who we found cleaning her car. 

The whole neighborhood seemed weary of the election, and Vinnie started getting gun-shy about even approaching houses that looked empty.  Word up and down the street was that people from the campaign were appearing every other day.  I have to admit that that level of interaction seemed intrusive—at what point do people decide to vote against your candidate simply because you won’t leave them alone? 
 
We only encountered one man for whom we thought race might have influenced his decision. When he answered the door, he told he was for Shaheen, “but not that Obama.”  We didn’t ask questions. 
 
Why, you might ask, did we choose not to confront bigotry or misconceptions more aggressively?  Well, there were a few reasons.  First, you’re on the doorstep of someone’s house. You’re taking their time, and you can’t win an argument by angering them.  Your job is to be bend-over-backwards nice and hope to sway people with your kindness and your desire for change.  If someone has biases that come from ignorance, it’s hard to say anything that won’t come across as condescending and/or won’t make them unleash their rabid dog on the next Obama supporter to knock on their door.  Second, while I’m a native of New Hampshire, I don’t know much about Shaheen and Shea-Porter other than that they presumably support most of the Democratic platform, so it was hard to counter the arguments that Crazy Boat Guy presented. 
 
Vinnie and I returned to campaign headquarters by mid-afternoon, where we tallied our results.  This is where I realized that, even though there were often two or three people at each residence to whom we were supposed to speak, we’d only get answers from the one that opened the door; we’d assumed, probably erroneously, that everyone else would vote in unison, as a family.

By way of example: Towards the end of our tour, we came across a family unloading stuff from their car, and spoke to the daughter, who was my age.  She told us, “We’re probably the most Republican household you’re gonna’ find.”  I decided not to point out that her mother was a registered Democrat—information she might have thought she could keep secret from her conservative husband and daughter—and was tempted to circle “would like a yard sign” or “would like to volunteer” on our sheet (I didn’t).  Still, it emphasized the futility and inaccuracy of gauging interest through door-to-door canvassing.  According to Dave Hendrie, only about 10 percent of people on the lists are home when volunteers come by, and those that are there obviously don’t provide the most complete data. 
 
So did I do any good?  Trying to be both kind to strangers and an active supporter of my candidate proved to be a difficult juggling act.  I doubt Vinnie and I swayed anyone, because even the people who told us they were still undecided didn’t want our help making up their minds. Recent polls have New Hampshire moving increasingly into safe territory for Obama, anyway.  Maybe by 2012, with campaigns being conducted more and more online—through social networks, YouTube, and blogs—door-to-door campaigning won’t be as necessary.  It already doesn’t feel that necessary, I can tell you.

In the interests of debate-watching purity, I decided to start watching right when it began at 9 and to stop watching when the debate ended at 10:30, so I wouldn’t be biased by any of the talking points (or even, dare I say, the objective observations of trained journalists) of the various networks.  I don’t know who won according to the snap polls.  I didn’t follow any of the live blogging efforts online, and I watched NBC, since they don’t have the insipid applause-line graphs, measuring the relationship between certain words and the joy or sadness of a roomful of dismally undecided voters stuck in some toss-up state. 

So, with that, here’s what I thought: this was by far the most interesting and telling debate of the three between McCain and Obama. McCain had an actual strategy this time; it was clear that he had been coached to say certain zingers, and for the first ten, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of the debate, he seemed to have Obama on the defensive.  The most unfortunate thing about McCain’s performance was how it could be summarized in the following sentence: Joe the Plumber is hurt and angry that you want to spread the wealth around.  If he’d used those phrases only initially, and then moved off his canned and forced delivery to more substantive and genuine points, he may have maintained that early lead.  Instead, it became clear that those were the only punches he had, and he continued throwing them until it was obvious that he was merely flailing.

Obama, meanwhile, continued to be unflappable.  He took each of McCain’s criticisms and simply and elegantly explained why McCain was mischaracterizing his positions.  It reminded me—and here I will probably reveal too much information about myself—of either the second or third season of Project Runway. (And honestly, Federal Election Commission: you had to make me choose between last night’s season five finale and the final debate, even though LeAnne was probably as much of a foregone conclusion as Obama is at this point?)  Andrae, the bald and oft-distraught designer, is having a crying jag on the runway, rambling about his dreams; nearby, Santino, the crazy but usually serene designer, can’t help but giggle at Andrae’s outburst.  And that’s what the debate last night made me think of.  McCain, frustrated and unhappy and trying to attack Obama on any number of things that have been used against him countless times before, is Andrae.  Obama, for the most part keeping it together but every once in a while snickering at his opponent’s effort, is Santino.

Both candidates defaulted to pandering on occasion.  When asked to speak about his vice-presidential pick, Obama started dropping the g’s on his gerunds, as in Biden is workin’, helpin’, and fightin’ for the little guy and workin’ families.  When McCain was asked to describe Palin, he called her a role model to reformers (for the abuse of power thing, no doubt) and women (for no other reason that I can see than that she is one), and then went straight to the special needs angle (BTW, how could she know more about raising a special needs kid than pretty much anyone McCain knows?  She’s only had Trig around for six months now). 

Later, McCain corrected himself four times when talking, I think, about education.  Here was the progression: kids, children, precious children, precious children with autism.  I could sound like I care, too, if I brought up dogs, cute and furry dogs, cute and furry puppies, cute and furry puppies rescued from Hurricane Ike, and then cute and furry puppies rescued from Hurricane Ike who now broker peace in Iraq by licking the faces of adorable Iraqi children.

But those are just words.  McCain, oddly, relied on rhetoric and eloquence to match Obama’s calm and substance.  To the surprise of exactly no one, it was not a success.

I thought Obama’s strongest answers were in addressing health care and in dispatching the Ayers and ACORN nonsense.  Here’s one (hopefully last) point I will make on Ayers.  This man was one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “top lieutenants” and was just sentenced to fifteen years in prison for screwing his own daughter.  Jesse Jackson, another King disciple, just put his foot in his mouth again, describing how Israel will lose its power over American foreign policy in an Obama administration (not true, of course, or else I wouldn’t be supporting the man).  Now, since MLK Jr. associated himself with such disreputable people who say and do such destructive things, shouldn’t we reconsider having a national holiday named after him?  I mean, if King hung around with these people, is he really the kind of historical figure we ought to be celebrating? 

Just as we recognized King’s greatness in the context of history, we need to elect the leader who is right for this moment.  Obama made it clear last night that he’s conscious of process, that he’s thinking of the long term, and that he’s serene in a turbulent time.  McCain’s wild-eyed thrashing about—not only physically, but on policy—led him to say that he’ll take a hatchet and a scalpel to the government (as if we needed to give him more weaponry), that he’ll be able to balance the budget in his first term, that he’ll drill and drill and then build nuclear plants, and that he doesn’t want bills loaded with any more gifts to planetariums, however necessary those gifts might be (and let the record show that I think there’s something deeply creepy about the way McCain says “goodies”). 

There were points last night when Obama looked at McCain with this expression of, I thought, utter sadness.  This was supposed to be the first presidential campaign that finally didn’t have to resort to smears and name-calling and crowd-inciting, because McCain and Obama were both men of substance.  After these three debates, one of them still is.

Exhibit A: September 15, when asked about the earmarks Obama’s requested: “That’s nearly a million [dollars] every day, every working day he’s been in Congress. And when you look at some of the planetariums and other foolishness that he asked for, he shouldn’t be saying anything about Governor Palin.”

Exhibit B: October 7, during the second debate: “He voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects. Including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.”

Never mind that McCain’s idea of an overhead projector is probably not the same as a planetarium’s idea of an overhead projector.

Why the revulsion?

Actually, it’s pretty obvious. McCain has watched those fat cat astronomers getting rich off the federal government, and he’s sick of it. Honestly, what gives them ownership over the night sky? Why, it’s plainly handouts from the federal government that allow them to buy their fancy telescopes and their…other excessive purchases that astronomers might make for their planetariums. With all the money we’re handing over to them, you’d think they were paying to light the universe themselves!

Of all the oddball things that have probably been funded through earmarks, choosing to highlight planetariums as particularly wasteful just seems weird. In fact, it seemed so weird that I figured I’d check with a few experts to make sure it wasn’t me who was missing something. I emailed Steve Sauter, the Director of the Bassett Planetarium at Amherst College, and asked him (a) whether planetariums could get by without state or federal funding and (b) whether America could do without planetariums. He replied, “Most planetariums are not-for-profit educational institutions that are woefully funded. If you accept the premise that astronomy education is important (and I do), then I can understand why a forward-looking Senator Obama would include funding for his local planetarium in an earmark.” I also emailed Jay Buckey, a former astronaut, and asked him similar questions. He said that “many people who subsequently go into science got interested at a science museum or through a science program.”

To me, McCain’s remarks reflect a Bush-like level of intellectual curiosity (read: not high) that I wish he did not possess. Part of the excitement around McCain when he ran in 2000 was that he seemed like an independent thinker. He acknowledged that global warming exists, called Dick Armey and Tom DeLay “intolerant,” and supported a minimum wage hike. Now, he’s been forced by his party—angry that they’re going to lose—to label Obama as a terrorist because he’s been on a board with William Ayers, who was a member of the Weather Underground.

But it’s a board that plots terrorist activities, right?

Well, no—it was the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Oooo, the Annenberg Foundation. According to a McCain ad out this week, that’s a “radical education foundation.”

Actually, the Challenge that former Ambassador Walter Annenberg funded provided a half billion dollars in grants to sites in several cities to study how to improve public education. When it was announced at a 1993 White House ceremony, President Clinton called it “a wonderful Christmas present to America’s children.”

Oh. But—but it’s run by Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist!

A former domestic terrorist. And—I mean, domestic terrorist is kind of inaccurate. Terrorism implies a kind of irrational violence—promoting fear instead of a cause. Wrong as violence is either way, I’d label him a radical activist instead—and a former radical activist at that. These days, he’s a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois’s College of Education. He has advanced degrees from the Bank Street School and Teachers College—hey, wait a second. I know what you’re doing.

What? What am I doing?

You’re distracting the political conversation from decidedly more important things, like, oh, I don’t know—the economic shitstorm. Here I just spent a solid five or six hundred words trying to wound McCain on his opposition to planetariums and defend Obama on his relationship with Ayers when both subjects are ultimately inconsequential to the nation’s health. I mean, we’ve got crises with our banks, our mortgages, our credit—it’s a troubling, complicated road to hoe for whoever wins. Pretty much every breath and synapse that McCain and Palin waste on something other than the financial situation between now and November 4th puts them in a deeper hole.

But McCain can’t win on issues—it’s just not possible for Republicans to do that this year—so he has to play up character issues. He needs people to vote for him because he’s a selfless war hero and because Obama is a shifty, un-American terrorist sympathizer.

That’s horrible. If he can’t compete on issues, McCain should at least have enough honor to avoid tearing down someone who gives people hope—who excites them about government the way that planetariums excite people about science. It’s almost as though he’s bitterly clinging to his narrative because he’s frustrated at his campaign’s loss of momentum.

So what brought McCain to this precipice? David Foster Wallace nailed it, of course, at the end of the article he wrote for Rolling Stone back when he spent a week on the trail with McCain in 2000: “If he becomes a real candidate, is he still an anticandidate?” And that’s basically it, isn’t it? The red-meat needs of his party’s base have consumed his ‘maverick’ voice, and McCain has had to treat everything as good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, without nuance, like God doing all that separation on the second day, except all pissed-off. If Obama was in the same room as Ayers, Obama hates America. If an earmark helps out a planetarium, it’s still an earmark, so it’s bad. Which all sounds, unfortunately, an awful lot like “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”