Political, poetic justice after 2 difficult years

There were a few disappointments, but for once the polling had been solid.

There was no way I was going to let election night 2018 happen the same way election night 2016 did.

OK, so maybe I didn’t have any more control over Tuesday night’s results than I had two years ago. But if I couldn’t influence the results, at least I could choose the environment in which I heard them.

I knew from past experience that sitting around, waiting for returns — even with good food and good wine — would only make me (more) anxious and agitated. So when Zyzzyva, the San Francisco literary journal, asked me to participate in an election night reading at City Lights Bookstore, I jumped at the chance.

First of all, it was City Lights. In anxious political moments, there are few better places in San Francisco to be than our most celebrated bookstore — also known as the bare-knuckled winner of national censorship battles, also known as the home to book sections with names like “Pedagogies of Resistance.”

Secondly, doing a reading would give me something to do besides checking Twitter all night.

Better to suffer from anxiety about public speaking, I decided, than to suffer small heart attacks from constantly refreshing multiple news websites for updates.

When I arrived Tuesday night, there was pizza and beer, and a room full of equally nervous people. City Lights’ booksellers popped in and out, offering water and more beer, and lots of reading recommendations.

I was surprised — and touched — to see that more than half of the people in the crowd were in their 20s and early 30s. When I spoke to them, I learned that many of them were graduate students or publishing interns. They, too, felt like City Lights was the right place to be on a night like this. None of them was responding to the political situation with youthful insouciance, either. Every single one of them said they had cast a ballot.

I read from “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time,” a new collection from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. There were six readers, and all of us had independently decided to read poetry. It felt like the closest choice to prayer. Between readings, Oscar Villalon, Zyzzvya’s managing editor, called out the latest political results as they rolled in around the country. There were a few disappointments, but for once the polling had been solid. And over the course of the evening, the expected results became the actual results.

There were even results to celebrate, like the fact that more than 100 women were elected into the House of Representatives, and many of them were firsts — two Muslim women, two American Indian women, etc. These women won their races by embracing their stories and by issuing a challenge to the voters about what real leadership looks like.

Finally, the rest of the country was listening.

Slowly, the sense of dread I’d been carrying around for weeks began to lift. It didn’t last long. Just two days later, the nation was engulfed in grief and chaos again.

A gunman had massacred 12 people in a bar in Thousand Oaks (Ventura County).

Across the country, people were back in the streets, protesting President Trump’s decision to replace his attorney general, allegedly in the hopes of impeding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

There were voting shenanigans in Georgia and recounts in Florida that demanded alarm and attention.

But there was also hope. That’s what I’ll take away from this week. ***

During the election, native San Francisco son Marc Benioff became a populist hero for his full-throated support of Proposition C, for the joy he took in pillorying fellow tech billionaires on Twitter about their stinginess, and for his — shocking! — willingness to pay taxes.

Benioff has always been generous with his charitable impulses, but his transformation has been something else entirely. Maybe he’s seeing the writing on the wall.

There’s more impatience with tech titans than I’ve ever seen, and it’s all coming from the grass roots. Mountain View and East Palo Alto both passed new taxes that were designed specifically to capture tech wealth.

Meanwhile, there’s been a global employee revolt at Google over the way that company handled sexual harassment allegations against executives. That’s a huge deal because — quite frankly — employees are one of the few groups to whom these companies are willing to listen.

In this climate, it behooves even billionaires to be benevolent. Buckle up, folks. Change is on its way.