James Hannaham

My name is James. J-A-M-E-S. And I am addicted to a show about addiction called “Intervention.” A lot of people find “Intervention’s” gut-wrenching one-hour tragedies too difficult to take. My partner, who loves shows like “The L Word” and “Melrose Place,” finds “Intervention” unbearable. He protests vehemently if I turn it on in his presence. It is “too depressing.” But I need to watch something too depressing, because I’m facing an even less hopeful situation. A few weeks ago, my mother, DeLora, entered the final stage of Alzheimer’s — the one in which you forget how to eat and starve to death. Recently I went to visit her; her eyes were dull, she slept through most of my time with her. She no longer speaks or reacts to anyone. A recent brain scan confirmed that, as my Uncle Larry put it, “there is almost no activity evident.”

DeLora has had Alzheimer’s for 13 years. A former radio reporter, she always encouraged my brother and sister and me to think independently and develop creative skills like writing. It was no doubt her influence that drew me to my career as a cultural critic in the first place. I have a difficult time writing about my mother in the past tense because she isn’t dead, but her mind is hardly functioning anymore. She’s gone, but not gone.

While millions of people have faced, and are going to face, the same difficulty, I know of no one who has figured out an acceptable way to grieve the loss of a mind. For people like my family, who value intellectual curiosity, wordplay and mental interaction, Alzheimer’s seems worse than death — a slow, fatal disease that makes you forget everything and everyone you know, and reduces you to a childlike and finally vegetative state. As if Alzheimer’s weren’t sufficiently agonizing, my mother’s condition came about after what doctors call a group of “mini-strokes,” one of which hobbled her left hand — the one she used to write.

I’ve come up with a lot of ways to describe the excruciating feeling of losing someone special without having to bury them: It’s like white noise, or an impacted wisdom tooth that never gets pulled, or being spit-roasted over a very low flame. What I haven’t figured out is a way to alleviate some of that grief as it stretches further over my life. Mostly I cope by dealing with it indirectly. I have made sure that my mother gets good care. I avoid thinking of her as she was in the past. Once, while driving, one of her favorite songs, Stevie Wonder’s “As,” came up unexpectedly on the CD player, and it triggered a memory of her playing the vinyl version on our record player on a summer day while we waited for guests to arrive for a cookout. Stevie’s gospel-tinged song features a “Hey Jude”-size coda in which he wails, a bit absurdly, about exactly how eternally he will love — “Until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea/ Until the day that I am you and you are me!” I really should have pulled off the road and wept, but by then I had established a pattern of moving forward despite any emotional flare-ups. I stepped on the gas.

I’m not a weepy guy. I care about a lot of things, but I don’t get choked up over many. My mother is partially responsible for this stoicism. As a recently divorced mother of three in the ’70s, working and going to journalism school, she did a lot of emotional prioritizing. When my brother and sister or I came to her with a grievance she considered trivial, she’d dryly ask, “Is somebody gonna die?” That benchmark might explain why the stuff that gets my eyes wet leans toward nonfiction, in which real people’s lives may be at stake. Fiction’s veil of invention creates a natural distance that I find pleasurable, but very rarely does it overwhelm me. What I want is for a work of art to move me on as many levels as possible — I want it to split my sides, blow my mind, and break my heart — but I don’t think that happens often for anyone, especially not a cultural critic. “Intervention” might not be art, but it always makes me a blubbering fool.

“Intervention” has been running on A&E for four years, but in case you’ve never seen it, there’s an element of deception in the show’s premise: The producers lure addicts into providing full access without revealing that their families have planned an intervention. The closest members of the addicts’ social network are in on the ruse, and the show intersperses their confessional interviews with scenes of addicts plunging needles into their forearms.

For its bait-and-switch techniques, the Boston Globe called “Intervention” “vile” and “an exercise in fraud.” In theory, my favorite show sounds like a hideous and possibly exploitative premise for prime-time fare. (Or worse, an opportunity for wet-eyed earnestness and psychobabble.) The show would not be possible without the ruse, however — no addict would agree to be filmed. And, for me, “Intervention” serves a higher purpose than entertainment. It has provided a safe outlet for the intense, bottled-up grief and anger I have felt for the last 13 years. “Intervention’s” editors leave in only the most intense, private moments of grief — mothers sink to the floor in fetal positions, sisters wrap their arms around homeless alcoholic brothers. Grown men cry — usually fathers driven to the brink of their composure. Nothing quite so cathartic has ever appeared on television before. Call it Television of Cruelty.

The show always makes me worry that someone’s gonna die, but here’s what gets me. I find that as I watch, I care more about the addict’s family members than for the addicts themselves. There aren’t many substance abusers on “Intervention” who are likable — constant dosing makes you a pretty boring, obnoxious person, it turns out. But most of them are squandering some kind of potential — they’ve forgotten who they are. Tressa had a shot at Olympic gold until she started doing meth; Trent, homeless and doing smack in a culvert, once worked as a four-star chef; Lacey became a millionaire in a divorce settlement. During the intervention, their families and friends remind them of the experiences, values and ambitions that used to guide their lives. Each member of the addict’s social network reads a written note designed to remind her who she used to be, and shock her into grabbing a chance to resume a fulfilling life.

The notes are clumsy — formulaic even — but heartfelt. The miracle (perhaps because, for me, sloppy prose should have no effect at all) is that this living eulogy generally works. Very few addicts on the show ever reject a tearful offer of a cushy rehab center on the California coast or the Arizona desert, even if, like Laurence, they don’t stick with the program and end up drinking themselves to death.

It is also a miracle to me because I would love to do exactly the same thing for my mother. DeLora has forgotten who she is, but no amount of memories and dreams I write down will remind her of that and jar her into resuming her old life. My whole family and our combined writing skills couldn’t do that. “I want you back,” family members almost always tell the addict on “Intervention.” I want my mother back too, but no one ever returns from Alzheimer’s. Instead, I get whatever solace and catharsis I can from watching other families remember who their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters used to be and bring them back into their lives with the delicate power of words and tears.

But last night I happened to be reading a book that put the whole incident into context, a volume that never fails to chill me: “We Charge Genocide,” a petition brought before the U.N. in 1951 that makes a very convincing case for defining the treatment of African-Americans in the U.S. as a genocide. This remarkable book consists, in part, of a litany of shocking bias crimes committed against black citizens across the country — and only documented ones occurring between 1945 to 1950. A typical entry reads: “February 13 — ISAAC WOODWARD, JR., discharged from the Army only a few hours, was on his way home when he had his eyes gouged out in Batesburg, South Carolina, by the town chief of police, Linwood Shull … [A]n all-white jury acquitted Shull after being out for 15 minutes.” And so on, for 50-odd hair-raising pages. Believe me, Toni Morrison couldn’t top it.

So the Gates story makes me thankful that it’s not 1945 anymore, the year when, on Dec. 22, Cab Calloway was “slugged by a city policeman” in Kansas City and needed “eight stitches … in his head.” Hallelujah that the incident did not result in Mr. Gates’ lynching, death and dismemberment (followed by a hefty fine), though the worst-case scenario of conflict between blacks and the police has followed this pattern too often in the past — and still flares up, but not to the same degree, and blacks have considerably more recourse under the law. I’m reassured that the public, the police and the media no longer officially condone racial profiling and violence against people of color even if we still slip into the pattern, or echo it, from time to time. There is even some debate among letter writers on news sites about whether Gates-gate constitutes a case of profiling at all. In the past such bias would go without saying and never create a ripple, much less an outrage — like the stories in “We Charge Genocide,” which, if anything, only convinced the U.N. to define genocide in a way that would keep the U.S. from facing our race problem.

I’m not saying that our modern transgressions are excusable just because arresting a Harvard professor in his own home is milder than blinding a black veteran, or that outrage is inappropriate. I’m simply rejoicing in the fact that the work of historians like Gates and documents like “We Charge Genocide” have made injustice visible to those who might not have examined it before — especially its perpetrators. This does not apply only to whites, by the way — I’m also including the ingrown racism of people of color. The majority of us would rather forget the hideous violence that underscores the history of race relations. We’ve made progress, as Gates himself has noted, and our impatience with the process is what causes it to move forward in the first place. The fact that Gates, who knows this narrative so well, has found himself forced to play a role in the real story of discrimination is, to me, like something out of a movie — it’s as if he’s awakened from a nightmare about slavery to discover a shackle around his neck.

This intrinsic irony is why, though I’m sure Mr. Gates’ arrest was traumatic for him personally — and if I knew him other than as a public figure I wouldn’t say this at all — I find it difficult to contain my joy or laughter when I think of this incident purely as a cultural event, especially now that the charges have been dropped and Gates has only sustained injury to his pride. First of all, I’m elated that black Harvard professors exist, though I’m sure there are not enough of them; secondly, that what happens to any Harvard professor, regardless of race, can become worth reporting on; and thirdly, that this event will probably make members of the Cambridge Police Department and other P.D.s think twice before they arrest another black man. Imagine the confusion it will cause the po-po — “Uh-oh. Is this brother a professor, too? What does Cornel West look like?” Maybe some ordinary, untenured black men in the street will get some much-deserved benefit of the doubt now.

I’m even happier that the net result of this contretemps may be that Gates, whom I consider a hero, will most likely gain two things: increased fame, which will hopefully lead more people to his work, and, dare I say, a bit of street cred, like Martha Stewart’s stint in jail. No one can accuse Henry Louis Gates Jr. of living in an ivory tower anymore.

Gates-gate also brings to life Malcolm X’s famous joke: Q: What do white racists call a black man with a Ph.D.? A: Nigger! The arrest of Gates exposes for us the truth of this meta-joke (it belongs to that category of jokes that are only jokes because of what we expect jokes to do), and reminds us how unsubtle racism is at its most virulent.

The conflicting statements of Gates and arresting officer J.P. Crowley also measure exactly the gap between, well, to be as accurate as possible, officers of the law and people they perceive to be black. (Genetically speaking, Gates is biracial, as he meticulously documented in his PBS series “African-American Lives,” though culturally and politically … it gets complicated.) Though they describe the same event, the two accounts are so substantially different that we can only pray for the leak of a YouTube video to set the record straight. Gates depicts himself calmly requesting the name and badge number of officers who had already entered his home and reveals gradually his realization that profiling might have occurred.

If we’re to believe Crowley’s police report (which I am disinclined to do, frankly), a Harvard scholar, faced with arrest in his own home, suddenly switches codes and begins to talk like George Jefferson — “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside!” This cry doesn’t sound so much to me like the gent who edited “The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if there’s one thing a successful academic knows how to respect, it’s authority. What’s more, in the battle of cop versus professor, it’s a safe bet that the African-American historian knows better what’s at stake when it comes to keeping an accurate record of the past.

Hitler’s legacy is so repugnant that even his surviving relatives fiercely guard their privacy and have mostly changed their surname, despite any profit they might make from sales of their famous relative’s prison memoir “Mein Kampf” or hawking artifacts connected to the Third Reich. For a rational member of society to speak well of the tyrant in public is to create an outrage. One person who famously did so toward the end of her life was Winifred Wagner, wife of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried, who had a very close friendship with Hitler, or, as her family referred to him, “Uncle Wolf.” Winifred Wagner claimed to despise Hitler’s politics and treatment of the Jews, and saved the lives of various prominent Jewish people through her sway over the chancellor, but she defended her personal relationship with Hitler until as late as 1975, in a controversial five-hour interview she gave to German film director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

Wilson’s novel seizes on the Wagner family’s intimacy with Hitler and re-creates the atmosphere of high culture and low deeds around Bayreuth, the site of a yearly festival of Wagner operas — and Hitler’s favorite retreat — in a voice whose serious tone (backed by exhaustive research) lends remarkable credibility to the novel. Through the narration of Wagner’s assistant, Wilson gives readers an unsettling inside look at a side of the über-fascist we have rarely dared to consider since the end of World War II — the opera lover who, despite the madness and destruction he unleashed on the world, was in the end still human, even if most would rather resign him from the human race.

Though the real Winifred has denied that she and Hitler ever had a sexual or romantic relationship, Wilson’s book operates on the premise that the two carried on a clandestine affair for many years, one that resulted in a secret love child. Like Winifred herself, who was an English orphan adopted as a girl by a German family friend, the child is quickly given up for adoption. But Winifred then encourages Siegfried’s childless personal assistant, N-, the all but nameless narrator, and his wife, Helga, to adopt the girl. The novel takes the form of a letter that N- writes to this child, Senta, who saves the manuscript and puts it in the care of her Seattle pastor just before she passes away many years later.

N- has long nursed an unrequited obsession with Winifred, and so he doesn’t mind when she urges him to adopt a particular child. He’s curious about Hitler, but his encounters with the leader are usually mixed with moments of puzzlement or revulsion. He watches in confusion as Hitler tells a children’s story in his characteristically passionate oratory, for example. At a rally, he stands with Hitler’s entourage and hears one of the chancellor’s rousing speeches punctuated by a flatulence as forceful as his rhetoric. It isn’t until 1939, when Winifred concocts a scheme to have Senta present a bouquet to Hitler at a performance of “Gottedamerung,” knowing that war might separate them for a long time, that N- can no longer deny that his daughter has been sired by the man whose National Socialists have begun to cause the mayhem that led up to the war — the Beer Hall Putsch, Kristallnacht, the Night of the Long Knives, etc. — and the woman he loves more than his wife. But for N-, these events unfold without the benefit of hindsight. He balances his uneasiness with German Nationalism, and justifies its anti-Semitism with the fact that the repressive party has brought pride and solvency to a country devastated and debased by the Great War.

Winnie herself is the best of all at self-delusion, and her reaction following the murder of Erich Röhm in 1934 is a microcosm of prewar German denial:

“With her seemingly unshakeable belief that Wolf personally would never condone any of the atrocities of his own regime, Winnie had rung him up in a temper … There had been quite a lot of shouting at him — not least because she was unable to believe that he had anything to do with the murder of Röhm and the others. ‘I know that you would have insisted on a fair trial,’ she told the telephone receiver.”

If Wilson makes Hitler seem less monstrous, that’s part of his point. He doesn’t do so in order to apologize for Uncle Wolf’s atrocities, but to warn us against denial. “Winnie and Wolf,” though penned by a Brit, could be the last great cautionary tale of the Bush years, with their Patriot Acts, government surveillance and “black sites.” In his passion to rescue Wagner’s reputation from its association with Nazism, among other things, Wilson suggests that the Nazis saw what they wanted to see in his work (German nationalism) and reinterpreted it for their purposes. Unfortunately, this association has outlasted their brutal rule. Chillingly, “Winnie and Wolf,” in a complex, rich and ambitious fashion, shows us how easily a leader’s charisma can distract both naive individuals like Winifred and entire nations from his faults and crimes, even as he leads us into chaos.

Obama’s presidency carries a huge burden of symbolic proof. As the president-elect’s acceptance speech emphasized, his victory caresses America’s image of itself as a place where equal opportunity exists for anyone who works hard enough. It helps erase a stigma against people of African descent that has lasted more than 500 years and included some of the lowest moments in our supposedly modern and enlightened age — Jim Crow, apartheid, slavery. It allows people of all colors around the globe to point to Obama and feel as if their struggle may not be a dead end after all, and that someone who shares at least some of their experiences and perspectives can offer genuine respect and perhaps even empathy to millions who have so frequently been overlooked and despised. It is a sign to humanity that the United States can walk democracy like we talk it. This is no small thing.

But this big-picture vision of the Global Village as the Kingdom of Obamaland is too starry-eyed to hold sway for long — maybe not even until he’s sworn in. An Obama presidency by no means represents the end of racism, just a hopeful sign of the beginning of the end. To see it as proof that anyone can be president, no matter their origins, is ludicrous. It isn’t as if Obama became president because the Electoral College has an affirmative action policy operating on a quota system. He is a man whose impeccable résumé, spotless personal history, elite education, leadership abilities, attractiveness, seriousness, sexual orientation, marriage to a woman of his own perceived race, whose gender, maybe even complexion and definitely choice of running mate have made him what some employers have a tendency to call “overqualified.”

During his race for the presidency, many people had misgivings about Obama’s supposed lack of experience, but few had anything to say about whether he had the appropriate qualifications to hold office, other than to wonder if America was ready for a president so suave he could play the first black James Bond. Perhaps if Obama were as inept as the man whose broken pretzels and hanging chads he will need to sweep up from the Oval Office carpet, yet still a contender for commander in chief, we could finally lay racial prejudice into its chilly crypt and be done with it. Because among other things, white supremacy has meant that unqualified but well-connected and rich white people’s dreams have fallen into their laps, while overqualified people of color have striven their whole lives to get nowhere. Obama has cleared a path for fairness.

Still, privilege is no Death Star, and one Luke Skywalker can’t obliterate it with a couple of lasers, no matter how well-placed. It did not vaporize last night, so in the Obama presidency we can look forward to some amusing and possibly infuriating contretemps that will arise from an African-American family leading the country. (Why was this never the premise for a sitcom?) The same battles will rage over affirmative action — will we cheat ourselves out of the next Obama by cutting it back? — and issues of discrimination in representation, education, housing, etc. For me, racism won’t be over until a bunch of black people can move into a neighborhood and watch the property values rise.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of immediate, serious sighs of relief that we can now legitimately heave. The pendulum has swung the other way. Obama’s long coattails have given Democrats a majority in the Senate and the House. Sarah Palin will have to return her expensive wardrobe and go study the Republican foreign policy playbook for at least four years. We will have the most intriguing first lady since, well, Hillary Clinton. Perhaps most important, Republicans will not choose the next couple of Supreme Court justices. The likelihood of a conservative majority overturning Roe v. Wade or other pieces of legislation important to the left has been severely reduced.

We are soon going to have an intelligent man in the White House, a literate guy who not only reads books but has written two himself. “That one” doesn’t try to hide his background and attempt to broaden his appeal with a veneer of folksiness; instead he approaches others without pretense. He has a beautiful voice: calm, reassuring, persuasive, sexy. With just these superficial qualities, he has already done a great deal for America’s image around the world. A McCain presidency, a Canadian warned me last night, would have made America “superfluous,” the debt slaves of China. Already we’ve seen Obama’s image on countless bootlegged T-shirts, chiseled into an FDR-like, constructivist symbol of progressive politics, creativity and open-mindedness. His election alone has rescued the world’s opinion of America’s ability to adapt and move forward.

But both radical leftists and radical right-wingers need to understand the same thing: Obama is not Malcolm X. He’s not even Kanye West. His motorcade will not consist of souped-up cars with wheels that spin and bump up and down outside the White House; he will not sport a diamond grill that reads “PREZ.” He’s a moderate. The right has changed the definition of the liberalism over the last 40 years by hectoring Democratic candidates, saying that they will over-tax and -spend, even as the current administration chucks billions of dollars into the furnaces of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s hard to now imagine a president getting elected without claiming to be a fiscal conservative, certainly not as we climb out of the current financial disaster. As someone elected largely because of our failing economy, Obama will have to toe the line of fiscal policy pretty carefully and make a lot of practical and shrewd decisions fast.

 On social issues, however, there’s no comparison. John McCain’s “health of the woman” air quotes could easily have lost him the support of even pro-life women. While there’s no guarantee that Obama’s brilliantly run, tech-savvy campaign will lead to a well-run White House, the decisions that we’ve watched Obama make have suggested reconciliation, sharpness, flexibility, ability to delegate responsibility to capable experts — in short, a solid footing in the reality-based community. But one of Obama’s great strengths can also melt into his most frustrating quality — he tries to hear all voices without prejudice. His desire to listen to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s claptrap surely cost him the trust of many Americans. There is a point at which a leader should be able to make a judgment about whether he’s listening to a real viewpoint or just plain crazy-talk, and Obama’s high tolerance for nut-job rhetoric may return to haunt him in the coming years. He may not want to waste too much time listening to lunatics, even if they happen to run foreign countries.

Obama’s acceptance of his Caucasian genes is another quality that sets him closer to the center than to Malcolm X. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: Obama’s biracial. He’s an African-American, certainly — in strictly genetic terms, he’s more literally African-American than other American black folks, whose veins are awash in various percentages of African, Native American and European blood. This is not to say that he hasn’t received some of the same treatment as black Americans, or that he is not welcome among them, or that people should denigrate his need to make his background understandable to people who think that “biracial” means a type of airplane. It suggests something far less divisive. It means that black and white people (not to mention other ethnicities chained to the binary idiocy of American race relations) can share his victory equally.

As Obama gave his acceptance speech in Chicago, the media seemed to enjoy focusing on the elation of black communities in Harlem, in Kenya, and at Morehouse College, or on the tear-stained faces of Oprah and Jesse Jackson, as if black people had always been primarily invested in Obama’s triumph. But we can’t forget that the black political establishment and a big chunk of their constituency was initially very slow to warm to the candidate. (Well, except the Kenyans.) Here, he was the white man’s black candidate, carefully vetted before winning the trust everyone seemed to think black people would lavish upon him based solely on his race.

Obama’s Caucasian heritage has not evaporated just because he’s the first American president to be unashamed to have a shot of espresso in his vanilla latte. By voting for him, whites have shown their acceptance on a major level, but if everyone continues to interpret his presidency primarily in terms of race, we’re simply perpetuating the same old values. The Obama presidency gives us the opportunity to see more clearly into a future when the pain and injustice of the past, though it will not be forgotten, can be transformed into a shared purpose, and we can help the grand family squabble of American race relations to settle down. Like most American families, we’ll have our differences, but we will be able to sit down at the same table and show each other some respect.

Ah, racism. It’s always a step ahead of us. Even before the majority of Democrats decided that Obama was electable despite being the first openly black presidential candidate, pollsters began gradually raising the level of speculation about the tide of bigotry that might overwhelm white voters once they got into that private little booth and faced the prospect of pulling a lever that suddenly seemed to read “Some Black Dude.”

For the past six months, though, countless pollsters have shown that the so-called Bradley effect, named after African-American Democrat Tom Bradley, who lost the California governor’s race in 1982 to a white opponent after leading in the polls, has ceased to exist, if it ever really did. Most likely, they say, it won’t significantly affect the outcome of Tuesday’s election. A recent Gallup Poll suggests that the number of all voters who would reject Obama based on his race, and the number more likely to vote for him because of his race, is about the same. (The numbers for those who would vote for or against McCain because he’s white are about the same.) In other words, the Bradley effect is neutralized.

Those polls don’t mean that racism still isn’t alive in America. It is. But it’s not as black and white as all the talk about the Bradley effect might lead us to believe. The couple in western Pennsylvania suggests that people can look past skin color while acting in their own best interests. For whatever reason or reasons — the economy, healthcare, the Iraq war, Sarah Palin — some racists are determined to vote for the black guy over the white one. A recent photo published in Politico (here and above) shows a Confederate flag proudly flying over an Obama sign in an Indiana home’s front yard. Racists for Obama? It’s a bracing contradiction and causes us to look deeper into what Obama’s candidacy is telling us about race in American life and culture. People have criticized Obama for his willingness to reach out to America’s international enemies, but they’ve seldom acknowledged that if he’s elected, he’s also going to have to deal diplomatically with haters in his own country.

The Pennsylvania couple’s intended vote also suggests that we base our impression of what it means to be racist on a number of false assumptions. To be biased, you don’t have to be a muscular guy with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo, or a late governor of a Southern state. You might be a radio personality, or even a liberal guy with a tendency to jam his foot into his mouth. In August, back before Obama gained his current lead, Jacob Weisberg worried in Slate that 5 percent of white voters telling CBS/New York Times pollsters that they would not personally vote for a black candidate “surely understates the reality,” and that if you went by the numbers, racism would be Obama’s downfall. It may seem like a logical conclusion, but actually there’s no way of knowing whether that self-admitted 5 percent represents something called the “racist vote.” Even if 5 percent of white voters claim they won’t vote for a generic “black candidate,” that’s not the same thing as saying they won’t vote for a specific individual named Barack Obama. (And the poll doesn’t differentiate by party, so we don’t know how many of those five-percenters are die-hard Republicans who wouldn’t vote for a Democrat of any ethnicity.)

Furthermore, telling some stranger on the phone about how you’re going to vote isn’t equivalent to casting a vote. Nowadays statisticians have identified a complementary phenomenon to the Bradley effect, the reverse Bradley effect, in which a voter tells a pollster she won’t vote for a candidate based on race and then votes for the candidate anyway, probably while feeling very, very naughty. Leaving us exactly nowhere in our quest to pinpoint the degree to which racism might hurt Obama at the polls. It leaves the media in a situation that black Americans are all too familiar with — struggling in vain to identify and measure racial discrimination as it hides, transforms and eludes our understanding.

The number of racists who aren’t voting for Obama isn’t as interesting as the number of racists who are. That he has any racist supporters at all points to a quality in bigotry that few people ever acknowledge — flexibility. It’s usually assumed that racism is all-powerful, that it alone will cause someone to vote against a black candidate. But blackness is just one possible plus or minus in a balance sheet with many entries. In an abysmal economy during which the white candidate’s campaign has seemed disorganized and erratic, common sense or shared values can prevail over gut fears about the color of a candidate’s skin. Dem consultant Paul Begala, quoted by Smith, suggests that the current state of our union might be dire enough to erase the fear of a black president:

If you got to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, “How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,” they would say, “That doesn’t sound good to me… But if you say, “Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,” it’s a different situation.

Perhaps urgent circumstances require so much self-interest that racism can wait, at least until the crisis is over. Maybe this is why Obama’s poll numbers seemed to rise along with the volatility of the world’s financial markets.

Though our biases may be the result of some hard-wiring, we can choose not to express them, or not to let them get the best of us. Maybe that’s why when people do cling to their prejudices, they have a hard time defending them. The cause may have a scientific explanation, but the justifications we give to racism are largely irrational. Human behavior being so unpredictable, there are plenty of people — not just whites, but people of all races and political persuasions — who don’t consider themselves racist but who would grab their belongings and hurry across the street if they saw me — 6 feet 2 inches tall, 210, dreadlocks — coming down a dark street toward them. They wouldn’t even care if I had a copy of the Harvard Law Review in my hand.

And speaking of irrationality, there’s apparently more than one reason for a racist to vote for Barack Obama. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson notes in the Huffington Post, some racists want Obama to win because they assume his presidency will give credence to their belief that blacks want to give whites a taste of their own medicine. When Caucasian Americans wake up to this idea, the theory goes, their outrage will spark the racial holy war that white supremacists so desperately await. Their theory does not, however, explain Joe Biden’s presence on the ticket.

Let me go out on a limb and say that a full-fledged race war is, um, perhaps the least likely product of an Obama win. It seems more probable, as the western Pennsylvania Obama supporters and the Gallup Poll suggest, that after all our attempts to examine and predict its possible effects, racism won’t have any discernible effect in next week’s election. That won’t be because racism no longer exists in the United States. Instead, racism will remain an elusive, unquantifiable force, one whose influence we can’t tease out from among the many other conflicting factors that will determine how Americans vote. And if Obama carries some of those regions deep in John Murtha country, it will happen because, prejudiced as some Americans can be, they know when to put their prejudices aside.

The reigning queen of overreaching these days is Sarah Palin. As we all know by now, her inability to name newspapers, her refusal to answer tough questions during the vice-presidential debate and her substitution of smug attitude for a grasp of the facts have never been issues for her core supporters, in light of her charismatic bluster, snippy wit and stunning stage presence. Politicians have distorted the facts and lied for centuries, but Palin may represent a new high (or low, depending on your perspective). Her bravado in the face of contrary evidence — say, when a Troopergate investigation found that she abused her power as governor and yet she boldly proclaimed herself “cleared of any wrongdoing” –  is something we might expect from rappers, motivational speakers and reality TV stars. As Palin’s rise suggests, the key to American success isn’t happiness — it’s confidence. “Fake it till you make it” may not be the U.S. motto, but it could be a runner-up.

Take all the hype out of today’s American culture and you’ll have next to nothing left — just some experimental poet locked in a broom closet somewhere with no Internet. Rhonda Byrne’s bestselling book “The Secret,” for instance, has encouraged millions of down-in-the-mouth Americans to “create their own reality” by eliminating all negative thoughts (like self-doubt), based on the harebrained theory that good attracts good. Huge rap stars like Jay-Z, Kanye West, T.I. and many before them have turned cockiness and shameless self-promotion into an industry copied by wannabe M.C.s worldwide. But perhaps nowhere are the rewards for emphasizing style over substance higher than on TV. Pasta-maker infomercials and home-shopping networks give us a model for selling anything, including ourselves. Hulk Hogan defends his right to oil up his daughter. Donald Trump will fire your ass if you don’t defend your right to be his apprentice, no matter what.

In an era of YouTube and 24-hour news cycles, nationally known politicians nowadays pretty much qualify as reality TV stars, so it doesn’t seem incongruous for someone like Sarah Palin to put on the same incredible displays of arrogance that have defined the genre. The vice-presidential candidate would be right at home among the overconfident dingbats of reality TV — “The Real World,” “Survivor,” “Rock of Love,” “Big Brother” or whichever ones you bother with. Ever since Richard Hatch won “Survivor” with his scheming arrogance, ever since Omarosa became a household name by stabbing fellow competitors in the back with an icy smile on her face, reality TV has been defined by calculating villains with more swagger than actual talent. These days, programs are entirely based around overconfidence as a selling point. “The Pickup Artist,” which recently began its second season on VH1, is hosted by a top-shelf breed of egotist in the form of Mystery, a Canadian illusionist born Erik Von Markovik who, with help from Neil Strauss’ book “The Game,” has turned hitting on women into a douche bag science. He has stuffed his (chain) wallet by hawking the truism that confidence is a turn-on in and of itself, a more important ingredient in success with the ladies than good looks, money or, God forbid, charm.

Over on Bravo, this season’s “Project Runway” seemed to be editing all of its contestants’ footage in order to make everyone sound like Marie Antoinette. Perhaps the producers wanted to recapture the magic of last year’s winner, the pixieish Christian Siriano, whose barbs made him an audience favorite. Most of the individual interviews throughout the season made it seem as if a producer had just asked, “What’s the most arrogant thing you could say about your own work, and the bitchiest comment you could make about someone else’s?” Similarly, the girls on “America’s Next Top Model’s” 11th cycle have gotten into a little culture clash because the French model-in-training, Marjorie, and her uptight ally, Aline, refuse to play the confidence game, even while her housemates insist that the only way to succeed is to show confidence despite any shortcomings. The greater your shortcomings, apparently, the more confidence you need, often in the attempt to argue with viewers that your faults don’t count — a move typical of Palin’s defenders, who think that anyone who criticizes her is just a hater. Marjorie has broken down in tears and admitted failure more than once, but she has won more challenges than her competitors. For her, confidence doesn’t count so much as refining her performance. And there’s a lesson in that.

Perhaps we’ve become so inured to all the posturing in rap and reality TV that now, when politicians show us the same type of empty swagger, we simply accept what they’re serving, and even cheer them on. Last weekend, “Saturday Night Live” presumably hoped to embarrass Palin by writing an over-the-top, boastful rhyme about her and having her “decline” to perform it on the show’s Weekend Update. But despite the bizarre Alaskan fantasia the show created, replete with fake show, pretend Eskimos and Amy Poehler shooting a guy in a moose costume with an imaginary handgun, Palin didn’t look particularly uncomfortable or out of place swaying along to the beat or raising the roof when Poehler shouted, “All the mavericks in the house put your hands up!” Anyone who expected Poehler’s performance to rival Stephen Colbert’s skewering and roasting of George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner or even Chevy Chase’s klutzy Gerald Ford impression must have been deeply disappointed. In order for the satire to have a real effect, Palin’s discomfort needed to be palpable and make the audience squirm. Instead, the surge in “SNL’s” ratings only amped up her star power.

The truth is, Palin would make a kick-ass reality star. “I think she could have her own show,” Lorne Michaels recently told Entertainment Weekly. And according to a recent piece in the Hollywood Reporter, some TV execs have already started contemplating her exit strategy.  With any luck, her schedule will free up, and she can start taping in early November.