James Hynes

I dropped by Zilker School again at noon, on my lunch hour. Here's the Obama table again, from a different angle. The McCain sign, by the way, is not for John, but for a local candidate for constable. My neighborhood is the heart of liberal South Austin, so you see mostly Hillary and Obama signs, with a few Ron Pauls thrown in, just because it's Texas. McCain and Huckabee signs are pretty thin on the ground in my part of Austin.

Some members of the local media. There were trucks from two different stations here. Still no line out the door, and I didn't go into the school, but I'm expecting a crowd at 7 tonight, when the caucus is supposed to begin.

The Hillary contingent. It's a pleasant day for an election, sunny, temperature in the 50s and getting warmer. Yesterday's epic wind has died down, so all the lawn signs are safe.

Here's step one of the Texas Two-Step in today's presidential primary. It's a photo I took an hour ago, on my way to work, at my local polling place (Zilker Elementary School on Bluebonnet Lane in Austin). Since we have early voting in Texas, I voted two weeks ago at my local Randall's supermarket, where I picked up some fat-free turkey dogs, two twelve-packs of Diet Coke (with caffeine and without), and, oh yeah, voted for Obama. But I plan to be back at Zilker this evening for the second half of the two-step, and caucus for Obama. When I get back there at 7 tonight, I expect to see a line out the door. I plan to take a book and my iPod and wait for as long as it takes. It goes against my carefully constructed persona as the cynical, seen-it-all satirist, but I'll admit it: I'm excited!

More later, with photos, if possible.

PS: And here is Texas Monthly writer Mimi Swartz, in today's New York Times, writing cautiously but hopefully about the return of (dare I say it) the Texas liberal.

In The London Review of Books, British novelist Hilary Mantel has a review of a new compendium of the paranormal, the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained. It's not really a review, truth be told—how would one review a dictionary of UFOs, witchcraft, and telekinesis, anyway?—but it is a thoughtful and witty examination of the whole idea of the paranormal and how it functions in modern life. Here's my favorite paragraph:

In fact, if you hang around the anomalous long enough, you see that most people within its range have an unexpressed but quite sophisticated sense of ambiguity. They go to a ‘psychic fayre’ in a spirit of temporary suspension of disbelief; it is just as if they had picked up a novel. For a limited time, events unfold around them as a powerful second reality. They read the story, or listen to the dead talk in a public hall; two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza. In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative views are not part of the counter-culture but part of popular culture, with its extensive TV spooks programming and Mind-Body-Spirit events held every weekend in sports halls up and down the country: the ineffable now smells of stale sweat and hot feet. An olla podrida of new age hogwash is served up to anyone who has a spare tenner and seems likely to part with it. We are only in the market for fun-size beliefs, unlike the US, where the aggressive fundamentalist irrationality of evangelical Christianity moves real money around, affects how children are educated, and darkens believers’ perceptions of other cultures. On the whole, we have the better part: superstition is easier to accommodate in the body politic than religion. It is less divisive: no one ever went to war about what you should chant when you see a magpie, or was burned at the stake for denying the reality of the Loch Ness Monster.

I have to mildly object that there are plenty of us in the US who are perfectly happy with fun-size beliefs. I'm one of those who doesn't really believe this stuff—not really—but who has been known to drop everything and watch three episodes in a row of The UFO Files on the History Channel. I especially love their little marathons of other countries' Roswells—Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc. There's even, as I recall, an episode about Texas's Roswell—Texas, of course, still being its own country, in spirit if not in actual legal fact anymore. And no, I haven't driven up from Austin to Stephenville to check out the sighting there. Not yet, anyway.

On the other hand, Texas is also where the Texas Education Agency's director of science lost her job because she was perceived as not being "neutral" about evolution. (No word yet on the TEA's stance on gravity and photosynthesis). So perhaps Ms. Mantel has a point.