2008: a retrospective

I'm looking forward to 2009 mostly because I'm glad to see 2008 be finished forever. The politics and the economics of 2008 were just about the worst I've seen in my lifetime. The 2008 primary—at least on the Democrats' side—got super messy. I was behind Obama from the very start because I live in Chicago and that's just how we do; we support our own. Even before his campaign I was impressed with his rhetorical skills, and I agreed with a lot of his politics as well. I disliked Hillary because I saw that since the Clinton presidency she'd been working towards occupying that seat herself, but it always seemed to me that it was for her own glorification that she did it. Sure she would probably do a good job, but that would mean that for my entire lifetime every US president will have been from one of two families, and that just seemed wrong to me.

Meanwhile I got laid off from my job last summer, which didn't surprise me but it still pissed me off. I didn't mind because I really saw Fave as a company adrift. Working there was like living out someone else's mid-life crisis. The owners were amiable and well-meaning enough but at the same time they were two men completely out of their league who, though they had surrounded themselves with people who knew what they were doing, often refused to listen. It angered me but I knew that I would fare better than they would in the long run, so I struck out on my own freelancing and pretty immediately got snatched up by an agency. I've made it to 2009 just fine but I hear interesting rumours coming from Fave lately.

The presidential election last year produced a curious mixture of feelings for me. On the one hand I felt so very proud of this country and, in a way, this city, when Obama won the nomination and especially when it started to look like he was going to win. The Republican side just made me feel ashamed for this country. In the 2008 election we saw that the Republican party has become a party of only three issues: abortion, gay marriage, and teaching evolution in schools. The 2008 presidential campaign was the ugliest I've seen in my entire life and I've been paying attention for a long time. To me my choice was clear and it had to be Obama, because to me he represented everything I liked about America, particularly the notion that you really can raise yourself up from poverty to Presidency here. Having up 'til then lived a life dominated by Bushes and Clintons (except a couple of years where there was a Reagan, but I was like two years old whatever), I had never gotten to witness that happening. John McCain, married to a trophy wife he ditched his old wife for when she got in an accident, son of a wealthy admiral, just did not give me that same impression. He never seemed like he knew what I, as a member of the middle class, go through on a day to day basis to make ends meet. But the real show-stopper there was his bewildering choice of Sarah Palin, a virtual unknown from Alaska whose uncouth "you betcha!" perkiness made me cringe visibly. It was at that point that I almost felt like it was McCain's way of bowing out. When he picked her for VP, it seemed like he was throwing the fight. A sort of dejectedness settled over the McCain camp and it really seemed that by the time election night rolled around, they had long given up.

Speaking of which election night was an amazing night for me. It's rare that you come upon a moment in history and in your life that you think afterwards, I will remember this forever. I think that I will, too. I was in Grant Park and I witnessed first-hand the election of the United States' first President of any colour besides white as all hell. That alone was reason to be excited, but in addition the election of Barack Obama meant the possibility we could break free from the kind of divisive, fear-based politics of 2000–2008. That's really the one thing I will miss the least about 2008: the bullshit fearmongering. I'm not saying that all the Fox News anchors are out of a job just yet, but I think we are about to see a major change in how the White House views the world and the American people.

One of the horrors of 2008 continues still: the economy. In 2008 we saw a house of cards forever on the precipice of implosion finally fall, and I suspect most of the people who built it up knew how fragile it was. In the interest of furthering the interest of a "free" market, the powers that be left the rest of us out in the cold. As a consequence of losing my job at Fave and also the beginnings of the economic downturn, I lost a mortgage on a condo I was planning to buy. In the end I think that was a good thing because I wouldn't want to be saddled with a huge mortgage at a time like this anyway, but it still sucked. I'm seeing more friends than ever getting laid off, and the more I think about it, the more I realize we're gonna be feeling this for a while. This isn't an ordinary recession at all. It feels like a depression. Here's to 2009 being better I guess.

Keep hope alive, space cadets.

RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER

I've always been intrigued by culture jamming and graffiti, and I love mysterious things, so it's inevitable that some day I would come across Toynbee idea tiles in my daily musings. I'd read about them a few months ago I think on Damn Interesting or, more likely, on the Wikipedia category for mysteries, which I frequently read. After a hiatus I became interested in them again, this time searching for a list of known tile locations. I found one, but it was on the now-defunct toynbee.net. It is still available through the gracious services of the Internet Wayback Machine though.

After work one day last week I didn't quite feel like going home, so I walked up to the shopping district around the Hancock building. It was a spontaneous outing but my current contract is very close to that area of Chicago, just a few blocks. As I got closer I started to get kind of excited though. I'd been in the Hancock/Water Tower district of Chicago many times but had never really paid this much attention. I found myself looking down at my feet while I walked over every crosswalk, stopping sometimes to inspect an anomalous bit of tar on the asphalt. As I walked around, passing intersections I knew once had tiles, I could see tiny remnants at best. I found myself questioning whether I'd seen what I'd seen, little scraps of blackened tar without the distinctive lettering of one of the tiles. All the while I was marveling at how many people were surrounding me, how many cars were passing, and just how busy this part of Chicago is all the time. How could he, the one responsible, have successfully placed so many in this, the busiest part of Chicago? It truly is an amazing achievement that he was never caught in the act. All we have of his identity is whispers in the media from the 1970s and an address in Philadelphia (from the Santiago, Chile tiles) that is probably wrong.

I was close to giving up on the search. The city of Chicago has stated that they see the tiles as vandalism (a difference of opinion they have with Philadelphia, the likely birthplace of the tiles, where they are seen as being worthy of some preservation), so most likely they were all destroyed by the time I set about my search. I did find one, though, at the next-to-last location I would search. Just barely visible on the northmost edge of the northmost stripe of the crosswalk between Water Tower Place and the Hancock building were the words "TOYNBEE IDEA".

It was that moment that I had been seeking, the moment when this phenomenon I'd only read about became a real, tangible thing. I don't know how old the tile was, nor how just that one line of it had survived and the rest had gone away, but I was thankful to see my momentary obsession rewarded. The tile looked like it was made with hardened modeling clay and despite its age the colours in the type still contrasted neatly with the white of the crosswalk stripe, and with the white backing of the tile. I knew from my research that it was made of true linoleum—apparently difficult to come by in the United States—and despite the sloppiness of the letters they were at least consistent across tiles. They looked as though they'd been fabricated and placed very carefully just there. There was purpose to it, as though the tiler had wanted his work to be as visible as possible. Yet he put them all on streets where no one looks down.

If the tiler was indeed insane—and I think by the paranoid inscriptions frequently found beneath tiles he probably was—I would at least like to know what idea it was he was trying to spread. The idea of resurrecting the dead on Jupiter is so outside the realm of possibility that it bears no consideration, but what if there's a shallower meaning behind all of it, and the tile text is inconsequential to that? Perhaps it's his attempt at metaphor.

I don't think we'll ever know.