Toe news: vast improvement.

We had a very ordinary, in other words perfect, weekend. Wushu for Claire and Spanish class for Julia on Saturday morning, after which Jules and I walked through sunny autumnal Noe Valley all fragrant with jasmine down to the Mission Library to meet Jeremy and Claire and Salome and Milo. Tacos for lunch and then home for naps. Sunday morning was Claire’s piano class so we walked up the hill in bright sun but against an icy wind, the first glimmer of winter. This may be my favourite time of year in San Francisco, with the wind’s raw edge promising cognac-laced pumpkin soup and Halloween and Oz apples and Lemos Farm and Thanksgiving turkey and pie and everyone’s birthday and Christmas. Harvest food is the best.

Jeremy and I went over our position with respect to, you know, the global collapse of capitalism and the impending apocalypse and so forth. We’re about as okay as a middle-class techie nuclear family could hope to be; we have savings and a reasonable fixed-rate mortgage and no other debt. We’re especially lucky that our green cards just came through, so if the company or companies tank, which merciful Zeus forfend, we can get jobs elsewhere. We’ve already been eating out less and buying clothes second hand and going to the library, see above. I could afford to knock it off with the Internet shopping, but the number one flashing red light of a way to cut our costs is to get rid of my beloved car Hedwig and her $50-a-tank dead dinosaur habit. And I think we were both half-investigating the possibility by spending the weekend on foot or on public transport.

May I point out here, though, how royally it pisses me off that we are having to economize? I am so tired of selfish people running the country that I have given into the temptation to brainwash my daughters. “John McCain has thirteen houses, which means there are twelve houses other people can’t live in,” I tell Claire. “That’s because John McCain’s momma never taught him to share his toys. Do you know how many houses Barack Obama has?” “Just one,” says Claire.

“And Barack Obama will end the war,” Claire adds. “Which is good, momma, because then you won’t have to cry about it any more.”

This must have become a fairly routine conversation around our place, because when Julia overhears what we are saying she cries: “Barack Obama? NOT AGAIN.”

ETA: Right now in the bath, Claire pretending to be on the phone.

“What? McCain’s winning? YUCK, YUCK, YUCK!”

“No he’s not!”

“Now the war will go on forever.”

“Oh no!”

“Obama’s got the mumps.”

Claire and Julia have a money box that is a tin with a coin slot in the lid. It is stuffed full of coins of various currencies. I had watched without necessarily registering that this money box joined mama and baby polar bear, green snake, rainbow monkey, kangaroo and the rest as they travelled on a sled made of a throw rug into the bedroom. When I went to clean the toys out of the bedroom just now, I picked up the throw rug and tossed the animals into the toy corner.

The money box, of course, fell out and landed on its edge on my left big toe.

Wow! Pain! It is so large when it comes at you like that with no warning. I bit my hands trying not to scream. It was so big and sparkly and painful! Like a fire that grew and grew. Most shamingly, there’s not a mark on me. It didn’t break the skin and no bruise has come up yet. Jeremy thinks I may have broken the bone. I doubt it, because I can move the toe, but dear God it really hurt.

Julia was most anxious. She looked into my face trying to understand what I was feeling, and then she started to cry and hold her own big toe. The origins of empathy; mirroring my body with her own. Which of course makes me wonder where the mommas of McCain and Palin’s most rabid supporters went wrong. I’m not a particularly nice woman, and I am lazy, but if my not-yet-three-year-old can already grasp theory of mind, why can’t the Republicans knock it off with the death threats?

Do they really not care about other people?

The election has been excruciating, of course, with occasional glimmers of exhilaration. One of the most frustrating aspects is that I feel I can’t fully revel in the professionalism and elegance and grace and style of the Obama campaign while I am still so deeply afraid that Obama might lose. If you’re overseas I am not sure I can convey just how gut-wrenching and painful and terrifying the last eight years have been in the USA; how impossible it is to forget the dust and ash of the terror attacks, and how unbearable it is to read about Americans torturing their prisoners.

Right now everyone’s obsessed with the economy, including me, and I can talk at lucid and informed length about the ways in which Bush and McCain and Gramm are directly responsible for the banking disaster. But the issue for me is always the war. It was the war in 2004 and it is the war today. Stockbrokers may be losing their shirts but soldiers and civilians are losing their limbs, and their sight, and their sanity. And their lives.

I hoped but did not really believe that Kerry could win in 04, and I hope much more fiercely that Obama will win this year, because while Kerry would have been a decent president I think Obama can be a fine one, a great one. Empathy again: I look at him with his fantastic wife; I look at how tender he is with his own children and those of other people; I admire his cool strategy and steely nerve; and I want so badly for other people to see in him what America is capable of, what people here can be.

He is from my America, my California liberal arts colleges and East Coast Ivy Leagues, the Chicago I love, the community organizers I’d like to be when I grow up, my whole mixed-up muddled-up shook-up world. I know that in Australia and England and elsewhere you all look at what goes on here with horror. I completely understand. I am horrified myself.

But Cheney shooting a man in the face, and making the victim apologize – rich men whining about selling their private jets, when poor people have no health insurance – when cancer spells bankruptcy for even affluent families – that’s not all America is. It’s also a nation of Sanctuary Cities and the Winter of Love and eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling. It is a moneybox stuffed with coins, and it is an unprotected toe.

The first entries in my delicious stream under the keywords “subprime” and “crash” are dated 21 August 2007. I’m not bragging, believe me. I saved those bookmarks because I’m kind of dumb about this stuff. Most of the time I am thinking about my kids, horses, books or food. But the shape of the mortgage crisis was obvious thirteen months ago even to a self-absorbed idiot like me.

Which means that anyone on Wall Street or Washington who says they didn’t see this coming is lying to you. Specifically, John McCain is lying to you; he’s been through this twice already, with Enron/Worldcom and before that, the Keating 5.

This is par for the course; and indeed the $700bn bailout is just the latest (and the most egregious and appalling) step in this Republican administration’s campaign to nationalize risk and privatize profit.

Let’s be clear: the real cost of the toxic mortgages is probably between $100-200bn. The other HALF TRILLION dollars covers the bankers who made the wrong bet on those mortgages. These are the bankers that took home $120bn in BONUSES over the last five years. (All numbers are from Devilstower on Daily Kos except for the $700bn, which the Fed pulled out of its ass.)

The history of the last eight years in this country has been a deliberate process of robbing the poor to buy private jets for the hyperrich.

It is unconscionable.

My advice: don’t bail them out. Restructure the mortgages for the homeowners who are facing foreclosure; we know that many (most?) of them were lied to by predatory lenders. Oh, and vote the GOP out of office.

Children learn from their mistakes by accepting the consequences. Why shouldn’t grown men?

Can we impeach Cheney now? Please? What’s it going to take?

…let’s look at some of the predictions the Monterey Institute made five years ago, for what they called even then this “Imprudent and Unnecessary War”:

• Al-Qa’ida conducts terrorist attacks to coincide with war
• U.S. viewed as causing high casualties among Iraqi civilians
• Inadequate U.S. and international support for reconstruction of Iraq
• U.S. must occupy Iraq for years to maintain stable and pro-U.S. regime
• North Korea exploits U.S. and UNSC focus on Iraq to build nuclear arsenal
• Enduring outrage among Arab and Muslim populations broadens social base for terrorism against Americans
• High U.S. military casualties in urban fighting

Seven for seven. Whee.