November 6, 2008--My "View"

As a real man who has never been known to eat quiche, I have never watched The View. Yes, I am well aware of it from occasional clips that work their way into the news media—when a presidential candidate such as John McCain appears and gets grilled—but I have never watched a full episode.

Until yesterday.

The morning after the election, flipping around the dial desperate for a continuous stream of news and insight about what had happened the day before, and eager to figure its political and cultural meaning, at the stroke of 11:00 AM the wrist with which I had been for 24 hours manipulating the remote control gave out and left me stranded on Channel 7--in New York City on ABC.

The View came into view, and in a state of exhaustion and happy surrender I stayed tuned and watched the whole thing.

It turned out to be such a powerful experience that I used up my last remaining box of Kleenex.

Barbara Walters I know and with Whoopi Goldberg I am familiar. But how to put this--neither is my cup of tea. About Elisabeth Hasselback I only know that she is the show’s one out-of-the-closet conservative and showed up during the campaign at various Sarah Palin rallies to help her deal with the clothes thing. And isn’t her husband a quarterback or something? I’ve heard of Joy Behar but yesterday I became aware of Sherri Shepherd for the first time.

I am so out of it that I had to Google “The View” in order to get all their names straight and spelled correctly.

But it was amazing. Amazing. If you didn’t catch it look for it on YouTube.

I am told that welling up with tears is a staple on The View, but to see Elisabeth Hasselback crying openly about how proud she was to be an American after Barack Obama was elected moved me to more of my own tears.

To hear an equally-tearful Sherri Shepherd, who must be in her 30s or 40s, talk about how this was the first time she voted and how, as an African American, it caused her to remember conversations with her father in which he told her that the things she aspired too as a young girl were beyond the reach of black people and that she should think about a career in the post office, to hear this got me fighting with Rona for the last of our collective tissues.

And to have Whoopi Goldberg confess that on election night, when Obama’s Electoral College numbers finally reached 270, that she could finally “put down my suitcase” and for the first time in her life feel fully safe living in America, that she no longer needed that packed bag at the ready in case the KKK or whomever came for her, when I heard that my heart almost exploded.

I have known Jewish people who escaped pogroms and the Holocaust who keep cash and gold coins hidden in their houses here in America in case they feel the need to flee; but to learn this about someone as spectacularly successful as Whoopi Goldberg—also throbbing with understandable emotion—and the release she was now feeling, underlined how profound a difference Barack Obama’s election has already made.

Now of course the heavy lifting begins. It’s thus time to put these tears aside and begin to pitch in.