Last Tuesday night, I dreamed of two unlikely election scenarios. In the first, Barack Obama lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College. In the second, John McCain and I scaled a mountain of grandfather clocks. The following morning, I decided to take a walk over to the city clerk's office to cast an early vote in the presidential election.
I had assumed that I would be one of the only students that early in the day, but when I arrived at the office I was still surprised by the diversity of the small crowd waiting in line.
Spanning all different ages and several races, the dozen of us resembled the cast of an inspirational civics poster. In an election season dominated by the theme of inflaming the differences between old and young, rich and poor, black and white, the image of my fellow voters and I linking arms around the voting booths in a spirit of camaraderie and mutual civic responsibility was the most positive impression I had had of the political process in the past several months.
During the last major election year, I worked for a short time in a McDonald's warehouse where most of the workers were older union hands. Intimidated by this generation gap and my belief that I had nothing in common with the other employees, any chance of me getting to know them was further hindered by my habit of slipping quietly away to the lunchroom whenever it looked like I might be assigned a large order.
I was on one of these meal breaks when Tim, a quiet, friendly employee in his 50s, looked up from his sandwich to ask me, Have you ever heard of Chuck Berry?""
At the warehouse, there was no such thing as a standard lunch or dinner hour. Today, as was often the case, only one other employee happened to be taking his break at the same time, and so the commons area was totally silent apart from our conversation.
""Yes..."" I started to respond, when I was interrupted, for the first and only time in my life, by a Teamster bursting into song:
""My ding-a-ling! My ding-a-ling! I WANT YOU TO PLAY WITH MY DING-A-LING!""
With no one else in the room, it was impossible for me to pretend I didn't notice that Tim had begun screaming about his penis. He continued:
""Catch me playing with my DING-A-LING!""
Planning my escape route in the event that his singing was only the first sign of a more violent psychosis, I waited for Tim to finish a few more stanzas (""Everybody Sing! MY DING-A-LING!"") before I smiled and said, ""Oh yeah. I think I've heard of that one.""
At the time, my reaction was to regard Tim as a lunatic. At the clerk's office, standing in the company of the elderly Hispanic schoolteacher, the young, white single mother and the black firefighter, I recalled the incident and decided that I had judged Tim too harshly. In choosing to see only the differences between us (I had never screamed ""ding-a-ling"" at a co-worker, for example), I had focused only on what he had said, ignoring the reasons he might have said it.
As the line of voters began to move forward slowly, it occurred to me that what Tim had wanted was not for me to join him in singing about his ""ding-a-ling,"" but to bond over a shared love of music. In this regard, Chuck Berry was a unifying figure, bringing together members of different generations, races and religions by bestowing upon them the gift of rock 'n' roll.
Looking around the room, I thought it was safe to say most of the people here had heard of ""ding-a-ling"" too, that it could be a sign of unity for us, just as it had been between Tim and me. I considered leading our group in a rousing, patriotic chorus on, ""Sure was hard swimming cross that thing / With both hands holding my ding-a-ling,"" but then, suddenly, it was my turn to step forward and fulfill my patriotic obligation, just like millions of others around the country.
All of us, together as Americans, united by a song about penises.
Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom? E-mail hunziker@wisc.edu.
