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Wednesday 16 May 2012
Wednesday 9 May 2012
Letter from North Carolina: Barack Obama (and Amendment One)
by Tom Macarte
If you were on the internet over the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen Barack Obama slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
What the rest of the episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon made clear was that it was filmed in Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This photo was posted by the White House Twitter account.
I picked Fallon. I slyly entered the lottery through the link emailed out to Seniors, and queued for three hours, getting fairly good seats.
Editor's note: in the wake of Amendment One, President Obama has just declared his support for same-sex marriage: “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
If you were on the internet over the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen Barack Obama slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
What the rest of the episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon made clear was that it was filmed in Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This photo was posted by the White House Twitter account.
The filming came after Obama gave a speech
about student loans to thousands of students, some of whom had waited outside
overnight to get tickets. Fallon tickets, on the other hand, were distributed
only to Seniors (as in, fourth year undergraduates) first through an online
‘reservation’ lottery, which gave you the right to queue up for hours to
hopefully get a seat assignment. They made it very clear that, with all the
security, students should pick one or the other, they would not be able to get
across campus in time.
I picked Fallon. I slyly entered the lottery through the link emailed out to Seniors, and queued for three hours, getting fairly good seats.
I’m maybe 60% sure this is me. I was around
that area, in a Carolina blue sweater, so at least you get the idea.
Obama was preaching to the converted here,
reminding students why they (probably) voted for him. It didn’t hurt that he’d
predicted the UNC Tar Heels basketball team to win the NCAA Championship (WE
WERE ROBBED: mostly down to poorly timed injuries).
I’d seen a tweet explaining that POTUS had
chosen UNC because it was such a great academic institution, which is partially
true but a fairly naïve assessment. With
North Carolina a swing state for Obama, where the young voters would make all
the difference, there was clearly an ulterior motive.
There was also a reason he’d chosen UNC,
and not just his college basketball fandom. North Carolina’s universities are
all pretty great, local rivalries aside (DUKE SUCKS), but Chapel Hill is often
referred to as the liberal centre of the State, sometimes of the whole American
South. When someone asked Jesse Helms, notorious early '90s right-winger (his
name should be familiar to any Bill Hicks fans), about a state zoo, he
responded by suggesting they just fence off Chapel Hill. As you can imagine,
this quote is recounted with rather a lot of pride.
But back to Obama. He was as wonderful and
charming as a liberal foreigner would imagine. I was still hoping for a full
musical number (he has been known to sing, and if it was going to happen under
any circumstances, it would’ve been then, backed by the Roots), but it was all
pretty great. I wasn’t anticipating seeing POTUS, but it was a great day, a
real treat for an American Studies student on his year abroad.
Something else happened really recently
(yesterday, at the time of writing) that I wanted to write about in terms of
Chapel Hill being a liberal centre. You might be aware of Amendment One, a
motion to rewrite the state constitution to redefine marriage and civil
partnership. It’s largely a move against gay marriage, but that is far from the
only thing that the amendment affects.
This morning, I found out that, as I had
feared, the majority of the vote yesterday had been FOR rather than against the
Amendment. I just wanted to say that that is not the North Carolina that I
know. Yes, a lot of this has to do with the liberal bubble I’m in, but I hate
that this vote sends out a particular message about the state. It only recently
dawned on me that it was likely to pass: here, in Chapel Hill, it seemed that
everyone was strongly against such a breach of rights. So basically, I just
wanted to work against the message it sends out. North Carolina is a beautiful
state, and I have encountered nothing but friendliness and compassion, both in
Chapel Hill and further out, in the mountains and on the coast.
The message that Amendment One sends out:
that is not the North Carolina that I know.
Editor's note: in the wake of Amendment One, President Obama has just declared his support for same-sex marriage: “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
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