Goldberg: The button man

By Tod Goldberg

Like many of you, I'm interested in the upcoming elections to see who wins, who loses and who gets placed into office by the Supreme Court. I've made no secret in these pages and elsewhere that I'm an ardent Democrat and whether or not that makes you like or dislike me isn't all that important, as the aspect of the election I'd really like to focus on crosses party lines: When is it appropriate to where my campaign button?

I don't posit this question lightly; I know nothing of button etiquette. In fact, this is the first political button I've ever owned and the first time I've felt compelled to let the world know exactly who I'm voting for (and it's not the guy who believes God speaks to him and the teams on the "The Amazing Race" directly). As I was walking out the door the other day, for instance, en route to a speaking engagement in a noted Republican stronghold, my wife stopped me and appraised my appearance.

"Take that button off," she said.

"Look," I said, "if I'm really invested in John Kerry, shouldn't I be willing to wear his name on my chest when I'm making a public appearance somewhere? Shouldn't I, as Barack Obama said, show them that there's not a liberal America and a conservative America--there's the United States of America! There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America--there's the United States of America!"

"Do you want to sell books today?"

"Yes."

"What percentage of the audience would you say is Republican?"

"The majority."

"Take the button off."

I thought about it for a moment. In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter. In a perfect world, I wouldn't flip off every car with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker, but the world ain't perfect, sweetheart, and sometimes you have to make concessions to commerce, which, I suppose is a rather Republican precept. I left the button at home that day and for the rest of the afternoon felt bad about it, like I'd locked a rabid German shepherd and an infant inside my Cadillac and was now the subject of an OnStar radio ad.

Part of the issue is that I just don't know where a button ranks in the fashion of things. Is it casual? Business casual? Evening wear? I know during election season many celebrities rock political statements on the red carpet, which is allowed because they are on the red carpet already, presumably a known enough quantity that their politics are secondary to the remarkable acting they've done on "One Tree Hill," and any fashion statement they make is considered part of the packaging. The last time I wore a button on a regular basis, it had the pictures of all five original members of Duran Duran on it and I wore it everywhere, no matter the occasion or dress code: to Record Factory to buy Bauhaus records I'd never listen to; to Loon Lake, Wash., to go fishing and to look as "mod" as possible while cleaning trout; out to dinner with my grandparents, who all the while implored me to remove the offending visage of the five Englishmen who didn't exactly shake the world, but did make some hella cool videos in Sri Lanka. Back then, a band button was like entry into a secret club, or, well, a club of about 50 million kids who thought Dead or Alive was going to change the world, fer sure, fer sure. Now, I'm just worried someone might spit on my Old Timer at Chili's because they love the merging of church and state and I don't.

There's also the whole workplace issue. I teach creative writing at a fine institution, and each day before I go off to mold minds and draw circles around clichés and say belittling things to students who I already know are primed to give me poor evaluations (thus making my derision all the easier), I ponder whether I should put on my button. Is it against policy? Will someone not listen to my words of ill-begotten wisdom because I'm obviously a liberal-pinko-commie? (Not that I'm actually a communist, but I'm trying to bring "liberal-pinko-commie" back into popular parlance.) Or should I morph into one of those centrist humans you typically see announcing network sports, neither for or against anything, just merely a voice of assistance who tries to benignly sway you toward the greater good, whatever that good might be, as long as it isn't one team or another, or, in my case, one president or another?

I choose, for now, to act locally and think globally: I wear my button around my gated community at all times. I wave to my Confederate neighbor (he dresses like a Confederate soldier every day, but drives an Acura). I chat up the woman next door who every so often claims, during HOA meetings, that aliens keep abducting her husband. And when my mother-in-law comes over, her own political choices handsomely selected for her by a pamphlet given to her at church, I wear it like a badge of courage.