Hillary’s Voice

(cross-posted at Reclusive Leftist)

Fai Fai Beach on Guam.

Dededo is a village in Guam. It’s in the news today because of Hillary’s astonishing almost-win in a territory that Obama had expected to take by 11%:

Even the Kentucky Derby wasn’t this close. In the strangest of circumstances that could only bring about the closest of races, Hillary Rodham Clinton finished with 49.9% of the vote of the Guam Democratic Caucus, just 7 votes shy of Barack Obama’s total of 50.1%. While Obama led for the vast majority of the night’s tallying, Clinton needed a strong finish in the municipality of Dededo, Guam’s most populous village. And she did - gaining 61% of the 822 votes counted by the Democratic Party of Guam.

Note: these are unofficial, uncertified results as tabulated by the Democratic Party of Guam. The DPG also noted a high number of spoiled ballots in Dededo.

Dededo. About 35 years ago I lived there with my family in a squat concrete house with a grassless yard of rocks. There were no big hotels on Guam then, no tourist industry at all. It was just a little island with an American Air Force base at one end and a Naval base in the harbor. It was a simple place.

One night the power lines came down and started a fire in the neighborhood; we piled into the car and drove out to the beach until the flames were doused. Rumor had it a snake had gotten tangled up in the wires, but this was many years before it was understood what was happening with the brown snake population. Thank God for that, because if we’d known at the time how many snakes were out there breeding like mad my mother and I would have simply died from terror.

Another night there was a typhoon, and we all sheltered in the middle of the house with the windows boarded up while we waited for the storm to pass. I was thrilled.

And the earthquake! A highlight of my young life. 5.6 on the Richter scale. I’ll never forget hearing the rumbling and not being able to sort out what was happening or why I’d suddenly fallen off the bench I was on.

I loved Guam. Earthquakes and typhoons and raging fires. Coconut trees in our backyard. Geckos on the walls inside our house; geckos everywhere. White sand beaches and cliffs and boonies and warm coral reef lagoons. Monsoon downpours in the afternoon. Little black chickens running across the road. I loved it all.

Another memory surges up, this one more relevant to the day’s proceedings than typhoons and fires (though possibly not earthquakes): when we moved to Guam the territory had just gained the right to elect its own governor. The Guamanians embraced the American political process with a vengeance, and for a couple of months the island’s single TV station was dominated by electioneering. They seemed particularly attracted to the surface symbolism: Democratic donkeys and Republican elephants, straw hats and bunting, endless reprises of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It had the feel of people trying to imitate something they had viewed only from a distance and without complete understanding, like the aliens in Galaxy Quest.

But that was long ago.