It ain’t all pretty, but 2009 looks a lot better than anything this millennium has witnessed so far. As in all things psychological and political, the signs point every which way. So here are my predictions — some grim, some gleeful, some substantiated and some woven of the holey cloth of dreams. Here’s to a really new New Year.

Class struggle, welcome back
“JUMP, you fuckers!” This placard, carried at a September rally protesting the financial industry bailout, may be too explicit for some of you random-acts-of-kindness practitioners. But its underlying sentiment is probably a healthy one.

Admit it. Unless you’re a hedge-fund investor laying off your gardeners or listing your yacht on Craigs-list, your heart is not flooded with compassion for the Masters of the Universe whose universe has suddenly deflated. You are not moved to tears by the suicide of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the financier ruined by Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The Villehuchets were so rich they lent money to Louis XIV; for such crimes many of them ended up on the wrong edge of the guillotine blade. Yet Rene-Thierry believed that the rich would forever get richer, and never pay.

Sisters and brothers, you are feeling a scintilla of schadenfreude, that slightly guilty pleasure in the misfortune of those who justly deserve it. Savor the emotion. The baby bankers throwing back $20 martinis in SoHo, the private-plane weekend commuters cluttering up Vermont’s woods with their 40,000-square-foot ski chalets, complaining all the while about their property taxes — these people’s needs and values have afflicted the rest of us long enough. Then crank your spite up to anger, a necessary ingredient of class struggle.

Not to worry, post-partisans. The U.S. isn’t on the verge of condemning Bill and Melinda Gates to the fate of the anciens Villehuchets. But when John McCain failed to convince voters that ending the Bush tax cuts would lead directly to Venezuelan-style communism, we may have witnessed Americans waking up to which side they are on. (Note to Joe the Plumber: I didn’t know Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, but I know you’re no Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet).

You’re a Wall Street investor? Me, too. Don’t let that confuse your loyalties. Your retirement fund is probably hovering in the high four figures. Sign a card, comrade. This year, we eat the rich.

Muddied green
If the rich, having faces, are not on your list of comestibles, you are in 2009’s avant-garde. Our food co-op is selling “artisan tofu.” Watch for the Gourmet Magazine feature on root vegetables.

But if designer rutabaga is the rage, its purveyors may be out of luck. Shoppers tell pollsters they are cutting back on organic veggies because of high prices. Magazine editors are deep-sixing their green issues. Hybrid-car sales are sluggish, while lower gas prices are boosting purchases of SUVs. Red (as in the deficit column) is shaping up to be the new green.

The lesson here is not that we should all build saunas, sit back and enjoy the Earth’s rising temperatures. It’s just that we can’t rely on consumer desire to save the oceans from boiling. Want gas-guzzlers off the road? Implement emissions standards that prohibit their manufacture. With climate-change experts and activists heading Obama’s new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that just might happen.

The White House heats up . . .
It won’t satisfy aficionados of extramarital fellatio and cigar play, but when Michelle puts on that red dress, Mama, somebody’s going dancin’ tonight. The Obamas bring some much-needed mojo back to a household that has gone frumpy and depressed. And for America’s growing girls and boys, the First Woman is living proof that smart, strong and serious can be sassy and sexy, too. Abstinence only, RIP?

. . . and sells out
So Rick Warren, the “purpose-driven,” anti-gay pastor of California’s Saddleback megachurch, has been chosen to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Is this trip to the dark side our new leader’s idea of crossing the cultural aisle? Or is it truly his first political faux pas? We’ll know after January 20, when he either pulls his own don’t-ask-don’t-tell or puts his money where his mouth isn’t and appoints some pro-equality judges. The question is how long queers will lie still and be sacrificial lambs to excessive ecumenicalism — and what we will all do if Obama doesn’t come to his senses.

Racism redux
This Christmas, Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman sent committee members a little gift: a CD featuring “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin of “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” In it, Shanklin regales listeners with an impression of Al Sharpton and ridicules not only Obama but also Snoop Dogg and Louis Farrakhan. Another highlight of the CD: “The Star Spanglish Banner,” an anti-immigration tune that begins, “Jose can you see . . .” And you thought the GOP had loaded neo-fascism, along with its cheerleader Sarah Palin, on a plane back to the permafrost. Dream on. Politico.com makes a good case that the flap over the CD could help, rather than hurt, Saltsman’s chances.

The new neo-atheism
Pastor Rick is giving that invocation. We still have not one but two prayers at the inauguration, not to mention one at the start of every Congressional day. The Washington National Cathedral, though it receives no government funding, is the congressionally designated “national house of prayer.” Conservative Christianity still exerts a deep influence on the politics of this purportedly secular nation. (Read Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant book The Family and shudder to learn how deep it is.) Still, there are signs that God may be taking a back pew in Washington. Obama has promised to nix the global gag rule, which prohibits reproductive-health providers in U.S.-aid-receiving countries from mentioning abortion to their clients. I’ve lost track of the number of times the word science has been spoken around Capitol Hill lately, uncoupled from its longtime companion, creation.

Prozac nation
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, won’t be out until 2012. But this year the controversy will keep heating up over whether the bible of psychological disorders (and guidebook for insurance-claim arbiters) should include Apathy Disorder, Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder, Internet Addiction and a host of other dubious diagnoses. These days, new psychological illnesses are almost invariably “discovered” by pharmaceutical companies that just happen to have devised drugs to treat them. The plot thickens when you learn (as the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported last May) that more than half of the new members of the DSM-V writing group have ties to Big Pharma. As the manual gets fatter, and more former human discomforts are enshrined as disorders, there will be fewer of us who are not certifiable — that is, certifiable consumers of psychotropic drugs.

Revenge of the nerds
First, the improbable happened: Republican pundits defected when McCain chose a dimwit as his running mate. Then the unimaginable: A candidate was elected not despite but because of his gift for uttering elegant sentences describing subtle and informed thoughts. Then that glimmer of possibility became reality in a Cabinet composed almost entirely of class valedictorians. Could the intellectual be making a comeback? Book sales are down, it is true, but publishers may be shedding mostly those customers who buy books (especially books by the likes of Tina Fey and Jamie Lee Curtis) and don’t actually read them. Call it the audacity of hope, but I’m putting my money on a brand-new product line that will pull the publishing industry out of the ditch: books for readers, written by authors.

Mission accomplished
Reports from Iraq tell us the courts are travesties of justice and the prisons are torture chambers; freedom of speech and the press are nonexistent (the journalist who threw his shoe at Bush was allegedly beaten brutally and faces seven years in prison); and women are in purdah. In other words, the U.S. “liberation” of Iraq has produced . . . Dick Cheney’s “democracy.” Next year in Afghanistan!

This piece appeared originally in Seven Days.

The Palin family played their supporting roles with touching amateur humility, as stunned and pleased as the new American Idols they are (abstinence-only graduate Bristol and shotgun fiancé Levi Johnston also looked stunned, though probably for different reasons). Baby Trig slept in the arms of Cindy McCain, seated beside First Dude Todd. Her embalmed face provided a sort of bluescreen against which he glowed with working-class virility.

Halfway through the address, Palin uttered the words “Saudi Arabia” and “Venezuela,” which apparently put to rest all qualms about her foreign-policy credentials. As one delegate told The Christian Science Monitor, “I feel like she’s the type who would get in there and figure it out.”

Early polls had the speech bumping McCain’s “definite” voters up by double digits across party and gender.

Palin may have mentioned Venezuela, but her brand is an enduring one, reliable for selling everything from oil-guzzling pickup trucks to oatmeal cookies: rural, small-town America. But it is the unspoken backstory, at least as Palin and the Republican Party subtly tell it, that gives the brand its power. Much of the rural South is black and the rural Southwest brown, and it is the rare small town without its Asian residents. But “country” reads red, white and blue — with the emphasis on white.

Sarah Palin’s twangy voice sang the country-music lyrics: this “gal” and those “good ol’ boys” and — my favorite — “snow machine,” which any self-respecting Vermonter knows is the correct term for what city folk refer to as a snowmobile.

But behind the rhetorical banjo pickin’, both Palin and her warm-up act, Rudy Giuliani, tuned in to another channel and let it play faintly in the background: a DJ turning Soulja Boy, perhaps with a little Beethoven mixed in. Barack’s music: urban, brainy and, of course, black.

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity,” Palin quoted “a writer” praising President Harry Truman. Is it the paranoia of a born-and-bred city girl that infers another message: that our big cities grow bad people — duplicitous, cynical and immodest?

Rudy started the scary-city talk by evoking the young Obama cutting his teeth on “Chicago machine politics.” The former prosecutor and mayor cut his own teeth on New York Republican machine politics — and, needless to say, the guy’s got negative backcountry cred. But Rudy could distance his own urban-ness from that of the Democratic candidate. With the Chicago reference he implied entrenched corruption — but also, silently, entrenched black power.

The next bugaboo that crept onstage was the Intellectual, a.k.a. the Elitist. “Washington elite” (would that be her running mate?), spat Palin, the words coated in venom. That bitterness was matched only by her disdain for “reporters and commentators,” those pointy-headed piss-ants crawling over Alaska for clues — how dare they! — about who the vice-presidential candidate is. Rudy, who gargles venom every morning, dipped “Ivy League education” and “cosmopolitan” in poison, too.

And then there was the ridicule Rudy and Sarah heaped on Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Giuliani could barely say the words without dissolving in hilarity. I don’t know about you, but the term “community organizer” brings to mind an image of a black or brown person shaking her fist before an audience on folding chairs in a public housing common room — or, in Rudy’s case, thousands of them, outside City Hall. The former mayor’s laughter was a kind of esprit de l’escalier, a riposte to the organizers and the enraged masses they brought to the streets each time — and there were numerous times — his police department gunned down another unarmed person of color. Now he was talking to “his” people, and his relief came out in irrepressible glee.

Yes, the convention committee had scoured the continent for an African-American Republican to read the Pledge of Allegiance. Yes, Sarah Palin is married to a man who is part Yup’ik Eskimo. But the convention floor looked like a vast suburban country club circa 1956: Ninety-three percent of the delegates were white, with 5 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. (Among the Democrats in Denver, 65 percent were white, 23 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic.)

While reviving the near-dead culture wars with Sarah Palin’s candidacy, the GOP was also bringing back a tactical chestnut: appealing to the whiteness, and racism, of its core.

It just might work. And then, it might not. Because that attack on community organizers also struck me as the one tone-deaf note in an otherwise pitch-perfect performance. Beyond racism, it revealed the true Republican heart — a heart that is hard to the plight, and dismissive of the collective power, of regular people.

The comment may also expose the party’s Achilles’ heel. Indeed, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe went right for it in an email to supporters the night of Palin’s speech. He referred to the speakers’ mockery of “Barack’s experience . . . on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.” Then Plouffe said: “Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.”

The community organizer provides a neat metonym of all the Republican Party is antagonistic to. Community has no place in a nation whose only recognized institutions are the family, the corporation and the military. To a party (including John McCain) that cedes unprecedented power to the executive branch and trusts the chief executive officer more than the democratically elected government official, popular organizing is an annoyance, or a threat.

“Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek,” Plouffe continued, reeling off a few of the GOP’s chief victims. “And it’s happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.” Including, one might add, the church basements from which sprang the evangelist Sarah Palin, and where a community of anti-choice, creationist, library-book-censoring sisters and brothers will soon be trying to phone-bank her to the White House.

In Vermont, we know the reality of small-town life. With all its virtues, it is not always honest, sincere or dignified. It can be violent, especially if you are queer or black or come from a trailer park. Small-town government can be petty and self-serving, as was Palin’s Wasilla, Alaska, administration, according to some locals (see www.andrys.com/palin-kilkenny.html).

We also know that small towns and rural landscapes are disappearing, thanks in part to Republican policies, from Big Agriculture-favoring farm policy to free-market favors to sprawl-creating development. If you live in Alaska and your beaches are black with spilled oil or your village is stranded by melted ice, the destruction is dramatic (though not plain, it seems: The Alaskans were yelling loudest when the delegates burst out chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”).

The country song is as much a eulogy to rural life as a celebration of it. Some lyrics explicitly lament the losses. Those are not the ones Bush-Cheney speechwriter Matthew Scully scripted for Sarah Palin.

Yet, if elected, Palin’s party will make its future ballads even sadder — both for the folks it exalts and the ones it demonizes. The sour notes lie deep in the folksy, feisty melody. And the beauty queen’s smile cannot hide the Barracuda’s white teeth.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

I speak, of course, of politics and of politicians, mortals of whom we expect sin yet demand innocence; people who, being mortals, rarely live down to our expectations or up to our demands.

Start with the obvious: According to a survey reported in USA Today last week, 87 percent of Americans believe in the existence of sin. Transgressive sex tops the list of no-nos, with 81 percent checking the box next to adultery, and 56, 52 and 50 percent, respectively, coming down on abortion, homosexual behavior and the use of pornography. A majority also cites cheating on your taxes as sinful. From which we may conclude that America is a nation of hypocrites, self-justifiers and wishful thinkers.

Still, in an era when church and state tryst as promiscuously as former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer did with his platinum-card call girls, keeping a halo affixed about the head is a requisite of public service. Thus, post-Spitzergate, a compulsory political ritual has been born: the pre-inaugural, preemptive moral cleansing, a sort of baptism, like the one staged by Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson. Upon taking the oath of office, Paterson announced that he too had strayed from his marital vows — though he was quick to point out that he hadn’t paid for his pleasures or spent campaign or public funds on the hotel bills.

The commentariat chalked up Paterson’s speedy acquittal in the court of public opinion to the fact that he’s a nice guy, unlike the prickly and publicly prudish Spitzer. But I think something else saved Paterson: the pitch-perfect religio-political hymn he sang at the podium, a story that located his erotic wanderings within the realm of marriage and family. Sex at Upper Manhattan’s Days Inn was not hungry, kinky or anonymous. No, Paterson’s couplings were emotional, mobilized by the hurt and anger of strained monogamous commitment. But hard work — counseling — led to reconciliation. The family was reunited. Amen!

The story gained an aura of almost harmonious domesticity when Paterson’s wife, Michelle, confessed her own dalliances. “Like most marriages, you go through certain difficult periods,” she told the press. “What’s important is for your kids to see you worked them out.”

So there you had it: a 21st-century, family-friendly Easter passion, replete with sacrilized love and worldly rejection, doubt and confession, death and rebirth — all that plus a refreshing splash, thanks to Michelle, of reality.

As if that weren’t enough, Paterson added romance to the tale. “We were very much in love with each other when we got married,” he said. “We’re very much in love with each other now.” That marriage is about erotic love first and last — and not (to name a few) property, children, ambition, shared values or domestic comfort — is part of the fable we tell ourselves, and the reason we’re amazed anew each time a public spouse stays with an unfaithful partner. (Actually, most marriages don’t break up after an infidelity.)

Americans, unlike virtually everyone else in the world, require that any saga of lust trumping monogamy feature a sinner and an innocent — or, in the secular legal language with which America expresses its religious convictions, a perpetrator and a victim. So the popular takeaway message of the Spitzer scandal (buttressed by the rap sheets of Clinton, Craig, McGreevy, Vitter, Hart and every other philanderer back to Henry VIII) is this: Men are dogs (I Googled the phrase and got 1820 hits in the last month) and women are their victims; angels.

Men are dogs, the logic continues, because men want sex, whereas women are angels because women want love. Mr. Nice Guy Paterson reminded us that men also want love. But nobody, least of all Michelle, could allow that women sometimes just want to fuck.

Still, in these last weeks, a good victim has been hard to find.

Not just Michelle Paterson, but Silda Spitzer, too, has failed to fit the bill. Rumor has it that the Spitzers had a sexy marriage. The papers reported that she urged Elliot to fight back when the charges first emerged. How do we know she didn’t know about his pecadillos? Sure, she looked stunned at that podium — but I’d put money on her rejection of the New York Post’s advice: “Steamroll this Lousy Bum, Silda.”

She probably isn’t going to listen to Dina Matos McGreevey, either. The former wife of New Jersey Governor James “I am a gay American” McGreevy (a.k.a. the “Love Gov”) proffered sisterly solidarity along with a plug for her own pathographic memoir, Silent Partner, in every available media outlet.

But Dina’s bona fides as a victim started crumbling almost immediately. Into the scrum one Theodore Pedersen, a fresh-faced aide to the former governor, dropped the Molotov cocktail that he and the McGreevys had enjoyed regular threesomes — “Friday Night Specials,” they allegedly called them. Pedersen told the Star-Ledger he spoke up because he found it “offensive” to watch Dina “playing the victim. She’s trying to make this a payday for herself.” In a huff, he added, “I was her Silent Partner.” No fury like a boy toy scorned.

As for Spitzer’s erstwhile consort, “Kristin,” at $1000 per hour, it was a stretch even for anti-porn crusader Melissa Farley to call her a victim (though she managed). By the end of the week, the aspiring singer whose stage name is Ashley Alexandra Dupré had logged $250,000 worth of downloads of her song “What We Want” and heard it played on Z-100 radio. There is no bad publicity, and now that we’ve seen Paris (Hilton), no better publicity than a little e-peddled pussy.

In short, it’s been a tough couple of weeks for anyone insisting that life divides into two impervious categories, sin and innocence.

The biggest challenge to this duality, though, did not involve sex. It was about race: Barack Obama’s address, “A More Perfect Union,” delivered March 18. The speech started out to staunch the hysteria stirred by videos of Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, denouncing white racism. Then it became much more: Some are calling it the most straightforward discussion of race in American presidential history (which doesn’t say much for American presidential history).

For those who haven’t heard or read the whole thing — and I urge you to do so — Obama basically said that racism is real, that the legacy of slavery is far from played out, and that African-Americans aren’t making this stuff up. He acknowledged why some white people are resentful: They feel they’re paying, through affirmative action or school busing, to redress a historic crime they did not personally commit.

Then, gently, Obama let no one off the hook. Reprising his campaign theme, he exhorted all Americans to look beyond racial division and suspicion, and to work together to better this imperfect union. I admit it made me cry.

The next day, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, George W. Bush took the stage to defend the invasion and extol the wisdom of staying on indefinitely. He rehearsed the old arguments: The terrorists are evil — they “kill the innocent.” America is good, freedom-loving. Georgie looked distracted. During the 17-minute address, he frequently glanced to the side, as if to ask his handlers, “Can I be excused now?” He ended his remarks with the usual, “May God bless America.”

It was then that I realized what was so encouraging about Obama’s address. Not the forthright statement, apparently news to some white folks, that America is not innocent of racism. Not even the vision that we can get beyond racism. Rather, in a speech about the “sin of slavery” — and slavery is one institution that unambiguously deserves to be called sinful — he told us that sin and innocence, perpetrator and victim, are no longer sufficient political categories. Not symbolically, not socially, and not strategically.

In a speech both criticizing and defending a Christian “spiritual adviser” slimed not for his religiosity but for his insufficient patriotism, Obama rejected the Christian moral certainties that have dominated American political discourse and policy for a quarter-century. This devout Christian son of an agnostic and a Muslim spoke up for ambiguity, for honesty, and for facing complexity. In so doing, he moved us one badly needed step toward secular revival.

Barack did that for race — no mean task. Now, if he could only give a speech about sex.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.