That’s the title of a great song by my old pal Steve Yerkey, about the night Hank Williams died. Legend has it Hank’s driver kept going even after the singer had OD’d in the back seat of the limo: he was too scared to stop, even as Hank finally achieved satori:

In a Pure filling station
On a New Year’s Day
In a car that needed gasoline
He found the only peace of mind
He would ever enjoy
In a place he’d never ever seen

(The Blasters had their own take on this evening, called “Long White Cadillac”. Compare and contrast.) I thought of Steve’s song after Hillary’s victory in West Virginia the other night. I had been flying across the country, watching the results on CNN, at least with one eye (the other was trained on an old David Lodge novel and the Pistons closing the door on the Magic). Except here Hillary is both dead star and driver, the engine of her own self-deception. She is trying to rally superdelegates in the party, essentially arguing at this point that a lot of working class white voters not only like her better, they’re a little bit racist to boot. But the hard-hearted Dems can’t seem to rally around a campaign whose motto could well be “White Like You.”

And then along comes John Edwards, stealing what little thunder she had from her win by finally endorsing Obama. What took him so long? The guy got seven percent of the vote in WV, just for being on the ballot; do you think Obama would have had quite the shellacking he did if Edwards had endorsed him sooner? If the vote had been a little less lopsided in that state, I guarantee that there would have been less tongue-wagging about his disconnect with white voters.

Not that I think there is anything wrong with Hillary raising the alarm. It’s clear that Obama is going to need every arrow in his quiver to defeat McCain, and paying attention to Hillary’s base is something he can start doing today. Wear the damn flag pin, shoot some pool, have yourself another hush puppy. While racism is alive and well in the hollows of WV (and south Boston, and Staten Island, and countless other communities across the country), I think the GOP is going to need more than “He’s black, and his church is scary!” to steal this election. (It’s going to be increasingly difficult to say his church is scary AND he is actually a Muslim; at some point Republicans will have to choose a line of attack and disinformation and stick with it.) The big news yesterday concerned the Dems big win in Mississippi. This was supposed to be the playbook for ’08: link candidate to Obama and Rev. Wright then sit back and watch him self-immolate. Except it didn’t work. The Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, won among the same kind of rural white voters who turned away from Obama in WV, good old boys (and gals) with one or two sheets in the closet. It was the Republicans’ third defeat in a special election this year, and they are now running for cover. But there’s no hiding place down here.

According to an article in Newsweek, Oprah Winfrey had been a member of Chicago’s Trinity United church until the mid-nineties — when she stopped attending services there, in part because of the inflammatory rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “Winfrey was never that comfortable with the tone of Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite talk-show host,” writes Alison Samuels in the May 12 issue, and then quotes an old friend of Winfrey’s: “Oprah is a businesswoman first and foremost… She has always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn’t be smart.”

It’s interesting that long before Barack Obama knew he would be running for national office, Oprah already knew she was running for whatever weird sister-confessor role she has held for decades — and she knew she could never stop running. I still think Obama and his people were naive not to think that Wright would come back to haunt the candidate but his victory in North Carolina and near victory in Indiana would seem to indicate that this isn’t the controversy that’s going to sink him. Even Newt Gingrich warned Republicans that they were going to need something better than the scary pastor in the closet to beat the Democratic candidate in November. Willie Horton won’t spook no more.

I guess I should say presumptive Democratic nominee, since Hillary is now engaged on the last, and possibly strangest, phase of her campaign: the dance macabre. It reminds me of a Randy Newman song: she’s dead but she don’t know it. Or maybe she does, since every pundit and pollster pretty much pronounced her such after she failed to deal a mortal blow to Obama. But after weeks of having meat tenderizer poured on him because of his relationship to Wright, she is the one with the fork being put in her. Watch for her surrogates and winged monkeys to continue to talk up her historic candidacy and the importance of every vote but did you catch Bill’s expression while she was delivering her victory speech in Indiana? When he wasn’t smiling and clapping with the crowd he appeared to be hearing a song of his own, over the hill and very far away…

It must be hard to live your whole life as if you are running for something when you’re not sure what it is; Oprah wanted to be queen of America and damned if she isn’t. Hillary wanted to be president but it’s unlikely she’s going to get another shot. And after that, every other job title just sounds kind of weak. Maybe she can take up preaching.

We put our house — well, one floor of it — on the Fort Greene House tour this year to show off some of the progress we’ve slowly been making remodeling the old brownstone, room by room. It’s a great excuse to do some spring cleaning and buy some new geegaws that we otherwise might not have. (After all, we’ve been talking about replacing the lighting fixture over the front door for almost nine years. Now we finally did it.) It’s also a great excuse to get out of the house, unless your idea of a good time is talking to strangers about marble countertops.

Fortunately, it was beautiful afternoon — the wisteria was in full bloom, the birds were on the wing — so I went into a darkened theater to see a new production of Beckett’s Endgame at BAM, conveniently located a few blocks from our house. John Turturro plays the part of Hamm, the old man in the wheelchair who is cared for by his servant and surrogate son, Clov (Max Casella). Hamm’s father figure, Nagg (Alvin Epstein) — whom he addresses as “progenitor” and “fornicator” at various times — and mother manque, Nell (Elaine Stritch) live near at hand, in separate garbage cans. (Was this the inspiration for Oscar the Grouch?)

I probably read Endgame the first time in high school, and have seen several productions of it since then. It’s one of those plays that makes more sense, and gets funnier, as I get older — which could be said of Beckett in general. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell says, “I’ll grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.”

I also needed to get away from the presidential primaries for the day. Everyone I met as I rambled through other people’s homes on the house tour was an Obama supporter (they were responding to my button) which was no surprise: multiracial and regenerative, Fort Greene is Obama country. And they, like me, were experiencing some anxiety about the state of things. HIllary’s Terminator-like tenaciousness and the tightening poll-numbers in Indiana and North Carolina are not making us question our faith (read the cover story in this month’s Vanity Fair, about RFK’s presidential run if you want to be reminded of the power of hope) or doubt the inevitability of his candidacy. But even as he brushes the dirt off his shoulder we want to go on. We still find it funny but we don’t laugh anymore.

I saw a bit of Hillary in Hamm: his parents die, his surrogate son abandons him (or tries to, endlessly) and he yammers on, seemingly for his own amusement. “Me to play,” are his first words, like those of a child, and the desire to put everyone through their paces — promising sugar plums that no longer exist –keeps the absurd comedy in motion. “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy,” he tells Clov, in hopes of keeping the disillusioned servant in his thrall. But the manchild has packed his bags. “Me to play,” he repeats to himself and then, wearily: “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.”

This is a play whose ends are in its beginnings, as the characters keep reminding us, and Clov’s first lines, spoken to the audience, are “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” I’d like to say it could end on Tuesday but some nightmares it seems you just can’t wake up from. “You’re on earth,” as Hamm likes to say, “there’s no cure for that.”

There’s definitely something mythical, if not Biblical, about Obama’s repudiation of Jeremiah Wright. The word “jeremiad,” which the OED describes as “a complaining tirade,” comes from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament; he was a prophet who kvetched before there was a Yiddish word for it. Wright’s arguments, advanced tirelessly between Friday and Monday, were not with the Lord but the world — particularly the political world his most famous former flock member inhabits.

A few pundits have already labeled this Obama’s Sister Souljah moment, — but the black activist Bill Clinton condemned before the Rainbow Coalition back in 1992 was nothing to him. She was just a way of making a point: that he wasn’t beholden to “the black community.” Wright was Obama’s pastor for 20 years –he married him and baptized his children — and in breaking with him, he breaks with one of his spiritual fathers. As Maureen Dowd noted in her column today, “The Illinois senator doesn’t pay attention to the mythic nature of campaigns, but if he did, he would recognize the narrative of the classic hero myth: The young hero ventures out on an adventure to seek a golden fleece or an Oval Office; he has to kill monsters and face hurdles before he returns home, knocks off his father and assumes the throne.”

I found myself thinking about Falstaff, whom Henry IV rejects in Part II of Shakespeare’s bio-plays. (It’s been said that only men appreciate the drunken, lecherous Falstaff — a character in a Richard Ford novel says he’s like the Three Stooges in that regard — but legend has it that Queen Elizabeth was so taken with the old rogue that she ordered Shakespeare to bring him back, as he did in the Merry Wives of Windsor.) The old scalawag taught the young Hal plenty about the ways of the world (and how to have a good time) before he was headed for the throne. But by the time the king confronts the corrupt courtier and his posse at the end of Part II, the thrill is gone:

How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester!
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane,
But being awake, I do despise my dream.

Not that Wright is obese (“surfeit-swelled”) or even a fool and a jester…much. Though watching the replays of some of his remarks, especially the Q&A period of his speech before the National Press Club, I wanted to yell, “Stop clowning!” The stakes are too high; this isn’t about you but the whole country. And if this is but part of our hero’s journey, it’s the part where he begins to cut away the obstacles from his past that would weigh him down. As King Henry says to his former mentor,

Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away my former self,
So will I those that kept me company.

Too bad Hillary can’t brush off Bill like that! Now there’s a man who’s been in touch with his inner Falstaff…

For anyone who might have thought, “I wish I knew more about what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright really thinks about our country,” the last three days have provided an embarrassment of riches. Wright has been MIA since an edited version of some of his sermons rocked Obama’s campaign last month but he returned with a vengeance on Friday, appearing on Bill Moyers’ show for a fairly decorous (and heavily edited) return to the public eye. Then last night he spoke to the NAACP convention in Detroit in manner more familiar to those who have seen more of his sermons than the snippets from the infamous YouTube tape. Then this morning came the piece de resistance, a speech (picked up by all the cable news networks) to the National Press Club that was more secular (and sarcastic) than either previous performance — followed by a Q&A period in which all hell broke loose again. 

Asked about his comments comparing the terrorist attacks of 9.11 to “America’s chickens coming home to roost” (an echo of Malcolm X’s response to the assassination of JFK), he said, “You cannot do terrorism on other people and not expect it to come back on you.” And questioned about his patriotism he replied, “I served six years in the military, does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?”

Over at Fox News the Pepsodent twins they have hosting the morning news were beside themselves with glee, poring over their notebooks, as excited as kids who just got a pony for Christmas. Rather than rip into Wright themselves (they like to leave the heavy hitting to the show’s evening stars, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity), they let the initial condemnation be voiced by one of the network’s house Negroes, Juan Williams, who clucked in predictable fashion over the reverend’s failure to disavow his own beliefs. At CNN, on the other hand, the reaction was slightly more tempered. Wright’s speech was listed at the top of the hour (9 am EST) as one of three major stories breaking (fires in California and the man who kept his incestuous family in an underground apartment being the other two), and their morning crew (again, not the sharpest knives in the network’s drawer) turned the damage estimation over to CNN commentators Roland Martin and David Gergen. Gergen, a political gun-for-hire, predicted bad things for Obama while the more Barack-friendly Martin (who had covered the Detroit speech the night before with Soledad O’Brien, the two of them dressed in matching dashikis) said it was the senator’s challenge to distance himself from his former pastor. “He needs to remind people, ‘I am the one running for president.'”

True dat. But even those who might be leaning Obama’s way are going to wonder, who brought this guy to the party? Personally, I find Wright a dynamic and compelling speaker. The best thing about Moyers’ show were the longer clips from the infamous sermons that put his controversial remarks in context, and it would be worth looking at the tape to get the full story. And having been to a few African-American churches, and heard a few preachers who come from the same tradition, I got some of the street-based humor and calculated outrageousness that stitched together his speeches last night and this morning. (He said Jesus was “playing the dozens” when he called His enemies a “brood of vipers.”)

But most voters don’t want the full story, as previous elections have proven time and again, and most white Americans don’t know from the African-American church tradition — sing-song hyperbole, passion and playfulness all mixed up — and don’t want to. The campaign can console itself with knowing that Wright rejected Obama for rejecting (if not disowning) him and promised that if he were elected, he would give him a hard time, too. 

Right now, that looks like a big if. The success of Obama’s campaign going forward will depend on how he handles the questions about Wright, something he feels like he has already done with his speech on race in Philadelphia this month. But just as Wright tried to win back his own story — his life, his dignity — by setting out to speak for himself instead of having his identity nibbled to death by sound bites, so Obama must now try and set his record straight. Tell the voters of Indiana and North Carolina, if not the nation at large, where he differs from his former pastor, and why. He no longer has the luxury of following the advice Wright says he got from his mother: “Better to be quiet and let other people think you a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.”