Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Dread I will indulge in one bout of pontification about the 2008 presidential election, and then shut up about it, at least until it's over. In one sense it could be said that I do not “follow politics.” It's true that I know who my senators and congressman are — not everyone does, strangely enough — although I'm not sure at this hour of the day that I can name my current state senator or member of the assembly. I can tick off the names of most if not all of the justices of the US Supreme Court (and tell you which ones, in my opinion, have no business being there), identify Duke Cunningham and Bernie Sanders and Barry Goldwater's running mate in the 1964 election (which I'm old enough to remember, vaguely). Still, I don't know who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, I haven't a clue who's chairing Barack Obama's campaign, or John McCain's, and I couldn't really tell you what the difference is between the responsibilities of the Secretary of the Treasury and those of the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. I don't watch television news or political talk shows or read political magazines except for The Nation and — to the limited extent that it belongs in that category — The New York Review of Books. I read two newspapers a day — The New York Times and a local paper — but I rarely spend more than twenty minutes or so on both of them combined. I follow two or three political blogs, but in most cases I just scan the postings there rapidly to get a sense of what's going on. With rare exceptions I don't follow the details of pending legislation or the incessant back and forth bloviation of the talking heads, commentators, blog trolls, pundits, spinmeisters, and their ilk with whom our Republic is so abundantly blessed. Some people are drawn to the political game the way other people follow sports. They're fascinated by the rivalries, the machinations, the polling, the endless fundraising without which the whole thing crashes down. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but I'm not one of those people — it's just isn't my idea of a fun hobby. In one sense, however, I am a deeply political person, because I believe that there really is a signal under all the noise, that politics is actually about something, that at the end of the day it does matter who gets elected and what they do. Like it or not we are not autonomous monads but part of a society, one which is itself part of a global system of societies, inextricably interwoven, and to the extent that our choices influence how those societies function those choices influence how we and others live and how they die. We are, corporatively, directly responsible for the way society is organized, and by the same token we benefit or suffer from the state of that society. Politics is not something that exists only in the abstract, or that only concerns other people; it is — whether we choose to recognize it or not — one of the primary facts of our daily lives. Although I have strongly held political opinions, most of which place me well on the left on the American ideological spectrum, I am not a purist. I recognize that there are many kinds of corruption, both legal and illegal, and that no political system — certainly not our own — is free from the operation of greater or lesser degrees of vanity, self-interest, obstinacy, and pure stupidity. I don't expect politicians to be paragons of virtue. I do, however, expect them not to be outright thieves or ideological fanatics, and to at least include a concern for the common welfare as one of the factors they consider before they act as they do. All of which should be self-evident and uncontroversial, except that there is never any shortage of scoundrels, and, depressingly, never any shortage of apologists for their behavior. It's no secret that in the last few years, in this country, the scoundrels have pretty much had the upper hand. It's not just the Bush administration — our political culture has been in a sorry state for a long time — but the last seven years and counting have certainly been marked by outrages on an unprecedented scale against the expectation that the leaders of a democracy ought to abide by the rule of law, deal openly and honestly with the public, and not pursue partisan and personal advantage to the detriment of the welfare of those who have elected them. And by and large, people recognize that this has happened, and understand who is responsible. Which is why Bush's approval ratings hover, in polls, somewhere between one quarter and one third of those surveyed. (Congress's ratings are even lower — among both Republicans and Democrats — perhaps because after so many years of imperial presidency Americans are no longer sure what the function of Congress is, or even if it has one.) The unavoidable question, of course, is not why Bush's approval ratings are so low, but why they aren't lower still. It's clear that a hard core of Americans will never desert him, in spite of his offenses against the rule of law and international conventions, his arrogance, his incompetence, and his utter inability to string together a coherent English sentence. That same hard core will never vote for Barack Obama, whom they no doubt view as a crypto-Muslim or a Red or at the very least a threat to jealously guarded privileges that might be jeopardized by the advent of a marginally more equitable political and economic order. It's hard to understand why anyone who has seen Bush for what he is would even consider voting for John McCain, who is campaigning on a platform that promises, almost without exception, a point by point continuation — or exacerbation — of Bush's disastrous foreign and domestic policies. Why, then, are the national polls, which show Obama with a small lead or in a statistical deadlock with McCain, even close? Are Bush's numbers so bad in part because he's actually too liberal for the extreme right, who disapprove of him but are not likely to cross over and vote for Obama? Or are people really swallowing the utter shit being shoveled by the McCain campaign? Are we that stupid? Have we learned nothing in the last seven and a half years? In the end is it all just because Obama is, as he himself has put it, “a black man with a funny name”? I should tune out the polls entirely, along with the associated chatter about what the Obama campaign is supposedly doing wrong, but I know I can't do it. The next two and a half months are going to be hell. I console myself with the knowledge that electoral vote projections — as of this writing — seem to be clearly favoring Obama, and that a persuasive argument can be made that longterm demographic and electoral trends are working in his favor. But I can't shake the horrible feeling that this country is, once again, working overtime to find a reason not to do the right thing. [Happily, events proved my last sentence to be unduly apprehensive. — November 5, 2008] August 19, 2008 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me

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