I want to detour from a subject I will continue to examine in coming weeks – the history, and supposed inevitability, of war – and focus, apropos of the coming primary election, on Presidential politics.
I understand there are Americans who feel passionately about one or more of the candidates – I mean, passionately in a way that doesn’t involve vomiting or moving to Sweden. I know these people exist; I hear them cheering every time Barack Obama says, “Yes we can,” or Hillary cries, or Rudy G. introduces his Vice-Presidential candidate, September 11th.
I know there are Americans who believe what these actors, these advertising logos come to life are telling us, who have a hope that one of these individuals will do what no politician has ever done – keep promises, deliver the goods, represent the interests of the majority, lead the country to a new day.
Or perhaps no one believes that. Perhaps some simply think it’s exciting that their cardboard cut-out might win the horserace. Either way, I know there are Americans who have their hopes pinned on one of these charmers and are excited about the election. I know these people are out there, it’s just that I don’t know any of them. Everyone I know is more or less apathetic, more or less cynical, more or less resigned to more or less of the same. No one I know is a believer.
Before you ask: Yes, I am voting. And, no, you’ve never heard of him (or her – I haven’t decided yet).
In other words: I don’t vote Democrat, and I don’t vote Republican. In other words, I don’t vote status quo.
I couldn’t help laughing (and almost cried, too) listening to Ted Kennedy exuberantly froth that “Change is in the air!” to a cheering crowd of liberals, some too young to remember the 1960’s, or Jimmy Carter, or even Bill Clinton’s salad days, and others too old.
In other words: They are not only willing, but apparently excited, about settling for the same old Democratic policies (I won’t say ideas; that would be too kind) and calling them “change”.
History did not begin in 2001. This is something that Bush, screaming for more Arab blood (or Persian – same thing, right?), and Bush haters, longing for good old days that never were, seem to forget.
We weren’t ruthlessly, horribly, and wrongly attacked “because we are free;” the world didn’t really change all that much on September 11, 2001; it wasn’t a surprise attack out of nowhere. We were immorally, brutally, unjustifiably attacked because of our political policies. Republicans and centrist Democrats take heed: We have been at war with the world since our inception. What happened in my hometown 76 months ago was miniscule – yes, miniscule – compared to what the people of Dresden and London, Vietnam and Iraq, Cherokee and Tuba City have gone through. We got a taste of what much of humanity takes for granted.
Did I mention it was wrong, and horrible?
And you Bush-bashers, for whom I have sympathy but am losing patience: Bush is nothing. Bush is a pimple on the butt of a falling empire. He is a symptom, not a cause. Militant capitalism was here before him and, by all current evidence, will be here long after. He is only its latest cheerleader, one of its uglier ringmasters. He is not the cause of our problems, and his impeachment – while undoubtedly justifiable and, I think, a necessary gesture towards restoring our beautiful Constitutional system, ravaged as it has been by decades of neglect and abuse – will not solve those problems, nor will the election of a charismatic moderate, no matter the gender or “race”, who would be better labeled “technocrat” than Democrat.
We are hiring managers, not leaders, not reformers, and certainly not what we really need – a destroyer.
No, Americans place far too much value on being comfortable, and keeping up appearances, and we do not (yet, apparently) have the stomach for the really radical change required if our free society is to survive the next century. And I’m not talking about social security, or about napalming Tehran, or building a wall along the entire Rio Grande. I’m talking about something much more fundamental, and that is:
Giving power to people instead of corporations, and making policies based on the needs of the working majority, instead of the investing minority.
In other words: Capital runs the country whether or not we elect a Democrat to preside over it. Until that changes, nothing will. Until each person’s voice is equal to each other person’s voice, and not made louder by wealth, we do not have democracy, but oligarchy. And when oligarchy is maintained (as I suppose it always is) by lying and by force, it is more honestly called piracy.
The pirates are clever. They’ve got their good-cop / bad-cop routine down to a science. You’d almost think they hate each other, almost believe that there are fundamental differences in their worldviews.
Kennedy put an end to Eisenhower’s Republican rule. Then, instead of country-club business elites running the nation, we had… um… country-club business elites and also a few historians running the country. I simplify here; certainly, Kennedy’s ideas about the role of government differed slightly from Ike’s, and he understood youth discontent where the old general did not. But Eisenhower wasn’t the symbol of 1950’s conformity we liberals have come to know and laugh at; he sent the National Guard to Little Rock, and in his farewell speech offered a warning and advice we have not only failed to heed, but have, whether by design or destiny, done everything we could to contradict. Instead of guarding against the “influence of the military-industrial complex,” we have turned over the country – factories, legislative lobbies, hearts, minds and all – to that most insidious of institutions. But Ike, of all people, warned us.
And yet, that complex ruled even in his day, and rules now with no competition, no significant opposition. Was Kennedy shot because he opposed it? Maybe (The House of Representatives thought so); if so, the military-industrial complex and its keepers abide absolutely no dissent from their propagandists-in-chief; Kennedy was a tried and true cold warrior, totally committed to the arms race (we didn’t go to the moon for the golf or the vistas, pal, though impressing the ladies was perhaps on Jack’s agenda), and not at all interested in extending democracy to Southeast Asia; when our man Diem lost an election to Ho Chi Minh, Diem was murdered and in came the Marines. Yet, his squeamishness about a second attempt at invading Cuba, and his reticence about full escalation in Vietnam, was not well received by the old guard. If that’s enough to get a president killed, we are dealing with nothing less than fascism.
But even if Kennedy was killed by a lone madman, the thesis stands: The state belongs to private interests, and they will stop at nothing. Kennedy was not the savior of liberalism, and Eisenhower wasn’t the embodiment of all things dull and reactionary. The truth is, they both represented the essential centrism of the American ruling class that got them elected.
I realize this is a simplified history, but so is everything on FoxNews and, (are you sitting down?) CNN and the NY Times front page. I realize I am painting with a broad brush; who doesn’t these days? I imagine I won’t convince anyone to change their political party or start voting Green with these few paragraphs; after all, I’m up against a lifetime of indoctrination by television, public schools, churches, textbooks, and politicians; you’d be a moron to believe me without a bit more thoroughness here. But I want to make it clear: there are alternative explanations for American hegemony ; one needn’t accept the Manifest Destiny 3.0 version of modern history and then simply be left to decide whether we should rule mostly by carrot (Democratic party) or stick (the other one). There are those who believe, based on the evidence presented to us, that this nation was long ago hijacked by pirates – and, tragically, that this hijacking occurred just as the People, finally, all of them, were beginning to be heard.
We also see clearly that neither party cares to do anything about it, and is not capable of it anyway, funded as they are by the very interests we must throw off. These interests are the interests of capital, which, being fundamentally unjust and anti-democratic, require their representatives (who are supposed to be our representatives) to lie, cheat, steal and, sometimes, brutalize and murder. Otherwise, the working people just wouldn’t take it.
That’s the bottom line. No government welfare program is going to save us from the inescapable inequalities of capitalism. No Democrat is going to buck the Godfathers who fund political campaigns and own the media. For all the moralism the GOP preaches, no Republican is going to allow the marketplace to value anything but its own perpetuation and profit; Jesus may save, but he also most definitely shops.
When Americans understand this, we have a chance to be free. Until then, we can choose between Kennedy clones with their sweet carrots of vague hope, and Ike look-alikes with their bitter sticks of realism and conformity: Barrack Obama with his inspiring, insipid rhetoric, and Mitt Romney with his slick, glib, whitebread Protestantism; or Hillary Clinton, the climax of baby-boomer aspirations for power, which required selling-out everything they wanted to be powerful for, and John McCain, the perfect Eisenhower torch-bearer, a war hero who is kind to immigrants, and whose principled positions on issues are trumped only by his principled allegiance to the President.
Among them, who will speak the truths no one wants to face? Who will tell our history of supporting dictators, from Hussein to the recently departed Suharto, who brutalized their subjects in defense of Western power and their own? Who will talk about the Federal Reserve and the complete control this private (yes, private) entity has over the global economy? Who will explain why Medicare is cut while subsidies to oil companies and McDonald’s continue increasing? Who will give us real plans for sustainability, rather than inept measures – vetted first by auto industry lackeys and utility company vampires – which amount to slowing down a crashing train? Who will stop the train, and turn it around?
Who will tell the truth about lobbyists, off-shore tax-breaks, cluster bombs, the war on drugs, extraordinary renditions, the 9-11 Commission, our relationship with Saudi Arabia, Central Asian pipelines, the Project for a New American Century, or countless other subjects that would reveal, if thoroughly examined, the true nature of American politics?
Despite their differences on a few wedge issues – abortion in particular keeps left-wingers tethered to Democrats – these candidates are really quite similar. They share core values and goals. We say this is what makes American great: we disagree, yet we share common values as Americans. Even Presidents as apparently divergent as Bill Clinton and George HW Bush can share a beer, go fishing, and head of to Burma to free monks from oppression. That’s why we’re “The Greatest”.
It sounds good. Having common values is terrific, right?
Well, it depends what the values are. And in the United States, politicians have consistently mouthed the values of most Americans – rule of law, compassion, justice, freedom, prosperity for all, equality, hard work, and majority rule are a few of the mainstays – and yet based their policies on other values entirely – power for the elite, social order above all, American hegemony, corporate profit, consumption, cheap labor, and new markets at any cost.
None of these technocrats has any answer; the don’t even ask the right questions.
And don’t we all know it? Isn’t any other suggestion naïve, or worse?
The Republicans believe in law and order, enforced about equally by preachers and police, keeping the world safe for capitalism. The Democrats, too, believe in law and order, made more pleasant by free gifts from the nanny state, also keeping the world safe for capitalism. And since we can’t decide which works better, we keep swinging to and fro, and each time we call it “change.”
Neither party is too fond of wildcat strikes, international progressive movements, or the Freedom of Information Act. They love wiretaps; for Republicans, however, such invasions of privacy require only the President’s blessing (Republicans are so trusting; it’s cute, isn’t it?); Democrats, being tireless warriors for liberty, require the approval of a secret court.
These are the extremes of the American political spectrum, separated by a few wedge issues, connected by an unspoken agreement that the wealthy shall do what they have done since Rome was built in 100 days by ten thousand slaves: They shall rule us.
But empires fall, and be patient: Rome wasn’t burned in a day either.
Maybe there is still time to save her. But we need to throw out the Caesars. We require a renaissance before the fall, not a half-millennium after it, a new enlightenment before the dark age can begin.
And we can’t count on these gentrified Senators to do it for us.
So vote, by all means, as will I. Just do not think our vote is the end of our duty; it is barely a beginning.