I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime.
So here I am, at the edge of everything, ready to take a leap into moonbattery. Deep breath. Flex your knees. Roll your head this side to that, loosen your neck, free up your shoulders by swinging your arms back and forth. Spit in your palms and rub them together. Even though you’re not about to grab anything, it’s something to do, a sign and signifier of focussed intent. Step up to the edge. Grip it with your toes. Crouch a little, find your balance, careful. Easy. Feel that clutching tingle in your glutes. Savor the air, suddenly sharp in your nose. Your heart’s beating faster. Let it. Swallow. Okay: coil your muscles, arms back, ready to fling yourself over and out, take one more deep breath, hold it a moment, let half of it out, and—
There.
—Of course, I had to climb back up out of moonbattery to pose for that leap, and now I’ve made it, I’m not actually falling tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle into the outer darkness, shrieking oddly umlauted vowels, coughing up words with too many consonants: I’m maybe a foot away, still on the ground, hunkered over a little, dust puffing up from my feet where I landed. There was no edge. This isn’t moonbattery. It’s just a step or two away from where you are now. Maybe a little darker, but otherwise the same. We were warned, goddammit: it doesn’t take the pattern-skrying of a Teresa Nielsen Hayden or the fever-stoking of a Greg Palast to make it clear. We were told, up front. That nameless Bush aide cheerfully copped to it, in the Ron Suskind article linked ’round the world:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Well, Bev Harris is studying what they did. You want a barricade? (Or a levee, to sandbag?) That’s as good a place as any to start setting one up.
The election was rigged. They stole it. Last time, they cold-cocked us when we both found ourselves in a suddenly dark room with nobody looking; this time, we went in with a flashlight, but they’d slipped us a mickey, and that’s why our lips are numb and our mouth tastes like cold pennies as we stand here, ready to make our little leap: the election was rigged. George W. Bush still isn’t president. (Except in all the ways that actually matter.)
And I’d like to say leaving is a crock, all due respect to my favorite popstar notwithstanding. I’ve said it, actually: leaving is a crock. There’s too much left to fight for and too much left to fight with for us to go gently into exile. But I’ve said it as much to buck myself up as anything else: I repeat it to myself, trying to spit that taste out of my mouth, to convince myself it’s true. Leaving is a crock, yes, but more to the point: leaving is hard. —But I’ve read “Jesus Plus Nothing.” They’ve told us up front what they want. They’ve cheerfully copped to it. We’ve been warned. And here I stand in Little Beirut, the capital of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County: somehow alienated, somewise cut off; alone, despairing, so very, very sorry.
Leaving is hard. But is it really harder than fighting?
What comes next? I don’t know. Whither the left? Ha! I barely can tell you what I’ll be doing tomorrow, beyond following Bruce Baugh’s sage advice the best I can, and keeping a weather-eye out for galiel’s canaries to start dropping. But can I just for a minute jump on the “moral values”-bashing bandwagon? We don’t need to start preaching, and we don’t need preachers (though we need everyone we can get). We know our morals and we know what we stand for and we know we’re right. What we need here on the left side, the side of progress, the side that gets things done, the somewhat more purple side that keeps picking those somewhat more magenta states out of the gutter and loaning them a sawbuck till payday that we know we’ll never see again, what we need is, and bear with me on this, we need a Daddy. We need father-figures to go on all the TV chat shows and sternly and implacably stick up for our values as we know them and lay down the law as we would write it with an ineffable air of authority that reaches right past the frontal lobes and plugs into the monkey-brain, there to patiently bit-by-bit unwire the awful “moral values” meme bombs with Truth and Justice and the American fucking Way, and I realize this is the voters-are-rubes argument, which is seemingly at odds with the voters-was-robbed argument, and I’ve plumped for the voters-is-mean argument, too, and probably will again, but elections are legion; they contain multitudes, and I know this is about to decohere into gassy rhetoric, babble and fury, but hear me out: what we need now is Atticus Finch, ladies and gentlemen.
So, hey, let me end with a quote from Barry Goldwater, that seems to have fallen off Will Shetterly’s site:
Now, those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
Using their own words against them! That’ll show ’em!
Hope dies last.
I was going to kick up an old entry on the commemorative slang we all should be using to describe Republican Fuck Tha Vote initiatives, but who needs that shit? We’re in the last days, the die’s rattling in the cup, our toes are damp in the Rubicon, and be damned if it’s the same river it was last time. Joshua Micah Marshall has the only post you need to read from now until Tuesday. He’s quoting somebody working the polls in Florida:
My job is to get people to the polls and, more importantly, to keep them there. Because they’re crazily jammed. Crazily. No one expected this turnout. For me, it’s been a deeply humbling, deeply gratifying experience. At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa—a heavily democratic, 90% African American community—we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote).
Here’s what was so moving:
We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important.
And there were tons of first time voters. Tons.
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll see you on the other side.
November criminals.
The evidence is abundant that Kerry has no concept of unintended consequences. He has been protected from those all of his life. Nutured as he is in the ideas so dear to the Left, of victimology and irresponsibility, of class warfare and division, of “situation ethics”, nannystatism and “internationalism”, he is as ill prepared to deal with the results of his “policies” as he is to tell the truth… or even to know what truth is.
He’ll be sure to fuck it all up while remaining clueless, protesting his own innocence and blaming it all on Bush.
He simply must not be allowed to take office, no matter what the rigged results of the election may be. And we must not tolerate the kinds of post election shenanigans the dipocrats are planning.
It is our American tradition to tolerate the elction of those with whom we disagree. Gear up for the next election and try to reach some accomadation with the other side, for the good of the Nation. That has been or practice and our salvation. And we have been trying in naive good faith to accomodate the Left for most of a century, to our sorrow and peril. Most of the ills in our politics and in society generally can be ascribed to this alone.
This time, there will be nothing left of that Nation in which this was the way of peaceful and civil governance. If Kerry “wins”, it will be too late to save the Nation which showed the world the miracle of representative republican government. Our soveriegnty and our Constitution will be further demolished, our economy and military weakened, our enemies emboldened, our confidence and spirit disheartened and, most likey, we will suffer catastrophic physical attack on our own soil.
The combination of disasters ensured by a Kerry “victory” amounts to a national crisis that we simply cannot allow. In four more years, it will be far too late.
Posted by LC Jon , Imperial Hunter at October 28, 2004 11:32 PM
So yeah: one thing and another and it’s looking enough like our long national nightmare might actually be over on the third of November that I’m biting most of my down-to-the-wire nails over Measure 36.
But you know what happens when a nightmare’s over, don’t you?
You sit up, gasping, and then the alarm goes off, and you jump, and you hit the snooze button, and maybe you try to go back to sleep for another five minutes, but you can’t, so you finally get up and I hope you remember to turn off your alarm clock, or otherwise it’s going to go off while you’re in the shower and God that’s annoying, but however it ends up you make coffee in your bathrobe and if you’ve got some time you read the news, and then you go and you put on some pants and you put on a shirt and you get your jacket and your keys and your wallet and you go get on the bus and you ride downtown and you go to fucking work.
That’s what happens when a nightmare’s over.
Voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also just about the least important thing we can do, politically. —Butterfly effect aside, swapping the smirched and tarnished R on the White House for a magical golden D is just the barest beginning.
The company kept.
Kevin Drum is surprised by who turns up on Reason’s poll of prominent libertarians, and I suppose I am, too: any movement than can (avidly) count Wendy McElroy and Charles Murray as members is—oh, hell, one just doesn’t know what to say. —But at the same time, I’m not at all surprised: it’s the usual suspects who measure their liberties in tax cuts and care more about being right than trying to do right—and run the risk of fucking up. You all know these guys, if you’ll permit me a gross generalization: he’s in every comics shop and sci-fi club and weekly Dungeons & Dragons session—actually, let’s swap that out for Diplomacy, or maybe Starfleet Battles, or, yeah, Advanced Squad Leader. —There’s a certain social power that comes from digging into an argument and overwhelming the other side, and nothing fosters argument like making an abstruse, persnickety, anti-conventional choice, clasping it to your bosom, and defending it rigorously against all comers. (“The grapes are sour, as anyone with eyes can plainly see.”) Hence the impish delight that wafts from the screen when Reason asks its assembled panel for their favorite presidents: “Bush 41,” says Jonathan Rauch, almost daring you to ask why. “Grover Cleveland,” says Robert Higgs. Losers fall back on the classics: Washington, Lincoln; Jesse Walker scores over-the-top cool points: “Richard Henry Lee,” he says.
But that certain social power easily evaporates when you find you have to walk your rigorous defense back, and power’s a hard thing to give up, and maybe this is why so many libertarians on this list are voting for Bush again, in spite of. Tax cuts, they say, ignoring the explosive growth of a government that will never fit in that bathtub; Islamofascism, they say, and blithely order up another round of aerial strikes in urban areas full of people who mostly just want to get on with their lives—but really, it’s for much the same reason as the principled non-voters and the Elmer Fudd write-ins: I’d rather be right on my own damn terms, they say, than run the risk of ever being wrong. —The poetic justice of the reality-challenged candidate so many of them have backed into, who clasps his impetuous choices to his bosom and defends them against all comers, on his own damn terms, is chilly comfort. —It’s not that I think that Libertarians for Bush is a large-enough constituency to swing a state, much less the election; it’s just that it’s always hard to see a dream so shiny turn so foully rancid.
(I mean, the Greens at least have a basic faith in the enterprise, however touchingly naïve. —Us Greens? Oh, look: my own concern for coolth is getting in the way!)
The ice has gotten thin beneath my feet out here, so it’s time for me to walk it back. I had a much pettier point to make, before I got distracted; a bean-counting, politically correct point, persnickety in the extreme: reading my way down Reason’s poll, I was surprised to note there’s three times as many Kerry supporters listed as there are women.
One just doesn’t know what to say.
Whoa.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York’s was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
—“Arrests at GOP Convention are Criticized,” Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Let’s not muddle this with nuance.
Once more, folks:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
Vinegar and honey.
The whole point of building on the nines, as slinkP will tell you, was to increase the us, and that you can’t do by walking up to them and sneering and spitting and backhanding them in the face, telling them they’re idiots, full of shit and nonsense, signifying nothing. Find the common ground—it’s always closer than you think: enemy soldiers on the front lines will forever have more in common with each other than with their own generals. Find that common ground and show them the way to us. —Anything else is chest-thumpery, sound and fury, heat without light; aggrandizing the us. Not increasing it.
But sometimes—
Here’s the Yes on 36 site—the one that’s, you know. For kids. Check its hip air of faux defiance, its commodified dissent: “I won’t be redefined.” Check the language in the Q&A on 36: “Measure 36 puts very simple wording in our State Constitution saying marriage is only between a guy and a girl.” Check how open-minded they’re trying to be: “Hopefully all Oregonians are against discrimination. But Measure 36 is only about marriage.” Check the focus of the clippings in their morgue: “Support for same-sex marriage among youth is shallow and summed up in one of the young generation’s favorite words: ‘whatever,’ Stanton says.”
(Of course, you should also check the muddled mix of rough and smooth edges, the use of white-on-grey Trebuchet, the outdated, washed-out rave flyer colors, the Gen X nostalgia-trip Fisher-Price rip in the logo, the awkwardly obvious stock photography and off-the-shelf clipart. You should meditate on why the promotional videos might only be available in Windows and RealPlayer formats. You should view the source and ask yourself what webdesigner worth their salt would use tables for something like this. But hey.)
This is honey, from a comb that’s slick and sophisticated enough. Conn Creative may be a small shop, but it’s a small New York shop, and that alone is enough to suggest this wasn’t ginned up by plucky volunteers with a passion for parttime politics. This them has a bankroll, and they’re using it in a bid to reach out and tear up Larry’s and Cshea’s marriage license, and they have the nerve to try and tell me it’s for my good—and they want so very badly to look hip while they’re doing it!
Gah. It’s the old paradox of contempt for contempt, intolerance of intolerance: I tell myself it would do no good to tell Conn Creative to sit down and be you silent, Christian; they would only stuff their ears with Leviticus and yammer “Sodom Sodom Sodom” till I gave up and went away. I tell myself it would do no good to show them the weddings that will not be stopped by this farce, and the families that will be hurt; they will swear up and down that they aren’t discriminatory, wouldn’t dream of it, that marriage is indeed threatened, oh yes, that this and this alone will save it. —I can’t find common ground with this moonshit bullshine. I have no honey to give them in return; all I have in my mouth is vinegar. All I can do is spit, and sneer. Thump my chest. Throw off some heat, no matter how dark I seem.
This amendment—if it passes—is written on tissue paper. It won’t last the decade. We will unwrite it, one way or another, and one day Larry and Cshea will once more be as married as Jenn and me, and just about everyone who ever spoke prominently in favor of 36 will shift and look away and change the subject whenever it’s brought up; if pressed, they’ll write it off as youthful exuberance, as having been caught up in the spirit of a time and a place. One or two of them might have the class to apologize for what they did, but most will just shrug: it all worked out for the best, didn’t it? You got what you wanted. Thank God it’s over and done with.
—Wouldn’t it be so much better to beat them back this year?
If this were a joke, I’d laugh, if it were funny.
The Portland Tribune has a front-page piece this week about the apparent 57% majority here in Oregon who favor Measure 36, which will amend the state constitution to define valid marriages as being only those “between one man and one woman.” The headline reads: “Voters back off from big changes.”
Sorry. Should have warned you to put your coffee down, first.
Look, there’s a sense in which this is true: for over 150 years, the Oregon constitution had language explicitly privileging whites, and retained outdated sections which set up such prohibitions that “no free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the State, or employ, or harbor them.” —We ripped that language out back in 2002, with Measure 14; so, in a sense, in this one sense, Measure 36—returning, as it does, a measured dollop of discrimination and bigotry to our state constitution—can be read as voters backing away from that 2002 change.
But in every other sense. The obliteration of the legal status of thousands of marriages. The willful imposition of a majority’s bigotry, hatred, and fear on a harmless minority. The appalling ignorance with which we’re setting out to second-class our friends, our neighbors, our families. The conversion of the state certificate that seals my marriage from an implicit mark of privilege to an explicit badge of shame.
These are very big changes indeed, that 57% of the state apparently wants to visit on the rest of us.
And so, in all these other senses, the Portland Tribune ought to hang its collective head in shame at such a misleading lede.
I’ll guarandamntee you this, though: if it passes, it’ll be one hell of a lot less than 150 years before we rip this putrid amendment out. It’s gonna make your head spin, how fast we dustbin this bullshit.
Which side are you on?
Then there’s the days I think it all breaks down as easy and simple as pie:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand—
Swiftly kicked pants for morale unite! Me, I’m still trying to scrape something together, so it’s a good thing Dylan’s on the ball. Here’s the sweet spot:
Robyn commented afterward that the strange thing about this campaign is the less you pay attention to it, the more you somehow assume it’s doing badly, that Kerry is a popsicle stick, that somehow everybody really does just buy into the blatantly painful things this administration has bungled in the past four years.
And then everytime you actually stop to consider it, to actually listen to this guy, you go:
Who the hell was it said we were down on the mat? Screw this Curse of the Bambino mindset, I don’t want to wait till next year.
I want to hear the words President John Kerry was sworn into office today, I want this country to rejoin the planet Earth, I want national forests and fuel alternatives and united allies and goddamned better health care than this corporate bleeding machine we have now.
I want terrorism to decrease because we’re aiding the Middle East instead of exploiting it, I want AIDS funding worldwide, I want couples, no matter what their chromosome tally, to be able to raise children and own houses and go to work without being terrified it will all be taken away.
I want to stop seeing blocks of red and blue, I want a conservative party whose causes I respect with freedom to dissent, I want a liberal party not afraid to be exactly that, and I want moderates to bridge the gap and small parties to give us all a good sock in the nose now and then.
I want American kids to be taught to eat good food, I want schoolteachers to be paid like doctors instead of like dishwashers, I want a strong and able military but one which no longer cancerously devours billions of unnecessary dollars.
I want women to keep their hard choices about childbearing between themselves, their doctor, and their own conscience. I want my library record to be between me and my librarian, I want a working class that doesn’t sell itself out to culture war charlatans in fear, I want solid jobs that are for the good of America and not the board of executives.
Read the rest. Then go! Move the world!
Platitudinum.
All unbeknownst, Messrs. Nielsen Hayden and Humphries are rendering my latest self-indulgence obsolete. Go: present your pants: be swiftly kicked.
M.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—“Dulci et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen
Sweet and meet, motherfuckers. Sweet and meet.
His life with the ghosts of Bush.
In the spirit of Roy Edroso’s unhealthy (but amusing; yea, amusing unto death) fixation on that perennial reactionary empowerment fantasy, “Life Among the Liberals,” I offer up this link to Rick Perlstein’s “The Church of Bush,” which I missed the first time out—despite the fact that he’s reporting on life among Portland conservatives. (Thanks to the Slacktivist for calling it to my attention.)
Elucidating the differences in approach is perhaps best left as an exercise for the reader. Wouldn’t want to spoil all your fun.
—Bruce Broussard, by the way: most recently famous for suing to get Multnomah County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Despite his righteous outrage, it was found he didn’t have standing. Just one more way activist judges and the liberal media and that darn fascist homosexual agenda are conspiring to oppress true Americans.
Forget 15%; try 90%.
And so I’m feeling shitty about the (yes, irrational) analogy that finishes off the rant below, which was on shaky ground to start off with, proceeded with some little rhetorical deftness to a point of questionable taste, and never got around to any sort of disclaimer or safety instructions; just chuck the whole thing before it gets out of hand, okay?
Because Barry points us to this New Yorker piece which reminds us all that squabbling over 3% here and 11% there has nothing to do with actually winning elections and everything to do with stoning apostates and kicking the exiles’ bread and salt into the ashes: makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something for about five minutes, and then what?
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
The at-once depressing and uplifting moral to take from all of this is simply to realize: voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also the least important thing we can do, politically.
Your blind item for the day.
X can’t say that because he evidently does not believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He and his handlers portray him as virtually perfect in the past and omniscient in the present. In and of itself, that’s also not unusual: it’s so hard for a presidential candidate not to get puffed up when laudatory remarks follow him as closely as Secret Service agents. But do we want a president who pretends that he can do no wrong and never has?
Okay: who’s X? And what color is the sky in the writer’s world?
Answers not so much below the fold as over yonder, in your Talking Points Memo.
Dispatches from the War on Common Sense.
Apparently, any protestor who breaks the law during the Republican National Convention in New York City should be treated as a terrorist, and prosecuted accordingly.
Update! These terrorist acts will include releasing swarms of mice, giving false directions to “little blue hair ladies from Kansas,” throwing pies, and encouraging prostitutes with AIDS to seduce Republicans without condoms.
Man, I miss New York.
Every single one a youse can just go straight to hell.
Yeah, I know. It’s irrational. Maybe I’m tapped; maybe all my moonlight’s drained away. Normally I’m as waffly as they come, if by “they” you mean terminally indecisive eldest children who in their zeal to make nice between all the various factions that tug and push their lives end up seeing the merit to every possible point of view and never really finding some floor for their own feet that stays safe and stable for long. I mean, there’s no way under the sea or over it that I’m going to vote for Nader this year, but I’m not about to apologize for having done so in every election since 1992, and if I can recognize there’s something sky-pied arrogant about the whole enterprise of third parties in American politics, well, still: something’s got to be done, right? If the Democratic party is assured of my vote no matter what, because where else am I gonna go, well, why should they ever listen to me? (When was the last time I ever tried to tell them something?) And if there’s more than a little irrationality and nose-slicing spite in the vituperative hatred of Nader players that gets to strut down the Democratic catwalk with depressing regularity, well, the comfort I take in knowing that my Nader votes did nothing to steal electoral votes from the Democrats I was trying to message is a cold and hollow comfort, indeed. (I’ve got little enough time as it is for the things I need to do to keep my own life on track. How else can I help steer the ship of state?)
And if my sudden flirtation with the lesser of two evils has more to do with where we all are now than any yawning gap between 1992-me and 2004-me, well, 1992-me is still pissed. Every election is a crisis. It’s always never the right time to rock the boat. That this election is demonstrably the most critical of my voting life, if not the past 50 years, if not the past 100—that the boat has already fucking capsized, and we’re all paddling about, doing our best to right it in heavy seas—it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. 1992-me still wants his fuck-you vote. And if you maybe think 1992-me is as spoiled and wrong-headed as he is idealistic and righteously frustrated, well, I’d probably agree with you; then again, you don’t have to live with him.
Like I said: irrational. I mean, very little good can come of the white-hot rage that lights up my skull and leaks out of my eyeballs when I read something like this in a recent poll of registered voters:
Can I repeat that? —In the here and now, this current situation, with a choice between—
- a manifestly incompetent boob who’s crashed the country, looted our treasury, smeared our reputation with blood and shit, done his damndest to restrict our speech and our freedom of association—not out of any actual desire to keep us actually safe, but merely to score feel-good points in the polls; who sees no fault at all in claiming to be above the law, and has seized upon the most craven and dishonest means to keep us all split and squabbling, at each other’s throats, so that his outnumbered and outgunned faction can hold onto power just that much longer, squeeze that much more money from our pockets to his—
- and John Kerry—
15% of all registered Democrats are seriously considering the boob. Margin of error somewhere just north of plus or minus three percent, but hey: line up seven random registered Democrats. Chances are good that one of them is planning on voting for Bush. (Back in 2000, when Democrats were suffering Clinton fatigue, and hated wooden, beta-male, earth-toned Gore, who lied about the internet and lied about Love Canal [and Story], back when we weren’t all seized with knee-jerk treasonous Bush-hatred, Bush scored 11% of the Democratic vote. And maybe that’s a good argument for taking this LA Times poll as a sport, a freak, an outlier, and maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like grasping this slender reed, but right now I’ve got a head of steam on, so siddown and shaddap.)
But that white-hot rage is fucking irrational. What do I want, unswerving, unthinking party loyalty? (Well, a crushing landslide defeat, with all of us on the one side, and the five percent of those wealthy enough to benefit from Bush on the other—minus those human enough to feel guilty about their perks; plus a smattering of white men so stupefied by the creeping loss of what they see as their due that they can’t vote their own self-interest. Three percent of Republicans are considering Kerry, by the way. Plus or minus something slightly north of three percent.) —I mean, tag the Democrats themselves for this? They’d just panic and go haring after that mythical rightward nudge, the fatted calf to sacrifice that would bring all those chimerical NASCAR dads and soccer moms back into the fold. Which is beyond stupid: the problem isn’t that we’re too far left, for God’s sake. On every single issue you care to name, from abortion to child care to health care to education to the Wars on Drugs and Terra, we win. Our positions are the positions the majority wants; our direction is where the country wants to be heading. (What “we,” kemo sabe?) —But that’s not the choice people think they’re making. They think they’ve got these two options, this guy, and that other guy. And if one of the guys seems a little rank to them, what with the French and the yacht and the ketchup and the stuff about how maybe he lied but it’s all so confusing and it happened thirty years ago so who knows, fair and balanced, remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt he waffles, you know, and so, gee, I don’t know, I guess what’s left then is this other guy, and hey, steady leadership, right? Times of change?
Tacking right doesn’t do a goddamn thing except amp up the talk about waffling.
There’s a rule of thumb about schizophrenia and psychosis that I heard somewhere, and while I have no idea how actually useful it is, it stuck with me: psychosis can be seen, largely, as atypical, abnormal reactions to normal, present stimuli; schizophrenia, on the other hand, is (again, largely) reacting normally and typically to stimuli that just aren’t there, or don’t map reality in a terribly accurate fashion. And while there’s a lot of psychotic “I’d never vote for a guy who said we committed atrocities in Vietnam” (when we did, and anyway, your other choice is a deserter who lied about serving in the US Air Force) or “I’m not voting for a guy who’s going to raise my taxes” (when he won’t if you’re with about 95% of the country, and you’re going to pay the other guy’s tax bill in more ways than you can possibly imagine)—what I want to believe, what I hope, what must be true is most of that 15% (that 11%, that 49%, that 47) is schizophrenic: making the best choice you can from a field of factoids and stories and opinions that have little to nothing to do with what’s really going on, what you really want, life as it’s actually lived, and governing as it’s actually done. Because, while the psychosis makes me want to leave the country, the schizophrenia we can do something about. With a lot of hard work and deft argument and careful organizing and speaking clearly and openly and honestly and without a lot of rancor and spite and anger about where we are now and where we ought to be going and how it is we think we’re going to get there: offering new opinions, new stories, facts instead of factoids. The odds are against us, but the world as it is is for us, and we can get it done, and a lot of bitching and moaning and white-hot recriminating rancor doesn’t help. It’s irrational.
Still.
15.
Anybody sneers about Nader spoilers anytime soon, I’m gonna give ’em such the smack.
(And then promptly apologize, I’m sure. Gah!)
