First writers and readers comment on the election.
America Alcoholica
By Donna Gaines
Remember, O Lord, what has happened to us; look, and see our disgrace. Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens, our homes to foreigners. We have become orphans and fatherless, our mothers like widows. We must buy the water we drink; our wood can be had only at a price. Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.
Lamentations 5:1-5
In the transition from capitalism to socialism there’s an interim period of history known as alcoholism. Typically described as self-centered, self-seeking, and arrogant yet filled with shame, the active alcoholic is a fear-based and narcissistic creature—sort of like America.
As advanced capitalism slams through an inevitable end-times collapse, we’re hung-over, reeling towards a terminal state of anomie; stranded somewhere between another drink and the promise of living sober. As any addict can testify, the morning after always feels apocalyptic; the daylight bores into us, drilling down to the core of our soul-sickness. Cold terror sets in, we’re nauseous with despair. Depleted, ashamed, hopelessly alone, we cry out for salvation, Lord I just can’t face another day. We pray for a miracle—a bailout, a regime change, a new messiah. We bargain with God, with fate, with history, making a thousand more promises we’ll never keep; liberty, freedom, equality, dignity, democracy.
Alcoholism is an individual malaise; sober living is a we proposition—a social project that requires binding fellowship. We’ve fallen so short, nullified sacred social contracts and sold out future generations. Wallowing in personal loss, debt and self-pity, now we play the game of blame and shame. Mostly, we betrayed ourselves. We followed a false god and here we are, spiritually and materially bankrupt.
We admitted we were powerless…and that our lives had become unmanageable. Yes, the last eight years have been brutal. But a hard bottom can be a blessing to a sick and suffering alcoholic. From the personal to the social, from the individual to the collective, profound desperation often precedes radical transformation. Yet even as we are dragged kicking and screaming into a better world, we resist. There is no great man of history who can save us now. We need a change of heart.
For the late stage alcoholic, the alternative to recovery is a slow, stinking, death. Bush is not Satan, McCain is not Bush, and Obama is not Christ. Denial is not a river in Egypt or a new club in Dubai. Analog or digital, PC verses Mac, either way, the party’s over. It’s time for us to rise up, suit up, show up, and grow up. Come November 4, America goes to rehab.
American Socialism 2.0
By Scott Spencer
The days of government bashing may be over: people want their government not only to keep them safe from terrorists, but they are calling for government to protect us from unsafe food, dishonest bankers, polluters, upper-income tax cheats. Obama wants the government involved in our health care, he wants to stop foreclosures, he is even murmuring about income redistribution, and right now, less than three weeks from the end of his political career, John McCain is accusing Obama of being a secret socialist. (In an earlier time, he might have suggested Obama move to Russia.)
The last time a socialist had a real voice in the national conversation was in the early Sixties, when Michael Harrington published THE OTHER AMERICA. It was a call to conscience, a plea for well-off Americans to recognize the poverty in their midst, and it helped pave the way to The Great Society. Now the socialist message need not be one of charity and kindness toward Others: with so many lives being squeezed by the gears of global capitalism, with jobs disappearing, pensions dwindling, ice caps melting, and CEO suddenly becoming a term of scorn, and the so-called Free Market an obvious invitation to chicanery, millions of us may be ready to consider a real socialist alternative. At last, socialism can be viewed not as a ticket to some ethical heaven but as a way of saving ourselves right here on earth.
If the Left can find a figurehead that can do for socialism what Barack Obama has done for liberalism then we may be closer than we think to having a real third party here in our country. If Barack Obama’s ascendancy can teach the Left anything it’s that youth, beauty, guts, and discipline really do matter. It may be time for the left to begin holding open auditions.
If Buddy Met Poppy
By Benj DeMott
Mike Leigh’s films from the 80s – Meantime, Home Sweet Home, High Hopes – have often been taken as truth-attacks on the meanness in this world that was Thatcherism. I take his latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, as a tribute to the larger sense of possibility in the Age of Obama. Don’t exactly have the Director’s blessing, but when I asked at a public screening of Happy-Go-Lucky if he’d object to an Obama-centric view of his film, Leigh stayed neutral. And he’s known for dissing responses to his movies that he regards as deeply stupid. So (real) Obama Girls of the world unite! Go see Sally Hawkins play Poppy – a socially aware but never despairing elementary school teacher. Poppy loves her life. Formerly a world-traveler, she’s grounded now. And she has a genius for human connection. Poppy gets fizzy with her (multi-culti) friends and students; she eases family tensions and a homeless man’s worried mind. She dances in high-heeled boots – likes a laugh, a drink and a fuck. Especially if it’s with the dream-boat social worker (who helps one of her students deal with “hard things” before flirting with Poppy). When I wondered out loud at that film screening if the sexy social worker’s presence hinted at a turn away from the radical scorn of the “helping” professions displayed so memorably in Meantime (“We got ants?”) and Home Sweet Home, Leigh demurred. And I’m glad since his films would be shit if his characters were theses. Still, Leigh’s comic “post-modern” social workers once helped define a time of no alternatives. The nicer, wittier beau ideal in Happy-Go-Lucky, by contrast, hooks up with Poppy at a World Historical moment marked by the revival of spunky liberalism and political optimism.
Though, of course, things aren’t looking Up to everybody. Happy-Go-Lucky’s narrative underscores that fact of feeling through a series of encounters between Poppy and her drivers ed instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan), who’s as much a man on the margins as the Lear-y homeless man she winterludes with through an urban wasteland. Locked into racism/misogyny and conspiracy theories, Scott locks on Poppy, though he won’t admit it. His crush gives her the creeps yet he remains a creature of pathos to her. He may be a proto-fascist but she understands he’s a human horror.
I’m reminded of their increasingly fraught dialogues when I reflect on my back and forths with certain bloggers at a website called The Belmont Club that’s read chiefly by Movement Conservatives with military backgrounds. Inspired by Obama’s example of liberal-mindedness and his faith in the possibility of finding America’s common ground, I began arguing – one against hundreds – for my candidate at the Club about six months ago. I haven’t converted anybody but minds (chiefly my own) have moved. Early on, I suspected it would be a trip to cross-over from my left-field positions to engage members of the Club. My first confirmation came when one (white) poster refused to allow that African Americans were a generous people, complaining that no black drivers had picked him up when he’d hitch-hiked back in the day. He’d been off the road for decades, but his hurt was still fresh. It all added up, in his head, to much more than 400 years.
This fantast is not the only member of the Club nursing strange resentments and a bizarre sense of the past. Worried that Obama is a Marxist/Islamist/Manchurian candidate, other Clubbers have responded to his progress with bloody-minded predictions of Civil War. The poster-boy for their madness is an ex-Marine who blogs under the name of Ken. Last month, he began a downward spiral as Obama rose in the polls. His increasingly unhinged posts at the Club amounted to a slow-mo analogue to Happy-Go-Lucky‘s final emotional implosion (and to the seriocomic climaxes in so many of Mike Leigh’s – “there is no such thing as normal” – character studies). Ken began by offering a novel take on John McCain’s electoral challenge – “The main thing holding the GOP back from absolute victory is the perception that we are a bunch of frightened accountants who cringe at big mean Democrats. Democrats are perceived as being studly bad boys.” Sex was on Ken’s brain as he fretted “the Left” viewed themselves as “sexually gifted” like “the British Cavaliers.” Dems were chips off the old dicks who also assumed they were intellectually superior “though they never have any really cool ideas, like settling space or enriching mankind through atomic transformation. They just want affordable healthcare.” Convinced “the Left” was out to “get people to think of gun owners as inferior, and at least look the other way while they have Waco-style massacres nationwide,” he called for a “Shermanesque solution.” Pressed for an explanation, he dug in:
The people we’re talking about are truly evil at a Pol Pot level. Keep in mind they support Kim Jong II…They don’t work, and the consistently target old women for their attacks. They are filth, and it’s time to give our nation a bath.
A few hours on – deeper into his own grave – Ken got more serious; he wasn’t calling for some “Auschwitz type mass murder, but rather simply the enforcement of martial law:”
A ‘Sherman solution’ doesn’t consist of extermination. It consists of killing off the worst of the worst, the irreconcilables. It’s essentially the Surge brought to the USA. It isn’t like your Democrat uncle with the German Shepard would die. It would generally be a bunch of violent, twisted, drug-addicted, continually unemployed losers who got told at the punk rock concert that the Republicans wanted to take their Hustler magazines, and who responded by pushing an old lady off some stairs (since, you know, all old people are Republicans). We’re not talking normal, average people here…
You said a mouthful man.
While paranoids have friends at The Club, Ken was so-over-the-top that even other muy macho posters began to worry he might be a provocateur, an “Obamaniac in disguise.” One pushed back when I pressed the Club to distance themselves from Ken’s September bender: “Benj, if Ken’s spring was wound too tight and it snapped, it would be a better man than you that dealt with him…” That come-back had more force than the poster knew. I couldn’t deny ex-military men and women in the Club had skills that might be vital if there ever was a need to stop Ken from acting on his expressed wish to “see headlines saying, ‘MCCAIN SUPPORTER KILLS ATTACKER.’” But that wasn’t all. The Clubber’s clarity about the uses of defensivenss brought back a guilty memory.
I recalled how I felt vaguely at fault after 9/11 though I didn’t know why right away. It wasn’t (close-to-a) survivor’s guilt – though my wife had been lucky, having passed on a potential temp job down around the Towers that day. But the answer slowly dawned on me. Terror had shown up my own beamishness about the…Family of Man. Founded on too-good-to-be-true a prioris about human potential, my politics had focused (pretty much exclusively) on ideas of Change. Like many Americans on the left, I tended to skip past the NEED for protection. My obliviousness to security concerns came home hard to me after 9/11. I felt the gravitas of folks – ex-military men and women, firemen, cops, et al. – who spent their working lives watching out for the worst while I’d been…happy-go-lucky.
I got some traction with (a few) Clubbers when I acknowledged my own personal failings/biases on this front. I’ve learned that if you’re trying to address folks who don’t share your politics, a (small d) democrat has got to know (and own up to) his/her limitations. Nobody wants to listen to wannabe moral superiors who come on from on high.
Clubbers made me climb off my horse of instruction when I posted criticism of William F. Buckley’s work and persona right after he died last spring. I was roundly (and rightly!) abused by them for “heartlessly” speaking ill of one so recently passed. I took my medicine and then watched from the sidelines as a more comradely poster made my case better than I ever could. He remembered how during one viewing of Firing Line. his father suddenly sat up in a chair and said (of Buckley): “That guy is the most self-satisfied son of a bitch I’ve ever seen in my life.”
That comment finished off a celebratory thread at the Club about Buckley. Though, needless-to-say, he’s still an exemplary figure to many Clubbers (and most Movement Conservatives). But these good soldiers tend not to come from money. And that’s one reason why they identified so strongly with Sarah Palin’s less toney feeling for herself. They were sold on the happy brutalism of her underdog brand with its scripted sound bites and back-story of a bitter “reformer.”
Palin’s meaner instincts aren’t worthy of at least one of her fans who posts at the Club under the name Buddy. Nomen est omen. There’s no friendlier (or sparkier) member of the Club. He even welcomed my posts early on, expressing curiosity about outside-the-GOP angles on Obama and America, though he made it clear from the jump that he’d be voting for Johnny Mac. Buddy once acknowledged Obama’s “inspirational quality,” but incessant rumors (and truer stories about less-than-winning episodes in Obama’s past as a Chicago pol) harshed that mellow. Still, when the Club’s re-enactors claim there will be blood after Obama’s election, Buddy tells them to chill. He’s offered good advice to me too, reminding me not to hector Clubbers but persuade with an “expansive spirit.”
Our own fraternal moments are less than spiritual. We’re talking bandwith amiability. (And Buddy has dozens of online buds.) Our particular virtual bond was founded on light stuff – namely, our mutual appreciation of the Coen Brothers’ film comedy, The Big Lebowski. Buddy knows what condition the human condition is in.
Holy Connection! I’m just recalling now how Mike Leigh spoke admiringly of the Coens’ artful enactments of American social life and times. That doesn’t mean Buddy and Leigh are in sync (or in solidarity). But if Buddy goes to Happy-Go-Lucky, he may see Poppy is a sort of anti-Palin. And he could end up relating more to Leigh’s worldly working class heroine than to Sarah Palin’s pious, proud and provincial persona. Know hope (as one Obamacon is fond of saying).
(Pace Armond White whose review of Happy-Go-Lucky is available here: http://www.nypress.com/21/41/film/ArmondWhite.cfm)
Optimism of the Will
By Bob Levin
Being 66 years old, with no kids, sometimes the only sensible response seems to be to not give a shit. Watch Inconvenient Truth; do the math; figure by the time Antarctica becomes Boca Raton, I am long out of here.
The last candidate that truly excited me was Bobby Kennedy. I was a VISTA on Chicago’s South Side. When he was shot, if someone’d bricked a window on 47th Street, I’d’ve heaved the second stone. The next 40 years have been a Slough of Despond. After Ronald Reagan, the electorate could have elevated a saliva-dribbling zombie; I wouldn’t’ve blinked.
But I vote. I wear buttons, post signs, distribute leaflets. And after John McCain’s contempt-deranged nomination of Sarah Palin – and her narcissistically near-psychotic acceptance – I wrote Barack Obama my biggest political check ever.
I know Obama’s heading of the ticket alone represents the near miraculous, but he lights muted fire in my belly. I wish, for one thing, he would talk about the poor. I understand the danger of aiming words of brotherhood and comfort lower down the socio-economic ladder than the blue collar class, but it disturbs me that if Michael Harrington dropped The Other America into our current forest, it would make no sound.
Sometimes, the (Groucho) Marxian analysis of clubs appears to suit presidential elections. Why vote for anyone who’d want the job? That response seems even more reasonable today than in other quadrennials. But Obama presents free of the obvious queasy-making cravings of past nominees and may prove the transcendent figure knowledgeable friends envision. I have read enough Doris Kearns Goodwin to believe that such leaders can re-deem the spirit of a nation.
Or, at least, as Jake Barnes said to Lady Brett, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The Crying Game
By Richard Meltzer
My only response re the election is I’m trying my damnedest to ignore and avoid it. I assume McCain will win, even if they have to fix 27 states. Can’t let them yank my nervous system from pillar to post with the sorry spectacle of an alleged level playing field and a 4-quarter competitive game, with 4 legitimate downs to every possession. The malevolence of it is too shattering to sit for. My heart is too weak.
Buffalo’s Black and White Ball
Stephan Talty
I grew up in a neighborhood, that if it was transplanted out of New York state to Ohio or Pennsylvania, would be one of those being dissected for traces of the Bradley Effect, for secret and not-so-secret racism and the mysteries of the white male vote.
But we weren’t politically interested in much of anything. The working-class “ethnics” who I grew up with were only a few generations away from the old country, and in the old country it was best not to expect much from politicians, if you wanted to stay healthy or sane. Ireland and its post-colonial blood feuds (Fine Gael vs. Fianna Fail would take you a decade to understand) and Soviet-dominated Poland were not places to fall in love with elections. And Italy – well, Italy is a study in political hopelessness all to itself. There was a genetic disposition, despite the bright shining example of JFK, to be fatalists. Politics only really mattered up to the level of mayor. What did matter was sports – particularly football.
Hollywood would have you believe that the miracle narratives of the past few generations were stories of athletes. Movies have been retelling the Jackie Robinson breakthrough (guided by a deeply humanist white coach/GM) in one form or another since Jackie put on a Dodger uniform – this month we have The Express. But black athletes are not as admired as they once were. It’s the curse of the receivers – TO, Ocho Cinco and Plaxico Burress are the new models of what a black football player is. And they are ridiculously non-inspirational.
If I had to point to one moment when black leaders broke through in the kinds of neighborhoods where I grew up, it was when Al Davis chose Art Shell as coach of the Los Angeles Raiders. Except that Art Shell sucked. So let’s move on to Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith and the generation that followed them.
This is where my neighbors got to see black men lead. It wasn’t Colin Powell or Condoleeza.
Once a politician is elected, he becomes larger and far less human. He will never be as alive or as touchable as he was on the campaign. But a football coach’s decisions are there to be seen every Sunday, in real time. You love them and you suffer through their idiocies. You see good and bad. Race recedes, slowly.
As an Obama supporter, I thank God for Mike Tomlin. I really do. I just wish the Browns and the Bengals, both led by black coaches this year, weren’t so publicly and irredeemably awful.
My February Epiphany
By Ty Geltmaker
Back in February I wrote emails to a list of friends detailing my – and my partner James’ – turn toward Obama. Here are passages from two of those notes that track my movement of mind during the primaries.
Go out to East L.A. as James and I did just a few miles from our Echo Park house this morning, where Ted Kennedy later spoke, and you will see that my fears of “fascistic spectacle” in the mindless chant for CHANGE, as earlier noted in comments on my skeptical support of Obama for President, are unfounded. What a site to behold: 20-somethings and others too young to vote, draping banners from East Los Angeles Tech College, talking smart of their hopes (as I know from teaching at L.A. and Bronx community colleges). I need to let go of a few intellectual security blankets and let a new generation take the lead. I invite even those somewhat younger than me to join in the handover. Let us and the youthful energy surging the Obama candidacy rally around his sensible-enough positions, pushing him to put into place the universal health care and other no-war programs we ourselves have failed to enact. And whoever wins the primary vote, let’s not be cry babies. Hillary and Barack should both be willing to run together in whatever order from the top…
I’m finding more and more people of my ilk not so much swept up but thoughtfully going with Obama after initial skepticism of the crowd, the chant for vague change, also confronting a kind of personal intellectual, cynical hubris against hope – as if it were something too common or pedestrian for my brainy constructs – that a lot of young people fortunately haven’t developed (yet) and others less fortunate cannot afford. In my lifetime I never imagined I would be agonized over having to support either a man of color or a woman of any color. And to think: It has been my 75-year-old mom in Peoria, a working-class white woman who as a youngest kid was taken on her mom and dad’s constant search for work from central Iowa to central Illinois during the Depression, to have told me from the start: It’s Obama.
School’s Out for the G.O.P.
By Mike Rose
I have been thinking a lot these days about the way knowledge or being knowledgeable gets defined in the political moment – in the moment, but affected by a thick web of longstanding American cultural conflicts.
An example is the way the McCain campaign has attempted to diminish Barack Obama’s education at Harvard Law School.
One conflict in play is that of rural America versus the city. This is Sarah Palin’s trump card. The rural versus urban conflict vibrates throughout 19th and 20th century American fiction: Country boy or girl escapes the close-mindedness of the small town to find cosmopolitan liberation in the city – or finds in the city amorality and alienation. Flowing through these story lines are condescension toward country life or, conversely, harsh judgment toward the city and its institutions…like Ivy League universities.
Related to this cultural conflict is the longstanding tension between practical life, experience, and common sense versus schooling, book learning, and intellectual pursuits. “It took a guy with a college degree to screw this up,” the saying goes, “and a guy with a high school degree to fix it.”
Resonant with both of these conflicts are the conflicts of social class. It’s pretty deadly when Obama’s answers to questions are labeled “professorial.” The implication is that he’s aloof, an elitist, out of touch with the common Joe.
It is this long, tangled cultural history that is invoked when members of the McCain entourage say “Harvard” or “east coast” or in some way refer to being in school rather than out in the real world.
John Kerry got a dose of this treatment, but where Obama is concerned, there is one other factor and that is race. By labeling Obama an elitist or haughty and out of touch, you don’t have to say a thing that’s overtly racist to spark in those who are predisposed the sense that the young Obama rose above his station, or was/is too big for his britches.
Another variation here is that, yes, Harvard Law is quite an achievement, but Obama got there because of the color of his skin – or, conversely, if Obama got there, it must not be that big of an achievement after all. As an e-mail rushing around the Internet suggests, if a poor white boy had a similar educational trajectory, he’d be hailed as a huge American success story by the Right.
Embedded within America’s cultural conflicts are legitimate criticisms of knowledge gained through formal education and the resulting professional standing it confers. Such knowledge can be abstract, removed from on-the-ground empirical reality. It can be exclusionary. It can be used to great harm – one of the documentaries on Enron is subtitled “The Smartest Guys in the Room.”
But the conservative attack on knowledge over the last eight years does not emerge from such concerns. Conservatives have not advocated for, say, deep experiential knowledge as a hedge against bookishness. The party that claims it offers new ideas has sacrificed its purchase on ideas. Instead, we’ve had the substitution of loyalty for expertise, feeling for rationality, and the cherry-picking rather than analysis of evidence. All this was done to maintain power and bestow privilege. Nothing new about that.
Feelings
By Judy Oppenheimer
The author notes she wrote this “before Tina Fay and the total collapse of the world financial structure bailed us all out, praise god??”
The Sarah Palin reaction is not unique. Crazed, terrifying, out of control, but not unique.
I remember once before watching what appeared to be an entire country go insane. The country was England, a place up til then prized, at least according to all known stereotypes, for the stiff upper lip. The precipitating event was the death of Princess Di.
Being saddened to see a beautiful young woman die in a fatal car crash is one thing. The reaction in England was quite another. People literally fell apart, sobbing, keening, lining the streets, in a veritable explosion of unstoppable emotion.
This was the country that had faced down the Nazis, stood tall throughout the Blitz, weathered the Battle of Dunkirk and remained stalwart, tough, and stoic through good times and bad. Collapsing into a sea of mass hysteria.
There were non-participants of course. The queen for one (as Helen Mirren’s depiction in the film illustrates brilliantly). A Brit friend of mine, a woman of good sense and balance, was so repelled by the madness she finally gave vent to her reaction, at a London restaurant. Her companion, terrified the other patrons would turn on them with a roar, possibly beating them to a pulp, hustled her out immediately. It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t smart to criticize the grief brigade. And their legions were everywhere.
Stiff upper lips have never been an American characteristic particularly. Even so, the reaction to Sarah Palin’s sudden catapult onto the political scene has left me as shocked and horrified as England’s wild Di paroxysms did 11 years ago. All reason seems to have flown out the window. This snippy hunter, moose peeler, pro life pro-gun pro-creationism mother-of-five and grandmother-to-be has somehow unleashed a tidal wave of hysteria as overwhelming as the death of the people’s princess did back then.
Watching the hoards, an estimated 23,000 strong (approximately three times the population of Wasilla, Alaska, where Palin was mayor) line up along Lee Highway in Northern Virginia, the place I grew up, for godsake, has left me shaken and nauseous. When my younger son, a committed Obama man, spoke to me after she appeared, his first words were — wow, Mom, isn’t she amazing?
I was chilled to the bone. The last time I felt like that was after Reagan’s first debate, when I heard my mother, a lifelong Democrat, murmur wistfully — “but wasn’t he nice?”
I knew then we were in deep trouble. And I know it now, too.
People — Democrats — think everyone will eventually come around, see the light. They’ll hear about Trooper-gate, about the lying, they’ll realize how unprepared she is, they’ll think twice. The Enquirer has troops spread throughout Alaska right now, searching for dirt — surely they’ll come up with something. It’s true—we’re actually counting on the Enquirer to bail us out.
What they don’t realize is, none of this will work. Did it cool anyone’s passion that Princess Di was revealed to be a stalker of married men, a bulimic, an hysteric? Not a bit. If anything, her foibles prompted more sympathy, more identification.
The common complaint one sees everywhere these days is that Obama is not reacting with enough steel. He has to get angry, go on the offensive, start hitting hard. Above the belt, below the belt, whatever it takes — go for it, man! Let’s crack through that wimp ceiling for all time.
I’ve said the same thing myself. I believe it. But I also wonder if any response like that would make a dent in this thing, which has so much of the tone and feel of a religious revival. I mean, you’re going to waltz into a mega church and argue Christ isn’t risen? I don’t think so.
So I don’t know what would do it. Would anything have punctured the Princess Di grief extravaganza? A phenomena that actually made the queen of England back down?
Reason won’t do it. Logic won’t do it. My only hope is that Obama, and his superb team, can manage once again to whip up their own hysteria…the hysteria that so repelled the GOP a few months back. Churn it up to a froth, guys. Get out there! It may be somewhat distasteful, but I’m beginning to believe it’s the only way. Hard times call for hard solutions; unbridled emotion can only be fought with unbridled emotion.
Let them pull every plug that can be pulled, and immediately. The situation demands it, and so does our future.
Presidential Hair
I met her at a Republican Party
we formed a committee right there
her personality can’t seem to get past Congress
but she’s got presidential hair
I want her for my running mate
I want her on my ticket
I want her to show me the country’s worst problem
then lick it
how does she do it
the makeup the hair always perfect
the lipstick neutral but leaning right
I could never understand
even after surgery
how it would feel to be her
having to keep her humanity inside
learning to speak in platforms
her love comes out like an insult
shocked it ever gets out at all
that’s what happens when woman-ness
has to force itself out through a wall
I met her at a Republican fundraiser
we established a foundation right there
her body’s still on the floor of Congress
but she’s got presidential hair.
By Natalie Estrellita
Apocalypse Wow!
By Dennis Myers
Last week, AP published photographs of Sarah Palin sporting a new election season scarf. Unfortunately for the Guv, the beautiful red white & blue motif featured a string of donkeys encouraging people to vote. It looked to me like one of those hidden picture puzzles, so I asked a conservative I know in the office to check it out. “Hey, what’s wrong with this picture?” Perhaps it was a trick question.
“Nothing. Those are elephants.” Really? Asked to look again, he declined and offered instead that, “If they aren’t elephants, then the picture was faked.”
It struck me that that is what this election is about. 2008 – we are not deciding on candidates. No, we face an ultimate referendum whether we can look at poison and still call it water. And here’s how it works.
For over a generation, American political theatre has surfed the high energy created by the dynamics of division. When Reagan stepped into his biggest role as the Great Communicator, he relished using the phrase the “L word” as though the implied derision could pass as legitimate discourse. Here I go again: from that smiled position on, our fabled democracy has been reduced to demonology. What parades as constructive dialogue is now only the art of fashion designer style politics: the politics of label.
That over-packed sentence is another way of saying I can’t go home again. Not to my small hometown anyway, where the elementary school I attended featured the name Herbert Hoover in cement on the entrance archway. Honest truth. But back in my elementary days I could still disagree with my Republican friends, even about the sins of Richard Nixon, without wearing the horns of a satanic dilemma. Now those kid conversations are all gone.
You’d be right to point out other poisons this country has swallowed since Reagan’s sun rose over America — our secret and not-so-secret wars, the matter/anti-matter subatomic spin of the economic classes, the fray of concern in every last thread of social fabric. All of it poison. That stuff must be easy to see: we hold these truths to be self-evident.
Apparently. it’s exactly like trying to see donkeys on Palin’s scarf. The rhetorical strain and stain of the Reagan legacy has generated an affirmative action: people can now see whatever they want to see. The poison has worked wonders: literal wonders, if you are awed at glaciers racing backwards or at the thawing permafrost creating a world of polar circle quicksand. The wonders for oh, so many freedom-fighting conservative patriots!
Now 2008 – perhaps from overuse, the tain underlying ourself-aggrandizing deceptions has worn thin and we find ourselves peeking through a new window. Our new! now! wonderland is filled with fictions and perspectives so unbelievable — a backwards B carved in cheeks, assassination catcalls left unacknowledged at hate rallies — that this election is left with only the visibly obvious. The obvious that Ms. Palin is pathetically inadequate in experience, temperament and perspective. The obvious that Senator McCain has implicitly run a campaign that makes Bush’s two terms look like the golden age of liberty. The obvious that there is no big tent in the GOP and that there are no mavericks hiding underneath it. Obvious, even as we are driving 90 miles an hour up the on ramp, that, hey, that bridge really does go nowhere. Everything’s as obvious as the donkeys parading on Palin’s scarf.
That’s why this election is a referendum on poisoned water. If America chooses to elect John McCain, we have looked straight at another glass of delusion and decided it is as clear and as clean a drink as of cool water. Then again, perhaps my opinion is obnubliatory and there really are acceptable levels of arsenic in our drinking water.
The post-script: I have reason for hope. Recently I heard that the mayor of my hometown changed from his Republican party registration so that he could vote for Obama. The story may not be true, but, if it is, I also hope it is obvious to the mayor that, no matter one’s registered affiliation, you can always vote for the candidate with the strongest grasp of reality. Drink up!
Notes from the State of Virginia
By Wesley Hogan and Dirk Philipsen
We’re writing this ‘round midnight in the “real” part of VA – south of DC’s suburbs. Okay, it may only be authentically simple minds like Sarah Palin’s who believe in a “real” Virginia. But this election season, even more sophisticated conventional political wisdom has proven unerringly wrong. How does one categorize the carpenter afraid to admit to his friends that he’s voting for a black man? The lifelong Republican housewife who confesses to terror of a possible Palin presidency…but has a “McCain/Palin” sign in her yard? The accountant who still thinks Republicans are better for the economy but worries about the country going in the wrong direction and so canvasses for both Senate candidate Mark Warner and Obama? Or the teenage Obama intern who now boasts of people coming in from Maryland on a Saturday to push Virginia Democrats across the finish line? Virginians today elude the stereotypes for white guys or suburbanites, for working Joe’s or soccer moms, even for CEO’s or evangelists. Here the presidential race has seeped into all the hills and valleys, the shop-floors and Mc-Mansions.
Our sixteen year old sat on the front porch yesterday, doing homework. We have Obama signs in the yard. An unknown SUV drove by, and flipped him off. Walking home from the bus, the kids report each day on the sign war in the neighborhood: “McCain/Palin” signs get thrown in the creek and “Obama/Biden” signs just disappear. Doing our recession-era shopping at Costco on Saturday, an electrical contractor parked behind us gestures to the “Obama ‘08” bumper-sticker on our car, grousing “I guess you guys have it wrapped up.” When we inquired “aren’t you voting for him too,” the electrician replied, “Well, yeah, I’ve got just about the biggest redneck crew in Richmond, and every single one of those fuckers is fixin’ to pull the lever for Obama, even though their daddies will roll over in the grave.” He paused, and then added: “I’ll vote for him too—I just can’t take another four years of this. But I’m not gonna tell my friends about it.” And last week a Baptist preacher and Army veteran, Reverend Leroy McLaughlin, placed a 4’ x 8’ “Vote for Change/Eight Years is Enough” Obama sign in his front yard in suburban Richmond. He woke to find that it had been replaced with a Confederate flag. In an eerie sign of the glacial pace of racial progress, the president of the Museum of the Confederacy in downtown Richmond publicly issued an apology to McLaughlin. “Such misuse and political abuse of the Confederate battle flag is a barrier to the study of Civil War history and discourages discussion on the historical factors that have shaped our country,” museum CEO S. Waite Rawls III stated.
Signs of ambivalence or blatant racism, however, seemed crushed in the wake of the welcome Obama received in Richmond last week. Hailed by young and old, black, brown and white, Obama greeted a crowd of 30,000, some of whom had camped out overnight to make sure they could get in. Our thirteen year old son was caught in the crush of people arriving at 15,900-seat Richmond Coliseum, and had to wait outside. So many thousands were waiting and pressing forward that he saw a young man’s leg broken in the crush. People pushed open a human corridor and the EMTs got through. After that four hours passed until, suddenly, the Coliseum door opened outward and Obama appeared ten feet away. “He thanked us for waiting,” reported my son. “He told us if we stayed united, there was nothing we could not accomplish. Health care for everyone, lower taxes, and a safer world. It was great to see him, but it was even better to see so many people together, united. I liked talking to the people in line. Everyone was so positive!” His eighth grade friend had accompanied her dad to the Palin rally two weeks before at the Richmond International Raceway. At the Obama event, she said, “this crowd was a lot more upbeat. Not so many people spitting. Not so much anger.”
The polls have varied from dead even to a twelve point Obama lead in the last four weeks, but the most impressive part of the election season has been the ground game. Fifty paid Obama staff came to Richmond six months ago, and in the last six weeks, that number has more than doubled. It’s enabled the Dems to mobilize thousands of volunteers to canvass, run phone banks, and organize tens of thousands of voter registration drives. At the historically black university where we teach, of 5,000 students, over 1,000 have newly registered. Statewide, the voting rolls have grown by over 464,000, five percent of the state’s total. We stood in line for two hours last weekend to vote early, and over half the line supported Obama in this majority-Republican county. If the highway to the White House runs through Virginia this year, Obama’s leading a thousand-mile caravan of people. Some will blow horns, some will hide behind tinted windows. They share in common a belief that the real Virginia has not yet been found on any polling chart or pundit map. So far, it’s a belief that’s given Democrats a good deal of mileage in 2008.
Reality Check
By Fredric Smoler
The word “realignment” is in the air, with Democrats poised for a blowout and 60 senate seats within reach: the almost unprecedented ability to shut down filibusters, and the chance to actually legislate, rather than simply ward off deranged judicial appointments. Over the weekend one NYT piece was headlined “Democrats See Risk and Reward if Party Sweeps,” but the risks foreseen – disappointing the party’s liberal flank, and a temptation to overreach – are not equally probable ones, and are in any case opposite tendencies. It will be hard to do both simultaneously, at least with any great vigor, and of the two the former looks more likely.
What will Obama do about the economic troubles that have gone far toward electing him? It is impossible to say. Some of the more hyperbolic types are talking about the final crisis of neo-liberalism, in which case the answer has to be “not much”, but final crises are very regularly discerned with greater confidence than experience would suggest is entirely prudent, and Obama’s advisers include a number of Chicago economists, not the most doughty opponents of neo-liberalism the world has ever seen, however that phrase is defined. These people apparently say some exasperating things: one of Obama’s most frequently-mentioned economic advisers, Austan Goolsbee, has been quoted to the effect that radically-widened income inequality in the United States is the product of radically-increased returns earned to the skilled. This would imply that the people on Wall Street who have just wiped out trillions of the world’s wealth are the most skilled among us, a bold view that may not resonate as well this year as it did last. The remark also made me reflect on my new doctor, mostly employed as a researcher at an excellent medical school, because I am pretty sure that she earns significantly less than anyone in her trade would have pulled down a generation ago. Are doctors really so much less skilled than they used to be? I’d have thought that the evolution of tax policy had something to do with radically-widening income inequality, but this is apparently a retarditaire view. These speculations aside, my bet is that no-one knows how much trouble we are in, or exactly what to do about it, or what Obama is likely to do.
Advisers to a Presidential campaign are notoriously a dime a dozen and a nickel a gross; on economic as on foreign policy, Obama inevitably has advisers on many sides of the same questions. Vice Presidential choices may not tell us much more, but it is still dispiriting to recall that the Democratic nominee for VP helped craft and pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, one of the most loathsome pieces of class legislation since Robert Walpole’s Black Act of 1724. Biden is among the top recipients of campaign contributions from the extraordinarily predatory credit card industry. My daily paper reports that the Obama campaign has pulled three times the number of contributions >$25,000 from the financial industry as McCain has, and was in recent years the senator who received the second highest amount of contributions from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. It is of course possible that Obama and Biden have received this largesse and promised nothing in return. And no matter what they may have promised, we can certainly hope that Obama and Biden, having won the highest offices in the land, will gloriously prove to be what the great Tammany sage George Washington Plunkett stigmatized as dishonest politicians: ones who do not stay bought. We can always hope.
There is ground for hope on many questions about Obama’s likely policies, although not always the hopes expressed by the supporters who preferred him to Hillary Clinton. Two colleagues in the faculty dining room made me reflect on the mystery that most of Obama’s supporters generally take him at his word on Iraq while happily doubting that word on a number of other things: one, who had voted for Hillary, indignantly replied to an accusation that his candidate had long supported the war in Iraq by noting that Obama seemed eager to risk war with both Iran and Pakistan, and was intent on victory in Afghanistan. The Obama enthusiast, outraged by this observation, asserted that Obama was clearly lying on all three counts. Perhaps – but if so, why believe that he will withdraw from Iraq by a date certain, no matter what the consequences?
How likely is durable realignment? A blowout portends very little about durable realignment. At the most optimistic current estimate, Obama wins with 375 electoral votes; for purposes of comparison, Clinton won 379 electoral votes in 1996, and was on the ropes very quickly thereafter. But assume that whatever economic trouble we are in falls short of the Great Depression, and that a recession does not last more than two years. Since Obama seems to be very far from an ideologue, and the academic economists advising him seem peculiarly interested in policies that may work in practice, rather than in theory, he looks unlikely to make things worse. The Republicans, meanwhile, look set to feud quite venomously over the defeat they look extremely likely to suffer, the fault lines between social conservatives and economic lunatics look likely to yawn wider and wider, and if Iraq and Afghanistan slowly fall apart, the electorate may not blame Obama any more than it blamed Reagan’s failures and losses in Lebanon, or a Democratic Congress for the collapse of South Vietnam. If it is hard to imagine what Obama will do about our troubles, it is harder yet to see what the Republicans will do about theirs.
Fired Up
By Howard Zinn
It will be a historic moment for our country if Obama becomes president, our first colored president (at least the first who acknowledges ii – who knows the complex ancestral history of the others?) And only fitting at this point, considering how colored our population has become, and how very soon “whites” will be a minority. I put the word in quotes because it’s quite a laughable description since none of us are really white, except as a cultural generalization. (I’ll spare you a poem I wrote while living in the South and becoming aware of the wide spectrum of colors among “blacks” and the equally wide spectrum among “whites” – a poem invoking/quoting an imagined racist and ending with “Us Whites Mus Unites.”)
I confess I am excited by the thought of Obama becoming president, even though I am painfully aware of his limitations – his smooth, articulate intelligence covering up a quite traditional approach to domestic and foreign policy, aided and abetted by a group of advisers recycled from the Clinton administration and other parts of the Establishment. Does he really think Robert Rubin will come up with a bold approach to the economy? Or that Madeleine Albright will carve a new path in foreign policy? (It was she who ran around the country in 1998 to defend Clinton’s bombing of Iraq, warning of “weapons of mass destruction.”)
If Richard Hofstadter were adding to his book, The American Political Tradition, in which he found both “conservative” and “liberal” presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, maintaining for dear life the two critical characteristics of the American system: nationalism and capitalism, Obama would fit the pattern. His obsequiously joining with McCain in approving the 700 billion dollar “bailout” for the financial giants is a sad sign. See my article (excuse the self-promotion) in a recent issue of The Nation rejecting the bailout as a futile “trickle down” act and making the case for directing the money right to the people Obama claims to represent.
So it will take a revivified social movement to do for Obama what the strikers and tenant organizers and unemployed councils and agitators of the early thirties did for FDR, pushing him on to new paths, so angering the super-rich that FDR, in one of his best moments, said: “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred!” Obama needs such fire. It is up to us, the citizenry – and non-citizens too! – to ignite it.
Faith of Our Fathers
By Lorna Salzman
Neither economics nor election-time punditry are exact sciences.
Pre-election punditry’s only proof is in the pudding, that is, the results of the election. So rather than predict the outcome, I would like to address the faith-based support of many liberals for Barack Obama. Why is it faith-based?
Well, it certainly isn’t based on any evidence that Obama actually supports the agenda that people assume he does. Obama has not hidden the religious inspiration that suffuses his life, yet secular liberals have had little to say on this score, even after he proposed expanding faith-based government-funded initiatives. Nor has Obama hidden his dedication to capitalism, free enterprise, or any other of the traditional hallmarks of the centrists in the Democratic Party.
He supports that oxymoron called “clean coal,” nuclear power, corporate-based health insurance, the death penalty; he voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act and in favor of all Senate Iraq war appropriations bills, opposed a bill capping credit card interest rates at 30%, and urged donations to Joe Lieberman, whom he calls his “mentor.”
Anyone comparing his voting record and public statements on these issues to those of John McCain could not conclude, as some right-wing and neo=conservative Jews have, that Obama is a closet Marxist who hates Israel. And anyone seeking to rationalize their vote for Obama will have a tough time doing so if they have actually looked at his record.
What is it about liberals that they can bash into political oblivion the person who has most consistently been the standard bearer for democracy and liberal values, who has repeatedly attacked the crimes of big business and corporations – Ralph Nader – but can welcome with open arms a proven centrist with unmitigated devotion to the Democratic Party, a party that is progenitor, alongside Pres. Bush, of all the worst betrayals of social and economic justice in the past eight years?
We may not get Bush Lite if Obama wins. What we will most likely get is four years of liberals making excuses, cutting Obama slack, and refusing to hold their representatives accountable, as they accommodate the same corporate interests as his predecessor. Obama may tout “change” but we know the Democratic Party doesn’t.
No big surprise: Wall St. has given more money to the Democratic Party than the Republicans. They must know something we don’t.
American Junkies
By Amiri Baraka
What should be understood in the current presidential campaign is that there are millions of junkies in this country. Addicted to White Supremacy. It is an addiction much stronger and much harder to kick than Heroin, also known as “Horse” or “Scag” or to the real down street people, “Boy” (So we can see that male chauvinism must be one of its components). What is also amusing, to a point, is that another addictive substance, Cocaine is called “Girl.” Americans hooked on Boy since the slave trade. Girl is more recent but they are old time junkies.
The scariness of these addictions can be realized by anyone following the campaign for president with any amount of objectivity. For instance, no matter that it should be clearly understood that McCain (say what?) has been little more than a very mild underarm deodorant for the Republicans. Having voted with Bush 90% of the time. And to his crack to Obama that he wasn’t W., that’s not a very good excuse. Most people would admit that, except when checking his voting record.
And let’s face it the Republicans, with their “Southern (white racist) Strategy” have acted like a thing with no legs in the years since Reagan. The Willie Horton race baiting stunt in the Dukakis election or the “Swift-Boat” character assassination has been typical. Not unlike McCain’s use of the William Ayers terrorist association gimmick or the why-we- must-find-a-cure-for-melanoma-by-election-time cheer leader Sarah Palin.
Palin herself seems, despite the typical thoughtlessness of McCain’s choice, part of my logical analogy of Boy & Girl drugs for Americans. Though perhaps inaccurately named, if McCain is Scag, “Boy,” a downer, Palin is “Girl” some head rattling “Blow” for Americans the GOP thinks are “that dumb.” One hopes that there are an overwhelming number of women who will be deeply insulted by McCain’s attempt to use Palin as the “beard” to masquerade the dead-end dullness of his campaign.
But if we can make light of McCain’s shallowness and often desperate and dangerous stumbling, we should also be aware that we are surrounded by millions of white supremacy junkies, who, no matter the obvious disparities between the candidates, are ready to “shoot up” another time with whiteness and get that pathological “high.” The theme of the McCain campaign is yet another indication of who McCain & Palin are. “Country First” is nothing but “Deutschland Uber Alles” (Hitler’s theme song) in redneck. McCain knows and his handlers know even more clearly that they are playing the race card, as the Republican Party has known it has been playing the race card, since Kennedy’s murder. There’s some evidence that the crew in the white house as we speak have been put there by his murderers. McCain has been dealing in redneck racist code throughout the campaign. His referring to Obama as “that one” has been cited by many as muffled n-word calling. But it has been the total contexting of Obama as “other,” “not one of us,” “un-American,” ”unpatriotic,” even by some fools earlier, as “not black enough.”
Obama, on the other hand, has been usually quite skilled at deflating, disarming and redirecting most of McCain’s most brazen attempts to not so subtly character assassinate or brand him. McCain’s relentless use of lies and half truths, teeth-set hatching a frozen fake smile trying to appear magnanimous (as in the last debate) while his eyes spin around like pinned down billiard balls imagining a retort better than he will come up with.
What is frankly scary is that, for instance, after the last debate where Obama stated and restated defense, healthcare, economic choices to McCain’s continuously over-generalized calls for “working together” in the most false sounding altruistic television host tone, sounding more desperate than convincing, when you heard the comments of some of the commentators you wondered were you watching the same program. The debate was so one-sided that even discounting different reactions by people holding different ideologies and philosophical and political expectation, you got the feeling that you were watching some junkies who’d just “shot up”!! in Germany’s Weimar Republic, In that Germany, in a time much like our own, the chaos and confusion and economic weakness and social debilitation caused first by World War 1 led to the creation of the German Socialist Workers Party, the rise of Hitler and the destruction of a democracy by a Fascism that engulfed the world in World War 2.
The moral and political poison of the Iraq war has hollowed this nation out on the inside and made it seem like Count Dracula to the rest of the world, even to the other imperialist Draculas. Economically, at 12 billion dollars a month, it has even cost this nation its titular distinction as “Head Dracula.” These wars, which at base are supposedly aimed at destroying Osama bin Laden/Qaeda and Terrorism worldwide, since 911 have been focused on an “Axis of Evil” (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, China) which are all colored people. Just as the majority of the people in the world are colored.
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But the Bush years, actually going back to Reagan’s toppling of what was left of the legacy of the “New Deal” – the would-be benevolent monopoly capitalism of the “welfare state” – and the beginning of the “supply side” sharper “trickle down” philosophy/policies of the glutton hyper-imperialist state, marked by relentless deregulation in order that Dracula might feed without limitations and all the internal draculas within it, its corporate parasites, might also feed without limitation without regulation has suddenly crashed, just as Hoover’s blood filled monstrosity fell in 1929. Just as the present unregulated monstrosity of overeating and defecating on everything throughout the world has been stunned by its own madness and crashed. It is not an “economic crisis” it is a crash!
This is the other aspect of national American addiction, and the creation of a population loaded with junkies, an addiction to monopoly capitalism, imperialism, as its world face. American imperialism has now not only reached the limits of its bloated terror on the world (and it is significant that now one of the most ubiquitous health problems in the country is obesity – as if nature itself were screaming,” Oh Beast! Stop yrself!). But in the frenzy of deregulation in all directions topped by the maniacal Bush-Cheney unilateral monstrosity, defaulting on treaties from global warming, anti missile, nuclear, world court, Geneva Convention, eating up, blowing up, murdering, marauding around the globe just like Bush walks, the strut of an empty fool.
The major problem with the crazed deregulation of Monopoly Capitalism for big capital itself is that in the end it is so insatiable that it will eat itself up. The willful permissiveness of the Bush regime allowed the corporations to run wild in their search for profit at any cost. One aspect of this bloated feeding is it allowed many of the financial institutions to turn themselves into little more than snake oil salesmen, con artists, until they started conning each other, not just the 6000 homeowners that are being foreclosed each day.
Yet when the markets crashed after all the bullshit about “Free Enterprise” and the “Market System” which is all they mean by “Freedom” and “Liberty” when they lose their shirts gaming us and each other, they are allowed to come crawling back to us for our money, for our tax money. Remember when they talk about “Government Bailout” they are talking about political and financial criminals saving their grand life styles with our money. Not a dime to bail out the foreclosed homeowners, but more of our money to bail out the criminals, so they can go on being criminals. It is not a bailout, it is a crime. Million and Billionaires using working people’s money so they can stay rich.
So they can live in their nice, clean, quiet, well-policed, well-employed, educationally secure, culturally nourished communities while you live in neighborhoods where to go to the store is a risk.
Those foreclosed homeowners should be paying their restored mortgages at lower rationalized rates with no hidden trick increases to public agencies and those resources returned equitably to the community rather than bloating already obese fat cats and their legal criminal enterprises.
Notice, also, how now McCain (is he related to the biblical Cain who slew the Able) they are accusing Obama of socialism. I wish some of these pseudo and infantile leftists would understand that Obama is talking about universal healthcare as opposed to McCain giving everyone $5000 bucks (which would be taxed) to give to one of the criminal health care providers, that McCain is playing the “market” game in the end, i.e. merely giving your money back to the culprits of this financial crash. And leaving most of us without health care. Why? Because as long as the ruling class corporations are making your money its “free enterprise” but to put such things as health care and housing under democratic public control is “bad” because it’s “socialism.” Not quite. But it is a step toward what would be State Capitalism, which would be infinitely superior to Big Dog eat Little Person system that exists under monopoly capitalism. This should be easier to see now. One reason it is not is because the media is owned by the same corporate criminals.
That’s another reason why the media are the most racist of racist influences in the campaign and why they muffle the real meaning of the fall of almighty capital. In Europe where I’m heading now to work reading poetry the dollar, once like mighty whitey is now worth about 60 cents. Since 911 when sympathy for the US poured in, the political and moral macabre “boss of the world” unilateralism of the Bush-Cheney craziness has turned the US image into a demoniacal laughing stock.
US citizens must be forced to kick the twin addictions of Monopoly Capitalism and Racism, but we should also understand Male Chauvinism and Homophobia are sustained by monopoly capitalism. In these last days of the campaign we can expect to see incredible examples of these sick and obsessive pathologies. Already there is an ignorant asshole riding through downtown Miami with a t shirt the back of which reads! “Nigger, Please! It’s the White House!” or the west coast Republican women who have produced a fake food stamp with Obama’s likeness on it surrounded by, say what? A watermelon, some barbecue ribs, a bucket of fried chicken and some Kool Aid. These dimwitted debutants claim they didn’t think it was racist. But no one thought they could think anything anyway. They’re just addicts, so is my man with the shirt. In a poem of mine I called the white house “the Caucasian Crib” but if some of these dope addicts can kick – maybe even go cold turkey – maybe we can begin to change that. Not necessarily those I mentioned, but some of the hundreds of thousands with less funky “joneses” than those!
It’s at least obvious to me that if the left is to have any authentic legitimacy in this country, at least with more than just themselves, as Obama is elected we must be about the business of putting together a huge “Left Bloc” of small ones in each state to fight for the leftward tilt of this cross roads, this confluence of fascism and socialism amidst the economic chaos and war these times are carriers of. It is Weimar to the bone. And McCain is just the kind of spineless monopoly capitalist-blockhead imperialism shapes who could lead this country directly into fascism. Obama offers an FDR-like image, in the sense that he will have to borrow from socialist leaning policies, just as Roosevelt borrowed heavily from the old CP for Social Security and Unemployment Insurance.
If somehow these American junkies permit the biggest dope dealers of US monopoly capitalism to prevent Obama from being elected, this same kind of Left Bloc must opt for a more disruptive course of action. One that would help derail what would then be a cattle car to the end of Weimar 2 and into the most bitter and destructive advent of a World War 3.
Make no mistake, the recent swiping of 700 billion dollars to bail out investment banks and another 250 billion to bail out commercial banks is to save monopoly capitalism at the American people’s expense! They’re talking about “oversight” echoing Obama’s citing the Republicans obsession with “deregulation” as the main reason for the present economic crash but if we pay almost a trillion dollars for the banks we don’t need “oversight,” we need to own them. If the market is so hip why don’t they just continue to play in that traffic, why come to us to bail out private enterprise?
But more and more they will have to borrow aspects of social democracy to save Monopoly capitalism. (See the latest Guardian (UK) newspaper, pleading with the big bourgeoisie to ease into social democracy.) But nothing can save this certainly all-but-defunct oppressive economic system, from the doom of its own internal defects. Will we manage to avoid the madness and fascist violence of the collapse of the Weimar Republic by taking the step this election proposes with an Obama presidency or will we plunge headlong into an oblivion of national collapse, with McCain piloting us all into the kind of crash he wants to be known as a hero for?
Remember, the US lost that war, just as it’s losing in Afghanistan & Iraq and its image as a beacon democracy all over the world!
From October, 2008