Friday, October 08, 2004
Not the Prom
The following is (well...not the picture) a total copy of the October 3rd blog on BarlowFriendz. I know I've been doing a lot of pointing to or copying from other folks' commentary. Well....if I catch a piece that's well written and presents a strong case for thoughts I'm coping to put on blogpaper, I'll take a mulligan on my writing and stick my nose out and point. Ruff! Ruff! Besides, this is what blogging's supposed to be about, isn't it? Not so much introspection as out-there-spection.
Supporting Kerry Anyway...
› 03:14 AM | Bush Outrages/ Current Affairs/ Politics
I'm aloft somewhere between Rome and Cincinnati, jetting back towards my crazed, stupefied, dangerous country after three days in Berlin. I dread coming home. You know things have taken a paradoxical turn when Germany feels safe, sane, and free by comparison with the United States of America. But that's how it looks to me.
That's how it looks to the Germans too. The idea that we might actually re-elect George Bush is unfathomable - indeed, inexcusable - to them. As one of them put it to me, "We can forgive you for electing him once. As we ought to know, any electorate can make a tragic mistake. But if you elect him twice, we will start fearing you Americans as much as we currently fear your government." I suspect this is a sentiment one could encounter almost anywhere on God's blue earth. If the election were global as, in fairness, it probably ought to be, it would be a pulverizing landslide.
I had a hard time explaining to the Germans why it's starting to look like we might just re-elect Bush anyway. For one thing, they have not, after all, seen as much of John Kerry as we have.
And let's face it, folks, John Kerry is really irritating.
There. I've said it. And, having broken the surface tension on that spleen blister, let me just get the rest of this off my chest once and for all.
For me, John Kerry's voice has already started to acquire that special fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect that Bush's induces in me. The thought of listening to him daily for the next four years makes me feel better about the possible onset of rock 'n' roll deafness. His morose Eyeore visage has become a vista almost as tiresome as Bush's simian smirk. His patrician demeanor reminds one why George Bush has gone to such pains to disguise himself as an illiterate West Texas hick rather than the Yalie he also is.
Worse, Kerry's transparently theatrical efforts to out-macho the Republicans make him seem, as a friend recently put it, all dick and no balls. Bush's problem, to hear Kerry tell it, is that he's *not tough enough,* despite his being demonstrably willing to bomb civilians in a country that neither attacked us nor expressed any desire to do so. That's pretty gosh-darned tough, if you ask me.
Kerry's failure to capitalize on the failures of the worst administration in my lifetime is unfathomable. The systematic ineptitude of his campaign organization so far fills me with grave concerns about his ability to form an administration that wouldn't make us nostalgic for Gerald Ford's.
Generally speaking, it would have been better for the future of the Republic if, upon eliminating Howard Dean, Kerry had been stashed in a location as undisclosed as the one where they usually keep Dick Cheney. Then he could have let Bush defeat himself through policies and actions that no sane electorate could have ratified.
But no. He insisted on campaigning, apparently under the misapprehension that to know him - or at least to know that virtual version of him his marketing wizards had wrapped around him - was to love him. This, unfortunately, has not been the general effect. Gradually, I have watched the steam go out of the Anybody-But-Bush crowd as we realized that anybody, in this instance, was the increasingly irksome John Kerry.
People who, several months ago, were ready to go door-to-door in Ohio in order to defeat Bush are unwilling to even campaign among their friends to elect John Kerry. And I have become, I must admit, one of these. Being an actual Kerry *supporter* just seems, well, un-cool.
For the last month or so, the election seemed reminiscent to me of ads for the film "Alien vs. Predator, " the tag line of which goes, "Whoever wins, we lose." (Further, it has seemed right to me that one of these characters is an alien and the other a predator.)
The first debate, which I watched over the Internet in Berlin, did nothing to alter my feelings about the candidates. Though many American pundits seemed to think that Kerry "won" that Battle of the Teledroids, it looked like they both lost to me, with their stammering repetitions and hollow phrases. Lincoln vs. Douglas it was not.
Is it any wonder that so many people are playing political possum again? As ordinary folks go back to pretending to be asleep, the true believers, more fervent than ever, prepare to re-elect George Bush.
But is Kerry really as personally lame as he appears? Well, in fact, no. I had dinner with Kerry at one point last year, and, while I found his views that evening to be a bit too tightly congruent with those of the real money at the table, I found the actual John Kerry to be a great deal more likeable than his manufactured simulacrum. I remember thinking he might be an entertaining guy to spend a day skiing with.
But even if Kerry himself were as off-putting as the guy I see on TV, should we allow his personality deficiencies or cultural idiosyncrasies to dissuade us from supporting him? I would say not, especially when we consider what's at stake here.
Right here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I'm having a moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.
Thus, when it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of homicidally misguided policies. Being inconsistent is a greater personal failing than being consistently, doggedly, disastrously wrong. Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial.
We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn't really matter who's President.
That's because George Bush was and is a package deal. Along with the man himself, whatever his personality traits, we got a large cast of characters who, in aggregate, have been vastly more important than the hands-off President himself. We got Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. We got Ashcroft to a fare-the-well. We got Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle. And, boy, did we ever get Karl Rove.
We got a legion of too-smart-by-half Stepford husbands with flags on their lapels, fire in their eyes, and God on their side. We got pharmaceutical companies designing our health care systems, the prison-industrial complex designing our sentencing schedules, Exxon and Enron designing energy policy, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and the Center for the New American Century designing foreign policy, Louisiana-Pacific designing forestry policy, and Con-Agra designing agricultural policy. We got the super-rich and multinationals designing tax policy to their personal benefit, creationists designing school curricula, fundamentalists designing scientific research agenda.
However one feels about the shapes of either John Kerry's jawline or his vowels, what matters most is the shape of what he would bring with him to the White House. His masters, his servants, and his fundamental beliefs will all be very different, whatever his marketing wizards (all of whom study Rove) are telling him to say now.
More to the point, terrible things have happened during the last four years that should not be rewarded no matter how we feel about John Kerry. The war in Iraq alone is unforgivable. While it would be a wonderful thing to have a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it is criminally misguided to think that we could bomb such a thing into existence. And while it has become a mandatory cliche to say that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq, I wouldn't even say this appears true at present.
Between his ill-conceived military adventures and the billions his tax cuts have diverted into the pockets of his friends, Bush has created a deficit that may ultimately bring down the world's economy. He has started the United States on a path towards oligarchy that, unchecked, could turn America into a country that makes Mexico look like Sweden. He is responding to the foreseeable exhaustion of the world's oil reserves with policies that burn them faster. And as nearly unprecedented hurricanes whip out of the warming Caribbean, he has continued to be the primary obstacle to a collective human response to galloping carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. He has taken a good shot at gutting the Bill of Rights, and, with regard to Moslems, he has largely succeeded.
I won't attempt to repeat the list of his catastrophes here. It's far too long, and much of it has been enumerated on the Internet already. We all know it, and yet we continue to occupy ourselves with such airy trivialities as which candidate looks most "presidential." And against this backdrop of Bush-driven national emergencies, I've been allowing John Kerry's accent to diminish my sense of commitment to his election,
I can't do this any more. Neither can the rest of us who have any regard for the well-being of our descendents.
Yeah, John Kerry makes a lousy candidate for Prom King. But that isn't what he's running for.
The following is (well...not the picture) a total copy of the October 3rd blog on BarlowFriendz. I know I've been doing a lot of pointing to or copying from other folks' commentary. Well....if I catch a piece that's well written and presents a strong case for thoughts I'm coping to put on blogpaper, I'll take a mulligan on my writing and stick my nose out and point. Ruff! Ruff! Besides, this is what blogging's supposed to be about, isn't it? Not so much introspection as out-there-spection.
Supporting Kerry Anyway...
› 03:14 AM | Bush Outrages/ Current Affairs/ Politics
I'm aloft somewhere between Rome and Cincinnati, jetting back towards my crazed, stupefied, dangerous country after three days in Berlin. I dread coming home. You know things have taken a paradoxical turn when Germany feels safe, sane, and free by comparison with the United States of America. But that's how it looks to me.
That's how it looks to the Germans too. The idea that we might actually re-elect George Bush is unfathomable - indeed, inexcusable - to them. As one of them put it to me, "We can forgive you for electing him once. As we ought to know, any electorate can make a tragic mistake. But if you elect him twice, we will start fearing you Americans as much as we currently fear your government." I suspect this is a sentiment one could encounter almost anywhere on God's blue earth. If the election were global as, in fairness, it probably ought to be, it would be a pulverizing landslide.
I had a hard time explaining to the Germans why it's starting to look like we might just re-elect Bush anyway. For one thing, they have not, after all, seen as much of John Kerry as we have.
And let's face it, folks, John Kerry is really irritating.
There. I've said it. And, having broken the surface tension on that spleen blister, let me just get the rest of this off my chest once and for all.
For me, John Kerry's voice has already started to acquire that special fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect that Bush's induces in me. The thought of listening to him daily for the next four years makes me feel better about the possible onset of rock 'n' roll deafness. His morose Eyeore visage has become a vista almost as tiresome as Bush's simian smirk. His patrician demeanor reminds one why George Bush has gone to such pains to disguise himself as an illiterate West Texas hick rather than the Yalie he also is.
Worse, Kerry's transparently theatrical efforts to out-macho the Republicans make him seem, as a friend recently put it, all dick and no balls. Bush's problem, to hear Kerry tell it, is that he's *not tough enough,* despite his being demonstrably willing to bomb civilians in a country that neither attacked us nor expressed any desire to do so. That's pretty gosh-darned tough, if you ask me.
Kerry's failure to capitalize on the failures of the worst administration in my lifetime is unfathomable. The systematic ineptitude of his campaign organization so far fills me with grave concerns about his ability to form an administration that wouldn't make us nostalgic for Gerald Ford's.
Generally speaking, it would have been better for the future of the Republic if, upon eliminating Howard Dean, Kerry had been stashed in a location as undisclosed as the one where they usually keep Dick Cheney. Then he could have let Bush defeat himself through policies and actions that no sane electorate could have ratified.
But no. He insisted on campaigning, apparently under the misapprehension that to know him - or at least to know that virtual version of him his marketing wizards had wrapped around him - was to love him. This, unfortunately, has not been the general effect. Gradually, I have watched the steam go out of the Anybody-But-Bush crowd as we realized that anybody, in this instance, was the increasingly irksome John Kerry.
People who, several months ago, were ready to go door-to-door in Ohio in order to defeat Bush are unwilling to even campaign among their friends to elect John Kerry. And I have become, I must admit, one of these. Being an actual Kerry *supporter* just seems, well, un-cool.
For the last month or so, the election seemed reminiscent to me of ads for the film "Alien vs. Predator, " the tag line of which goes, "Whoever wins, we lose." (Further, it has seemed right to me that one of these characters is an alien and the other a predator.)
The first debate, which I watched over the Internet in Berlin, did nothing to alter my feelings about the candidates. Though many American pundits seemed to think that Kerry "won" that Battle of the Teledroids, it looked like they both lost to me, with their stammering repetitions and hollow phrases. Lincoln vs. Douglas it was not.
Is it any wonder that so many people are playing political possum again? As ordinary folks go back to pretending to be asleep, the true believers, more fervent than ever, prepare to re-elect George Bush.
But is Kerry really as personally lame as he appears? Well, in fact, no. I had dinner with Kerry at one point last year, and, while I found his views that evening to be a bit too tightly congruent with those of the real money at the table, I found the actual John Kerry to be a great deal more likeable than his manufactured simulacrum. I remember thinking he might be an entertaining guy to spend a day skiing with.
But even if Kerry himself were as off-putting as the guy I see on TV, should we allow his personality deficiencies or cultural idiosyncrasies to dissuade us from supporting him? I would say not, especially when we consider what's at stake here.
Right here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I'm having a moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.
Thus, when it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of homicidally misguided policies. Being inconsistent is a greater personal failing than being consistently, doggedly, disastrously wrong. Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial.
We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn't really matter who's President.
That's because George Bush was and is a package deal. Along with the man himself, whatever his personality traits, we got a large cast of characters who, in aggregate, have been vastly more important than the hands-off President himself. We got Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. We got Ashcroft to a fare-the-well. We got Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle. And, boy, did we ever get Karl Rove.
We got a legion of too-smart-by-half Stepford husbands with flags on their lapels, fire in their eyes, and God on their side. We got pharmaceutical companies designing our health care systems, the prison-industrial complex designing our sentencing schedules, Exxon and Enron designing energy policy, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and the Center for the New American Century designing foreign policy, Louisiana-Pacific designing forestry policy, and Con-Agra designing agricultural policy. We got the super-rich and multinationals designing tax policy to their personal benefit, creationists designing school curricula, fundamentalists designing scientific research agenda.
However one feels about the shapes of either John Kerry's jawline or his vowels, what matters most is the shape of what he would bring with him to the White House. His masters, his servants, and his fundamental beliefs will all be very different, whatever his marketing wizards (all of whom study Rove) are telling him to say now.
More to the point, terrible things have happened during the last four years that should not be rewarded no matter how we feel about John Kerry. The war in Iraq alone is unforgivable. While it would be a wonderful thing to have a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it is criminally misguided to think that we could bomb such a thing into existence. And while it has become a mandatory cliche to say that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq, I wouldn't even say this appears true at present.
Between his ill-conceived military adventures and the billions his tax cuts have diverted into the pockets of his friends, Bush has created a deficit that may ultimately bring down the world's economy. He has started the United States on a path towards oligarchy that, unchecked, could turn America into a country that makes Mexico look like Sweden. He is responding to the foreseeable exhaustion of the world's oil reserves with policies that burn them faster. And as nearly unprecedented hurricanes whip out of the warming Caribbean, he has continued to be the primary obstacle to a collective human response to galloping carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. He has taken a good shot at gutting the Bill of Rights, and, with regard to Moslems, he has largely succeeded.
I won't attempt to repeat the list of his catastrophes here. It's far too long, and much of it has been enumerated on the Internet already. We all know it, and yet we continue to occupy ourselves with such airy trivialities as which candidate looks most "presidential." And against this backdrop of Bush-driven national emergencies, I've been allowing John Kerry's accent to diminish my sense of commitment to his election,
I can't do this any more. Neither can the rest of us who have any regard for the well-being of our descendents.
Yeah, John Kerry makes a lousy candidate for Prom King. But that isn't what he's running for.
Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home Verging on Pertinence Just some more disposable thoughts clogging up the hinterlands
<< Home Verging on Pertinence Just some more disposable thoughts clogging up the hinterlands
