Nov. 2 2004
Gavin Newsom mis-timing: Timing is everything. At the time of the gay marriages in SF, I thought, too bad he didn't hold that thought and do it after the November election, instead of giving Bush a distraction from the war, a ballot issues in bible states to drag in the fundamentalist voters; Would it have made all the difference -doubtful. Was it a factor - definitely. Yes, Bush started it in the state of the union, but Newson put it on the front page for a week. If he did it now, it would have been off the radar by the next major lection, and it might have a more lasting and intelligent debate around it, relatively free of electoral spin..
Howard Dean might have lost the same or worse, and he might have had a steady rise to victory, but would have put on the table a real healthy debate, real war issues and a real exit strategy, but Kerry was chosen for electability. to Kerry's great credit he carried at least some of this to the debates, and putting some of these arguments forcefully in front of a reluctant-to-hear American public is a lasting accomplishment. The American obsession with winning and winner takes all and winning is the only thing leads to the electability argument, but it is an artificial and democracy diminishing obsession. All the parliamentary governments accept a tie as a kind of viable situation to be negotiated - The Anaheim Ducks, Disney's hockey team tried to impose a shoot-out on every regular, tied game because they felt Americans would not accept a tie .
endless boring win strategizing - in the event too bad more risks were not taken
but the overriding danger is the 1/3 or more of the electorate that embraces the anti-democratic anti-human rights message of Bush, and the extent that bad cops, politicians bigots and, as my German friend who grew up under the NAZIs and has been shuddering for the last 4 years in deja vu says, the brownshirts will be strutting about and imposing their private views and morality and bullying on the rest of us.
Well, Sitting Bull broke down and cried and handed over all his earnings to the poor of London, as his fellow Buffalo Bill wild west show performers tried to stop him. How, he is reported to have said, can they (the immensely wealthy English at the height of the empire) not take care of their poor. Yet to take up the reigns of empire, it takes a certain abandonment of Judaeo-Christian -Muslim principles of charity to dive into an empire full force, to sacrifice the young people to the cause of suppressing the 'barbarians", a certain acceptance of strategies of terrorizing the population and turning a blind eye to atrocities. And this was reflected in the neglect of the poor at the heart of the empire.
Benefits of the Roman Empire
In high school history we learned, that although the Romans were brutal, there were many benefits and these we listed, not the brutality:
- echoing weirdly the German trains running on time - the Roman roads
- Roman language and culture
- laws
these dovetailed consciously and didactically with how the British empire styled itself.
Strategic electoral politics is ugly because it skips the real tough educational,investigative and deliberative processes that are required for lasting intelligent pragmatic social decision-making.And the epitome of shallow strategic politics is the US right now, maybe a function of being the sole superpower as Britain was at times in recent centuries. Most of us, me included, were dazzled by and partook of the irrational exuberance as Clinton danced a delicate strategic balancing act that maintained a tenuous peace and tentative steps toward peace in concert with a fantastic expansion and bubble which benefitted from the relative peace and relatively good image of Clinton around the world, just enough to maintain the economic expansion. A kind of zenith of the co-opting of acitivists from the 60's who compromised by having families, getting corporate and professional jobs through theta 70s and 80s, I am reminded of the words of a French Canadian woman about 50 I met on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit in the later 90s. She said her son had scolded her: your generation blew it; you had the advantage, you had the right values in the 60s and early 70s and you gave up on it, when if you had just kept focused a little longer all the problems, the environment,overpopulation, poverty, would have been easy to solve! And I think he is largely correct - if enough of us had forgone jobs and families, it would have been so easy compared to now, to solve a lot of these problems, and give our non-existent children, but more importantly, the next generation, a much less compromised world.
So as daily Kos and others reiterate, the roots of the pickle we find ourselves in lies some decades (centuries?) in the past, and the way out is not for the fair weather ally but for the dogged and determined who are prepared for the long haul, for decades of watching and listening for a square inch of opportunity, for retreating and going forward as the situation evolves, for deep, deliberative study and action, for a willingness to make major life decisions with these dynamics in mind, without the security of an all knowing guru, ideology or God or even of ultimate good outcome. I once heard Martin Buber quoted or paraphrased by a local interpreter of his works: if, at the end of your life, you cannot consider the possibility that your life's work has been in vain, then your life's work has been in vain.
