I Just Want it Over

Anyone else as sick of this election as I am? I can't even remember when this all started. I just remember an array of people in both parties putting each other down. Then the ridiculous sight of candidates behind a row of desks on stage trying to answer stupid questions intelligently (anyone else think of the Miss America pageant?). Then the barbs sent from one front runner to whoever appeared to be the competition. Now the last ditch efforts at name-calling and trying to dredge up scandal to convince the "undecided." Undecided?? Pullease--are these people just waking up from comas?

Come on. Enough already. Most of us have known for weeks if not months whom we're voting for. I want this thing over. I'm worn out with hanging up on recordings and muting the political ads. I've voted already. I just want some peace.

But even as I say that I realize that peace may be elusive. I read the other day that Ms. Palin is thinking about announcing her candidacy for the presidency in 2012should John McCain not make it. Does that strike fear into anyone else's heart besides mine? If she starts running the day after the election, we can look forward not only to an election season that never ends--bad enough--but to four more years of the wink and the smug anti-intellectualism.

The anti-intellectualism really troubles me because it seems to make a triumph of not thinking just at the time that we need to think harder than ever. The Puritans brought anti-intellectualism to American life. Thinking was counter to God, the pulpits thundered, and if you want to know the wages of thinking, just look at the lost Eden. It shows up now and then usually promoted by authoritarians, people who don't want others to think. Intellectuals are often the bad guys (for the religionists, it's the humanists)because they think, want proof, and aren't docile. They generally speak out when someone is just blowing smoke.

I'm an intellectual (if I don't sound too arrogant) and a pragmatist. I measure success by outcome and not by whether it makes me feel good that I am forcing someone else to conform to my personal set of beliefs.

I voted for Obama (early voting) because I want someone calm at the wheel and not the continuing bunch of carpetbaggers who have destroyed the economy. Sometimes I shake my head in disbelief as I listen to people. Can't they get beyond abortion and "palling with terrorists" to look with cool eyes on where this country is headed? Can't they get beyond emotion to see the policies that have led to the economic melt down? Can't they become informed partners in running the country and not rely on politicians who promise anything to get elected? This race shouldn't even be close.

When I taught writing to college freshmen, I used to warn them about "primary certitude." This is when you believe you have the absolute truth on something and refuse to listen to any other arguments. When you raise your voice and yell vehemently that you are right, you are generally falling into it.

There's been a whole lot of primary certitude--too much for my books--of it this election. I just want it over.

Insanity, Mendacity, and Incredulity

Sid and I were buying cat litter and other essentials in the usual elephantine quantities (50 lbs of litter) at Sam’s Club the other day when the young, female clerk remarked on my Obama button. She told me that she’d recently had to reassure her mother by correcting an e-mail claiming that Obama was a Muslim and that he wasn’t born in the US.

Well, I replied—I hope you told your mother only if you don’t count Hawaii as a state (since 1960 but it was a territory before that and so everyone was already a US citizen) and only if you stop having it both ways: if he’s not a Christian, why beat up on him for his decidedly Baptist Christian minister?

I had to shake my head. Anyone reasonable who researched the matter of Obama’s birth ought to know that while birth certificates are not public knowledge in Hawaii (thank God because of identify theft), the Honolulu Star-Bulletin publishes regular lists of births, deaths, and marriages in the newspaper. My marriage was listed. And so was Obama’s birth in 1961 just ten days after the fact. Enough, you would have thought. Apparently not. The persistence of these rumors and untruths leaves me wondering about the sanity, mendacity, or incredulity of the people who forward them.

Sam’s Club seems to be a cultural crossroads of some kind. George told me a good one last week about Colorado Springs. Those in the know realize that the Springs is the conservative core of Colorado. No one is as conservative or as sometimes whacky as the Springs can be. A judge had to tell them that an ordinance allowing landlords not to rent to gays because they are gays—was actually against the very Constitution they hold sacred. The Springs is the headquarters of Focus on the Family, which ought to be enough said. A recent drive through some very nice Springs neighborhoods shows a few defiant Obama-Biden yard signs sprinkled among those for McCain and Palin.

Back to George’s story: He heard from a friend that she went into Sam’s in the Springs wearing an Obama button. This is pretty gutsy, but no one said anything until a woman came up to her in a rage and demanded to know if she was really going to vote for a Black Man. George’s friend was deeply offended and told her she was stupid. Good for her. But that question was actually rather exceptional in its honesty and directness. Most other, more PC, people might have couched it as “liberal” or “socialist.” I guess PC in the Springs means Politically Caustic.

I’m bemused by why anyone supports John McCain and Sarah Palin. I respect Senator McCain and I would have preferred him to George Bush, but with the economy making death rattles and over 4,000 deaths in Iraq and the fact that the Republican Party has been the one calling the shots for the past eight years, I just don’t get it. I would have liked to see the current administration forced to defend itself. If that meant an impeachment, so be it, but Speaker Pelosi seems to have desired sainthood and took impeachment off the table. I felt frustrated when she did that. Clinton never cost 4,000 lives or ruined the economy, yet he was subject to it. Why ever not someone who clearly lied about taking us to war? Is this now acceptable behavior for US presidents? I hope the next Congress finds someone more in touch to be speaker.

I’ve already made my feelings on Ms. Palin clear. She’s on the take. I don’t blame her. Everyone else is and has been for eight years. But why ask me to continue the plunder? They were saying on E! (the entertainment channel) that she should be a talk show host. I think she’d be great at that. Her appearance and her spunkiness might give Oprah a run. But run the country? Please spare me.

Somehow or other, I and the country will get through the next ten days until the election. When it’s over, I want to go back to writing genial, funny blogs about human relations and growing older. Until then, I can only hold my breath and hope that no one fixes the elections this time.

Honor

The other evening I watched John McCain take back the microphone from an elderly woman who had proclaimed Obama to be an Arab. McCain rebuked her ignorance and earned boos for calling for respect for his opponent. One has to assume that the woman came to the rally to be reassured that McCain shared her hatred of things different and foreign—one also has to assume that she was not the only one. McCain’s response was at least a step in the right direction toward being presidential, but it was also and only a fleeting glimpse of the decent man who once was.

I’d like to think that McCain had a shock of horror as he recognized his base in this woman. It must have been like seeing members of the Ku Klux Klan, Skin Heads, Neo-Nazis, and fascists sprinkled in the audience. Is this who he wanted to support him? How far he has fallen since giving in to the right wing of his party and since bringing on board a vice presidential candidate who has been told to raise the rabble. I shake my head as I watch the mayhem: how can we talk about extremism in the Middle East when we do such a good job of it here?

But it’s not just McCain—it’s the entire Republican Party that has become the home of the emotional, prejudiced, and unthoughtful, fanned on by those who fear a future where the leaders are not white and not evangelical Christian and by the self-interest of cynical political and corporate leaders who have between them brought this country almost to ruin and who fear a change in administrations because it will mean taxes and regulation.

Where is the honor of the Republican Party? Apparently it sold out to religious fanaticism and to economic greed.

How insignificant by comparison seems an undignified romp in a closet in the Oval Office. And where are the family values they hit Clinton with back then? We hear little about those anymore given Ms. Palin's own shotgun marriage and her daughter’s pregnancy. One can only imagine how this would have been used against Hillary Clinton. Things don’t have to be true anymore—only shouted loudly for the panic to begin.

One of the greatest ironies for me is listening to Alan Greenspan. He’s the one who, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, opposed any regulation on Wall Street and who is now backpedaling fast. His explanation for the stock market decline is to shake his head like some sorrowing grandfather and say that deregulation would have worked if the banks had been honorable. Honorable? Where money’s concerned and obscene salaries and bonuses depend on profit with no questions asked? I want to scream back to him—who was it that destroyed that honor if not you?

Let’s be honest about this. Obama represents the future of this country. It is a minority future. It is not white and exclusively Christian. This scares the hell out of those who are. In my opinion they have to understand that they’ve had a good run, they courageously settled the country, and they’ve profited. Now they have to share. There were American Indians and Hispanics here long before the White settlers and there will be an increasingly mixed population in the next generations.

Change is never comfortable but neither is clinging to a past that no longer works. The honor I hope for in my president is not to hold rallies where people shout threats and scream insults but to provide the leadership to hold on to what is good from the past and also to turn to face America’s future with pride and hope. Most important to me, though, is to give that message to those who fear and to turn away from those who shout hate and ignorance.

May I indulge in one little nasty (I never said I was pefect)? My hope is that Ms. Palin goes back to Alaska after November and does not win re-election as governor.

Who Benefits?

Cassandra was a Trojan princess given the gift of foresight by Apollo who, since she rejected him, accompanied it with the curse of not being believed. I don’t claim Cassandra’s flawless pre-knowledge but at this point in my life and America’s history, I think I understand how she must have felt.

Let me picture her for a moment. She has offered the prophecy that Troy is going to fall to the besieging Greeks. She pleads with the Trojans to listen. They don’t of course—that’s her curse after all. Troy falls and she is doomed to live the rest of her short life as a Greek prisoner, trapped in the guilt that if perhaps if she had only been more persuasive, if she had only couched things in better terms, if she had only chosen different words, that perhaps she might have been heard and might have saved her city and family. Apollo indeed had his revenge.

We all live with what-ifs. When you’ve lived as long as I have and have been around power, as I was—on the sidelines admittedly but I could see there from where I was—most people develop a wise and seemly skepticism—or at least ought to.

One of the things you learn is that the ways things are spun are seldom the way they are. The wise person approaches every proposal with the question “Who benefits?” So often otherwise altruistic leaders succumb to the loudest voices among their constituents. Nothing then can get done unless somebody benefits and it is not always the people in whose name some contract or program is funded.

This principle applies as much to contracts to build schools and roads as it does to wars and nuclear-non-proliferation treaties. It particularly applies to groups wanting approval of constitutional amendments. Someone is benefiting. Is it whom you believe it to be? Find out and you find out what really is happening.

Eight years ago, I found myself faced with a presidential candidate appealing to patriotism and the “American Way.” My bull meter turned on. Who’s benefiting? The candidate wanted to lift all “interference” on business. He said removing all restraint would enhance competition and would create jobs. He promoted the ideal of a world in which business unimpeded by government would raise all boats.

I didn’t have to be Cassandra to predict what was likely to happen given the reality of human and corporate greed. He may have been wedded to the idea of a free economy but his supporters were committed to profit. Who benefited was every corporation and entity that could afford a lobbyist and wanted to feed at the public trough. I was perplexed and still am: how could anyone not understand the greed and public damage such a policy would inevitably arouse?

Through the years, I’ve learned to be skeptical. I’ve watched money change hands supposedly for some noble purpose but actually for personal ego and future favor. I’ve watched people not in the know think they have “won” some benefit without understanding how they have been pawns in some process far larger than they. Sometimes it’s been so obvious that I’ve had to conclude that people were being willfully ignorant.

Above all, I’ve learned that human nature doesn’t change. It was just as greedy and willful in Greece and Troy as it is today. Even the Church has had to reign in unruly human beings: the Ten Commandments are basic rules for people who have to live together.

As of October 2008, what frightens me most, though, is the possibility that the lessons of controlling human greed have apparently not been learned.

Cassandra today might tell us to move beyond phony idealism and old, comforting “truths” and accept that we are just as prone to error as the Trojans. She might challenge us to grow as a nation by allowing ourselves to recognize that pride is blinding us to those who cynically profit from it. We ought collectively to be able to look into the mirror and shudder at how we tolerate personal attacks, name-calling, appeals to emotion and prejudice, flag-waving, half-truths, and the artificial us-versus-them. On the contrary, we need to be clearheaded to recognize where the power really is and what it’s being used for.

Power is hard-edged, silent, and unemotional. I’ve seen it. It’s a coiled snake waiting for opportunity. It uses patriotism and vanity as the venom to remove its opponents. It never believes in intangibles like patriotism. It hisses with pleasure when people waste their time squabbling over lapel pins because they never ask the real questions. It shakes the rattle in its tail to panic us into feeding it. And until we as a nation are mature enough to confront and control this power, it will continue to distract us from our responsibility of determining and taking responsibility for our future.

My Vice Presidency

I want to thank everyone who pledged me their votes--all twenty of you. I appreciate your trust but realize that it would be most unfair of me not to release you to vote for the other candidates. I am therefore suspending my campaign. It has been a wonderful experience for me personally as I had not believed before that I could attract twenty votes. I am humbled and grateful.

America's Political Super Bowl

With the Wall Street bailout debacle going on, I feel like a failed lemming who doesn’t know which cliff to jump off. I have no idea who to believe: the group that is predicting that we will all lose our jobs through lack of available credit, or the one that says this is just another rip off. I’m not invested in the stock market precisely because I don’t pretend to understand it. All I know is that someone—make that a whole lot of someones—failed in their jobs.

The Washington Post says that a major part of the problem was not the usual culprits we’re hearing about but instead was the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who decided their role was profit and they used their money—our money—to hire lobbyists to tear down any regulation imposing controls on them. I suppose grab and run sums up corporate philosophies these days. I sure hate to see them rewarded by further mortgaging our children.

This whole affair, coming as it does with that period of insanity known as the election, provides a double whammy, meaning that there’s no one left to trust. Everyone’s become corrupt and a special interest—even organized religion. I am left to wonder what it is that I am watching.

The closest I can come to describing the spectacle is to call it the American Political Super Bowl. This seems appropriate because people are not choosing candidates—they are choosing sides, and they are prepared to defend their team with flag waving and loud shouting that says absolutely nothing except “Go Team.”

On the one side, we have Team America. They are known for loud foot stomping while chanting USA, USA. They wear American flag pins. They want things to remain as they were: comfortable and predictable and flattering to their vanity. They do a lot of talking about values (their own), standing on their own two feet and not taking hand-outs, and building fences to keep out illegal immigrants. They still want to dominate the world through military force (“Americans love a war,” said General Patton, the team owner of Team America), and they love to kick butt. Corporations love them because Team America believes in the almighty (although now devaluing dollar) and tries to remove all restraints on raising that buck. They tend to look on minorities as mostly illegals, encroaching on the American dream, and better off out of the country if they aren’t willing to work for less than minimum wage. Their hero is Ronald Reagan, the head coach and author of trickle down economics.

On the other side, we have Team Future. These are people who are chanting “Cut us in. Cut us in.” They distrust corporations because they are making money and not offering benefits. They like to picket Wal Mart because they think it doesn’t pay its workers enough. They may be part of America’s growing minority future and have an attitude problem toward Whitey or the Man or Gringos, or whatever they call the shrinking Caucasian population. They are likely to favor Affirmative Action programs but get resentful if someone suggests that they or anyone else might not have succeeded without them. They like to blame lack of opportunity for their lack of progress and talk a lot about raising the minimum wage. Many of their parents look back with nostalgia to the days when unions meant something. They like social programs and are more likely to favor choice when it comes to what they call reproductive rights. John Kennedy is the owner of this team and its coach is Ted Kennedy.

Trying to referee, somewhere in the middle of the field, is a bunch of Independents who are endlessly courted by either team and who stand, like me, dazed in the glare of the headlights of the two on-rushing groups. These Independents are something of a mystery to the two teams who either feel that if they aren’t part of the solution they’re part of the problem, or that they should either love America or leave it. While the teams line up along the sidelines and the cheerleaders kick up their thighs to loud cheers, the Indies are likely to be in the end zones and wondering what the hell is going on.

What IS going on? In the end it is only a game, after all. Presidents can’t do that much without majorities in Congress. Bush’s trouble was that he had a Congress in which his party had the majority in both houses. He might have been a more successful president if he had encountered opposition and been forced to defend his policies. I see him now as a tragic figure as Aristotle described that figure in The Poetics: a man who does what he believes is best and is destroyed by it, destroying others around him in the process.

Personally, I would like to see both teams cool it a bit. All the cheerleading, the name-calling, the posturing, and the ticket selling is turning me off—and I’m one of the people in the middle so supposedly I’m desirable. I want both sides to quit telling me they are absolutely right. I want them to talk about issues rather than spin me slogans. And I PARTICULARLY want them to stop sending me passionate e-mails that are false, misleading, and full of crap. Do they think because I’m independent I am also stupid?

I nominated myself for Vice President because I was tired of this nonsense. I want someone to come forward who is not an ideologue, not zealous, and not a messiah.

I want someone to acknowledge the fact that dealing with Middle East has no easy answers because there are thirty-five hundred years of history that most Americans don’t bother to learn before they rush in with fix-its such as democracy. These are people who live two thousand years ago as if it is yesterday. Now we are part of what they will remember in another 2,000 years.

I want someone who will understand that governments balance and protect for the sake of fairness and the national interest; they do not promote one group over another except in exceptional cases such as ensuring fairness and civil rights, which are part of what this country prides itself for.

I want someone who will understand that the rule of law is not something to be manipulated to someone’s pet point of view. Either we have a nation of laws or we have a nation of constitutional amendments that serve special interests.

My God—what I really want in a president is intelligence, objectivity, judgement, education, and compassion. Does such an animal exist? I hope that America is the winner when the referee calls, “Play Ball.”