Burke on the Meaning of the Election
Timothy Burke of Easily Distracted has some interesting thoughts on the meaning of the just-concluded election: Ship of fools.
I’m going to cheat, and give you part of his conclusion, but you should read the whole thing to get the gist of what he’s saying.
Perhaps the hardcore that hates me and everyone like me, that hates the other 49%, that hates New York and California and Boston and Chicago, hates the cities and the educated and the culture-makers and the secularists, perhaps they cannot be turned or changed or persuaded, any more than I can be on the convictions that form the heart of my lifeworld. Perhaps this is a social conflict so deep and so fundamental that its resolution will never be carried out through electoral politics. Four more years may make no difference. If so, then our time is better spent in a quest for the Fort Sumter of our times and our souls, for the path to the figurative dissolution of our contaminated Union.
November 4th, 2004 at 9:14 am
Thanks for the link! I wouldn’t have gone quite as far as he did but still took the following to heart
“I also know there are people who cannot or will not choose another path, who are seeking and may find an American authoritarianism or theocracy that will extinguish American democracy for our lifetimes. There are people who want me forgotten, silenced, gone, maybe even dead, people who hate me and anyone like me. Their enemies are not the terrorists: their enemy is other Americans. I will not simply lay down before that hatred. I did not start this fight in that spirit but I am prepared to respond to it if cornered and left no other choice.”
November 4th, 2004 at 12:34 pm
…or maybe a lot of people just voted for a different guy than he did. Why is it, for too many people, that a personal sense of defeat translates into the dark night of someone else’s soul?
November 4th, 2004 at 3:24 pm
Liten, Thom, as hard as you fucking can: This election is a very big deal because of what it says about the soul of this nation, and because of deeper trends which are too far gone to change easily.
It says we can see the photos from Abu Ghraib and not much care. It says that our ‘free press’ can delude us as thoroughly as Pravda once deluded the ordinary people walking the streets of Moscow. It says that we can be tricked and tricked and tricked. It says that a large number of us are too dumb and soft to know our own best interests. It says, in a hundred ways, that Americans are not special.
It shows deeper trends have a dreadful momentum. It shows we won’t kick the petroleum habit until we are truly out. (Incidentally, most petrochemicals can be replaced by renewable alternatives. One of the few sensible things Bush mentioned during the debates was ‘biodiesel,’ a nascent techno-fix that turns any damned old medical waste and such crap into pretty good diesel. But there is at least one thing we should consider the scarcity of: helium. It’s extracted from natural gas; once free, it wafts off into space. You can’t get it anywhere on Earth except out of natural gas.) We have gone and got ourselves into a religious war with Islam which, frankly, we could LOSE.
Discover Magazine listed twenty different ways the world could end, and about a third would be our own fault, such as stupid warmongering or environmental sabotage or artificial plagues. If you haven’t got your head wrapped around the idea that the human race could get wiped out SOON, for REAL, well, gee whiz. I don’t want to share a planet with you. Please die. I’ll finish your lunch.
I wouldn’t be half so hard to get along with on this issue if we already had settlements on other planets, or O’Neill colonies at various libration points around the solar system. But we just aren’t there yet, and it is SO irresponsible, so MAD, to let people like Bush and Cheney run this country, god damn. There’s no placve to run. It’s like some smart dude said: in an insane society, being well-adjusted is not a sign of health. In an insane asylum, you DON’T want to fit in.
Yes, I feel a personal sense of defeat, but I have been after bigger game for a long time. You seem to think the spoils of victory are champagne and a chauffered car, a leather chair in the halls of power. A pool and a bimbo, a cigar and a top-down Mercedes with a bad-ass stereo.
That’s all nice stuff, and the only thing better than a pool and a bimbo is a pool and three bimbos.
But what I am talking about is the power to decide my own fate in the universe. When the Republicans steal elections, they are stealing my right to think my little grandson might have grandchildren of his own, and that they might have their grandchildren, and that those strangers might stand where I stood, listen to jazz in a little Mexican dive under the Williamsburg Bridge like I once did, look up at the same stars that once whispered to me in the cool mountain nights, love and dream like I once did.
Go read the Left Behind books. They’re HUGE bestsellers in red states. And think deeply on the fact that they believe that stuff there. Think deeply on the fact that earthly life does not ultimately matter to millions of red state voters. On the fact that, deep down, they really are ready to drink the Kool-Aid, just like the cultists at Jonestown in Guyana. And they are ready to make you drink it. If you are not scared, you are a fool.
November 5th, 2004 at 9:14 am
Tom, in sincere concern, you really need to calm down. I’ll apologize if I upset you that badly, but you really need to take a breather…
November 5th, 2004 at 9:48 am
No, Tom does not need to take a breather. He needs to do exactly the opposite.
He and everyone like him need to get mad enough to fight — before there’s nothing left in the US to fight for.