"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."—Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"
From the start, the only thing that could win Election 2008 for the Republicans was tragedy or chicanery, or a combination of the two. The dynamics of the race were already in place before the candidates were picked: all-time least popular president; wasteful, unpopular and divisive war; skyrocketing energy costs; collapsing housing market; jobs outsourced; retirement savings wiped out; medical benefits denied or nonexistent; schools and infrastructure in disarray; Katrina; corporate criminality run amok; climate change; porous borders.
Somebody would have to pay, and in the past it was always the party in power that paid. In this case, the Republican Party has presided, these last eight years, over what James Howard Kunstler calls "the Wrecking of America." At some point, even the slowest sheep in the flock discover they've been sheared. So the only things the GOP have going for it are fear, race-baiting, xenophobia, lies and a false sense of patriotism and "exceptionalism" (Palin's favorite word).
My uncle, a decorated Korean War veteran, has been sending me emails that were sent to him, about Obama not really being an American or that he's really an Islamic agent bent on destroying us. He wants to know if these things are true. He's a decent man, has seen the world, and has battle scars to prove it. And yet even he falls for this stuff.
Let's not talk falsely now—this kind of "swift-boating" has a proven track record. And if the GOP can steal another election—through vote "caging" or discarded ballots (see the new issue of Rolling Stone for Greg Palast's and Robert Kennedy's disturbing story, "Block the Vote")—they will retain their hold on power. But we will no longer be the United States of America. We will more resemble countries we profess to stand against: Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Myanmar. We will be just another tinhorn dictatorship ruled by guns, police, fire hoses, tear gas, tasers and torture.
America has behaved like an alcoholic for years, denying it had a problem and believing, like all drunks, that it can keep drinking booze indefinitely. Eventually, though, even the strongest system can't stave off the biological facts of life. I've known alcoholics who have looked good well into their 40s, while I've aged. Then, almost overnight, a biological switch is flicked and hair turns white, faces sag, organs go on the blink, colds linger, and they suddenly look 80. It can happen to nations, too.
Every four years, the rhetoric soars about this being "the most important election in our history." In 2008, this may be the case. We can't afford another tragedy like the one that befell Kennedy's father in 1968, or the usual Republican chicanery. When Hillary Clinton invoked the name of Bobby Kennedy to explain why she continued to stay in the race when the polls and primary results were against her, a sick feeling permeated my soul. In the heat of the moment, I wrote some things about her I probably will regret. But she pushed the wrong button. The image of a young, dashing RFK bleeding to death in an LA hotel kitchen was emblazoned in my mind.
America, we can't go there again. Dead bodies were strewn across the nation's TV screens when I was a boy, and it did something to the psyches of a generation. I flinch in horror when I hear about supporters at Palin's Nuremberg reenactment rallies screaming "Kill him!" about Obama.
We the people are better than all this. Aren't we?
The hour is getting late.
