My friend Jamie Berger is angry. Angry in a deep-seated way. Angry in a way I understand.
First, a reference point:
I taught Freshman English for years. This taught me a lot about what I call “belligerent ignorance.” There were, happily, exceptional students I am grateful to have had the chance to know. But the large majority of the rest didn’t know squat, and they were often visibly perturbed that I wanted them not only to write papers in their idiot patois, but I desperately wanted them to develop the skills of critical thinking. I might as well have been teaching a pig to sing (with or without lipstick).
Right now, I’m experiencing rumblings of a great fear. I don’t want to care so much about the minutiae of what now passes for politics. It makes you have to engage in small-mindedness
like discussing lipstick. But I woke up to the importance of politics in December 2000, when I watched in horror as the Supreme Court halted the democratic process and declared a man who got fewer total votes president. So what legitimacy did it have, exactly? (I’m sure someone will come along to belittle that, but I really don’t care–it’s bleeding obvious to all but the most devoted Kool-Aid drinkers if they didn’t even want it to be a precedent.)
I’ve suffered through eight years of watching my country get scared and trust a man who has no curiosity, little knowledge, and no business being near the White House. No matter your political stance, you–yes, you there–should care about what these people have done to the foundation of our democracy, the Constitution. Bush has claimed powers that no president has had or ever should have. He’s claimed the right to declare anyone he wished an “enemy combatant,” whether American or otherwise, and throw them into some offshore brig until they rot. Just because he says so. Our insecure voting systems are in the hands of private companies who won’t let us see the code that counts votes. I don’t care what party you’re a member of–something is wrong here.
And what enables all of this is that most people aren’t informed, let alone smart. They choose who to let into the White House based on a series of images in a little box in their living rooms. The once-proud “straight talker” starts lying so egregiously major publications use words like “vile” about it, and yet the polls shift in his favor.
What has our country become? Few care about the details of governing. Fewer yet know what FISA stands for, or that the man who inhabits the White House has claimed the right to spy on whoever he wants. Even Barack Obama, who I would be relieved to see in the White House, voted to give the phone companies immunity for helping Bush spy on all of us.
Most people, by definition, are bound to have average intelligence. And these folks are being played for fools by much smarter people who simply do not care about them at all. People are ruining their own democracy because of unbelievably petty things. “Al Gore invented the Internet? Then give me that dude from Texas!” “John Kerry windsurfs? What an elitist!” On and on it goes, and those of us who oppose it can do very little to stop it. How will it end? What will the historians have to say about the end of our Enlightenment experiment in the New World?
Will people really choose a candidate who looks good and talks like a wind-up dummy? Will they believe things just because they’re repeated? Does it matter when no one can truly verify a vote count anyway?
I’m tired of having to care so much about the petty side of politics. I just want a functioning democracy. At this point, I’ll do everything I can to help Barack Obama get in the White House. I’ll expect that once he’s there, he’ll disappoint. But at least he (probably) won’t invade the wrong country or go to war with Russia. At least he likely understands the Constitution, since he taught constitutional law.
If he doesn’t win, it will be because the politics of fear and ignorance work. And it’s deeply depressing to think Americans can fall for that, over and over and over. I think that, at heart, the prevalence of fear and ignorance are what Jamie’s mad about, what my father’s frustrated by, and what I’m numb about. What can be done, exactly? What place does knowledge hold in our culture? Will archaeologists find all of us fossilized amid layer upon layer of decaying televisions? Will we measure our lives by season finales, by how much we’ve watched the rearranging of electrons on the front of a cathode ray tube?
Pardon the fairly random nature of these thoughts. I just feel rather like I have an anvil in my stomach as I see McCain preying on ignorance so baldly. I think Obama will come out ahead, and the lesser evil will prevail. The alternative is the triumph of deceit, and likely the final steps in abandoning the Constitution and becoming an empire that has always been at war with Westasia.
