Because of this newspaper's deadline schedule, Super Tuesday has not happened as I write this. It will have happened by the time you read this. Since I don't know what voters in the 24 states that held primaries on Tuesday will do, I offer anticipatory congratulations to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Mitt Romney has been, from the start, destined to return to his billions and his boys—who did their patriotic duty by helping dad not get elected—and ponder…what? Who cares!
It matters to me who the next president will be. It matters probably more than in any election since I have been voting. But on a more general existential level, it may not matter who the next president will be. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Rove have left behind such a wretched mess that whoever has to clean it up may eventually be accused of having created it. It will take at least two terms by anybody, no matter how superhuman (even Rambo), to repair the damage. And that's just the physical damage—to infrastructure, the economy, the environment, the military, the Constitution.
But repairing the qualitative damage may take a full generation. And, if anything good has come out of eight years of Bush, it will be that another generation has been mobilized and energized to take up the challenge. At least we should hope so. Because if not now, when?
In the eyes of the rest of the world, America is like a husband who has cheated on his wife, and she has found out. If he then thinks he can simply return to the house without some penance, he's hopelessly deluded. Sure, he may be able to watch the TV, eat the food, play with the dog, but the eggshells are crushed with every footstep, because the trust has been broken. Sometimes that trust, or a semblance of it, can be restored, sometimes not. That's why they have divorce courts and lawyers.
Meanwhile, as America has been out tom-catting around the globe with Bush and his neo-con men, other countries have been passing us by. The latest Environmental Performance Index (EPI) was just released at the World Economic Forum. The EPI is a measure of how effective a country's environmental policies are across a range of "indicators" (water and air quality, habitat protection, greenhouse gas emissions and more). The previous EPI, in 2006, showed the U.S. slipping. In 2008, that slippage is free fall. The U.S. is ranked 39th in the world on its environmental performance, falling behind Albania, Croatia, Malaysia and Slovenia. Dan Esty, director of Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy and head of the EPI project, told me, "We're starting to see what happens when countries treat environmental issues with disdain."
Shakespeare, as usual, nailed it in Othello, when Cassio wails, "O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial." Another British writer, Charles Dickens, said some pertinent things along these lines when he visited America in 1842. He imagined that he would walk into an Eden of democracy and freedom. Instead, the trip was so demoralizing—as chronicled in American Notes and satirized in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit—that he admitted to a friend, "I am a Lover of Freedom, disappointed—that's all… I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country, in the failure of its example to the earth."
Dickens returned to America 25 years later and found a nation transformed. Paying tribute to the "amazing changes," he noted, "Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I have nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct from when I was here first."
More "amazing changes" need to begin in November, 2008.
