So here's why I haven't been writing about the election.
Four years ago, I got really upset by the election. Really, really upset. The injustice of what went on, the blithe way in which the Supreme Court overstepped their bounds, the appalling manufacture of a "crisis situation" (thank you, CNN, FoxNews, etc.) necessitating that the Supreme Court get involved in the first place...all of it just absolutely steamrolled the entirely rational and measured system the Founding Fathers built into our election process. I didn't necessarily feel that Gore should have won--he didn't get a majority of the electoral vote either. The Florida disaster meant that, if that state couldn't declare its votes (which was starting to look like a real possibility), neither candidate would have had the requisite 270 votes needed for a majority. In that situation, Congress is called in to starting making decisions, using an extremely lopsided system that gives equal voting power to each state regardless of population. Is this a fair system? No. But it's the way things are supposed to work. It was designed to run this way specifically because the idea of a President appointed to the position by a group of cognoscenti appointed to their positions by former Presidents smacked of the kind of oligarchic kingmaking that the Constitution was designed to stop. Why? Because it's possible that allowing that kind of backdoor power-brokering to go on can result in potential conflicts of interest when, just as a hypothetical example, the son of one of those former presidents is running for office and is appointed mostly by judges appointed during his dad's twelve years in the White House.
For me, it's not a question of whether the Supreme Court's actions ultimately changed the outcome of the election...I don't believe they did. It's the ease with which they appropriated for themselves a power they should never have had. It's the myopia of our government and the ahistorical understanding of what America is supposed to be for that disgusts me. It's the small-minded politicians who endorse any strategy that's "legal" to get and keep themselves in office, ignoring the one implied tenet of the Constitution--that it must be guarded over and nurtured by people who believe in what it's supposed to do, not in what it lets them get away with. It's the knee-jerk flag-wavers who have a child's belief in the infallibility of their government, despite mountainous evidence that that government has been steadily rotting away the principles by which it is raised above the people it is mandated to govern.
It's this mix of apathy, opportunism, and the mindless devotion of the masses that leads to an administration that writes up documents proving that, due to loopholes in language, torture is technically legal so long as the victim is not considered an enemy combatant, in contravention of nearly a century of international law; a people who cheer songs like "Osama yo Mama" and allow the president to tell us that we are under attack by foreign boogeymen because "they hate our freedom"; a military that, in its Western ideas of how to root out Iraqi resistance, humiliates men before their wives and parents before their children in a culture in which honor is synonymous with life. Honor is very nearly a dead husk in America; we've forgotten that it means something more than doing what we're told and being proud of our religion or our country, two things which for most of us are circumstances of birth. There is no honor inherent in being an American; honor comes from upholding the principles that led to America's founding. There is no honor in breaking down the door to an Iraqi homeowner's house and forcing him to his knees while his children watch. Those children have a far more developed, and far less nuanced, sense of honor than our own, and they are learning a definite lesson about America.
In 2004, we are less protected from one another and our own government in this country than we have been in my lifetime. The Patriot Act is a travesty, an end-around circumventing some of the most important Constitutional amendments we have--the right to free speech, the right to speedy trial, the right to privacy, the right to avoid self-incrimination, and others have all been effortlessly ash-canned by an administration whose collective sense of what is right appears primarily based on a combination of self-righteousness and a dogmatic belief that America exists for some higher purpose, the execution of which is their God-given duty--and fussy issues of Right, of what Rousseau called "a moral and legal equality which compensates for all those physical inequalities from which men suffer," ought not to interfere with that grand goal. We have lost our sense of what is Right; worse, we have actively shed it, in favor of what is allowed, what is possible, what is acceptable. Make acceptability the benchmark for Right, and our moral stances become shifty things, slippery and reversible as we begin to define Right in terms of what we want. Our government no longer recognizes the difference; it has gone far down the path into mistaking what it wants for what it has a right to, and what it already has for something it earned, rather than a gift passed down by more careful custodians than they. It is like a child, quick to assert its own "rights" but slow to understand those of others, and slower still to respect them.
We are little better as a people. We are fickle and foolish; easily riled, easily distracted; quick to anger but quick to forgive. The government needn't concern itself about disguising its relentless assault on human rights because we are so very, very quick to forget. Guantanamo Bay upset us a litte, but we forgot, and hundreds of people are still there, held without charges against them or access to counsel in a manner that would horrify us if it were done by another government; the tortures at Abu Ghraib was repulsive, a blot on the idea of America that the rest of the world will be slow to forgive, yet only months later most Americans can't remember the name of the prison, let alone any of the soldiers involved. I'll avoid the trite observation that reality television has replaced reality. In any case, it's not true. We have a reality--it's just not a pretty one. We no longer expect our government to treat individuals with dignity or with consideration, and we are rapidly approaching the point where we behave in the same way ourselves. We get on with our lives, keeping our heads down and our voices low, and believe that we'll get by because we haven't done anything wrong. As one of my students told me in a discussion of the Patriot Act, "it's only people who have something to hide who care about it. If they're not doing anything wrong, why should they be worried?"
I don't think either candidate is going to substantially alter the new course of this country. We have jumped the rails but good, and I don't know whether there's much any one person can do to stop it. I'll keep trying, keep getting behind people I believe in, keep heading out to the voting booth every chance I get--because otherwise I'd have to admit that we've passed the apex, that America is irrevocably on the accelerating downhill slope all political experiments have eventually faced. I'll vote for Kerry tomorrow, in the belief and hope that he can't be worse than what we have now, even though I dislike the man and his politics and have for a long time. I'm a pessimist with a broad streak of stubbornness, and I'll keep plugging away at the system even though I lost faith in it a long time ago. But I'm always a little afraid that I might turn others off to the system with my bitterness, so I try to clam up about it whenever possible...because, as completely and utterly fucked as I think things are right now, I am far more disgusted with people who don't vote than I am with those who disagree with me and vote that way. And so I've been trying to keep my mouth shut about the election (aside from hassling my students incessantly about the importance of voting) as much as possible, for fear that through my bile and anger I might inadvertently turn someone off to participating in the system. And then today I woke up and thought it was high time I got the hell over myself, and so I've written this. I know it's a little long, but it felt good to get it down.
Okay then. Election day tomorrow, everyone--get your stickers early and show them off to your friends and co-workers.
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