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Date: 02/11/08
Letter To America
So, Mr, Mrs and Ms America, you're gonna be voting this weekend?
Well done and good luck.
Now, this is not going to be a case of yet another silly blogger telling you which lever or button to press. After all, I'm a European. We've only had something which can reasonably called democracy here for about eighty years or so (the odd meandering off the path notwithstanding), so we haven't yet learned the most important lessons that your land - as the true home of democracy in the modern era - has to show us; namely that it is crucial to the health of a democracy for participation in it (and effective control of it) to be vested in the hands of the largest number of vested interests and corporate sponsors as possible - though we do seem to be catching you up quite nicely in that department at the moment.
Beside which, trying to tell - or even suggest to - a population one of whose most attractive features is its innate contrariness which way they should vote is a futile exercise. One of the English so-called 'quality' newspapers (that is to say, one not owned by Canadians, Channel Island tax-dodgers or Australians pretending to be American for business reasons) tried that the last time round, and it led to nothing other than an entire state going red when it just might have gone blue without the interference.
(Oh, and it's really rather confusing that your slightly more liberal party should be denoted by the colour blue and your distinctly illiberal one by the colour red; that's not the way we do things over here. Can't you do something about that?)
You see, I don't think it really matters which way you vote. Certainly viewed from over here it probably doesn't matter. Oh, I know there are many Europeans - perhaps the majority - who will shake their heads if you elect a mentally-unstable hypocrite and the Bridgegate Bimbo into the highest office in your land (or the third highest if you count the CEO of Exxon and Bill O'Reilly). It would be a head-shake based on the sort of sadness you feel when you see a friend who is determined to go on a path of self-degradation and you know that there's nothing you can do to stop them, because they have got to want to stop before it'll do any good.
But, lest you think that I am dropping hints here, I can't really see what it is about Obama that so many people over here are falling over themselves not only to praise him but to actually come over to your happy land and campaign on his behalf. The people who are doing this, of course, are on what may broadly be termed 'The Left', although given that these are frequently the same people who have spent the last decade or so supporting and campaigning on behalf of such well-known god-hating Commie faggots as Tony Blair, the description should be taken with the same scepticism with which you would regard the result of a WWE contest. These are the people who - shockingly - consider your forty-second President to be a cretinous, credulous numbskull and would consider almost anyone else to be preferable. Especially if that 'anyone else' happens to be of a non-white colouration and can be used as a means to absolve themselves (at least, in their own eyes) of whatever guilts to which they may be heirs. But then, what can you expect from liberals (a word which isn't a perjorative term here yet, but with the help of such clear-minded visionaries as Melanie Phillips it soon will be)?
Certainly, the junior senator from Illinois seems a personable sort of man who appears to be capable of some degree of independent thought and an ability to express himself cogently. Although that could all be just coaching, of course. I saw his speech in Philadelphia a month or two back - at the height of the Jeremiah Wright Affair - and thought it struck a pretty good balance between the combative and the cutesy-pie; enough to make the question enough of a non-issue to make his opponents seem like a bunch of hypocritical obsessives (which would be grossly unfair, of course, but this is politics we're talking about here).
But then that's indicative of the problem. The trouble is, you see, that looking at it from here, although it's not difficult to differentiate between the characters of the candidiates (and certainly not difficult to separate their choice of Veeps-in-waiting - one of them doesn't have a single original thing to say, and the other is Sarah Palin) it's not easy to see what the real differences between the parties themselves might be. Many of us have long viewed the American political scene (at least, as it is presented to us by the media - ours and yours) with some bemusement. This bemusement used to be amusement, until we started to develop our politics in the mould of yours, and we too ended up with two (or more) right-of-centre parties constantly manoeuvering to exchange coats for a while.
I'm told you have voting machines in the US now. This is really rather appropriate, because the politicians that you vote for or against (and, it seems, sometimes doing the one when you thought you were doing the other) are little more than parts of a machine. The term 'machine politics' is, after all, yet another of America's great inventions. As a result, it doesn't really matter who you vote for: the same old cogs keep going round, the user interface will be revamped from time to time, but the machine keeps on running just the same as before.
The public faces of your parties may be enough to sway enough people, but the men behind the curtain keep chugging along the same old way. This is why I can't get enthused about young Barack (I call him 'young' because in political terms he is, and he's less than a year older than I am). Because I know that, for all his personability, for all his ability to get a message across, behind him stands the Democratic Party. The party of "Let's all vote for the Patriot Act", the party of Nancy "Impeachment is off the table" Pelosi and Harry Reid, the party of Joe "Vote McCain" Lieberman. In other words, the same bunch of cowardly hacks who not only permitted Bush 42 to emasculate your Constitution and Bill Of Rights (two of the most inspiring documents in human history), but encouraged him to do so (and to go much further) by their supine acquiescence to what they judged to be the mood of the times. If the US is nearer to being a police state now than at any time since the passing of the Posse Commitatus Act, then it is only because those in power during the last eight years have been allowed to push it that way with the aid of the Congressional Democrats (with the odd honourable exception such as Russ Feingold).
This leads to elections such as the one you are now having, where the substantive differences on policy are practically impossible to discern. In such circumstances presentation and image are all, and politics becomes less the art of the possible and more the art of the plausible. Hence the concentration on how much money the respective campaigns have raised, as if that was the point of campaigning at all. And, when the differences between the parties are infinitesimal, this leads to both sides trying to gain the slightest advantage in whatever way they can - including the illegal removal of voting rights for those deemed to be likely to vote for the other side. On the key issues - the economy as it affects the working and non-working poor alike, the environment, foreign policy - viewed from here, there isn't a significant change likely to come from changing the face behind the desk in the Oval Office - even if that face is of a different hue than usual. The machine will grind on, there will continue to be welfare for the rich and workfare for the poor, there will continue to be natural disasters whose effects will be exacerbated by official indolence, corruption and/or cheese-paring, there will continue to be the mad scramble to gain control of as much of the planet's resources as can be gained by armed force or the threat of it. And the rest of us will still wonder how it was that the Great Experiment was allowed to go so badly awry.
Because 'gone awry' it most certainly has. It's not a modern phenomenon, though; it's as old as lobbying special interests themselves. But what's the alternative? There are, I'm informed, other candidates running in this election, although even the candidates' own next-door neighbours could be forgiven for not knowing if they rely on the media for their information. Voting for one of them will make next to no difference to the result (despite Democrats continuing to whine on about how Nader cost them in 2000), but at least you might be able to salve your conscience by doing so. It would mean that whoever did get elected, you could always claim when things go (further) down the crapper that it wasn't your fault. Except that it is, because you (in the plural, as in y'all) have allowed things to reach this pretty pass, and unless you get active and dang quick about it, nothing will change for the better.
Anyway, as I say, I'm not telling you which way to vote - it would be counterproductive in any case, and I'm only an ignorant, backward, mullah-lovin' European pussy who doesn't have two hundred and thirty two years of history to learn from. Besides which - whatever I might think - although Obama looks as if he'll win just at the moment, we know that there's many a slip between the polling booth and the Supreme Court.
All I say to you is vote! And then when you end up with the same bottle of warm raccoon's piss, but just with a different label stuck on it, try to spend the next four years thinking about how you're going to change things. Oh, and please stop lecturing us about democracy - we did invent it, after all.
