Election eve, people. Two years of complete, unalterable domination of our nation's television and radio airwaves and campaign spending that could have salvaged the economies of numerous small nations have culminated in this - an event like the night before Christmas, if Christmas enraged a solid 40 percent of the country and made the rest act like cocky jerks and allllll the presents were broken toys and dirty, hand-me-down clothes.
And what do we expect?
The cynical expect recounts, voter fraud, voter suppression, and - at worst, they say, violence, regardless of who wins.
Perhaps the optimist expects progress on an enumerated set of policy issues. Perhaps.
or just change. whatever that may mean.
Was it all worth it though?
Let alone the fact that the networks are guaranteed to talk about the 2012 election within days of the result being announced. Hours?
Let alone the fact that - after tomorrow, when the outcome becomes fact - we may actually have to pay attention to one of the numerous global catastrophes occurring right now on our planet, as we run around in circles trying to pretend our differences on health care policy can provide us with some sort of identity.
Does this whole thing really make a difference? Is it not another opiate to distract us from solving the legitimate issues of our economic, cultural, and social problems that simply not be solved through a presidential election?
or is that cynical? hope hope hope hope.
On the one hand, the fact that the networks dedicated a solid year to the issue almost assures me that no, indeed, it does not matter. This has been the latest blockbuster movie or a soap opera with characters with far greater flaws and far more significant character traits.
On the other hand, i would feel awful to write off the efforts of a lot good hearted people on either side of the campaign as totally wrong.
These are nonetheless questions to consider.
Where do we go from here? Why do we go here?
Here is Chris Gibson, a good friend and student of medicine, laying it out as only he can.
Other submissions in this series:
-Dan Evarts' "A Bad Night in Sha'ab"
-Reid Bellon on the symbolism of Obama
-The Nahsville Minx doesn't buy the hype.
-Mom explains her political philosophy
-Teddy Kahn on Dog Sh-t and Competitive Obama-Mania
-S. Thompson on "The Business Party"
-Grandmom's thoughts on how politics play in her world
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Two days before the election that we have endlessly been told is the most important in a generation, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say anything about the candidates, the race, or politics in general that has not been said, usually more eloquently, somewhere else. And, curiously, it seems everywhere one turns, the focus of most media is becoming increasingly narrow, as one might imagine a man in the desert would seek to wring the last vestiges of water from a dry sponge. Instead, it seems more appropriate (and easier for me, having no specialized knowledge of voter trends in exurban Virginia or generational politics within the Vietnamese community of Orange County), to step back and ponder the larger picture. As in: what difference can a new president really make, truthfully?
At first glance the answer appears to be: a lot. This is certainly the supposition of the 24-hour news channels, who daily risk giving themselves a brain aneurysm to bring us the latest breathless revelation on what Barack Obama had for his afternoon snack and whether that could represent a new opening for McCain (“he’s stopping at a Taco Bell! He’ll be out of commission for at least two hours!”). It’s now a truism that, well, things ain’t exactly peachy in the broad swath of America. No matter which dichotomy you choose—domestic vs. international, economic vs. cultural, bourgeois vs. proletariat—the shit spans the divide.
And, frankly, a lot of the problem has to do with presidential influence, namely that of our current one. I go back and forth on the relative personal failings implied by overly polemical statements like “George W. Bush is the worst president in United States History,” or analogies such as “like Nero, but with less musical talent.” But the fact remains that we missed two opportunities not to elect a very provincial man with enormous personal flaws, and now we’re paying the price. Leaving aside the unanswerable question of whether the current financial crisis can be mostly blamed on his administration (it probably can’t), it is still pretty much undeniable that many of his military, environmental, educational, and healthcare policies have been disastrous, probably because in large part they’re mostly not policies at all, but a collection of reactionary devices concocted to satisfy a small number of corporate and religious interests. I maintain a staunch belief that either Gore or Kerry would have done a better job, and that in nearly all objective respects, a President Obama would be infinitely preferable to a President McCain—who, by actuarial probabilities, would very likely become a President Palin, and to talk of infinite infinities just gets silly.
But even if the best happens on Tuesday, and Obama manages to successfully navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of undecideds and voter disenfranchisement, how far will that get us? How much better off will we be in four (or, hopefully eight, barring Palin in 2012) years? I have to say that on this question, even I am undecided.
As many have already noted, it may be that the challenges confronting us are just too great for any one administration, no matter how talented, to overcome. It remains to be seen how long or deep the recession that we’re in will last. It remains to be seen whether we will actually be able to pull our troops out of Iraq without plunging the country into civil war, or whether our Sisyphean adventures in Afghanistan will ever resemble anything better than a remake of Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray wakes up every morning to find the Taliban have taken over his apartment building. It remains to be seen whether our educational system will ever be able to retool, or whether we’ll just continue to farm out our R & D to the best and brightest of Southeast Asia. It remains to be seen whether the millions of us without healthcare coverage will get it, or whether we’ll start to reduce our national carbon footprint, or whether any of the other myriad problems with our current state of affairs will be rectified.
But there are deeper, systemic problems with our country and our culture that also certainly contribute to this litany of talking points, yet that almost as certainly will go unaddressed by any president succored by the current establishment. They are likely unsolvable, woven like seams into fabric, such that pulling at them with too much zeal unravels the entire cloth; but without recognizing them and blindly cheering the messianic Obama phenomenon (which, frankly, is sometimes hard not to do), I fear we are setting ourselves up for a bitter national disappointment whose emotional impact may rival that of the disillusionment that has enveloped the Bush years.
Maybe the easiest to spot is the fact that no matter who wins this race, money will still reign supreme. We’ve already seen this come to bear as part of the campaign itself: if Obama pulls out a win, it will be largely on the force of his record-breaking fund-raising. Washington is many things, but no one would ever call it honest; yet even in the most honest of towns, money will still grease the wheels of those who have it. If it can’t buy you direct influence with bribes, it can still buy you air time and ad space and turn opinions in your direction. And even the most principled of lawmakers must still bow to the bottom line some of the time to get money flowing back to their constituents—if they want to get re-elected, that is.
Perhaps this is the second problem, even more insurmountable than the first: the flaws inherent in a representative democracy. In a country as populous and complex as ours, it is inevitable that the few must make decisions for the many, which means that most of us are by necessity left out of the day-to-day decision making process. This is unavoidable: a pure democracy in a nation of several hundred million would be equivalent to anarchy, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the quiet evolution of China have essentially refuted the ideals of communism, at least as they can be applied at the level of a large state. A better form of government has yet to assert itself. The upside of a representative democracy as we have conceived it, most broadly put, is that our government has managed to function, sometimes thrive, without ever completely falling apart for over two hundred years. I’m not trying to be funny here; a quick survey of other world governments over the same time period shows that this simple fact puts us in pretty elite company. But the downsides are many, and one of the greatest is that, no matter what kind of spin you put on it, a large portion of our potential electorate remains, even now, effectively disenfranchised.
I suspect many would dispute this, arguing that through elections and the judicial system, we are in fact arbiters of our own destiny. But when a particularly pigheaded decision comes out of congress, or our president presses ahead with some particularly egregious action, what real recourse do we have? I suppose we can write letters. Certain lucky localities get to decide small pittances through referenda. And there’s always the next election! But seriously—there are true injustices executed at the hands of our government every single day, and the very system that largely sustains us also prevents us from addressing them. Throw money into the mix (as above), and the disparities only grow greater. As an unelected citizen, I might not have a whole heck of a lot of access to decent remedies, but I still have a fair sight more than a lot of other folks.
The real question here is not what should we search for in place of our current system, but which problems are inevitable and which could be resolved by tweaking a few of the parameters. The money thing is too monstrous to tackle at my kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. As for access, I think we would all benefit by a bit more crop rotation, by which I mean term limits for legislators, and maybe even for bureaucrats as well. No one ever says they’re setting out to become a career politician, but this is indeed an available vocation for a lucky few, and it shouldn’t be. Two senate terms—twelve years—should be plenty of time for any truly altruistic man or woman to serve the country in the manner he or she envisioned upon first arriving in Washington. Much longer and people get lazy, they lose their skills, they develop a real fear of being jettisoned back out into “the real world” (sad, isn’t it, that this is such an obvious antonym for Washington). They begin making decisions not for the benefit of their constituents, or out of some deeper sense of morality or principle, but for a simple expediency: getting re-elected.
There are other, even deeper problems with the way things are now and the way they probably will be in four or eight years. Some of them have to do with how we see ourselves (read: The Media) and some go beyond perception to the actual substance of ourselves. With the light vanishing outside and more Sunday afternoon errands to run, I’ve run out of time to touch on them all right now.
But the funny thing, if I don’t get a chance to write again before the election, is that I still find myself a little excited amid all my moaning about these inherent flaws. Maybe it’s just being so damn glad to see the waning days of the Bush administration. Maybe without meaning to, I’ve drunk a little bit of the kool-aid and can’t stop myself from imagining what it would be like to be governed by a truly transcendent president. Maybe deep down, I don’t really believe everything I just said, or else I’ve resigned myself to it.
It doesn’t really matter in the end. Before we can fix the enormous, we have to start with the merely huge. Obama ’08.
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