[silk] Magnanimous Defeat

[Udhay Shankar N <udhay@xxxxxxxxx>]

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John Perry Barlow on the day after.

Udhay

> ------------------------------>  -------------------> -------->
>
> MAGNANIMOUS DEFEAT
>
>
> Boy, does this suck. Even with a couple of days of perspective, it still 
> sucks. And it may suck for 4 more years.It may suck until sometime in late 
> 2012, when the Mayans seem to think time and space will collapse and 
> everything will suck everything into everything else. And that will really 
> suck. But, for now, life goes on.
>
> I feel as if half the people in America have just forced a fat crow down 
> my gullet. I am compelled to admit that I am genuinely out of touch with 
> half my country.
>
> I feel like I'm suffering the death of a loved one. I'm not sure which of 
> the stages of grief I've reached at this point, but I'm pretty well past 
> denial. I'm mourning a number of losses, one of which is the belief that 
> "my side" is actually a clear majority that would reveal itself if we ever 
> shuffled off our disdain for politics and voted in any force. ( Actually, 
> we may be a majority - I don't trust these results - but even if we are, 
> our margin is very slender and we were too dumb, diffident and 
> disorganized to prevent the other side from successfully gaming the 
> system. I would be angry about that if it would do any good, but I see 
> where anger has gotten us so far.)
>
> I worked last night on processing all that wrath. To accelerate the 
> process, I watched several conspiracy videos. I pondered over the plane 
> the wreckage of which isn't visible in the pictures of the whacked wing of 
> the Pentagon, I wondered how the New York Fire Department could have 
> "pulled" 7 World Trade Center without having spent weeks preparing it for 
> demolition, why no jets were scrambled to take out the hijacked planes, 
> how the Patriot Act appeared so suddenly after the World Trade Massacre, 
> etc. But believing that 9/11 was a vast, right-wing conspiracy is as 
> pointless at this stage as believing in the likelier possibility that the 
> exit polls were actually as accurate in Ohio in Florida as they were 
> everywhere else. Maybe it will all come out someday, but there's precious 
> little we can do about it now. Who are we going to complain to? The 
> authorities?
>
> i even rented Fahrenheit 911, which I had never seen before, and was 
> halfway through that when a young man who lives where I'm staying in Playa 
> del Rey came home. Dale is a very solid guy from the Midwest. He's decent, 
> enthusiastic, friendly, and resourceful. His girlfriend is an FBI agent. 
> He's as American as it gets. (Though I've often thought the same of my own 
> weird self.) He didn't want to talk politics. He's too polite, but I 
> dragged him into a conversation anyway. Even though he had not discussed 
> it with the other two people who live here, I had a feeling he was a Bush 
> supporter. Which, in fact, he turned out to be.
>
> It became obvious right away that we were not in substantial disagreement 
> over many policies. Dale was hoping that Bush in his second term would 
> push for reduced dependence on oil and would come around on the 
> environment. He wasn't crazy about the war. Our differences were over 
> culture and style. Dale doesn't like Europe, though he's never been there. 
> He's met Europeans and he resents their supercilious attitude towards us. 
> He figures it for jealousy.
>
>  "America," he said, "is like the captain of the football team, the most 
> popular kid in school." He was describing his recent self, I expect. "The 
> Europeans are like the chess club and they resent this guy cause he's the 
> one who gets all the girls, even though he's not an intellectual like 
> they are." I eyed him carefully, while secretly inspecting myself for 
> similar resentments. It was lucky for both of us that he doesn't actually 
> get all the girls. "Really," he said, "it's about character. It's about 
> morality."
>
>  "Wait," I said, "What about the morality of killing a hundred thousand 
> Iraqis for no good reason?"
>
>  "Saddam was killing them too." I doubted that even Saddam has ever 
> killed as many Iraqis in a year and a half as we've just polished off, 
> but I let that pass. "Besides, when Bush attacked, he thought he had a 
> good reason. I can't believe he didn't think America was in danger." I 
> could, but I let that pass too.
>
>  This young man had been trained to respect authority just as surely as I 
> had learned to suspect it. Whatever our agreements, we would always be 
> separate in that regard. It was something that had grown into him in his 
> lower middle class Christian home in central Illinois, along with a good 
> pitching arm, in the same way that Bohemianism had taken root in me 
> during the 60's. Morality and character are words that have subtly 
> different meanings to each of us. And a lot of the divide has to do with 
> the degree to which we are willing to admit the feminine into our 
> natures. I think he suspects I'm a little too sensitive. It's less about 
> character and morality than it is about masculinity. We have different 
> notions about what it is to be a man, and they are important to us.
>
>  But they don't necessarily make a bad fella out of either one of us. We 
> both represent aspects of the American psyche that need each other, the 
> jock and the intellectual, the Boy Scout and the renegade, the guardian 
> and the wild card. We both love this great and terrible country, even as 
> we fear one another's excessive influence on it, and part of what we love 
> is the creative fever that arises from our division. As we need each 
> other, however unwillingly, so America needs us both.
>
> Perhaps it's just the bargaining phase of grief, but I can see that one of 
> the things I must do to feel less a stranger in my own land is to have 
> more conversations like the one I had with Dale. Indeed, as I've said 
> repeatedly before, we must do our collective best to shatter the fetters 
> of intolerance and live more in the necessary amnesty of interdependence. 
> We need to quit scaring each other. Both sides are convinced that the 
> other is trying to impose his culture on us, whether by law or by 
> Internet. Fear of the Other, whether Bush or bin Laden, whether terror 
> without or terror within, has been murdering reason and civility in 
> America. We need to look one another in the eyes and see the human being 
> behind the enemy. If we're not going to start shooting each other over the 
> next 4 years, we will need to do that a lot.
>
> At the very least, I need to take the other side seriously. Dismissing 
> them as a bunch of homophobic, racist, Bible-waving, know-nothing 
> troglodytes, however true that may be of a few, only authorizes them to 
> return the favor. I don't want somebody calling me a dope-smoking, 
> fag-loving, one-worlder weirdo, however true that might be. We are all 
> masks that God wears, whatever God that is. We might try to treat one 
> another with according reverence. At least we might try to listen as 
> though the other side might have a point.I truly think we all owe one 
> another an apology.
>
> Still, despite a pandemic of pus-mouthed invective, the good news remains 
> that there's been no shooting so far. Given the ferocity of our divisions, 
> I feared violence would erupt during these elections. America has been 
> acting like such an amateur at democracy that had once I feared we might 
> go all the way to martial law. You will recall that, some months ago, I 
> expressed the uneasy feeling that there would be another terrorist 
> show-stopper right before the elections and they might be postponed 
> indefinitely. Such fears seem absurdly hyperbolic to me now. While it is 
> true that the country has divided itself roughly along the same regional 
> lines that preceded the Civil War (check out 
> http://www.selekta.com/map.jpg), I don't really think we're about to have 
> another one.
>
> Furthermore, despite the Patriot Act and many other insults to real 
> freedom - as opposed to the rhetorical kind - I remain at liberty to be be 
> as weird as I want as long as I don't scare the horses or smoke my drug of 
> choice in public. In my cohort, there have been a lot of invidious 
> comparisons between Bush and Hitler. I've even made some myself. While 
> there is something marvelously invigorating about that kind of hyperbole, 
> but it's simply not true. I don't expect any official visits at night 
> (though I'm not a Muslim), nor do I believe there are secret camps being 
> built. While I think that attacking Iraq was both immoral and impractical, 
> it's hardly comparable to setting off World War II. Iraq may rhyme with 
> Viet Nam, but Poland it isn't. It will be hard, but I resolve not to 
> invoke historical admonitions unless they actually fit.
>
> I've spent much of the last couple of days trying to remember more 
> comforting historical analogies. I have a long history of pre-announcing 
> The End of the World As We Know It. Clear back when I was a budding young 
> libertarian, I believed that Barry Goldwater's crushing defeat by Lyndon 
> Johnson was the end of conservatism in America. Boy, was I ever wrong 
> about that. It took them a few years, but they came back with a vengeance 
> of which the most recent election was, I pray, the high-water mark.
>
> When Ronald Reagan was re-elected, I thought that really might be the end 
> of the world. Literally. After all, Reagan was waving around MX missiles 
> like they were cap pistols, talking about winning a nuclear war, and 
> giving all appearance of believing that some combination of science, 
> money, and hokum could shield us from Armageddon. The Russians were scared 
> spitless and so was I. In the end, it was the Cold War that ended, not the 
> world.
>
> I was deeply spooked by Nixon's re-election, but look what happened to 
> him. And, like Nixon, the president and his men may now have enough rope 
> to hang themselves with. They have made such a spectacular mess in the 
> last four years that Gawd Almighty would have a hard time cleaning it up. 
> I suspect that 4 years of Kerry's dithering in the ruins would have had me 
> voting Republican again when it was all over.
>
> Sure, it could be awful. In four years, the Supreme Court will probably be 
> packed with Christian Ayatollahs, the dollar will make the Argentine peso 
> look like hard currency, coat-hanger abortions will be all the rage, the 
> urban campaigns against the Islamic Alliance will be going very badly, 
> Osama bin Laden will be taunting us from his blog, only the 
> castle-building business will really be booming, and gasoline will be 10 
> bucks a gallon (which will still be fine with the super-rich.) By then, 
> even the administration will notice the seawater lapping at the front 
> steps of the White House (though they will still maintain that global 
> warming is cyclic and not connected to greenhouse gasses), the only old 
> growth left will be in National Parks, and the National Parks will be for 
> sale. Trench-coated officials will be making nocturnal visits and this 
> paragraph will be against the law. Our school children will be celebrating 
> the 6004th birthday of the Planet Earth and grateful that Jesus spoke English.
>
> By then, people will either be regime-changingly sick of this band of 
> radicals or the Bush administration will have actually turned itself 
> around and done a decent job of governing. As an American, I'm hoping for 
> the latter. Because, as much fun as it was to write the last paragraph, I 
> would rather it looked even more hyperbolic in 2008 than it does now.
>
> I have a terrible admission to make. I've been so fanatically opposed to 
> this administration that I have taken dark satisfaction in their failures, 
> even though these were American failures as well. I welcomed growing 
> indications that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating into a sump-hole 
> of back-alley insurgency. Good economic news was bad economic news as far 
> as I was concerned, and vice versa. I was tickled to death with Al Qaqaa 
> and its terrorist-purloined WMDs, and not just because the name was so 
> great. Surely all these bad tidings would eventually add up to an 
> indictment that would convict Bush in the eyes of the American people and 
> they would rouse themselves from Fox-hypnosis and 'possum sleep and vote 
> for change.
>
> But it didn't turn out that way. While I still believe that half of 
> America is hallucinating on hot religion and bad TV, I can't say I have 
> been any too sane, having been delivered into a condition where I took 
> comfort in the successes of our enemies and frowned at news of economic 
> recovery. Despite my own financial anxieties, and those of all around me, 
> I have been so zealous that my own well-being was secondary in importance 
> to the political damage bad times might do the Bush administration. Now 
> that's hallucination. And I'm sorry.
>
> Having gone so nuts, I can work on being sane. This is not to say that 
> you're going to find me whispering George Bush's name adoringly, in the 
> eventual fashion of Winston Smith. But from this point on, I will wish him 
> better in many of his challenges. Since we're in Iraq and don't know how 
> leave, I will hope, against my expectations, that our efforts there will 
> result in a functional pluralistic government we can do business with. 
> Hell, I hope for a functional pluralistic government here and pray as well 
> that a kinder, gentler Bush will remember his promises about compassionate 
> conservatism and act on them. I hope that the swan dive he's taking with 
> the deficit flares out and begins to ascend gracefully. I wish him, and 
> us, the best. May all our Gods forgive us and may we forgive one another.
>
> This is not so say that I will not go on believing, as I have for many 
> years, that war involving civilians is barbaric unless the survival of 
> one's nation is at stake. I will still believe that truly free societies 
> maintain mechanisms to promote the even distribution of wealth. I will go 
> on believing that liberty is worth living for and not to be sacrificed so 
> readily to fear. I will go on believing that my daughters should not be 
> forced to bear children they are not prepared to raise properly and I will 
> not forget that people make mistakes.
>
> For the next four years, I will try to stick by my country and trust that 
> the inherent goodness and wisdom of its people will not go on being 
> anesthetized, even by neuro-linguistic programming that makes Newspeak 
> look like a good start. I will work to see that the next elections are 
> done with equipment and methods we can trust. I will start now to look for 
> opposition leaders I can believe in, people who display a courage in their 
> convictions that will match the genuinely impressive dedication that the 
> president has to his.
>
> This will be a tricky four years. In addition to a sense of humor, which 
> should have plenty of dark meat to feast on, we will need cunning, 
> courage, clarity, and, as I say, forgiveness. We will need understanding, 
> perspective, and something that also seems in ready supply at the moment, 
> humility.
>
> And, since victory is to the patient, we will need patience.
>
> But I've been engaged in this stand-off between the 50's and 60's all my 
> adult life. Finally, I see how much we need each other. I hope we all come 
> to see that and give one another a break.


--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))



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