To expect humanity from our leaders--both political and corporate--is anthropomorphism. Time and again our hopes will be raised and then dashed. Indeed, the aim of much of politics is to raise our hopes and then let them drift off into nothingness, into 'business as usual'...
The most powerful system is that which leads people to take hold of their own leashes. That is, the system under which people do what is expected of them without any external control being exerted over them...
The Culture of Make Believe, by Derrick Jensen
A number of reasonably well-informed people on the left, myself included, have declared that we will never vote for a democratic candidate. Last year, many of us intended to vote for a 3rd party candidate or not to vote at all.
Then, in what can only be described as a momentary fit of dementia, John McCain had to go and prove that his ageist detractors were right to be concerned that he was too long in the tooth to be President. The man woke up one morning and had a vision of the perfect vice president: a heavily-armed, anti-choice, Mooseburger-eating Pentecostal beauty queen and former sportscaster who, given the opportunity, would burn every book in the country except the Bible and the Left Behind series while personally serving in the firing squad charged with carrying out the death penalty for queers. Fearing a Palin theocracy, many of us on the left donned our hazmat suits and rushed to the voting booth, hoping that we would be able to get in, cast our vote for Obama, and get out before we vomited into our self-contained breathing apparatus.
Perhaps, like me, you haven't bought into the lie that the Democrats are all that different from the Republicans for many years. And perhaps, like me, on November 4th you strutted into your local polling station, filled with pride that you were too intelligent and enlightened to harbor any illusions about the two-party charade. With a smirk you smugly voted for harm-reduction. Unlike the unfortunate drooling Obamaniac zombies, we knew that the only Change we were voting for was Camel Ultralights instead of Camel Straights.
One year has passed since I voted for harm reduction and rushed home to take a scalding hot shower where I curled up into a fetal position while humming Jesus Loves Me, hoping that the third degree burns would help me forget what I'd just done. I don't know about you, but over the past year it has occurred to me that all that talk of voting for harm reduction proved that my intellectual conceit was unwarranted. In fact, as much as it pains me to admit it, I was a bigger fool than the full-fledged Obamaniac who, on election day, painted his torso with the Obama campaign logo and funneled beer after beer while watching the election returns and chanting "Yes We Can!"
I decided to make a list of what I found so terrifying about the prospect of a McCain/Palin administration that it made me waste an hour of my life voting for Obama and the Dems, thereby legitimizing the whole fucking charade. Here is a small sample:
1. A dramatic escalation in the United States' wars of aggression.
2. A credible threat to a woman's right to control her own body.
3. A continuation of the so-called bailouts at the expense of the working class and the poor, and a failure to penalize the Wall Street pigs or enact regulations with teeth to ensure such brazen theft would never happen again.
4. An extension and expansion of the Patriot Act.
5. Further dismantling of what's left of the social welfare system.
6. A foreign policy characterized by arrogance, bullying, and a refusal to work with the rest of the world to deal with issues like the destruction of the environment and banning land mines.
7. The legitimizing and perpetuation of hatred and persecution of queer and transgender people; using us as a wedge issue to distract the public so it won't notice their crimes (e.g., giving trillions of dollars to their pals in the defense industry to wage a war against people who have never harmed us).
8. The implementation of even more draconian economic policies designed to shore up the power of the plutocracy and harm the rest of us.
9. Ratcheting up the persecution of immigrants.
Now, here is the same list detailing how Obama has managed to actualize each of those fears in less than a year in office:
1. Even before the Blackwater revelation, the Obama administration began beating the drum to escalate the war in Afghanistan. On Dec 1 he will announce his plan to send thousands of troops to kill more innocent people in Afghanistan (perhaps the only campaign promise he's kept). Meanwhile, the Iraq war rages on without any sign that the US will ever withdraw.
2. The Democratic-led House passed a health care reform bill that, if enacted, would be the biggest success in the anti-choice movement's history. Obama stated he would sign it.
3. Enough has been said about the bailouts. We all know about Obama's close ties to Wall Street firms. All I have to say about it is that the only thing Obama did that McCain/Palin might not have done was to re-brand the bailouts as the "troubled assets relief program".
4. Obama not only extended the Patriot Act, but he expanded it. Just like he did with countless other Bush administration policies.
5. Soon, many people will be required by law to purchase private health insurance at considerable personal expense. Even if there is a "public option", which seems unlikely, it too will be quite expensive. Obama has stated that he wants to roll back Medicare and other federal welfare programs to pay for his health care reform plan--after all, if you are required by law to purchase health insurance, those programs are pointless, right?
6. I think there is no need for me to elaborate on this one except to point out that the Obama administration announced that the US would never sign the international treaty to ban the use of landmines, making the US one of two countries that refuse to sign it.
7. Read all about how Obama has done all of these things to LGBTQ people here, and here, and here, and especially here. Also, see the clip embedded below.
8. I think the pursuit of health care reform legislation that will force millions of working class and poor people to buy the insurance companies' product while increasing profit margins beyond their wildest white collar crime fantasies under Bush might count as an example. Then there's TARP. Those are two pretty huge accomplishments for one year!
9. Obama is relentlessly trying to make the US-Mexico border look like the North Korea-South Korea border. The fence is coming along quite nicely, I hear. Read more about it at Counterpunch.
Of course, right now it is easy for me to feel a sense of unshakable resolve about my refusal to vote in the next election. Obama is busy implementing neo-conservative policies that the Republicans failed to achieve when they were in power, even though his dirty talk is vastly more eloquent and soothing as he shoves it in balls deep. I'm angry at the Democrats for being Democrats and failing to live up to my expectation that they would at least use lube, even though they've always made it clear that their ultimate goal is to loosen me up enough so they can start fisting me.
I ask you all to do me a favor. In 2012, when the Republican ticket is Palin/Dobbs or Dobbs/Phelps, will you remind me of this little rant when I start talking about how I intend to vote for the Dems because Camel Ultralights seem slightly less likely to kill me than Camel Straights?
I'd sure appreciate it.
P.S.- I am going to print up a bunch of bumper stickers for the next elections that read, "Don't Vote! It just encourages them!" Place your orders now! :)
I think one response we see too often is that in attempting to comfort ourselves from the despair, we constrain ourselves to feel-good messages, where the endings are always happy, the difficulties easily surmountable. But those messages go nowhere, they don't even comfort us, and are almost impossible to maintain against the evidence of our own senses. Much better, I believe, and more honest, is to look our despair in the eye and be enheartened by an ongoing resistance that is our last best hope, however forlorn that hope sometimes seems. It may be that we have constructed for ourselves what Thoreau called an atropos, a fate. We have a system that is self-propelled, largely, by virtue of our not withholding our support for it, and not resisting it, not fighting it as hard as we can...
From The Culture of Make Believe, by Derrick Jensen
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