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The View from Across the Pond |
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I did not vote in the last election, since I didn't want to bother with it while travelling, but I am admittedly pleased, if not surprised, that the Democrats took the House away. Bush's agenda, if carried to its logical end of war and paranoia, is going to bankrupt and alienate the country still further from the rest of the world. Perhaps the Democrats can do something to start cleaning up the damage. But the questions Lance asks also hang in my mind - is a shift to the Democrats really going to make a big difference in the current political trajectory? America seems a nation increasingly bent on control and surveillance to me, a nation where laws multiply and freedoms dwindle, a nation deep in debt and intent on helping other nations rebuild with the subtle application of high explosives.
My impressions are colored, of course. I write from Amsterdam, the most free, diverse, safe, and relaxed city I've ever been in. It takes an extreme act of stupidity or ill will to get arrested here - Dutch prisons are very small, and the cops just tell you to cut it out and go home. The Socialists won 25 seats in the recent elections, and the Party of the Animals became the first animal rights party in a European Parliament by winning 2 seats. Altogether, there are 10 parties represented in the Dutch government, and they have to wrangle out compromises and form a cohesive government.
I can't help but contrast that to American elections. Republicans and Democrats, hundreds of ém, with a few Independents, Libertarians and Greens scattered around. Vermont has a socialist in the Senate now… I mean, what if I think Marx had some good points or dabble in state's rights or think that corporate transparency is a good idea? What if I want the Pacific rim of the US and Canada to secede? What if I think we all ought to be paid like permanent employees of the state? Or that we should build a space elevator? Or that we should eradicate extreme poverty in the world? Or work on cleaner energy? Who does someone who holds one of those ideas vote for - a politician who mentions it because he knows seniments about it are strong in the area? But little gets done. It's business as usual, wars and consumer buying power and the military industrial complex, big business capitalism subsidized by the state.
Point being, the Democrats and the Republicans are giant social machines, sucking up money and excreting favors to the entities large enough to feed them well. That's politics, of course, but they are so massive and so keen on appealing to the needs of a little more than half the nation that good, original, unorthodox ideas are lost in a flood of "what will be accepted?" If a man or woman's busy pleasing everyone s/he possibly can, s/he don't have much time for innovative ideas.
In short, I think a democracy must function on the full participation of its populace, not in a choice between two versions of the same thing. Maybe someday we'll abolish the electoral college and halt the flow of big money into politics, but with the vested interest of the media and big business it might be difficult. When they won't even let the third party guy into the debate… ahhh… And if something lines your pockets, why change it?Don't vote for independents because they can't win, after all, though…
It's hard to defend America to people abroad - I usually have to admit that what my country is currently doing in the world is shitty, and then distance myself from it. Because to the rest of the world, our War on Terror is crazy. When you suffer around 7,000 dead in the course of overseas conflict that kills somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000 (sources vary widely) of the people you are supposed to be bringing democracy to, one has to ask who is inflicting terror on whom. Especially when 100,000 people a month are fleeing Iraq. Not many Americans walk around worrying that a guided bomb is going to hit their apartment block. And yes, Islamic terrorism is nasty and should be hunted down, but there has to be a better solution than sending a whole bunch of kids from lowerclass America out into twisting Medina streets and along dusty narrow roads looking for bad guys and blowing them up - anyone who resists their presence with force is the enemy, and this in a culture where the home is private and you are honor bound to protect your kin. Don't think I disrespect the soldiers - I have three friends in the Army overseas right now, and I understand why they are there and that I have no conception of how it feels for them, but if I were in their shoes, I know how I'd start to think - 'anyone might try to kill me." War is a really shitty thing if its in your neighborhood.
I do believe that if America dedicated a portion of its massive current military spending to constructing schools, building infrastructure, and addressing poverty across Africa and the Middle East that we might do a lot toward reducing anti-US feeling abroad. Although when I hear the French criticize us, I now tell them that they are as implicit as we, given their status as third in world arms sales and a nation of consummate consumers. The roots of terror, though, are truly despair, not ideology. In America we have random school and office shootings, human beings going mad after giving up hope in a better day to come. The natural counterpart is the suicide bomber, of course. An education, skills, but no chance of the easy and worry free life, no hope of attaining all the things that flash over satellite TV, and now a whisper in the ear that you can be certain of a place in Paradise with one little act… But if there were the basics - clean water, cheap food, electricity, ease of movement, opportunities to rise, perhaps the whisper would not be so strong.
America is in need of a new path of some kind, this much is certain. I remain hopeful that the Democrats will break out of their ideological stagnation and get some progressive intelligent reforms going. They can start with ending the war, re-protecting the environment after Bush's rape of that issue, and figuring out some kind of long-term plan for America. 2008 will be an interesting year, especially if we elect a woman president. What the hell, it'd be a break from that long list of old white guys, maybe she'd steer us somewhere other than down into surveillance and corruption.
So yeah, we'll wait and see. But grassroots organizing may well be the only thing that ends the reactionary period we've been in since the 70's. It's amazing to think of how much more freedom you have in Europe, and indeed in many developing countries, than in the US, largely because there are so many more police in the US, and they have a much freer hand in threatening you with arrest. I myself was once threatened with 5 years for recording a police officer during the arrest of a friend. It boggles my mind that you need permits to parade or to play music on the corner in a country where free assembly is explicitly set down in the damn Constitution.
I would like to see change in America, I would like to see this phatasmal Fear of the East dispelled and a more responsive system of government emerge. And while I´m daydreaming I'd also like a teleporter and a spacesuit.
