Common

A friend sent the following link for my perusal:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1103-28.htm

To which I respond: Rah.

Maybe I'm in the minority (even within the minority), but I'm finding sophomoric pep talks like these nearly as demoralizing as Condi Rice's appointment or Gonzales's nomination. They suggest nothing so much as that that the so-called loyal opposition will continue to have its head up its ass and naught but pieties up its sleeve.

Henceforth, to think of US politics as though it were just a matter of knocking on one more potentially pro-union door is to truly misunderstand the disastrous circumstances, economic and political, faced by this nation — and particularly by nonelites in this nation. It's also to underestimate the enthusiasm with which huge numbers of those nonelites are jogging up the gangplank of their own death ship. And finally, it's to overestimate — condescendingly, I suppose — the degree to which elites can, or should, or have been invited to, "save" those who aren't. All anyone of conscience can really do is keep telling the truth as ardently as possible. In the end, if the greater number of the populace continues to select disaster, then disaster is most probably what they'll get.

(And yes, I am aware there's an argument that most people don't get the truth but rather something very different. But I am not convinced. The little channel arrows on the remote go up as well as down. A wide variety of newspapers are available free of charge online, or at newsstands for about the price of your average can of soda. When people feel that two guys pledging troth to one another in a ceremony before family and friends is more of a "threat" to our cultural definition of "marriage" than is, say, "The Bachelor" or "Who Wants to Marry My Dad?" or the fourteen-thousandth People magazine cover on Jen & Ben/Jen & Marc/Jen & whoever-it-is-this-week, I'm not sure all the data in the world on economic change and job depletion, let alone unemployment among young men in the Arab-Islamic middle-east, is going to have any salient impact. Some people may just want to eat cake, especially when they can enjoy a simultaneous side dish of self-righteous resentment of those supposedly hedonistic northeastern elites against whom elections are to be used as a form of fantasy revenge.)

Besides, the strongest bulwark against creeping theocratic fascism from every direction ain't Canada, it's the EU, which has genuine economic clout to rival or exceed that of the US as well as growing political influence. Currently it's the strongest refuge of secular middle-class culture. Canada's just a short nation-building intervention away. Can't you just see it? Baptist sleeper cells creeping north from Oklahoma and Utah, disguised as disaffected Oregonians?