Good luck USA and remember I love you

[The thirteenth and last of a series called 'Love notes to democracy', written while in the USA as a member of a team of international monitors overseeing the US Presidential Election 2004]

In “The Town Line”, a daily newspaper serving Central Maine, USA, I came across two postings under the “personals” in the classifieds section.  The first one said, “Dear Mom, you are right.  I’ve decided to get an education.  I’m running away to join the circus.” The second, further down in the section, said, “Dear Daughter, life is a circus, and the clowns are running the show.  Good luck and remember I love you.”

This was just one week after the US presidential election.  I don’t know if the mother and daughter involved were related to each other or if these postings referred in any way to the democratic process.  However, it occurred to me that if one were to substitute the word “politics” for “life”, one could obtain a fairly accurate description of political life in the United States. 

A circus is a spectacle.  It is grand.  People get to see it, but are not allowed to participate.  In the spotlight are clowns, acrobats, jugglers, high-wire artistes, fire-eaters, stunt artistes, and animals.  They make audiences laugh, make them gasp, give them thrills, win their adoration, and make them cheer wildly.  After the show is over, the audience returns to its separate, individual lives, and memories of the spectacle are replaced in their minds by issues such as rent/mortgage payments, the education of their children, healthcare, the increasingly probability of a draft, and the “need” to retreat into the happy land called Apathy to name just a few of the after-laughs.  The circus manager does not resolve any of these issues, either for the collective or for the individual. 

Yes, they go to the circus, so what?  Yes, they had a presidential election, so what?  One could articulate both these questions without changing tone, without changing facial expression.  You don’t go to see the circus everyday.  You don’t have an election every day.  One’s senses are flooded by an orgasmic flush now and then, but always momentarily.  The United States elected a president, amidst an outburst of political activism.  The people have gone to the circus.  They’ve had their moments.  They’ve had their laughs.  Now they have gone home! And on their way out, a giant sign told them, “Glad to have entertained, glad to have performed for you.  We’ll be back in 2008.  See you then!”

Of course, this is caricature.  If politics is a circus, then there are many circuses, many of which are not called “Presidential Election” and many of which refuse to see entertainment as a sedative, but as a potent stimulant encouraging audiences not to remain passive recipients of cheap thrills but to participate, flip and/or change scripts, to re-choreograph their lives and their communities. 

Jorgensen’s, the coffee shop in Waterville, Maine, where I am typing this, has a couple of note books for people to scribble down their thoughts.  Someone has written, “I think I am off-stage in someone else’s play and I can’t decide if this should bother me.”   It brought me back to the “circus postings”. 

If Mom, above, saw circus as the appropriate metaphor for the political mainstream, she is absolutely right.  If the “daughter” believes that “circus” refers to that other politics, she is going to learn and probably write her own political script. 

She might encounter Charlie Chaplin, the grandmaster of laughs, who was named for “un-American activities” and whose American residency was sought to be terminated.  She might also hear of the singer Paul Robeson, described as the  epitome of 20^th Century Renaissance Man, who was denied a passport and like Chaplin named for “un-American activities”.  She would be appalled by the continued relevance of McCarthysm and the persistence of the Jim Crow ideology.  She might learn of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.  She might revisit the famous statements by Malcolm X regarding “American Democracy” and “the American Dream”. 

She would learn of Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement and how Uncle Sam robbed that democracy of its luster.  Of Salvador Allende and Chile.  Of Patrice Lumumba and the Congo.  Of other honorable people and brave nations bloodied and pillaged by the United States through guns and deceit.  She would learn of the Uruguay Round of the GATT spawned the World Trade Organization and how poverty and idiocy were globalized. 

She would also, I am willing to wager, discover the Third World that exists within the borders of the United States.  She would realize that this “country” is a resource plunderer and a market-seizer outside this country.  She would learn about the political economy of war.  Hopefully, she would feel the warmth of the fraternal embrace of other peoples in other parts of the world, who too are scripting their lives in the alternative circuses that spell the future of hope. 

In this process of recovering education from the grasp of clowns, she would be able to distinguish the true, educative clowns from the imitators that are legion in this polity.  She would realize that saying “no” is not necessarily a negation, but an affirmation of the will to be different, to resist the invasion of the mind by everything-will-be-alright type of propaganda. 

She will have my salutation.  She will have my embrace. 

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Territories of the displaced political

[The eleventh in a series of articles collected under the title 'Love Notes to Democracy', written while in the USA as a member of a team of international monitors overseeing the US Presidential Election 2004]

This is the age of globalization.  This is an age celebrated in terms of the imminent setting up of the Global Village and indeed where people are already talking of something called the Global Family.  This is the age of the Information Superhighway.  An age of freedom flowers bursting into flames in the most desolate landscapes, an age where the unmistakable word of the creator downs the unbeliever into submission by the very power of its truth.  This is an age of the fulfillment of Orwellian Prophesy.  Pigs fly.

For this is also the age of mass migration, from villages to cities, from forced unemployment to conditions of slavery and urban squalor, the global south to the global north, from community to gated community, from contentment to conditions of misery, from war zones into refugee camps, from the picket line into jail, from a conscious objector to a conscious subjectivity, from the expression of outrage into the shell of disbelief.  Pigs fly. 

The globalization of markets and the irrelevancy of national boundaries for the flow of capital, exploitation of labor, extraction of resources and violence to fragile ecosystems, has been accompanied, it seems to me, forgive me if I am wrong, the globalization of idiocy and of poverty, the replacement/misplacement of Territorial Nationalism by Diasporic Nationalism, the mushrooming of Promised Lands and virtual communities, and the emergence of the “refugee” as the largest collective category on earth. 

This, therefore, is a refugee story, and given realities, it can be argued that it is the story of our time worth relating.  I am not a storyteller, and therefore I hope my arrogance in attempting to write this introductory note to what ought to be the Magnum Opus describing our time, would be forgiven. 

Fidel Castro understands refugees and the politics of refugee-making.  For decades now successive administrations in the USA have berated Castro for being a tyrant and for denying to the people of Cuba the “freedoms” they ought to enjoy, never mind the fact that people in the United States do not enjoy free education and free healthcare.  Successive governments have urged and/or tried to coerce Castro to allow the people to go, to look for and discover the magic of freedom, justice and democracy in the United States.  Castro did the unthinkable.  He actually “let his people go”!  And the US quickly shut its borders. 

This is the fundamental problem of the monstrosity that is a monster wanting to bring down a monster.  When the monstrosity acquiesces, the winning monster can’t take it.  In refugee terms, the refuge-seeker never finds refuge for he/she is never liberated from the burdens of nostalgia.  Even the most ardent Cuban American celebrator of US-style democratic freedoms, says he/she wants Castro “taken out”, so he/she can go home, although in his/her heart of hearts that is an option if made available would be flatly refused!  More crucially, the Promised Land into which refugees pour their lives and their dreams seldom keeps the promise.  Put simply, there has been too much colonization and re-colonization for anyone to reasonably expect to recover or build “home”. 

Sure, the world has known millions of “boat people”.  The United States of America itself, for example, was made into what it is today, through violence and constitutional enactment, by “boat people”.   Nevertheless, for all the millions who have abandoned their traditional homelands and replaced these with nostalgia, there are millions more who do live on their traditional homelands, without rights, without acknowledgment of history, without franchise and very often under conditions of slavery, colonized out of their minds. 

The problem with the United States of America, is that it refuses to accept that it is peopled by refugees.  Worse, their descendents who for want of anything better to call “home”, while believing rightly or wrongly that these “united” states make up their traditional homelands, are unwilling to accept that they are in fact refugees on their own land, helpless recipients of ideological bombardment, disenfranchised and conditioned to fight wars on people they do not know for reasons they are never made to understand. 

Anyone whose mind is colonized, is not an agent, but by definition a subjectivity.  There is no voter in this country that can state with absolute certainty that his/her vote counted and/or was counted.  Vast sections of people, especially the minorities have little or no say in the decisions made on their behalf and supposedly for their own good.  This is why people, in the aftermath of the November 2 “result” are expressing a need to “go to another country” and are talking about “seceding from the union”. 

Decolonization is not an easy project.  Just as one cannot obtain decolonization by migration, one cannot decolonize the mind without breaking down the colonized regions of the thinking faculty.  One can perhaps live out one’s life in the refugee camp called Hope in a land that one believes would someday be named the Promised Land, but one cannot employ the faculty of nostalgia to recover what is traditional in the homeland of the mind. 

There is a refugee in the mind of everyone who has been in many ways structurally disenfranchised.  This refugee can be clothed and fed thanks to the largess of a social and political environment that is enveloped in make-believe, but he/she cannot recover his/her hills and valleys, rivers and oceans, breezes and soils, nor the loot that have been in many ways plundered from his/her traditional homeland, unless he/she decides to do so. 

Don’t let them get your voice, baby, don’t let them get your heart, for voice and heard congeal into melodies and these are never totally inaccessible.  Where people resolve to sing, they turn themselves into a massive orchestra, and in the vast and mysterious communality, results in a harmony that has the power to obliterate colonization and refugee camps. I firmly believe.

 

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“Nothing” really matters

[The tenth in a series of articles collected under the title 'Love Notes to Democracy', written while in the USA as a member of a team of international monitors overseeing the US Presidential Election 2004]

“Queen” refers not just to Elizabeth.  “Queen” for me is the band that gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, and I remembered “her” because of a particular line in that song, “nothing really matters, nothing really does” thrown in among a confession of sorts dedicated, we are made to understand, by the murderer to his mother.  I am just referring to the overt, literary meaning of the lyrics and if there is any hidden meaning, it escapes me.  I plead innocence on account of cultural difference. 

What reminded me of this particular line was a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George attempt to sell a sitcom to a major television network about “nothing”.  The proposed sitcom would mirror their “real” television lives, which play out, day in and day out, the various elements that make up “nothing”.  This nothing-of-substance seems to be an accurate mirror of urban life in the USA.  Seinfeld, after all, enjoyed one of the most successful runs in television history.  “Nothing” had mattered, after all. Nothing matters, really! 

From the founding fathers to someone who believes he is a kind of founding god father, from Lincoln to Bush, the United States has proved that mediocrity can only be subdued, and then not forever, for it somehow finds its way to the top.  The less you have of substance, the more you have to show!  This is why there is a thing called “show business”.  Yes, marketing nothing and making a sale is what is called business or more accurately business-as-usual.  Let me elaborate.

You go to war on account of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and your friends make a killing (!) after securing contracts to re-construct the country you’ve just destroyed.  You fight in the name of god (whose existence is disputed) and you end up controlling some of the richest oil fields in the world.  You fight in the name of that silly word “democracy”, which has been robbed of any useful and/or applicable meaning, in order to establish and/or protect the worst tyrannies. 

The New Yorker, in its “The Talk of the Town” section of September 27, 2004 has a hilarious story, which I offer below in condensed form.

“Earlier this year, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, hired a team of independent experts to go to Iraq and evaluate the agency’s programs there.   The experts returned with a pretty pessimistic prognosis.  Prior to publication, USAID kept sending back parts of the report for revision, draft after draft, essentially weeding out all criticism and ensuring a decently whitewashed document.” 

Yes, the world was given quite an optimistic picture that would surely have made those on the ground in that many times tortured land puke many times over.  Anyway, how is that for transforming nothing into everything?  Should we laugh?  Perhaps.  Except that this is not news.  This is the modus operandi of despotic regimes intent on preserving ideological control over populations.  What is funny is that the USA does not need to pretend to be the champion of democracy and justice anymore.  For one thing, everyone knows it is not.  Secondly, the USA has the guns and the will to know what to do to anyone who wants to say it as it is.  It is not that nothing really matters, but nothing can really be made to matter!

Let us take the case of democracy or lack thereof in the USA.  In your democracy, good people of the USA, for example, there are no people there are only numbers.  They vote, but they don’t get counted.  You have a free media whose collective brain is too crippled to think and express freely.  You have relatively easy access to the information superhighway, but you are conditioned to deny access to the bad news.  You have the watchdogs of democracy acting like puppy dogs, content in playing the old records that re-produce your master’s voice. 

One could argue, philosophically, that nothing actually means everything.  I’ve known people, for example, who have renounced everything and by this very fact are richer than most.  The converse is also true.  The United States generously offers foreign aid to countries that have been structurally impoverished as though it wants nothing in return, but in fact extracts ten times what it gives.  Nothing is as ridiculously simple as obtaining something close to everything after investing nothing, if you have the capacity to enforce certain types of contracts on corrupt or otherwise flawed governments. 

I believe that between nothing and everything, there must lie something.  So let me try to enumerate the “some things” that I have seen and which give me hope that this uneven and indeed immoral commerce of nothing for everything, this show-business of fraud, can be transformed into something more socially palatable than delusion. 

The United States of America, I firmly believe, is the home of the same proportion of idiots, bigots, crooks, swindlers, murderers and other vermin, as one would find in any other country.  The United States of American, by the same token, I firmly believe, is the home of decent, honorable, good-hearted, giving, human beings capable of community and embrace.  I have seen such men, women and children, felt their warmth, been caressed and comforted by the life-giving waters that flow abundantly from their cultured sensibilities.  I have seen them fight the honorable fight, seen them devastated by defeat, and have seen them reconfigure their lives and their resolve.   

This largely unacknowledged community of people is alive and full of liberating energy and love.  You will find them keeping life alive in the teeming metropolis as well as in the heartland of “red” America.  They may wear the Republican or the Democratic badge or may not wear one at all, but they all carry in their persona and their lives, the unmistakable insignia that seeks to build a better, more inclusive system of governance.  They may pray in different churches or not pray at all, but they will not prey on innocence and ignorance.  They have “something”, these people do.  And it matters and hopefully will matter much more the nothing-everything dichotomized world of usurpers of popular will and re-definers of un-won or misbegotten “mandates”.

They might laugh at or laugh with Jerry Seinfeld, but will not be moved to emulate the brain-effacing sitcoms that bombard their living rooms with nothing on a daily basis. They are capable of making “nothing” matter less than it does now and of reducing “everything” to its real, believable proportions.    

How and when does this something come to matter?  Who can tell?  All I know is that it is reasonable enough to believe that when certain things come together, by design or by natural law, the vast emptiness that is nothing has to concede ground.  Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the great Urdu poet comforted himself in his multiple incarcerations in these lines in which I constantly find inspiration and which therefore I frequently share with fellow-travelers:

“Your feet bleed, Faiz,

but something must surely bloom

as you water the desert

simply by walking through it”.

I do not have to urge this other, more hopeful and infinitely more beautiful “America of the Something” to walk.  It already does and I am glad. 

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“Chortle Now”: the hidden transcripts of “democracy”

[The ninth in a series of articles titled 'Love notes to democracy' written while in the USA as a member of a team of international monitors overseeing the 2004 US Presidential Election]

About a week after the US presidential “election” I watched a fascinating program on “60 Minutes” about fake degrees.  The report covered a fake degree-awarding institute that called itself Hamilton University.  Essentially a web-based racket, this intriguing “university” has been in the business of selling certification for many years. 

I was not surprised.  In a world where pollution and polluting rights are bought and sold, a world whose operative ethic is deceit, why shouldn’t people have the freedom to purchase whatever it takes to deceive?  What grabbed my attention was one of the scripts used by Hamilton’s telemarketers to sell their deceit-product to customers on the lookout for deceit-facilitating certification. 

This is how it went, roughly: “Well, you know about the great liberal arts schools and what kinds of people they produce, don’t we (chortle now)…” Yes, they scripted in the chortle cues as well, as would any telemarketing scriptwriter I suppose.  I couldn’t stop chortling, though.  This was just after the “election” and I was full of democratic sentiment and full of sympathy for those who believe that the USA has a functioning democracy. 

If chortles are scripted into duping mechanisms, what of the subtexts of such scripts and what of the chortles therein, I wondered.  These people must laugh to themselves, all the way to the bank or to the White House for that matter.  So I thought I would try my hand at unearthing the subtexts (chortles included) scripted by, for and with telemarketers of the Hamilton Universities of Democracy. 

“Ok, so we screwed up in Florida, so we just got smarter.  We brought in machines so that we can minimize human error (Chortle now!) and proceeded to eliminate the eminently human agency of voting by human intervention subsequent to the closing of the polls.  We have the media, the watchdogs of democracy (Chortle now!) behind us, ever-willing to sacrifice the will of the people so that we don’t lose face internationally, and we shall count on them to deliver the free-and-fair.  Thanks Fox! 

“Sure, we played our little games of subversion by posting misinformation regarding polling stations, by moving them without informing people, threatening the poor that they were liable to be arrested for non-payment of electricity and other bills, and other rib-tickling things (Chortle now!).  These were of course eyewash.  Those poor democracy-worshipping suckers got an army of lawyers and poll watchers, some from as far away as Sri Lanka, to observe and report malpractice throughout the voting, but they couldn’t do a thing about those machines now, could they (Loud guffaws now!)? 

“Jokes aside, let us talk about “democracy” in general now.  Democracy is government by some people, with some people for some people, fuck the majority (Chortle now!).  One man, one vote?  No.  One person, one vote (Chortle now!)!  Well, really (wiping tears of mirth), people have nothing to do with it.  To tell the truth, this is the democracy of the rich, most of whom are white, for the rich and by the rich, and people still believe that Woodrow Wilson really believed or practiced what he said.  Those poor bastards (Chortle now!)!  I mean, c’mon, he promised the poor voter he won’t take the country to war and committed his troops within six months of assuming office whereas the Bolsheviks promised they would pull out of the war and kept their word. 

“Let us, despite our poor knowledge of geography, go more global for a change.  Haven’t those who still believe this is a democracy, heard of our track record internationally?  Surely they know how we have supported the worst tyrants and despots throughout the world?  Was not Ferdinand Marcos our friend?  Was not Samoza? Was not Batista? Didn’t we look the other way when Suharto slaughtered half a million people in Indonesia?  Did we not fund and arm people who were trying to overthrow democratic regimes the world over?  Did we not establish a School of the Americas to help our friends mete out punishment to those who didn’t toe our line?  Didn’t we support the white racists in South Africa? Is not our greatest ally, Britain, a monarchy? Don’t they know that we fought a war to re-install a monarchy in Kuwait (Chortle now!)?  Did we not put the finishing touches to a land that we had helped reduce to rubble by bombing the living daylights out of a long suffering people, so that we could hand it back to the war lords?  Would these people know that we are talking of Afghanistan, for god’s sake (Chortle now!)?

“And what of Iraq?  We went there to re-claim for the Iraqi people their country(Chortle now!), save them from our former friend Saddam, and establish democracy.  We sent them democracy encapsulated in bullets (Chortle now!), we made their desert bloom into a million flowers called participatory decision making, by raining bombs on them. 

“The talk of the town is that the constitution is to be amended to allow Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president.  Why not?  He is certifiably white, isn’t he?  And rich.  And a Republican.  In short, he is eminently qualified to become president.  We wouldn’t do it for someone like Amadou Diallo, the West African immigrant who was shot 44 times by NYPD heroes a few years ago, would we (Chortle now!)? 

“Demographers say that in 50 years the number of white people would drop to below 50% of the population.  The Founding Fathers must have known this.  This is why they come up with the brilliant idea of electoral colleges.  First of all it eliminates the danger of the popular vote throwing up, god forbid, a president who is not a blue-blooded Caucasian.  Also, in conjunction with the constitutional sanctioning of gerrymandering, we can keep these dumb asses off the white house for a long, long time.  Hopefully by that time we would have a de-facto monarchy, with, hypothetically, George Bush VII sitting on the throne (Chortle now!) and the problem of “majority” would not even arise.” 

What of the real scripts now, and who will read them and when?  I don’t know.  Mis-education is as much a crime of the mis-educated as it is of the mis-educating.  Self-censorship is as grievous a fault as is censorship.  So, I shall leave the script-readers and script-believers to weed out misinformation and fashion for themselves a democracy that works for them, but I will by way of fraternal embrace, offer the following anecdote.

In the early nineties, a Cuban economist, Carlos Tablada toured the USA, promoting a book called “Man and Socialism in Cuba”.  He went from university to university, talking about the book and about Cuba”.  A friend of mine had gone for one of these talks and he told me that Tablada had been heckled by some Cuban immigrants and self-righteous democracy-know-alls.  They had said that Cuba was not a democracy, that Castro was a tyrant and a despot.  Tablada had listened to all of this and responded in the following way.  

“You might not know that every adult in Cuba has military training and are permitted to carry arms, all provided by the state.  Fidel Castro frequently visits factories and universities, unarmed and without bodyguards.  Can you name me one leader in the so-called free world where democracy is supposed to be thriving, who does this or would be prepared to do it? Of course Cuba is a democracy!

It is ok.  You can chortle now.  For real.  Go write your own scripts.  Go include your own chortles.  I wish you strength as I do my own and fraternal scriptwriting, chortling in the process of course.   

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Let’s go to another country*

(or the timeless specter of St. Monica)

I am hooked on Eduardo Galeano.  The man walks through my sensibilities, planting flowers.  Some are made of dry-wit brown, some flutter like flags of rebellion, some exude the fragrance of hope and some are textured with irony and pain.  And in this field of color, texture and fragrance, from daybreak to dusk and in the many hours of night, are produced aggregates that shatter television screens and simple stories that fuel the relentless interrogation of truth.  I am a poor student of this extraordinary man, but I record, by way of appreciation, the stories, subplots and elaborations that jump off the canvass on which he paints the world in all its colors, dismal and brilliant. 

“In the barrio of Cerro Norte, a poor suburb of the city of Montevideo, a magician gave a street performace.  With a touch of his wand, he made a dollar bill sprout from his fist, then from his hat.  When the show was over, the magic wand disappeared.  The next day, neighbors saw a barefoot child walking the streets, magic wand in hand.  He tapped on everything he came across and stood waiting.  Like many other children in the neighborhood, that nine-year-old boy liked to sink his nose into a plastic bag filled with glue.  Once he explained why: ‘It takes me to another country.’”

In the aftermath of the US Presidential “election”, a new map has emerged in North America.  The unknown cartographer has gathered “blue” states that “went to Kerry” in an expanded “United States of Canada”, and has named “red” states as Jesus Land.  Jesus I am sure would have pouted and said “Elie, lama lama sabathkini”, for being a Buddhist, I have heard that the archenemy of liberation marches into the final battle wearing the clothes of liberation.  But that’s another story. 

The story is that of many blue-citizens wanting “out”.  “I want to migrate to Canada”.  “We might as well secede from the union”.  These are the gut-reactions of some who have only now noticed their beloved country is disintegrating before they eyes or that it never really existed in the first place.  These are the sentiments which persuade me to say by way of offering comfort and light humor to ease the pain, “Come to my country; I will do my best to give you citizenship, for you are political refugees”.  Yes, the wheel has come a full circle.  A land peopled by freedom lovers fleeing tyranny, have to flee the tyrannies they themselves spawned.  Except that this very same tyranny has erased for all intents and purposes the notion of territory-based nation. 

This country inhales a plastic bag filled with glue that takes the people to countries called nostalgia and forgetting.  And this diplomatic passport that facilitates travel from one dream to another, one myth to another is called television. 

“Development: an image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV.”

Life is an entity that lives off make-believe, not realizing, as Peter Guerevich has pointed out that power is the ability to make one inhabit the powerful’s version of one’s reality and conversely, that inhabiting someone’s else’s version of one’s reality is the ultimate condition of ideological slavery.  A simple exercise would explain it all.  Replace “development” in the above proposition with “life in the United States” and we get the following:

“Life in the United States: an image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV.”

“During the year 1998 the globalized media dedicated the most space and their best energies to the romance between the president of the planet and a plump, voracious, talkative woman named Monica Lewinsky.  In every country we were all Lewinskyized.  We had her for breakfast, reading the papers; we had her for lunch, listening to the radio; and we had her for dinner, watching TV.  I think something else happened in 1998, but I can’t remember what.”

Lewinskyization is not something that happened in the middle of Clinton’s second term.  It is as much an “American” tradition as is Apple Pie and Ice Cream.  This is why Weapons of Mass Destruction is Monica Lewinsky.  This is why The War on Terrorism is Monica Lewinsky.  This is indeed why The Existence of Democracy is a Monica Lewinsky.  Moral Value?  Yes, another Monica Lewinsky.  Islamic Fundamentalism too.  As was the Evil Empire prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

This is why people find it hard to believe that another country exists within this Monica Lewinskyized USA, a country that resides as a throbbing pain in their hearts and minds, so painful that it requires the constant anesthetization of Monica Lewinsky morphine.  

The United States cannot remember Enron, does not want to know the links between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, does not want to learn the political economy of oil, forgets that it houses a significant segment of the “Third World”, does not breathe a word of how its industries are rapidly making it difficult for the entire world to breathe, and will not admit that the “Axis of Terror” is headquartered in Washington DC.  The above do not coalesce into that fascinating an image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV the people of the United States consumes from their living rooms. 

This Monica Lewinskyized country will not admit that the franchise of their people is systematically robbed or, more correctly, was aborted at birth.  This country which audits the health or otherwise of political systems all over the world, does not tolerate or make possible an audit of its own “democracy”. 

When will the United States switch off the TV that is the “plump, voracious, talkative creature named Monica Lewinsky”?  Sorry, I should write that in a different way.  Will the United States ever wake up to the need to switch off the TV that is the “plump, voracious, talkative creature named Monica Lewinsky”?  That is a question that the United States must answer.  I come from another world, but I do not think I will be judged harshly or be called presumptuous for offering the following observations. 

I do not think that the “other country” so desired by a citizenry that has been turned into glue-sniffers exists outside the United States.  For this “other country” is the United States, which, despite manifest fraud, systemic disenfranchisement (not to mention vast sections that refused to exercise its franchise, probably due to a manifest lack of faith) and endemic Lewinskyization, still “officially” voted against Bush to the tune of almost 50%.

Today is the name of this other country.  This Hour is the name of the state each citizen must live.  This Moment is the name of the community that builds the trenches, builds the schools, develops an embrace made of love and hope, and lays the foundation of that other, more enduring and infinitely more honorable universe called Tomorrow.  

*The ninth in a series of articles collected under the title 'Love Notes to Democracy', written while in the USA as a member of a team of international monitors during the US Presidential Election 2004]

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After the election debacle, which way for the Left?

[This is the 8th in a series of articles titled 'Love notes to democracy' written around the time of the US Presidential Election 2004, when I was a member of a team of international election monitors, working in the state of Florida]

In Sri Lanka, in the aftermath of the general election in 1989, a columnist wrote an article titled “After the election debacle, which way for the Left?”  The “Left” referred to what is now known as the “Old Left”, those political parties which spearheaded the struggle for independence in the 1930s.  They were roughly two factions, the Trotskyites and the Communists, and had come together, along with some centre-left groups, to form the United Socialist Alliance, and were routed at the hustings.  Another columnist, supportive of the more radical (and to this mind the most progressive and “truly left”) People’s Liberation Front (better known by its Sinhala acronym, JVP), responded with an article titled, “Which way for the Left? Right!”

I remembered this as I was roaming around Miami Dade, Florida, on November 2.  I remembered this line, because there were three possible outcomes, two of which would be cause for concern, given a refreshing desire by ordinary people in the USA to ensure their voice is heard through the vote. 

Outcome 1:  the difference in the number of votes polled by George W Bush and John Kerry is so small that every vote would be fought over, every allegation of fraud looked into and all the niggling issues that are part and parcel of a patently flawed system would be discussed and debated.

Outcome 2:  John Kerry wins easily. 

Outcome 3: George W Bush wins easily.

I believe, in the interest of the future of democracy in the USA, Outcome 1 would have been the most desirable because it forbids the issues from being pooh-poohed, swept under the carpet and generally forgotten until 2008.  Outcome 2 might have persuaded the more alert and democracy-desiring sections of the population to celebrate the fact that Bush was voted out of office, while forgetting that the fundamental issues pertaining to exercising the franchise, being able to vote and having one’s vote counted, has not been resolved. 

We got Outcome 3.  I was troubled by the possibility of two by-products emerging.  One, the Democratic Party believing that in order to win in 2008, it has to re-clothe itself in the political colors of the Republican Party.  Secondly, the marginalized sections that had been mobilized in unprecedented numbers, would retreat into a state of unbelief, resolving not to vote because in the end their vote did not count. 

It is too early to say if either of these will happen, but I believe it is worthwhile pointing out the problems of these possibilities.  The signs are there, however, and in fact they were out there even before November 2.  The Jewish Vote.

The Kerry Campaign and indeed the Democratic Party have essentially abandoned the struggle for a more representative and fraud-free democratic system.  That task has been left to the likes of Ralph Nader, Cobb and organizations such as Moveon and www.blackboxboting.org and others who voted Democratic not so much because they were pro-Kerry, but because they were more anti-Bush.   

Noam Chomsky, referring to US foreign policy on Latin America, and especially El Salvador in the late eighties, once said, “the entire political spectrum in this country agrees on this…..” (I can’t remember what exactly they were agreeing about), and went on to say (complementing his comment by bringing his hands together, within about an inch apart from each other) “although of course the spectrum is this thin”.  There are many people, especially in other parts of the world who would laugh when Republicans refer to Democrats as “left”.  Sure, they are “left” in a relative sense, but the Republicans are so far “right”, that “left of the Republicans” is still way too far to the right! 

My friend Ayca Cubukcu, a graduate student at Columbia University put it best: “The Republican candidate is always going to be to the right of the Democrats, and therefore will always be able to pin the left label on the Democratic candidate.  So what’s the point in trying to be “right”? 

But this is the obsession of the Democratic Party!  Someone said that ideology had become a non-issue in presidential elections.  True. And what of the Left outside of the Democratic Party?  Why is it so reluctant to admit that even if allowing for fraud, millions of Americans in the United States have embraced Bushism, that we-are-number-one-and-we-don’t-care-for-world-opinion kind of arrogance is a significant trait in the cultural ethos of this country? 

No, the Left, like the Democratic Party prefer to live in the rarified territories of nostalgia.  Their politics is colored by and indeed motivated by a longing for a land that does not exist and probably never did.  If there is a Religious Right, it follows that there is a non-Religious Right as well.  The Left, however, has failed to obtain the other “Other” of the Religious Right, for if there is a Religious Right, logically there should also be a Religious Left, but no, the Left does not want to touch religion with a ten-foot pole!  They could for example, at least in line with the fundamental political sense of subverting the enemy, reference Jesus Christ himself to counter the bigotry that is mouthed in his name. 

Someone said, “It is important for the Left that Bush is defeated, because Bush makes the Left look ridiculous; once he is defeated they can take on Kerry.”  Makes sense, but I believe the people of the United States can do better.  And I believe that the Left can reason better.  Sure, Bush makes them look ridiculous, but not as silly as they make themselves look! 

They could find out why millions don’t vote and maybe they will realize that these people simply cannot identify with the likes of John Kerry.  Or Hillary Clinton for that matter.  Even if the Democratic Party reduces politics to capturing the White House, it makes no sense to act as though these people do not exist. 

After the election debacle, which way for the Left?  Right?  Not right, I believe is the answer!

How long will the vast numbers who have by not voting expressed a massive vote of no-confidence in the system remain silent?  What if, they decide to take matters into their hands and into their communities?  What if they design a politics outside of the mainstream and it grows big enough to so narrow the defined “mainstream” and make it obsolete?  What if Howard Dean, who is probably the only candidate deserving the left label, and who was unceremoniously dumped by the party hierarchy, decides not to take up the post of President of the Democratic Party?  What if the Left dares to ponder the fact that the most left candidate in the senate races, Barack Obama won some 70% of the votes in Illinois?  What if Barrak Obama himself contests as an independent?  What if the so-called Blue States initiate procedures to secede from the Union?  What if someone launches a let’s-not-vote campaign and agitates for a none-of-the-above option to be included in the next ballot, so that the United States and the world can measure the true political pulse of the country?  

Let the Left, self-defined and Republican-defined, sleep on these questions.  Let the Left awake.  Or decide never to wake up again.  In either event, the people of the United States of America would have gained, I believe.

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Whither democracy now?

[The 7th of a series of articles on the US Presidential Election 2004, titled 'Love Notes to Democracy', written while in that country as a member of an international team of election monitors]

Sometime during the early afternoon of November 2, while moving from precinct to precinct in Southern Florida with a team of international election observers, I mulled over the following question: “After the election, what next for ‘democracy’ in the USA?” 

I did not have any illusions about “American democracy” when I came to the USA, all the way from Sri Lanka.  I did not have illusions about being able to witness malpractice for fairly obvious reasons: I knew that the electoral process did not begin at 7.00 am and end twelve hours later; I did not have any access to the “before” nor the “after”, which are as critical as the in-between in the matter of obtaining the much-celebrated “free-and-fair”; and even in the “in-between”, we were accorded, in South Florida, very limited (and grudging) access.

More importantly, there were systemic flaws that had not changed despite the fiasco that was Florida in 2000, flaws that were neither limited to Florida nor that particular election: that the election was not being conducted by an independent authority, that there was an appalling absence of uniformity across and even within states; and that there were too many ill-trained polls workers who were, sadly, supervised by partisan election officials.  Add to this the introduction of “computer voting” and collation amenable more to human interference than to human error, especially given the surprising reluctance to complement the process with a paper trail that could act as back up in case of dispute, and we get an election that was structurally too problematic for anyone to write a fairytale report about. 

So no, I did not have any illusions about the process.  This does not mean I did not have hope.  Indeed, I asked myself the above question because I had seen, albeit in a limited way, an incredible outpouring of democratic intent among the people of this country.  In Southern Florida, for example, I saw the energy, hope and resolve that community organizations brought to educate voters and to ensure that no one interferes with their right to vote.  It was encouraging to see that people had understood that the present and future of democracy lay in their hands and not in those of presidential candidates. 

To my mind, John Kerry and the Democratic Party conceded not just the election the very objective of making-every-vote-count which was the rallying cry of hope in this country, the “world’s oldest democracy”.  The “before” and “after” issues alluded to above seemed to have gone underground and the media by and large seems to have glossed over the persisting questions pertaining to democratic process.  Predictably, everything was brushed aside by one word, one name, one horrendous exercise: “Fallujah!” 

I talked to people from Miami Dade, Florida to Waterville, Maine, and from Manhattan to San Francisco, not forgetting the so-called “Red States” or “Jesus Land” as some have dubbed this region.  Many seemed to have taken up permanent residence in that strange and sterile land called Comfortably Numb.  Yes, I was disappointed.  

“Whither democracy in the USA?” is the question I wanted answered.  I did not expect an answer, however, when my sister, a citizen of this country, took me to a meeting of the Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice a couple of nights ago.  Listening to people articulate their concerns, their fears, and their outrage, renewed my faith in the democratic spirit of this country. 

Encouragingly, they were less upset not by the possibility that Kerry had been robbed but by their democratic voice having been mugged in the process.  The question was not one of whether a computer “glitch” not having an impact on the outcome, but that such errors need to be addressed and corrected if the franchise of every single voter is to be protected.  “Conceding” without resolving these questions, translates into the following: “we really do not care about democracy, we only wanted the White House and the people in the streets were but a means to that end”. 

“Waterville Bridges” is a small group, but they seem to have realized that the democratic process is not something limited to a day in early November in years divisible by four.  If John Kerry or the Democratic Part is not interested, “fine”, they seem to be saying.  “We are interested and we will be heard,” is what I heard them say in various ways.  They seem to be done with the mandatory period of mourning and happily, are not focusing on 2008 and the next Democratic Hopeful, but on today, the American Voter and the future of their children and communities.  They want full investigations into all allegations of malpractice in every precinct.  They are “local” enough to want that, responsible enough to be appalled by the subversion of the democracy question by “Fallujah” and international enough to see the connections.  Simply, they felt that the right to wage war is also predicated on earning the right of representation. 

Waterville Bridges is admittedly a small group, but then again so were the Founding Fathers.  Waterville Bridges is a small group, but they comprise an “America” that holds hope for this country and the world, and they are but a Maine articulation of a phenomenon that is fast becoming the “mainstream political” of this country, and a political that no one aspiring to political office can afford to ignore and probably too numerous to be crushed using brute force.  As a citizen of the Global South, I am thankful that this “America” is so resilient despite the many reversals it has had to suffer.  I leave this country in a couple of weeks, and when I go home I will tell my friends back home, “we have friends, even in the USA”.      

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The church is the state

[The sixth of a series of articles on the US Presidential Election 2004, written while in that country as a member of a team of international election monitors]

The constitution of the United States of America says, “We hold these truths as self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…..”  Bill Scott of Vassalboro, ME reminds the people of Central Maine, in a “reader’s view” carried in the Morning Sentinel, that George Washington himself had said “It is rightly impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible”.  The “world”, mind you, not just the USA.

Bill Scott “invites” all atheists and agnostics to leave the United States.  If Bill Scott does not have any African American or Native American blood in him, then he has a lot of gumption!  The ancestors of those who rule the USA did not come to North America by invitation.  They slaughtered the native populations and called it “Thanksgiving”.  There are other ironies, but let us brush them aside.  Let us focus on church and state, and the constitutional contradictions that are ever present and constantly re-affirmed in real life politics.

The Bill Scotts of this unhappy country know that the church and state are inseparable entities, regardless of what the constitution promises.  They are constantly reminded of this fact as they buy and sell bit and piece of what they believe is “life” using currency notes and coins issued by the United States Federal Reserve System.  “In God we trust” is the operational grist of the mill that facilitates life in these “united” states. 

The founding fathers made a fundamental mistake when they wrote the constitution.  They managed to separate the church and state in a way that did not really separate them, and this is commendable and indeed symptomatic of the schizophrenia that plays havoc with political practice.  Unfortunately, when they wrote “church” into the political practice that flows from constitutional edict, they forgot to state which church they meant.  They forgot to name the god on whom they are so dependent.  And so the history of the United States can be read as a struggle to define for itself a church and a god. 

Unable to reconcile the schisms of Christianity, the sons and daughters of the founding fathers chose the path of least resistance: they chose to focus on one “Other” or another in the hope that this violent encounter would yield as by-product a religious self-image. 

In the beginning, this fledgling “democracy” was shy about naming the project.  So shy were they that even the enemy’s name was coded in secular terms.  And so it was that this country fought wars, hot and cold and sometimes lukewarm, against The Evil Empire, the Drug Empire and Terrorism.  The rhetoric was about establishing democracy, about eradicating the violation of human rights, about making the world drug-free and free of fear, never mind the fact that these initiatives were patently anti-democratic, that they violated human rights and that they were fought by a nation that is the capital of the world’s drug lords. 

Disguises come off sooner or later, pretensions slip, and when you have accumulated enough money and guns it doesn’t really matter that you are a mass of contradiction and that the world sees you naked and ugly.  And so, today, even though it continues to define self by bouncing off a vaguely defined “other”, we see the United States finally dealing with its congenital schizophrenia regarding church and state.  Today the war is fought on behalf of Jesus Christ, flouting the ten commandments and making a mockery of the Sermon on the Mount, in ways that would have made Jesus Christ, re-invented as a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, Caucasian born somewhere in the “Red States” of the United States, refuse resurrection.  Today the enemy is a “heathen”, no different from the “unbelieving heathen” that was converted or slaughtered by Bible-toting missionaries and their gun-toting comrades-in-arms in the first centuries after Columbus mis-navigated his ship and caused so much confusion about Indians, West Indians, East Indians and Red Indians, as so beautifully outlined by Roy Shah in Hyde Park, London a couple of decades ago. 

Today the enemy is clearly identified as a person who does not subscribe to “Christian Values” and/or does not believe in the Christian God. This “enemy” includes not just the Muslim who asserts identity and proclaims faith in the Middle East and elsewhere, the Buddhist in Sri Lanka resisting unethical conversion of well-funded and fanatical god squads, and other pagans who find no reason to concede to Corporate Christianity a monopoly of the divine and/or spiritual, but it includes all Christians who are willing to accept that the divine speaks as many languages as there are peoples, is tolerant and essentially peaceful. 

All these “enemies” are defined as misbegotten doubters who are children of Satan, intent on erasing from human memory the notion of the holy trinity, the grace of the man from Galilee and the word of truth which they refuse to believe is written in a hundred different ways in the bible itself.  Yes, the “enemy” is a mad man and an aberration, a gargoyle and a fiend, a murderer and a thief, a beheader of democracy, a zealot and an escapee from hell who should be driven into his traditional homeland. 

This is the “enemy” of the America that refuses to see in itself the mirror image of the enemy, zealous, trigger-happy and willing to kill more than to die in defending not so much the message of the “savior” as protecting its corporate logo and the violence and misery it spawns globally. 

This is why this “America” references the need to resolve constitutional contradiction through a religious war, a Christian jihad, a 21^st Century Crusade.  And this is why this “America” has declared war on its own people, seeking to establish by force of gun and threat of censure a religious monolith that defines itself by defining away all that is best in the Christian tradition.  This is why the world clasps its hands in prayer and raises its voice in an universal appeal to the differentiated and numerous divine, “God Help America!” 

A man walked up to me this afternoon, a white man, middle-aged, wearing a jacket decorated with Christian iconography.  “Sir, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asks.  “Sure,” I say.  “Could you please spare me a dollar?”  “Of course,” I say, and give him a one dollar bill, stamped of course with the ideological statement, “In God we trust”.  “Thank you, thank you very much.  Please don’t misunderstand.”  I smile and am about to cross the street when he says, “I am not prejudiced or anything, I believe only in love”.  Maybe he felt he needed to say that because I am black, because I would be in appearance and by the law of averages to be a non-believer, and because he felt he needed to apologize for the un-Christian arrogance of Church-is-the-State Americans of the United States.  I don’t know. I liked the “love” note in his statement. 

What happened to that Church, I asked myself.  The church of love, the church of the Sermon on the Mount, the church of the Ten Commandments, the humble church of the prince-of-peace Jesus Christ? I do not know, but if I was pushed for an answer, I would say the following.

That Church exists all over the United States of America, in the “blue” states and the “red”, and even within the hearts and minds of the Bill Scotts, not only in Vassalboro, ME, but in every small town and big city, in urban landscapes and in the rolling rural which surround them.  This Church lies persecuted by modern-day Pharisees clothed in the much polluted clothes of that decent and cool human being called Jesus Christ.  Perhaps, this Church is already crucified.  But then again, if America really wants to give final and absolute legitimacy to the marriage of church and state in a meaningful and liberating way, there is nothing in the script to say that this Church cannot and will not be resurrected. 

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