The Weirdest Time Ever
At last, tonight, our months of suffering as a nation will be over. I refer not to a Democratic takeover of Congress but to the cessation, at least for now, of election year campaigning. Tonight I am at home, alternately watching TV news, checking the blogs and websites, and catching up on some magazine reading. I am steeped in the media culture of our nation, and it feels very uncomfortable.
The ever-tightening races are a spectacle to behold. The growing suspense as the percentages rack up is almost as hypnotic as the point in the movie where the scary music starts very softly and you just know, before you know how you know, that someone is going to get creamed. Or maybe someone will come to the rescue and the town will be saved. Except that in politics no story line is that simple. You have to pay to play in this country, and that means that everyone is serving a corporate master of some sort or another. The trick is to vote for someone with backbone and integrity, and those seem to be in short supply these days.
Caring passionately about politics leads directly to indigestion, sometimes heart failure. It’s a dog-eat-man world out there, the competition is vicious, and hardly anyone holds the best interests of the country as their primary concern. This is in stark contrast to what they tell you when you run for student council.
Student council is like a giant school-wide civics lesson with a dash of Miss America thrown in. Its purpose is to get kids interested in taking leadership among their peers, and to get said peers to buy into the idea that voting for a leader is a good and useful task, and that they should do it regularly. It is also an attempt to channel those raging hormones into something useful for a change, getting kids to think beyond what they’re having for lunch to the larger issues that matter to their generation.
The result, all too often, is that hormones win and the election becomes a beauty pageant, with the most desirable young man or woman winning whatever post they ran for, and the smart kids, the ones most prone to cynicism in the face of beauty contests, losing every time. This does not seem like the best way to prepare kids to become active participants in a democracy, but perhaps it is the only way we’ve figured out so far.
I have been interested in politics ever since being class secretary in second grade. Growing up in a conservative family during Watergate, I knew without having to know it that Nixon was a liar, and that my parents and all their friends were being duped. It broke my heart to see this spectacle play out, and I am not sure I ever fully recovered from that sense of betrayal by my supposed leaders. I really believed what I had been taught about this being a special nation that stood for liberty and justice for all. I guess I still believe that is possible, which is why every election season I practically have to take to my bed when the suspense builds to such a pitch. I can’t stand the disappointment.
This year is the worst I’ve ever seen it. After a devastating six-year slide into fascism brought on by an administration we knew was corrupt from the start, the hope of change is in the air. It has created this fragile expectancy among all of us starving for honest, accountable leadership. But the suspense does not just come from the hope that the Democrats will control Congress. It also comes from the fear that if they do, we still will not have honest, accountable leadership.
Taken all together — the horrors of the Bush administration, the constant parade of corruption felling politician and preacher alike, and the fear that even if there is change it will not be enough to slow our descent as a nation — it’s quite a toxic brew here in media land tonight. I’m managing to face it for once, even just now after learning we have re-elected Schwarzenegger as governor. It’s a brutal world out there, but it is the only one we’ve got. May we all keep fighting for what we believe no matter the odds, and may this strained and difficult time be the start of real change for this country.
November 8th, 2006 at 6:47 am
Santorum was the first to fall. That proves to me once and for all that what goes around actually DOES come around.
But even a Democratic House, even accountable leadership, can not turn global warming around, relieve the staggering national debt, or bring healing to Iraq and other areas of Bush-era disaster. It’s the end of the empire - the most I can hope for is a softer landing with the Dems.
You said: “It’s a dog-eat-man world out there, the competition is vicious, and hardly anyone holds the best interests of the country as their primary concern.”
The congressional staffers who come to me for massage ALL believe they are working in the best interests of the country. I doubt seriously the people they work for feel any differently. The ones I agree with, the ones I disagree with, though ambitious and too smart for their own good, carry a huge sense of responsibility on their shoulders. They believe they are doing the right thing. You hear about the worst of the them, the Hasterts, the Foleys, the Allens, and you think that means everyone in American politics is utterly corrupt. They aren’t, really they aren’t! One of the great gifts of my profession in this city is that it’s impossible for me to objectify “the government” or even “the military.” Mistakes are made every day, compromises and deals go down, but it’s a rare minority (in my experience) who actually are thinking about grabbing all the power and money for themselves at the expense of the country.
Thank you Anne for your marvelous post! I love people who make me think.
November 8th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Hi Reya, thanks so much for your comments. Yes, I am sure you’re right that most people in politics believe they have the good of the nation at heart. I am really against conspiracy theories of most every kind, plus I have a cousin in the Pentagon and I know he is a good person trying to do what he believes is right.
It is a very good day today. We get our Constitution back. We get accountability for Iraq. We get a raised minimum wage, reinstatement of taxes that Bush cut, and fixes to health care and pharmaceutical piracy. It will take a while to relieve our crushing national debt and address our worrisome trade imbalance. Hopefully we can start taking the initiative on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, and make the best use of the time left to us to reverse the horrors of climate change.
Some things are too far gone to change. I don’t know how to address the absolute disaster we have created in Iraq. I don’t think we’ll be able to avoid a lot of the impacts of global climate change. I hope to God we can stabilize Afghanistan.
But I do believe it’s an incredibly competitive world, and we can’t assume everyone is going to play fair. I look forward to integrity, and if there’s backbone in it too, maybe we really will turn things around.