2005-09-06 - 11:49 p.m.

When the Nearest Lamppost Isn’t Close Enough
I stopped writing in this journal a while ago, for a variety of reasons--number one being that I try not to live and breathe politics. I stay informed, I vote accordingly, and I share my opinions with anyone who wants to hear them--and plenty who don’t. Here, what had started out as a fun way for me to exercise my satirical muscles had transformed into yet another continuous online rant about That Man in the White House and his cronies. The web, I thought, had plenty of those. I’d much rather write about music, or Lesbian Pancakes, or the everyday idiocies I see all around me and about which I can at least vent a little--not the grotesquely huge, world-shattering idiocies against which we’re all basically powerless.
But sometimes you have so many thoughts in your head that you just have to let them out.
Ideologies kill people. The more extreme the ideology, the more fanatically it is followed, the higher the body count. God only knows how many people have died through the millennia in the name of religion. We have a slightly better grasp on how many people Marxism and Fascism killed, if only because the time frame was shorter--only a century or so--and we can count the mass graves between Guernica and Phnom Penh and make a semi-educated guess about how many corpses they contain. The ideologues didn’t bother to count them, of course. Why should they? What do a few million lives matter when you’re busy creating the Perfect Society? You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, the apologists for Stalin used to say.
This past week, the utopian ideology we live under--the starve-the-beast, drown-government-in-the-bathtub, free-market-ueber-alles religion that all our leaders from both major parties have been preaching for 20 years--claimed its largest batch of victims to date. Not the first, by far--it has been killing people quietly for years--but the most at one time. That rising tide that the Republicans go on about? It lifted all the boats, just like they said it would. Meanwhile, those unable to board the boats sank straight to the bottom.
Normally, cynicism and ironic detachment are an excellent defense against rage and heartbreak. Not now. At times like this, those defenses are ripped away and suddenly every nerve is exposed and on fire. My ironic quips are useless against the sight of the President playing air guitar and eating birthday cake while one of our most beloved cities disappears into the Gulf of Mexico. White House officials are off seeing Spamalot on Broadway and dropping $3,000 on shoes--just how am I supposed to react to that, with Monty Python references and Imelda Marcos jokes? Fuck, I want to shove those Ferragamos straight down Condi’s throat. I want to round up the whole gang of scumbags and force them at gunpoint to live in the Superdome for a week before stringing them up from the nearest lamppost--or maybe from the roof of Trent Lott’s newly rebuilt front porch. I want to pull down the whole rotten stinking system and send it into the ocean right after New Orleans.
I begin to see how middle-class people can turn into revolutionaries.
Not me, though--not yet, anyway. I’m an American, and like most Americans I’ve been indoctrinated into viewing the ballot box as the only legitimate means of bringing about change. We’ve had our revolution already, thank you very much, and there’s no need to have any more--Jefferson’s words about the tree of liberty and the blood of tyrants notwithstanding. Besides, I’ve read enough history and heard The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” enough times on classic-rock radio to know that revolutions usually end up making things worse. So I write letters to Congress, give money to the Red Cross and stop fantasizing about sex long enough to daydream about Bush’s impeachment.
The non-cynical part of me desperately wants to believe that the Bushies won’t be able to spin their way out of this one. But I wanted to believe the same thing about the stolen 2000 election--and the nonexistent WMDs, and Abu Ghraib, and Plamegate. Robbin’ Rove and his merry men are so good at what they do, they don’t even bother to conceal it anymore. “Well, beating up on disaster victims didn’t work, let’s try blaming the governor of Louisiana. ... What, that’s not working either? Oh well, better toss Brown and Chertoff overboard, then. ... And remember, folks: Now is not the time to point fingers.”
Expect them to start blaming Bill Clinton any day now.
Not that Clinton would have done much better. He may at least pretend to care what happens to all those poor black people who Bush so obviously doesn’t give half a shit about, but he--and the other two Democrats who’ve run for President this decade--is still a high priest of the I’ve-got-mine religion. You have to wonder--how many of those trapped in New Orleans this week had toppled into the abyss of poverty after Clinton kept his promise to “end welfare as we know it”? No, the Democrats are bought and paid for, too--the ones who can afford to run for office, anyway.
And yet.
There’s always an “and yet” with me. Hovering just above the muck, nosing its way past the floating lumps of rage and hopelessness, waiting for me to swoop in and airlift it to safety.
Maybe I’m naive, but I sense that a tipping point has been reached. The disgust has been building all summer--over the Terri Schiavo spectacle, over the growing nightmare in Iraq, over the right wing’s attempted Swift boating of Cindy Sheehan--but it’s taken this latest horrorshow to push it over the top. Bush’s approval rating is lower than Richard Nixon’s was during Watergate; the media has suddenly gotten its balls back and is actively calling the administration on its bullshit; SUVs with those asinine “W” stickers are far less numerous on the freeways than they used to be. Whether the owners have scraped the stickers off in embarrassment, or simply can’t afford to fill their SUVs’ gas tanks anymore, is anyone’s guess--but the effect is still the same. Being a fan of George W. Bush isn’t cool anymore.
That won’t make a bit of difference, though, unless we all take a good, long, frightening look at ourselves and rediscover the social contract--that we’re-all-in-this-together sense that has been the animating force of American democracy from the very beginning.
I’m not talking about the cultlike “fellowship” of the fundamentalist churches, or the enlightened Leave-It-to-Beaverism of upper-middle-class liberals, or the hippie version of “community” in which life is one neverending Burning Man festival. I’m referring to what de Tocqueville called “voluntary associations of all sorts”--the various connections we have that knit our social fabric together, loosely enough for us to enjoy freedom, but tightly enough to give us a sense of belonging to something outside ourselves.
As individuals we can each do our part in repairing that fabric. We can join organizations--political, social, religious, or completely frivolous--based around common interests or common goals. We can get to know our neighbors. We can keep in touch with old friends, make new ones, and make time for all of them--real friendships, not bogus friendships with coworkers we secretly hate, relationships based on nothing but water-cooler discussions of reality TV and Friday happy hours at T.G.I. McSkratchy’s. We can give time or money, or both, to causes that we support. We can do pretty much anything that doesn’t involve staying home and watching TV.
However, none of that will mean shit unless we take back the political process as well. I can’t speak for anyone else, but from this point on the first question I’m going to ask when evaluating a candidate for elected office is: Where does that candidate stand on the social contract? Is he or she working to uphold it, or dismantle it? And in office, will his or her policies make it easier for us to fulfill our part of the contract, or to shrug it off and wallow in our own bigotry, ignorance, fear and me-firstism?
Just maybe, after a few years of that, I’ll once again live in a civilization where, if a major earthquake hits San Diego and I’m stranded at home without food or water, someone will come and get me--regardless of how much dinero I have. Or, if I make it through unscathed, I’ll be able to do my best for others who can use my help. That’s my part of the bargain.
That’s why it’s called “civilization.”

***

Go backwards ... Go forwards