Divided We Stand (Still)

I'm just old enough to have some first hand sense of what America was like at the end of the Vietnam War. Though I was much too young to be able to understand exactly what was going on, I got definite impressions of things that were happening around me. I was born six months before some National Guardsmen flipped out at a school I would later attend and killed four people, and have memories (however vague) of some of the last of the anti-war demonstrations. Even though I was viewing these events mediated through the evening news and my family's dinnertime discussions, I knew pretty early on...I'm talking like age four or five...that I was with 'the hippies.' Their music was great, for one, and they appeared to me to have a better and more sensible vision than the politicians did. For example, as far as I could tell from the hearings my mom watched everyday one impressionable summer, the President was a crook; since he was the guy who ran the country, it followed in my mind that the whole thing had to be a fix. My impressions may have been naive and childlike, but I nevertheless think I'm on the right side of history on this one.

I knew most people around me didn't feel that way; but I think what I didn't really understand at the time was how strongly they felt the other way. How much most of the adults around me not only disagreed with 'the hippies,' but how many of them actually HATED them. And, to be fair, I probably glossed over the extent to which 'the hippies' hated back. Maybe growing up in Columbus and hanging around High Street and the OSU campus, I got the wrong idea about dissent and debate in this country. Both seemed to be encouraged or at least tolerated, and what they told me about how America was supposed to work in school suggested that was the case.

I guess what I'm saying is: I shouldn't be shocked that America is so divided, that otherwise decent people are unable to listen to each other. The world I'm living in now is really not that different from the one I was born into. While the thirty years in which I grew into adulthood were relatively peaceful...few 'hot' wars directly involving
my countrymen, anyway, and none of them prolonged...there was no healing, no consensus formed, no diminishing of the conflicts that had roiled the country during the decade when I was born. Still, while left/right confrontations over, say, Central America were vicious for the people drawn into them, they were pretty easy to walk away from or even ignore. Even the recent witch-hunt against Bill Clinton, shameful as it was, had a certain comic (or at least absurd) aspect that seemed self-distancing.

There's nothing funny about what's going on now in Iraq, nor in the way it is playing out at home. Every day is crushingly depressing; it's like the movie "Groundhog Day," only the holiday has been switched to Tet. And the job the mass media has done in covering it is a complete and utter travesty, unless by 'covering' an event you mean putting a veil over it. George W. Bush and his Neocon Keystone Kops lied the country into war and they continue to lie and lie and lie in what would be a desperate attempt to cover their asses if the vast majority of the press corps didn't continue to eat their bullshit like candy. And way, way too many people are buying into it. Worse, there's almost no opportunity for discussion, only the noise of people shouting at each other.

The upcoming election, though, does provide a ray of hope. And the debates have been surprisingly good. Bush has looked even more stupid than I thought he would, Kerry more aggressive and effective than I'd expected. When Bush was mumbling something about Dred Scott--DRED SCOTT, what are you talking about--in the second debate I couldn't help but think a TKO would've been called had this been refereed like a prize fight. Sure, some of the pundits have tried to spin Bush's
performance into something it wasn't, and his true believers are mostly unswayable, but no one with eyes to see can deny what happened. Bush tried again and again to say he was resolute and his opponent wishy-washy, but the opposite was true; Kerry looked like a mature adult while Bush resembled nothing so much as a petulant child trying to explain his way out of trouble. Kerry looks like a man that could be President; Bush, you can't believe the guy IS the President...and I guess in many ways, I don't.

Though John Kerry represents its best wing as one of its most liberal members, I have serious reservations about the Democratic Party. Clearly they are too beholden to the corporations that contribute to them. Yet, corrupt as that institution may be, at least it seems connected to reality; the Republicans seem to have rationalized their greed and cynicism into a dangerous, megalomaniacal moral certitude that is grotesque to behold. Dick Cheney's bad heart isn't merely a medical condition, it's a form of poetic justice; to paraphrase Dostoevsky's famous quote about God, if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it as a metaphor.

George W. Bush is a malignorant tumor on the American body politic. It is hard to imagine anything worse that could happen to our nation than this administration metastasizing into a second term. We have a chance to excise this Bush President and his cronies, and we'd better seize it. If we don't, I have the terrible feeling that there may not be another one for a long time.

Epilogue:

Since completing this article, it has come to my attention that many people in the Pro-Birth movement equate the Dred Scott Decision with Roe v. Wade. Since it would be political suicide for Bush to come out and say he wouldn't appoint a judge unless he was against Roe, it seems that Bush may have brought up Dred Scott as way of speaking in code...or tongues, if you will…about overturning Roe v. Wade.