The other day I had a conversation in the Plaza with a middle aged Bush supporter and a very young Kerry fundraiser. I was talking to the Kerry guy when the other fellow came up to us and asked why we were supporting John Kerry. The answer we both gave was a bit lame, I thought. It was simply that "he isn't George Bush." In contrast to our ambivalence he was unequivocally and enthusiastically behind Dubya. In the ensuing debate one issue was clear to me - the basic tactic of both major factions in this election is fear. The Kerry people are driven by terror of four more years of George Bush. The Bush people define themselves as afraid of just about everything: terrorists, arabs, homosexuals, people of color, foreigners, Democrats. The only political campaigns currently driven by anything other than fear - ideas for example - are those out of the mainstream (I will mention no names).
After a little while the young Kerry guy went back to his fundraising and the Bushite and me continued talking on our own. I discovered that the primary news and opinion sources for this rather educated and intelligent Republican was the New York Times (which he viewed as "liberal") and The Wall Street Journal (which he trusted to guide him toward what to think about the things the Times reported on). Although he recognized with some chagrin that his candidate was "syntactically challenged," his attitude overall was that George Bush was more stalwart and straightforward in his beliefs and commitments, therefore more to be trusted than John Kerry, whom he maintained was unclear on virtually everything. Besides which, John Kerry betrayed his country when he campaigned against the war in Vietnam and he really didn't throw his own medals over the wall and he was never really a hero anyway. Pretty much the party line. He admired Dubya for courageously kicking his alcoholism and for openly proclaiming that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Ah, I thought, here we come close to the essential struggle:
It seems that followers of the three primary deities of the west: Jehovah, Jesus and Mohammed are locked in mortal struggle that involves all kinds of prophecies and promises and apparently contradictory commitments made between Gods and men regarding a particular plot of land. The rest of us, being addicted to the oil that lies beneath the lands of Mohammed and other poor and angry people allow ourselves to be pulled into this massively complicated family quarrel. Many of us wish we could simply change the channel and leave all of this religious nonsense behind, but we manage to keep feeding the machinery on one side or another of this interminable struggle. From an "enlightened" humanist perspective we see that religion in the present age - perhaps in all ages - is primarily a matter of politics; cultural, economic and racial, and the gods are only products of particular places and times. A fear of the world and other people drives some to view the diversity of religions as threatening rather than enriching, stridently maintaining that we must declare ourselves and take sides, defending our position as absolutely right or wrong. In the face of this persistent historical idiocy that has served to enslave people for centuries, our founders made the truly revolutionary decision to separate church and state with the firm boundaries of law.
In the United States we now talk of a 'culture war.' As far as I can tell this is primarily a war against the Great White Father, who for many generations used his religion as an excuse for his excesses. The Right(eous) wing sees America as the fortress and refuge of what it defines as Christian civilization against the inevitable flux of a world in rapid and deep transition. Contradicting this scheme is the fact that the so-called protectors of civilization are trapped in a deep paradox. They've been colonized by the very forces that have brought their civilization to dominance, and these forces have absolutely nothing to do with the Christian God, or anyone's God. Like the poorest third world nation, America finds itself ensnared in a net of abstractions regarding profit and power, struggling for its survival against a corrosion at the very foundations of our biological and spiritual life. The big question of our time is whether America can find its true nature in time to save itself, and perhaps the world, from the penalty of its own excess.
As the world changes ever faster the circling of the wagons appears more isolated and delusional, while remaining extremely dangerous, dealing arms and paranoia to the whole world. Will it be necessary, as it has in times past, for our own children to shed their blood on our own streets before America wakes up and sees the precipice? The forces rushing together in New York for the upcoming Republican convention are as volatile as anything I've seen since the sixties. Both sides have declared their total disrespect of one another and are busily drawing the lines of battle. People have vowed to make the city a "living hell" for conventioners. Thousands of demonstrators are vowing to flaunt the restrictive rules the city has laid down. Many are likely to be arrested and many will probably be injured. Those who come to celebrate the nomination of George the W. will be under siege and their convention may appear to the world as a hollow celebration on the swaying deck of a floundering ship. Or it could become the rallying force behind a fascist crackdown, like a modern right-wing version of The Alamo. Whatever the consequence, both sides are likely to go from that place more polarized, and the strains on our union will grow.
Personally I waiver between faith and fatalism. I'm old enough to have seen this kind of thing before. In 1968 the largest coordinated offensive was launched against American forces in Vietnam, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the nation exploded in civil riots, LBJ hid out at the ranch and then the Democratic Convention in Chicago turned into a police riot as the forces of control tried to make peaceful protest impossible. I remember that time as being full of both confusion and exhiliration, the feeling that something big was going to break and whatever came of it nothing would ever be the same. As a nation we hit some kind of wall and somehow we broke through, if only for a little while, before the hypnotic forces of the spectacle consumed us once again. We're still here and still together as we race toward another threshold of awakening. The world will continue to change, and the Armageddon and Rapture won't come and save us from the changes. There will simply be more war and useless suffering until we let go of our need for righteousness. One way or another we who survive the battles and the peace will return to our senses and find a way through the dangers, although a lot that we know will have to pass away. In the immediate future, to the degree that America identifies with a fundamentally paranoid and apocalyptic view of the world, our nation will continue to summon chaos onto itself. For some reason I've come to believe that enough of us are choosing to turn away from the useless struggles and focusing instead on the promise of a nation founded not on absolutism and fear but on confidence and promise.
For those who still wish to take it to the wall I wish you all good fortune. We'll be waiting for you on the other side.
10:13:15 PM 
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