Tough Week
I wrote a longish piece on Wednesday, but I just couldn’t bring myself to post it. I wrote some things in the heat of the moment that no longer seem as urgent after a couple days of reflection. And the truth of the matter is that I couldn’t organize my thoughts cohesively—too many points of disbelief, too many recriminations, too much anger.
Now it’s Friday, and I’m still angry, still in disbelief and still mentally disheveled. But the only thing I can think to do about it is write, no matter how disjointed it may all seem when it hits the page.
I’m a liberal agnostic, and that pretty much sums up my bewilderment at the choice our country has made to pursue a path of conservative religion-based leadership. It has me feeling pretty out of step, but I suppose it could be worse. I could be a liberal agnostic gay stem-cell researcher. In Kansas.
I Live In A Blue State
Let’s start with that. I’m not in Kansas, and I’ll say my agnostic hallelujahs for that. (Which is actually “Fuck yeah!”) I’m in Minnesota, and out of all the negativity I felt on Tuesday there was one silver lining: Minnesota is a Blue State. Firmly. And not only did Minnesota go big blue for Kerry, but there was a dramatic shift in the Minnesota House toward the blue side as well. What was previously a very GOP legislature is now only 68-67 for the GOP. One of the things that threw me for a loop when I moved here was the disparity between Minnesota’s liberal reputation and the conservative reality I saw. Sure, we elected Wellstone, but the state Senate, House and Governorship were all firmly GOP. The anti-tax crowd is huge here, as are the typical conservative proponents of highways and urban sprawl. This week it occurred to me that perhaps Minnesota is simply progressive, as opposed to liberal. When the rest of the country was turning to Nixon in the 60s and 70s, Minnesota had Hubert Humphrey. When the country was going Clinton in the 90s, that’s when the Minnesota GOP started to win big. Now that the country is going to the GOP, Minnesota seems to be tiring of it’s own infatuation with the party. We’ll see if the trend holds in 2006.
Down With Empiricism!
I’ve already had dozens of conversations with friends about what happened Tuesday. Here are some of the thoughts offered:
· Kerry blew it
· No Northeast Democrat can ever win
· People hate intellectuals
· The country is swinging to the right
· People are stupid
Who knows? Here’s what I think:
I think an awful lot of this country has an immediate and visceral reaction to intellectualism, something they associate with both coasts of this nation. You know what else gets associated with intellectualism? Reading. Being informed. Facts. Plans. Details. I know it sounds like I’m making a slur here, but I’m not. I’m simply talking about the way a lot of the people in this country respond to people who try to use facts and knowledge to make a point. People don’t like to be told that they are wrong. And they certainly don’t like to be told they are wrong by someone who claims to have more knowledge. They rebel against that.
The election wasn’t a referendum on Bush’s policies; many who voted for him didn’t care for them. For so many Kerry supporters, we thought the obvious evidence of incompetence was game, set and match. But that’s only true if one believes in empiricism. And if this election shows us anything, it’s that there is a whole lot of this country that isn’t interested in that.
This election was a referendum on reality. Supporters of Kerry were inclined to think Bush’s win set us back decades. Try centuries. Remember the age of enlightenment? We’re going the opposite direction. Not necessarily the Dark Ages, just the In The Dark Ages.
God Is A Democrat!
A lot is being said this week about how the Dems must “Talk about faith”.
Great. I couldn’t be any happier about that development. I’m lying, of course, but as an agnostic I only have a vague fear of repercussions for doing so.
I don’t care if Democrats talk about God. I really don’t. If that’s what it takes, go right ahead. I’d prefer that we lived in a secular state, like the Constitution hints we should do, but if God talk is what it takes to get our country healthy again militarily, economically, socially, then I’m willing to tune out a few “Amens!”
The problem is, it’s not going to work for Dems to just magically start dropping the G word at every opportunity. For one thing, a lot of them are pretty ham-handed at it, because they understand that God is a personal thing, unlike most Red State zealots. Nothing seems more fake than talking about your relationship with God in a public setting when you have always believed it was a private relationship.
Faith certainly needs to be addressed, but let’s recast social causes for what they are: moral causes.
It bothers me that so many people vote with their God-fearing hearts instead of their heads, but why do the candidates most preferred by these people seem to be the ones that are incompetent or mendacious all the other issues? Why can’t religious people be smart, too? Maybe this agnostic intellectual isn’t the best person to answer that question, but that seems like a consistent and telling correlation.
It’s Good That Kerry Lost
Rationalization? Sure. I would have preferred a Kerry win. While I’m at it, I would have preferred dramatic reversals in the House and Senate composition and a 30% increase in literacy and critical-thinking skills nationwide. But guess what? It didn’t happen.
We need to accept that the political pendulum just wasn’t ready to swing back to the left. The country wanted to see the policies of this Administration run their course when given the alternative of Kerry. There is the temptation to say, “More power to them. Those sorry bastards better be careful what they wish for.” And in fact I have said that many times this week with more colorful language.
The reality is that a Kerry Presidency would have been an exercise in maddening futility and unfair blame. If Bush’s policies do in fact lead to some sort of ruination, Kerry would have taken a hard, hard fall for that. He wouldn’t have had a Dem House or Senate to work with, and he has a shitstorm to navigate in Iraq, not to mention Iran and North Korea.
Now, of course, Bush has to deal with the consequences of his policies. Hard to blame Clinton or 9/11 going forward now. One would like to think that the nation would hold Bush accountable if we had another four years like the last four. Sadly, there is the chance that the Ignorance Trend continues, and people might still decide to go GOP in 2008 because they don’t want to see their kids live in a world where unmarried mothers might teach grade school.
Moving Forward
I feel so much better today than I did Wednesday. Everything still sucks, of course. I just let it go. I had to. It’s not resignation, it’s recognition. Recognition that I can’t live with the anger, despair and frustration. The time will come when we need to pour ourselves back into the effort to change the way our country is run, but until that time there is no benefit to me to stew about it. I need to go on and live my life.
It’s hard to know what is happening to our country—and our world—right now. I hear fellow liberals put forth their own doomsday scenarios, and I am sympathetic to that. Just the changing makeup of the Judicial Branch alone is frightening to comprehend. But I’m even more concerned about the way the world responds to and engages the U.S. socially, militarily, and economically. (I’m pro-choice, very much so, but I think the other threats are more devastating to our future as a country and people. We can always overturn a court case down the road. It would be much harder to reverse the impacts of a two-front war or a collapse of our economy due to a pullout of foreign capital.)
But it also always seems darkest before the light. It’s easy to get caught up in the despair of this moment in our time when so much of our nation seems to have turned it’s back on empiricism, but I’d like to think that this is just a bump in the road.
I still believe that most Americans will eventually need to see proof that we are on the right course. I have faith that people will eventually choose to improve the world they inhabit. We’ve done it for thousands of years. We may take a step back every now and again (The Inquisition, the Holocaust, techno music) but we do eventually find our way and move forward.
But will it take four years, or forty?
2:10:04 PM 
|
