Sour Grapes
In the process of writing a longish rant awhile ago (it eventually got eaten by Userland -- the fact that I was typing directly into WYSIWYG without backup indicates how steamed I was), it occurred to me that my pissy attitude about the election has a lot to do with lingering bitterness from the 1988 campaign.
That one was ugly even by post-Reagan standards. Michael Dukakis ran as a fiscal conservative/social progressive -- the guy who read policy papers at the beach, trimmed his lawn with a manual grass-cutter, and had balanced nine, make that ten, budgets. To undermine him, the GOP seized on a couple of tangential, but ideologically overdetermined, issues and successfully branded him as a "liberal," thus completing that term's devolution from adjective to slur.
All that was bad enough. What was even more dismaying, from my point of view, was the way Dukakis' ethnicity became an issue. That's what the tank debacle was all about -- a beetle-browed Greek-American, it seems, looks inauthentic and perhaps vaguely "furrin". By contrast, a duty-ducking WASP in a flight jacket is saleable, especially if he does the thumbs-up and talks like he's auditioning for a spaghetti Western. Kriselda at Different Strings posted on this awhile back; it's what fueled my original Radio-zapped rant.
American dream-themes had figured strongly in the candidacy of Dukakis, son of Ellis Island, representative of the second immigration wave that populated New England mills in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By now, you'd think this group now enjoyed full All-American status, but of course that's never exactly true. There's a hierarchy, a pecking order that we're generally aware of and unconsciously observe, even if we despise it. I've heard echoes of it in the talk surrounding Dean, another budget-trimming fiscal conservative/social progressive. He may be vulnerable to the "liberal" smear, but at least he's a WASP, thus electable. It's lucky that Joe Lieberman's too far to the right, because it gives us a convenient reason to write off his candidacy without resorting to euphemism and hem-hawing.
The repudiation of my political stance combined with the barely-concealed dissing of my ethnicity in 1988 was a souring experience. I basically decided politics, something I'd been active in and enthusiastic about, was crap -- a racket that wasn't worth my time or emotional investment. I sat out most of the next decade without paying an undue amount of attention; I was glad Clinton won, of course, but in a somnolent sort of way. Paul Tsongas, another Greek-American, had run against him in the primaries and, predictably, lost -- but that didn't bug me any more. Who gave a rat's ass? In 1996, sure that Dole posed no threat, I voted for Nader. No wonder -- Nader was a proxy Dukakis! A somewhat Mediterranean-looking guy with a fixation on dull policy issues, consumer safety, unsafe cars, utility rates, that kind of thing. He probably read about them at the beach, if he went to the beach.
The last time around, I found myself starting to miss politics. I'm getting older, so a lot of things have a renewed allure born of nostalgia -- I thought about College Democrats, my old girlfriend (we met while doing phone-bank duty for Walter Mondale), another friend who became a real-life campaign worker and used to feed me interesting gossip. Why be a grump. It was a racket, but that didn't mean it wasn't interesting. I'd compounded my Dukakis-induced misery by depriving myself of something I'd once enjoyed and found meaningful. That seemed self-defeating and dumb. No need to be so defensive and emotionally stingy; sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. That's life, right?
Then came Florida, and hanging chads...
I'd still like to be more involved, and to ditch some of the fatalism. The problem is, I'm attached to the fatalism. It's a kind of compensation, the feeling that I understand the rules, even if they're screwy; it allows the illusion of occupying an observer position. Since every election in my memory has been a set of variations on the same themes, it's easy to find this plausible. In this way, each election becomes a self-fulfilling, defeatist prophecy, and I do my small part to help perpetuate things-as-they-are.
Of course, things actually do change. Sometimes.
3:19:46 PM 
|
|
