January 2008

Hope

Usually, no matter how crappy a year we’ve had, we are able to greet the new year with at least some degree of optimism. Sure, things have sucked, but they can only get better, right?

In a presidential-election year, this should be all the more true: sure, I should be thinking, it’s been a rotten eight years, but this spring, my favorite candidate will come out of left field and rout that bloated big-money favorite for the nomination and then trounce whatever sinister hack seems to have the odds in his favor.

My first experience with this sort of dewy-eyed hope was in 1968 with the anti-war candidacy of Eugene McCarthy. All of us in the ninth grade, including our teachers, hoped he would win and put an end to that crazy faraway war that had already been going on so long that it seemed impossible that anyone our age would ever need to worry about the draft, though as it turned out, we did.
Of course, McCarthy didn’t have a chance in hell. Bobby Kennedy did, but he was murdered, and then Hubert Humphrey got the nomination. We all know who won the presidency.

So by 1972, I was already a hard-bitten cynic. While my friends were out canvassing for McGovern, I was sure he couldn’t win, since he was just another peace-nik candidate whose name started with Mc. Imagine my surprise when McGovern did in fact get the nomination. But of course, he was thoroughly creamed (or CREEPed) by Nixon’s Watergate machine.

You’d think that perhaps I would have been hopeful when Jimmy Carter won, but I wasn’t. Though I could not have been less interested in politics at that point, I had read his famous Playboy interview and thought that whole “adultery in my heart” thing was just weird. I was also suspicious of his aw-shucks persona, which did turn out to be a sham. Though I was old enough to have cast my first presidential ballot in 1976, I sat that one out.

When Carter managed to win without my help, I was relieved, and I did stand freezing on Pennsylvania Avenue to watch him walk past (rather than riding, since he was a Man of the People) on Inauguration Day. But that in no way caused me to believe in the electoral process.

In the intervening years, I have moved from the ignorant cynicism of youth to a more mature and reasoned dark despair. These last two presidential elections have been enormously painful. I still shudder when I think of those two endless-seeming nights in a community center, surrounded by TVs and listening to a roomful of Democrats cheer, then sigh, then gasp, then cheer, then sigh, then gasp—and then fall silent. I dread the thought of going through that again.
Try as I might, I see no reason to be hopeful about 2008. Even if someone like, say, Dennis Kucinich, who is a sort of Eugene McCarthy de nos jours, were to somehow be elected president, I don’t see how he could get us out of the jam we’re in. The Bush Administration has squandered all our economic resources in Iraq so that even if we were to pull out of there right now, we’ve already pissed away all our savings and are in hock up to our eyeballs to the Chinese. If America goes broke, which seems quite possible, the human casualties will be tremendous. And while I do think we should pull out of Iraq today—yesterday—pulling out will not bring back the lives lost there or repair the rubble we will be leaving behind.

It seemed quite obvious when Bush was running against Gore that he didn’t have the brains to run a country, and that he would screw everything up, but even I, pessimist that I am, could not have envisioned quite what an enormous mess he would make. The American people are sick of the mess, of the war, and of Bush himself, but even if we were all to rally around some wonderful, shining candidate, the chances are good that, given the situation with our voting machines, he or she would lose, or rather, “lose.” The Republican candidates are all so repulsive that none of them can even take the lead. The Democratic candidates are brilliant, creative, passionate, and good-looking (Obama), but the nomination will probably go to Hillary, who has many sterling qualities but is fundamentally disliked by most of the electorate. Hillary will, in turn, probably lose, or “lose,” to whichever Republican slime-ball Diebald likes best.

So where does that leave us? America is a broke, broken, stumbling, bumbling giant. The world hates us. Our media is controlled by corporations with vested interests in screwing us. We have fouled the environment so badly that even if we sign on to the Kyoto Protocol this minute, we can’t possibly undo the damage we’ve done, nor is there a “national will” to change the way we live. Our educational systems are under attack by assessment-crazed bureaucrats whose goal is to turn us into a nation of idiots. Our electoral process is broken. Our laws are broken. We are heading into a recession. We have even ruined the weather.

Happy New Year.

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