Paul Corman-Roberts
By the time this column goes to press, we should be just days
out from perhaps the most overspent, overexposed, overhyped
election in the history of the United States of America.
On the surface, the very future of our society appears to be at stake.  
Certainly both the GOP and the Democrats are playing it up as such if their
respective conventions, which both served in reality as spectacular
commercials selling the good will of the Western-oil industry.  No matter if you
were a Republican or Democrat, you got a heavy dose of PickensPlan.com
and the American Petroleum Institute.

In many ways, voting isn’t much different than praying or recycling, in that
engaging in said activity as a practice doesn’t actually change anything in the
daily course of our lives that can immediately be measured, but they
symbolize our desire to have a semblance of control and making a difference
in a larger participatory experience.  In essence, they reflect our desire for
community engagement, without the inconvenience of being truly engaged in
the community.  The acts of voting, praying and recycling are primarily
solitary, and one hopes that if everyone else is pulling their weight in their
chosen ritual, then maybe something might change for the better.

Many Americans, artists, rednecks, male, female, tattooed and
un-tattooed alike refuse to vote for just this reason…the exercise feels phony
and contrived to them.  Meanwhile, there is a scramble between the
candidates to out-pose each other as “experienced” while being “outsiders.”

Make no mistake…the symbolism of this particular election may well be the
most significant in the nation’s history. A man of color who preaches a true
centrism, perhaps a truer conservative than the handout hungry pork barrel
cartel who have been running congress and the executive suite for the last
eight years, versus the life-long embattled “maverick” veteran whose odds of
surviving his first term are about fifty-fifty.

The hard split that has effectively existed in the U.S. electorate since 1948;
and now, just like then, the split can be effectively divined by a sense that
things must change and quickly, or that the current administration hasn’t
gone far enough in its efforts, and that the inarguable half-assed
incompetent conservatism of the Bush II’s administration would have yielded
far more positive results if it hadn’t been so “compromised.”  But as your
good friend and mine, T. Boone Pickens is fond of preaching, this debate
misses the larger “point”…the larger point being that the electorate engages
in a mass delusion that hard symbolism can actually make an immediate and
tangible difference in the social fabric of our society.  

The kicker is, this time it really might.  The odds haven’t been this good for
symbolism as a concrete and active force since Roosevelt vs. Hoover in ’32.
Don’t think the parallels haven’t occurred to the brain trust of the RNC, and
this is why they are fighting perhaps the most brilliant and desperate fight
they have ever put up.

There are some crucial differences this time around. The symbolic “war” that
holds forth in the public arena of Democrat vs. Republican now exists in the
absolute basest way they can be interpreted; not just black vs. white, but also
poor vs. rich, mongrel vs. pedigree, weak vs. strong, or perhaps even more
significantly, a semi-socialist society vs. a purely tribal,
factionalism…temporary peace (which peace always is) vs. perpetual war
(which doesn’t stop until we get back to the dark ages.)

This symbolism may well, in the long run, determine the fate of the manner of
the United States demise, whether it goes smoothly or whether it goes ugly.  
But symbolism it is nonetheless. Neither Obama nor McCain has plans to
leave Iraq unoccupied. Neither has any real intent to create universal health
care available at no cost to the most unfortunate citizens, honest or
otherwise.  It’s difficult to see either of these nominally well meaning men truly
stopping the trend of the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.

But I wonder as this column goes to press, if the price of gas will continue to
have “stabilized?”  Or will time-tables be announced for the withdrawal of
American troops, even as a skeleton brigade of Special Forces and foreign-
service staff support larger contingents of privately contracted soldiers on the
several “super-bases” constructed in Iraq over the past five years?  And just
how much is the odd, frightening, yet undeniably brilliant selection of
Governor Palin for the GOP Vice-presidency going to distract from the real
issue of who is most qualified to lead what is supposedly the leading light of
the world into the 21st Century.


Let’s play a game here.  If suddenly come election day, some shadowy
figures wearing black trench-coats were to approach you, and then brandish
weapons and pictures of your family (or at least people you actually do care
about) and force you to go to the polls to vote, without them telling you who
to vote for, but simply that you must vote or the consequences will be the
most dire you can imagine…who then are you going to vote for?  

Obama or McCain?

You're voting on a computer so there is no write in option. It’s not your death
you have to worry about in this game. Even if the only thing you ever cared
about was your pet hamster, these goons have promised to bring it back from
the dead only just so you can watch them torture your adorable little innocent
to death.

Obama or McCain?

The way one answers this question doesn’t speak to whether one can truly
be thought of as a bigot or a progressive; an appeaser or a simple
traditionalist.  The answer speaks to whether one is a cynic or an optimist,
and of course, we have no shortage of “qualified” voters out there for who
these two core outlooks are not mutually exclusive in this era and not so
much either, the conditions that might prevail if one were capable of truly
being forced to vote in the USA.

One of the romantic views of US democracy is that one should not feel forced
to exercise their right to cast a ballot; that we should only vote if we are so
inspired by inspiring leadership.  While there hasn’t always been an
abundance of these qualities in the history of our nation’s political leadership,
there was always one to come up at just the right moment when the Republic
required it.

McCain?

Obama?

For all the talk of change both of them purport to be in favor of, it can be
maddeningly difficult to see how exactly they are going to execute the said
changes they claim to represent.  

Perhaps the cynical approach is to look at this from an entirely different point
of view; not which candidate will make things better, but which candidate
would make things infinitesimally, or even cataclysmically worse?

McCain?

Obama?


Okay, game over.  But let me leave you with this pungent little turd of truth
lolling around in your mouth…if you chose to answer the challenge above,
your choice is every bit as symbolic of your own attitude toward human
nature and it’s place in the future.  I know for a fact there are prolific writers
(and artists) both mainstream and in the small, independent presses who will
vote for McCain because they are unable to bring themselves to vote for a
ni…well, I’m white, so I’m not supposed to say it either, but let’s not pretend
here okay.  Voting for a symbolic “commander-in-chief” doesn’t seem so
symbolic when it feels like an act of submission to something greater than
oneself…and if that symbolic something else happens to be somebody who
for all your experience is from Mars, then why would you do that?

Of course, many in the small press, no doubt reflective of society as a whole;
have no problem with this act of submission.  Many of us have been trying to
force ourselves into communities’ larger than our selves, and not always with
such pretty results.

Your pundit’s bottom line:  Vote this year, even if it is just symbolic, if not for
your country, than for yourself.  And the great thing about this, and what still
gives me hope for this country, is that you don’t have to vote for McCain or
Obama.  Hell, in most states, you can vote for yourself, and what writer
can’t respect that?
.
Photo--
"Dearborn, Michigan. National Labor Relations Board election
for union representation at the River Rouge Ford plant.
Workers voting in a secret booth"
Siegel, Arthur S., photographer.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,
FSA/OWI Collection, [reproduction number,
LC-USW3-016331-C]
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