Recommended reading

Corey Robin's review of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, by Greg Grandin (Chicago, 311 pp), Dedicated to Democracy. Corey Robin teaches at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

Don't misunderestimate him

A couple of my fellow recovering Kerry-voters have by now sent me this wisecrack : "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." -- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Sorry, friends. I don't believe G. W. Bush is a moron. He just plays one on TV. It's worked so far, so he has no reason to change. As for Mencken, who was basically a monarchist, his contempt for the American people is equalled only by Karl Rove's. Our people, as a collectivity, may be slow to learn and susceptible to being confused, but as someone wiser than either Mencken or Rove once pointed out, You can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Colombia: the high price (in blood) of inequity

This news just reached me:

Two hit men riding a motorcycle gunned down renowned Colombian sociologist Alfredo Correa de Andreis and his bodyguard Edward Ochoa Martinez on the afternoon of September 17, 2004 as they left a neighborhood supermarket in Barranquilla. Ochoa died instantly of three bullets to the head, while Correa died moments later upon his arrival at the Clínica El Prado a couple of blocks away. The incident took place only a few blocks from the Barranquilla Police Station. No suspects have been apprehended in the case.

So many murders in that country, so little control over the armed bands. It's been going on, with varying intensity, ever since the murder of Gaitán in 1948, though its antecedents are even older, in the wars like the ones Col. Aureliano Buendía fought in the early decades of the 20th century. It's mainly about land and the wealth that can be produced from it. If the pro-land reform forces had been victorious, way back a hundred years ago, the FARC would not be in the field and the landowners wouldn't have the wherewithal to support the paras, and it would be a lot harder to find landing strips for your cocaine exports. Colombia is one of the starkest examples of the high costs of maintaining a system of injustice for so many scores of years. People keep rebelling, or at least protesting, and they have to be killed in order for the big owners to protect their property.

When victory means defeat

The goals are political and economic: a stable and at least superficially democratic order, to allow US corporations to exploit markets and resources. The means are military: tanks, howitzers, aerial bombardment, etc., no longer subordinate to either the political or economic goals. The means defeat the ends. What good does it do American long-term interests -- or even the interests only of our capitalists -- to turn Falluja into Grozny? Next the killing-and-levelling machine is moving to Ramadi, to Mosul, even to Baghdad. We are on our way to producing a nation of Groznys. You'd think that our leaders could have learned something by watching the Russian disaster. But no, they are doomed to following the same path, because, like the Russians under Putin, they do not understand the relationship between their methods and their goals.

(After I wrote the above, I just found these remarks by Tom Andrews, the former Congressman (D-ME) who heads Win Without War and served on the House Armed Services Committee: ‘Successful’ U.S. Incursion in Falluja Is a Major Political Defeat.)

Grim humor

Thanks to Sylvia Holms-Jensen for forwarding The Banana Republican Catalog. We need a chuckle. Meanwhile, Iraq burns. It's just like Vietnam: every step toward victory as our war leaders define it (another town destroyed, another few thousand young men defending their homeland killed, along with uncounted tens of thousands of civilians and lots of our own young men and women), the closer we move to utter defeat of our goals of ending foreign threats, securing resources for US corporations, fostering justice and stability (they are inseparable) in the lands we've invaded.

Recommended reading

Why Bush Won, by Don Monkerud. Don's conclusion: "For Republicans to be patting themselves on the back because of their superior moral values is likewise a big mistake. The country is not as conservative as they think, and they may not always be able to rely upon reactionary Christians and fear to win elections." I think he's right; read his argument to see why.

"We can't win by playing defense and catch up"

Douglas C. Smyth, a friend and colleague in The National Writers Union, writes:

I think the election should cause us to reflect a bit on what was offered by each side.

As your email below reflects [a call to NWU members to plan how to respond to the election results], Democrats were largely on the defensive. What was offered was NOT BUSH, not something positive. A mailing from Tikkun also pointed out that Democrats did not address themselves to moral values. There were a lot of other moral values at stake besides gay marriage, such as corporate rip-offs, killings in Iraq, and the prison abuses there, caring for those less fortunate, and so on, but neither Kerry, nor Edwards were particularly comfortable with presenting issues in that way, and in fact the last Democrat to do so somewhat effectively was Jimmy Carter. Think of the moral outrage of Martin Luther King jr. That would have resonated with many of those white evangelicals who turned out in such numbers for Bush.

Democrats and liberals have let the Christian right define the moral issues, when really the moral issues are on the liberal side. And they still are, and will continue to be: issues of justice, freedom and caring.

And, as my despairing son (in Madrid at the moment) pointed out, Democrats will never win anything if they don't come up with new ideas and better ways to present them. Despite Kerry's skill in the debates, he was terrible at presenting ideas, because the ideas he presented were so complicated and convoluted and so much of "better not different" from the Republican policies he was criticizing.

Think how simple it would be to present the Single Payer Health system compared to Kerry's "plan." Or Bush's position on abortion, vs Kerry's, or on gay marriage. (I am just using these as examples: I hate Bush's simple positions on these).

Until our side can present a clear moral vision, and an inclusive one, and a simple platform that offers hope for everyone, we will continue to face election outcomes like the one on Nov. 2.

We can't win by playing defense and catch up.

Oh, and by the way, we did organize, but no organization can trump clarity of vision, when there is equal or better organization on the other side and that clarity as well.

I worked hard, volunteered, gave money, traveled for the campaign (I never did before), and so did thousands of others. I think our efforts went for little (we did win PA and NH and Wisconsin) because Kerry didn't really stand for much, except NOT Bush. I do hope that this is the death of the DLC, at least, and the beginning of a truly alternative (dare I say unequivocally progressive?) opposition to the radical Republicans who have taken control of our nation. At least the Republicans will make it extremely clear what we're really against, but we have to offer something positive, not just a slightly more humane version of the same.

Douglas

I agree with most of what Douglas says. I think the real task is to strengthen all those organizations that defend the true, foundational moral values of our country, the ones spelled out in our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights. The National Writers Union is one of those organizations.

"One of the most cowardly wars ever fought"

"The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it and are now in the process of selling it."

Arundhati Roy, from her 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture, November 3, 2004, Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney University.

Was the vote rigged?

William Rivers Pitt thinks so: Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster. The moral of the story is that we who defend America's founding liberal values are going to have to work very hard for the reconquest of civil liberties and the "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" asserted in our Declaration of Independence. We will come back, just as our enemies on the right came back from ignominy after 1964 and then again the disgrace of Nixon (1974) and defeat of his unelected successor Ford in 1976. But the struggle to reclaim America's founding values is going to have to be waged statehouse by statehouse, precinct by precinct. And parallel to the ground war, in those overarching, nationwide (and even international) interest groups united by the Internet.

Political suicide -- a losing proposition

Michael Moore sent out a message the other day, "17 reasons not to slit your wrists" because of last Tuesday's vote. Then today's NYT reported that a 25-year old man from Athens, GA, distraught because of the election, had driven to New York and the World Trade Center site where he committed suicide with a shotgun. And these are only a couple of the many references, half serious, half jocular, to suicide because a majority of American voters (a slim majority, but a majority nevertheless) has rejected us and the values we hold most dear.

Killing ourselves? Hey, that's not even a good joke. Moore's "17 reasons" not to were not very convincing, all along the lines of "Well, it's not really that bad" -- but it is that bad. The election of Bush and the support he got from American voters is really bad news for the economy, for civil rights, for the environment and world peace. But it's no reason to commit suicide, especially not solo suicide.

That's the trouble with modern American liberals. They would rather die than raise a fist. The right-wingers behind Bush's victory are also ready to fight to the ultimate consequences (as long as they can send other people's sons and daughters to do the dying). The old-time liberals, like Patrick Henry, Sam Adams and all the others were willing to fight to the death for what they believed, but not to go peaceably without doing serious damage to the enemy. That's the American tradition we need to revive.