- I have never voted. For one thing, my thinking never
fit into the grotesquely oversimplified agenda-boxes of modern political
parties. Furthermore, our little lives are embedded in the overall context
of a dismally corrupt and inhuman civilization. Voting has the wizened
visage of a cynical charade when one understands that the noble experiment
of a Republic does not factually exist any longer. During the theatrical
presentations of electoral melodramas, the ironclad kings of corporate
greed look down from their thrones behind the curtain, wholly unperturbed.
Our wretched civilization, flying the false flag of a democratic ideal,
has had only one practical effect for decades now.
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- The result of the overwhelming cultural conditioning
we undergo from birth has been to entrain the majority to a lifetime of
thoughtless consumption. I could not bring myself to vote when I saw that
no matter which party I voted for, the hypnotic enslavement of most Americans
to brutal materialism, at the cost of the systematic ruination of the natural
world, would continue unabashed and unabated. No matter what, and no matter
who passed briefly through Washington, the result would be the banal horrors
of big business as usual. I have been reduced to waiting for some sort
of unexpected catastrophe to wake us from the sleep of unreason.
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- A lifelong abstainer is obliged to vote for the first
time.
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- Because catastrophe is already upon us. And there are
ultimately critical differences between the two men running for President
and between what each will do if elected. There are always differences
among such men, and this time the underlying differences demand scrutinizing
with high-powered, future-penetrating, over-the-horizon optics. Because
the truth is that any honest effort toward dispassionate comprehension
of our predicament will result sooner or later in a single inevitable conclusion.
Reelecting Neocons means voting for the deliberate destruction of every
last elusive remaining particle of what America was meant to become.
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- And if that isn't enough to satisfy the bizarre new American
enthusiasm for home-grown totalitarianism, there is more. Reelecting Neocons
also means issuing a serious come-hither invitation for all-out, man-made,
hand-made Armageddon. If such ghastly goals suit your fancy, then by all
means, do whatever it takes to bring them on. We know there are those among
us possessed by the unaccountable craving for a premature ending to the
human race. Or one may stand on the sidelines dithering over the list of
political crimes on both sides, preferring the abstractions of passivity
as salve for an excessively twitchy conscience. But let us not make the
fatal mistake of believing that because we are dwelling in the context
of systemic madness, it therefore does not matter who we vote for. This
time it matters beyond belief.
- It is unfortunate that what is at stake in this election
is not evident from the rhetoric, other than the rather important item
that one candidate can speak his native tongue, and the other cannot. The
drone of dreaded sound bytes pervades the tedious speechifying. But great
glaring personal and ideological differences are lodged beneath the dreary
audio tracks, and these differences are vital to whether or not we have
much future at all as a solvent and minimally rational nation. This is
not a choice between the usual liberal or conservative prepackaged products
and productions. This election has nothing whatsoever to do with liberals
or conservatives, in either their better or worse incarnations. This is
the choice between gaining a little time to address the innumerable underlying
problems besetting us on every hand, and committing collective hara-kiri.
This is the choice between at least having a chance to work at solving
the problems of life, and the abrupt freedom from care consequent to ritual
mass suicide.
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- This is the vote of a lifetime.
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- For the non-aligned and congenitally disaffected, it
can be difficult to shake the mind free of habitual judgments, and to see
this crossroads in history for the stark choice it really is. But it can
be done. One can understand a great deal simply by looking objectively
and in depth at the lives of these two public men, realizing that one of
them is going to be driving our own lives, and the lives of our children.
People will howl that one cannot possibly have been objective if the results
are not to their liking. But a dispassionate process can still produce
quite colorful results in even the most resolutely unbiased inquiry. Because
to proceed objectively does not mean that the results are necessarily a
lukewarm mush of evenly divided scolding and compliments. Once in a while
people and events turn out to be far worse than one could ever have imagined.
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- After an extended period of research and reflection on
the upcoming election, I offer the following profoundly unambiguous comments.
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- One candidate is visibly, palpably insane: a smirking
mouthpiece for the purest concentration of ruthless bloody-mindedness ever
to darken the door of Washington. The prize-winning status of this administration
is quite an accomplishment, considering the long grubby history of complex
capitol chicanery. There are of course people who have not noticed precisely
how Neocons are methodically trying to eviscerate the remnants of every
last morsel of good in our country, and by no means only on the liberal
side of the equation. It is the conservatives supporting these demented
death-dealers who will go down in history as by far the most misled and
gullible partisans of modern times. And that too is really saying something,
considering the competition. It is hard to fathom how such an unbroken
record of stupendous errors and outright lies might escape notice after
all this time, but so it is. Meanwhile, the other candidate is perhaps
at best a reasonably intelligent and reasonably decent man, and at worst
merely another mixed and ambitious example of one aspect of the ruling
class. There are people whose overpowering prejudice prevents them from
noticing this combination of qualities as well, but such an oversight is
more understandable when scrutinizing a man possessed of outwardly bland
characteristics. It is easy to spot the grimacing chimp, but not so easy
to spot the human.
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- One candidate is a fervent member of a morbid cult: the
kind of terrifying maniacs who actually believe an immanent destruction
of our world will result in their personal teleportation to more blissful
realms. The other candidate suffers from no such fanatical delusions of
fundamentalist grandeur. One man is the fraying sock puppet of megalomaniacal
sociopaths suffering from fatal emotional and mental disorders, who believe
(as did Hitler) that God actually approves of their murderous drive to
dominate the globe. The other man is merely a typically unexciting garden-variety
politician who exhibits no symptoms whatsoever of religious mania or incipient
personality breakdown. One must conclude unequivocally that the lesser
of evils is in this case, for once, factually and crucially the lesser.
One may be so bold as to state that it is uncertain whether or not the
lesser evil is especially evil at all.
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- One of these men is a malignant idiot and a lifelong
bully, and the other has displayed at least occasional moments of genuine
courage and conviction. One candidate is patently dysfunctional through
and through, and the other is not. One candidate is an integral element
in a single extended corporate family clearly bent on stealing as much
of the world's resources as inhumanly possible. The other, while rich,
has never displayed a compulsion to commit grand larceny on a planetary
scale. One must carefully examine the effects of being born into the absurdity
of mere wealth-as-royalty, since both candidates enjoyed that position.
There are, as it happens, many different kinds of rich people. And we had
better clearly perceive the difference between the extremes, since we have
by and large abandoned citizen involvement in our own government. We have
all too frequently deferred to the rich to run our lives for us. In this
instance, the only question is which sort of rich man we want.
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- In this case then, how far does the scion fall from the
family tree?
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- One man was raised with an unquestioned sense of unearned
entitlement. This candidate's mother never sullied her precious mind with
vulgar thoughts about the problems of the unwashed multitudes. She successfully
taught her unfortunately weak-headed son to see the world of privilege
in exactly the same way. People are still dying in agony so that neither
her beautiful mind nor her lifestyle be unduly disturbed, and this is an
attitude that her son has internalized to perfection. One candidate and
his family are the kind of rich people for whom you and I and most other
sentient beings represent unimportant chattel, to be abused as a way of
life: devoured at will and at leisure.
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- The mother of the other candidate was a wealthy American
aristocrat with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. This translates as the
individual realization that much is required from those born into a fortunate
worldly position. This man's mother also successfully transmitted her deepest
convictions about the ultimate purpose of wealth and power to her son.
In this instance however, her view was that power and position impose a
lifelong obligation of service on behalf of the less comfortably situated.
And since we elect so many rich people to high office in this country,
we had better understand that a deep sense of obligation to human society
on the part of the wealthy is a highly desirable quality. It is a very
commendable attitude when found running in wealthy families, especially
compared to the alternative offered by a powerful dynasty composed of outright,
unrepentant in-your-neck vampires.
-
- And from where we are, where will either candidate take
us?
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- At the very least, our immediate future depends on which
of these men manages to win the election, with or without interminable,
excruciating legal wrangling. We already know where the present administration
wants to go, since they have been dragging us along the fast track to ruin,
directly toward the abyss, nonstop. If the candidate dangled by fright-peddling
extremists wins the election again, we can look forward to the continuing
loss of personal and social freedoms, perpetual fogs of fake fear, endless
exercises in self-defeating preemptive wars, an overflowing stream of returning
dead and maimed youth, bottomless debt, rapidly expanding poverty and sickness,
and ever more richly-deserved loathing emanating from the world community.
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- If we elect the other man, we will still have all the
basic underlying miasmas of a greed-based corporate ethos to face. We will
still be living in the context of a failed Republic turned dumbed-down
consumer monger. We will still be embroiled in an astonishingly stupid
war and murdering untold thousands of innocent souls. We will still be
enabling Israel to do whatever it likes, stoutly pretending that it alone
among nations requires no salutary criticism. We will still have a number
of genuinely dangerous enemies to try to deal with. We will still be suffocating
in our own pollution. We will still be a citizenry from whom many nefarious
black projects remain hidden. We will still be facing enormously difficult
problems from accelerating climate instability. We will still have a worse
than useless, spine-free mass media. We will still be lied to. And we will
still be impoverished by this lengthy spell of lawless corporate insatiability
and military adventurism.
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- But at least we will not be willingly led by the criminally
insane. At least we will not be destroyed from within by a band of technologically
advanced Genghis Khans nurturing bloodcurdling lusts for empire, exercising
absolute intimate dominion over their cowed subjects. At least we will
not have consciously chosen crackpot simulations of human beings as our
most powerful sworn protectors. At least we will not have to listen to
the stone cold utterances of the most practiced and vicious liars ever
almost elected. At least we will have a chance to take a deep breath and
think about the kinds of devastation we are already in. At least we can
buy a little time to consider how on earth we might go about beginning
to address the real problems we have. At least we can give ourselves the
opportunity for another kind of future than the dead end certainty of the
endless Neocon Night.
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- I know there are no guarantees that the collapse of our
nation can be prevented by anyone at all at this point. Nevertheless, I
choose to cast the vote of my lifetime for hope, and against the most vicious
and dangerous administration in the history of the United States of America.
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