thread: 2008-11-07 : Hope & Courage
On 2008-11-07, Ron Edwards wrote:
That's why the appointment of Emanuel and the incipient appointments of Ross and Harman should incur the most wrathful bipartisan, cross-spectrum protest in American history ... and yet not be a rejection of Obama as our president.
I agree with you: such a response should not be powered by a feeling of betrayal, but rather of straightforward outrage against those appointments on the simple basis that they are wrong-headed, immoral, and (for Harman, relative to the Rosen & Weisman court case) treasonous. Doesn't matter whether Obama made or is making them, or someone else.
On a more general note, I suggest that we are cursed, culturally, with a massive shared delusion that "politics" are primarily performed and expressed as elections. Elections are horrible things, as they now stand. They've lost almost all of their primary function, which is to get the fuck rid of someone who's doing damage in his or her office, in favor of elevating people into impossible levels of "fulfilling dreams." And due to that, reinforcing and making it perceived as *natural* that activism is a silly and useless club that malcontents use to fill their time.
When you elect someone to fill your dreams or to "be you" in that office, then the last thing you're going to do is eject the fucker, via impeachment or election, when he does something heinous. You've sunk cost in him, you've identified him as your hope-bearer, it'd be like rejecting yourself. It'd be admitting that your guy should have lost, which is basically calling yourself a *loser* when you cheered and wore a funny hat and called yourself a winner. All this is founded on an infantile, responsibility-less worldview that politics ARE elections.
I voted for Obama and stand by that. But that doesn't mean I am stuck between (a) accepting everything he does as right because he's going to fulfill my dreams or (b) flipping over to hate and whine because he didn't do just as I wished. I fear that my outlook is very rare.
I'm a child of my culture enough to think that democracy's better than any other form of government. But that doesn't mean it's any good, untended. It's full of horrible pitfalls and as far as I can tell, our culture has fallen so deep into this particular one that I can't see a way out.
