I look at that map (which is only a more humorous version of the actual electoral results map at http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/president/), and I see several things: One, the United States of America aren't united, anymore. Two, I don't understand how the majority of this country thinks in regard to choosing legislators. Three, I apparently have become the enemy, the Croatian huddling on the coast hoping the Serbs don't invade. I have to agree with the UK magazine the Daily Mirror:
A friend on an email list posted this today: As for me, I will live as I have always lived and keep in mind the lessons passed on by my family...if that blue zone around this state disappears, I'm out of here because the ones in my family who ignored the creeping stench of Fascism are now buried in a mass grave in Croatia called Jasenovac. The rest died in the 90's war between Serbia and Croatia. The ones who were called paranoid and stupid are here now and alive.
So where do we go from here? Apparently, the majority of my fellow citizens are more worried about their neighbors' sex lives than they are in whether we're sending our young men and women off to die for a lie. Apparently, the majority of my fellow citizens think you can bomb terrorism out of existence. Apparently, the majority of my fellow citizens think that tax cuts to the wealthy benefit them in some manner.
For myself, I can take comfort in the thought that our efforts did pay off here in Washington state. We won here. We'll have a Democratic House and Senate, we re-elected (by a commanding majority) our senior Democratic Senator, most of our House delegation is Democratic, and with accurate counting of the ballots (which is apparently questionable), we'll have a Democratic Governor. So we can hide here in the upper left-hand corner of the map and wait for the rest of the nation to come back from their attempt to unwind the watch and return us culturally to the mid-1950s.
The good news - in our district, Geoff Simpson and Pat Sullivan won, by fairly comfortable margins. Patty Murray crushed Nethercutt altogether. Nearly all the Democratic incumbents won. We've taken control of the state House and possibly the state Senate, if Craig Pridemore hangs onto his minor lead. The bad news - we won't know for days whether it's Chris Gregoire or Dino Rossi who'll be our next Governor. We didn't manage to take any of the three open national House seats from Republicans. We have an anti-choice and anti-gay-marriage state Attorney General. We re-elected a Republican Secretary of State, so we'll probably have Diebold "delivering votes for Republicans" in this state in time for the 2006 election, with no auditing or oversight. We re-elected a Public Lands Commissioner who believes in handing public lands over to corporations for whatever they can squeeze from them.
The way I see it, it took the Republicans 12 years of full control, from 1920 to 1932, to completely ruin the country's economy and bring us to the edge of violent revolution. This bunch seems likely to be able to bring us to that point in 8 years. All we can hope is that there's another visionary FDR in the wings. The map shows me little hope otherwise; they have the states they need to ratify any asinine amendment to the Constitution they like and to appoint at least three more extremist Supreme Court judges. The first nominee for the Supreme Court will almost certainly be John Ashcroft. If his appointment is ratified, then there is no hope of anything approaching bipartisanship or moderation. I expect these things to happen almost immediately. The only ray of hope is that, by immediately passing their anti-gay-marriage amendment, they'll remove that very divisive issue from the table for 2008. Then what will they use to polarize and divide America?
The cynical, pragmatic opportunists on the right don't really want the anti-gay-marriage amendment passed. It's too useful as a wedge issue, a content-free hot-button issue to divide Americans. However, they'll have to, in order to avoid having their hypocritical and viciously cynical stance unmasked; the true-believer religious zealots of the right will insist on it. That isn't going to make the Scaifes and Norquists on the right happy. In order to sustain the "culture war" meme that's been so useful to them, they'll have to find another internal scapegoat, another internal enemy to fear. In the past 50 years, they always had Communism and the internal boogeyman of "fellow travelers" and "comsymps" to draw on for this purpose. What can they use once they remove gay rights from the table? Ditto for anti-abortion legislation - which, mark my words, they WILL pass - once the amendment is ratified, then what? What will they be able to use in 2008 to divide us?
I have to admit to a certain amount of anger now over the selection of Edwards as the vice-presidential candidate. I truly believe he brought almost nothing to the ticket. Nothing against Edwards, but what constituency was being appealed to with that choice? It's not as egregious as the selection of Lieberman in 2000 (shudder!), but I will always wonder what would have happened had the choice fallen on General Wesley Clark instead. I believe many of those red states would be blue today had General Clark been the VP choice.
Hindsight is always 20-20. But once again, I have to wonder just what our party was thinking. Oh, and about that fabled "youth uprising" - it didn't happen. The under-25 MTV set didn't get their asses up off the couch - they stayed right there in front of Cartoon Network and voted in the same anemic percentage they did in 2000. They're the ones who'll be sent to foreign wars to fight and die. They made their beds. May they enjoy lying in them.
Yes, I'm bitter. I no longer feel like a part of the United States of America. I feel like a refugee up here in the last remnants of our democracy, isolated on the coasts. The Confederacy finally won; it took them 140 years, but they finally won. If you don't understand what I mean, this map makes it fairly plain:
John says he's no longer going to call himself a veteran. We took down our flag yesterday, and folded it and put it away, probably for a very, very long time. While we were folding it, in the same ritual fold you use when you hand a flag to a bereaved mother over her child's coffin, I burst into sobs.
Inside, I am still sobbing. It's not the loss of the election - you win some, you lose some. It's that map. The dream of American democracy is dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment