 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
 Ice
Cube 
 "It's
a tried and true way of dealing with people or nations that the
ruling elite finds troublesome or inconvenient -- whoever gets in
our way. They're simply lumped into the enemy pile. "
 "You
need gas money and a car that works. Of course, my preference is
to do it in the middle of the night! Leave them little presents,
you know what I'm saying? Like the Easter bunny." "Gregory
La Cava is probably the greatest classic Hollywood director still
in need of rediscovery. The man W. C. Fields called the best comedy
mind in Hollywood is virtually forgotten today."
 "North
Korea will conduct its first test of a nuclear bomb, and the Bush
Administration will respond by putting Kim Jong Il on the Federal
Do Not Call list."
 "Carbs
are the new terror-ists. Bread is the new Bin Laden. I can't
wait to order a low-carb veggie Whopper. People are pathetic."
 "The
surreal-ists wouldn't know what to do with Harvey Birdman. Its ingenious brand of adult animation owes as much to absurdists like Ionesco and Duchamp as it does to Bugs Bunny."  "There
is no one thing to know in Lord of the Rings more important
than the fact that everything is disappearing, and disappearing
fast."
 "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support
to our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be
laden with explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed,
peace be upon him." "There
was some-thing truly visceral about Cube's voice that made his ever-present snarl that much more serious. As he barked on Death Certificate and Amerikkka's, he was the nigga you love to hate as well as the wrong one to fuck with."  "In
a segment that seems designed to honor yet another one of rock and roll's
seminal yet fallen heroes, MTV just can't help talking about why it,
not Nirvana, mattered so much."  "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he wants
is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous in fact,
but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure in the grand
eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle. Pyongyang isn't
even in the Bible!" "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and now
they have to realize that they can actually create that world
and fight for the things that are worth fighting for and not
feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is no point in
holding anything back."
 "Well,
well, well. President George was in one hell of bind when it
turned that that Saudi Arabia funded Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Realizing
we'd invaded the wrong country, Bush did the honorable thing:
he's come out against gay marriages." "It's
also directly because of 2000 that people are more active. Everyone
that was pushed to the brink of sanity is going, "What the fuck?
We can't let this happen again."
 "Even
though Sonic Youth grabbed Cobain by his hypodermic needles and
helped foist him into the spotlight, alterna-fans du jour didn't
return the favor when the New York noisemakers lobbed this bottom-soaked
missile their direction." |
by Ross Levine The election of 2004 was close, but not close enough. The outcome was nearly the same as in 2000, except this time Bush won. Decisively. So what's it all mean? Is it true that the only Democrats remaining are gay black Jews? Should all of us be put on suicide watch? Do we now have to shudder over 11-2 as well as 9-11? What the heck went wrong? Or better yet, how will we set it right? Err, left. First of all, there are a myriad of possible reasons why Kerry lost, and I suppose I should mention a few. Most agree he never quite succeeded in making himself more than the alternative to Bush. True, many of us were impressed by Kerry's performance in the debates, and on some issues, he sounded truly passionate and inspired. On other matters, however, he was more robotic than his competitor. For every "you can run but you can't hide" emanating from the President, we had "We will hunt the terrorists down and kill them" from the Senator. It was painfully obvious he was just trying to make himself sound tough enough for centrists, and by doing so, was falling into Bush's trap. His eleventh hour photo foray into hunting rivaled the Dukakis tank debacle, and though Bush in a flight suit on an aircraft carrier was certainly no easier to swallow, at least W was in the company of cheering soldiers rather than dead geese. And of course, Kerry's focus in Boston on his Viet Nam service might have been OK as a footnote to his action plan for the Presidency, but instead his plan was the footnote, and the strategy made him an even bigger target for those lying swift boaters who, we understand, had already been firing at him before the convention. What was intended to cast a shadow on the draft-dodging Bush instead shined a bright light on Kerry's antiwar exaggerations after he returned from Southeast Asia. The fact is, with the WWII generation disappearing into dust, the vast majority of voters have never served in the military, and perhaps see such service as insufficient reason to prefer one candidate over another. Additionally, Kerry was a veritable basset hound to Bush's rottweiler. Kerry should have been relentless in reminding us of "mission accomplished," "bring 'em on" and "no weapons of mass destruction under here." He should have bitten into Cheney's energy task force and not let go, chewed Abu Ghraib and spit the pieces in Bush's face, and been relentless about "Medigate," the Bush administration's withholding from Congress of Medicare projections related to the prescription drug benefit. Kerry should have memorized Richard Clark's book and the Osama Bin Laden Pentagon Daily Briefing that Condi received in August 2001 and quoted both ad nauseum. Kerry should have answered every charge with three of his own, and perhaps he gave it a valiant try, but alas, his hands were tied. That's because he was playing to a few states, mainly Florida and Ohio, and had to be careful lest he alienate a single voter who resided there. Bush wasn't afraid to say he was against abortion and for the rights of the unborn, and that he supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a rather draconian proposal by any measure. Kerry, meanwhile, took a hundred words to get to the word "choice," and insisted he, too, was against gay marriage, but felt it was each individual state's decision, which of course seemed more a prevarication than a position. With Kerry's Massachusetts pedigree, most conservative voters assumed he was for gay marriage no matter what he claimed, and one has to wonder that if he had turned the question around and made it a civil rights issue, and said that he, unlike the President, believed in equal rights for all, would that straightforwardness -- no pun intended -- have possibly lured some moderates back over the thin blue line? Probably not, but at least he would have appeared less waffle-some.
And then there's the war. Kerry had voted to give the President authority to wage it, and so his second vote against the additional funding came one vote too late. His insistence that he was wrong in the way he spoke about the war, whereas Bush was wrong for going to war, was an admirable attempt, but unfortunately, most Americans are not partial to word games -- they want to sip a lager with their leader while talking about "gettin' the evil doers over there before they get us over here." Kerry might have come up with any number of responses to the President's relentless quoting of "Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time," but it may just be there was no way he could have neutralized the poison of his initial vote. That was a toxin only Howard Dean was untainted by, and the party -- and its primary voters -- terminated Dean early with the perception that he just wouldn't fly in Tallahassee or Toledo. And then there was Teresa Heinz Kerry who, as it was spun, picked on the Madonna herself, Ms. Laura, and the four hurricanes that gave W a legitimate opportunity to shower money on his brother's constituents, and the dispassionate tenor of Kerry's eyes, and the fact that senators are different creatures than governors or presidents, and spend their careers compromising, not commanding, and so on and so forth culminating on election night in a big red cake with not quite enough blue frosting to sweeten Democratic dreams. But such a dissection, so close to the disaster, is a painful endeavor, so let's try to look ahead and figure out how the Democratic Party can -- pardon the phrase -- be born again. For one, we must stop being ashamed of ourselves. The Republicans have made the word "liberal" a smear, and we've allowed them to do it. Call one of them "conservative" and they flush with pride; call one of us a "liberal" and we turn red -- or is it blue? -- with embarrassment. And why is that? Because we've let them define liberal as welfare cheat, frivolous lawsuits, big government and Washington bureaucrats, whereas conservative means core values, low taxes, security and the will of God. These are all just labels, to be sure, but you don't have to be a marketing expert to know that labels and slogans sell or sink products, and the liberal label has been turned into a liability. And not because the Republicans fling it about as an insult but because the Democrats seem to take it that way. I personally prefer progressive to liberal -- liberal may have a glimmer of looseness with sex or money -- but then again, it also shares a root with liberty, and implies an open-mindedness that many moderate voters might feel compelled to gravitate to. Perhaps the FDR and LBJ liberal is a creature of the past, just as the Rockefeller Republican is headed for extinction, but there is still room for liberalism in America. After all, you can say that the word "conservative" suggests parsimony and exclusivity while "liberal" hints of generosity and acceptance. Democrats need to reclaim "liberal" from the Republicans, breathe new life into it and then brandish it like the cross before the vampire. Heck, Christ Himself was the ultimate liberal, and if the other side tags "bleeding-heart" onto the front of it, well give it back to them in kind -- remind them that it's better to have a bleeding heart than none at all, and that a "compassionate conservative" is (or is supposed to be) just another name for a conservative with, yes, liberal tendencies. So let's shake off the shame and become "level-headed liberals," how's that? And if they taunt us with "tax and spend," taunt them back with "cut and squeeze." The next step is pumping up the pride. Yes, we Democrats are diverse, but that is not a negative. It does not mean we have pink polka dots and they don't. That somehow, we're not as "American" as they are. Now that the election is over, it's easy for the winner to say we're all Americans, but that's hardly how he got to be the winner. Just as we've let the Republicans define the word liberal, we are also letting them define the word "American." And what is an American? It may not be a matter of race anymore, but they've made it a matter of morality -- that somehow, it's more moral to be them than it is to be us.
What kind of crock is that? Since when is morality measured in their terms? Their morality is based on appearances, and on consigning the messier parts of life to a place where they're never spoken of. For instance, abstinence is the only acceptable birth control, and if you acknowledge contraception, you acknowledge sex and therefore make it happen. Homosexuality is a lifestyle, and if you acknowledge it, you are tacitly supporting it, because if you ignore something, it can't possibly exist. Morality to them means going to church, whether you're Godly or not -- being in church is what makes you Godly, not what you do outside of it. Morality means "my country right or wrong," that to protest or exercise a similar right guaranteed in the Constitution is immoral because it implies a lack of faith -- it implies a questioning of God, for after all, God blesses America, so how can America be wrong? America is God in their eyes, and that's why they believe Americans have a God-given right to the American "way of life" -- this resource-intensive existence that by sheer necessity extends our tentacles to every corner of the globe with the justification that we are a land graced by God in a way that other countries are not. Other countries worship us, whereas we worship ourselves. Or at least, we feel it's about time we did. The terrorists attacked us and we bled. It's the perfect reason to abandon our soul searching and reach for our guns. The time for any self-scrutiny whatsoever is over. Well, if that's their definition of morality, why don't we Democrats give them ours? We must, and we need to do it with vigor. For us, morality is not hurting other people just because they are different from us. Morality is not placing our American-ness over our humanity. Morality is saving our world and not just ourselves. Morality is about the pursuit of an overriding truth rather than a selective one. Morality is accepting and fostering difference rather than persecuting it. Morality is adapting human laws and institutions to human beings, not the other way around. Morality is not a scorecard lifted from the Bible, but a matter of being true to oneself without being cruel and oppressive to somebody else. Just as a war on terror is unwinnable, a monopoly on morality is impossible. No political party can claim such a monopoly, but of the two parties, it's ours that has a stronger case for doing so. Next comes unwarranted hubris. We blues must not look down upon the reds. Contrary to a popular blue-state belief, they did not vote for W out of stupidity. It may seem so -- how could they swallow the war, the deficit, the tax cuts for the wealthy, the environmental assaults? -- well, for the most part, it's not out of stupidity but ignorance, and there is a difference. To call someone stupid is an insult; to call them ignorant is to acknowledge that they are limited by their experience. In a Kansas country store, the diversity factor is a bit less than in a Los Angeles supermarket. When everyone around you has a Bible in their hand, you can't help but believe it's more than just a book. To take one particular issue as an example, the gay kid in rural Alabama doesn't usually come out of the closet at his local Baptist church. He takes the bus to New Orleans or New York, and therein finds a home among people who have some understanding and appreciation of who he is. It's not that the Bible toters in his hometown are stupid, they're simply ignorant of the Godly nature of his life, too. And unfortunately, the intolerant stance of George Bush and his faith-biased coalition only feeds the fires of that ignorance. Democrats must recognize, too, that Americans are afraid. Franklin Roosevelt, after a devastating attack on American soil, continued his Great Depression mantra -- we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But Bush and Cheney relayed a far different message: We have nothing to fear but John Kerry and the Democrats. And it worked -- the fear factor blossomed on 9-11 and hangs over the heartland like a mushroom cloud. No matter how you look at it, Bush is a hawk to Kerry's dove, even if Kerry insisted he was ready to continue the war in Iraq, and even increase our military strength there.
Over and over again, we see that most Americans still consider the Iraq war a battlefront in the war on terror. In their busy, money-strapped lives (which ironically may become more money-strapped as Republican supply-side policies fail to deliver), it's enough for them to know that U.S. soldiers are fighting a war overseas with people who do not like us. End of story. If they don't like us, it's certainly not the President's fault. It's certainly not our fault. It's because all people who do not like us must be terrorists. The word helps dehumanize them, and if they're not human, why should it matter what we do to them? Of course, the irony of ironies is that in the city that suffered the brunt of the 9-11 attack, the people voted 3 to 1 for Kerry. For Bush fans west of the Hudson, 9-11 is more symbolic than real -- it was not so much an attack on buildings and innocent people but on our very right as Americans to feel safe and secure in our own country. Whether the war in Iraq makes us safer or not, they cannot feel safer without it. Fellow Democrats, don't discount their fears. But nor should you believe that ignorance is impermeable. Yes, eleven states went along with measures that cap, no, not jury awards but equal rights for all Americans, and in the South Carolina senate race, they elected Jim DeMint, a Republican who doesn't believe gay people should even be allowed to teach school. (Has anyone asked the senator-elect what gay people should be allowed to do? Might not a hairdresser or even an interior decorator come in contact with a child?) Democrats must believe that, if they couch their arguments effectively, if they attempt with passion and conviction to chip away at ignorance, the voters will listen. Otherwise, the party will have to splinter, to jettison those factions that it believes the "reds" will not accept, leaving such untouchables to their own devices, and transforming the Democratic Party into an organization without a soul -- a party with material goals but without any claim to justice or truth. But we all know the Democrats will not do this. The reason many of us are Democrats is that we're accustomed to adversity and diversity, which is what gave us our Democratic leanings in the first place, and the last thing we would do is evict those who are different, until the Lord forbid, we would come to reflect the very party we're opposed to. It's better for us to lose an election based on what we stand for than to win one based on what they stand for. Instead of us trying to conform to what is now perceived as a nation galloping toward the right, we should hold fast to our beliefs and make the nation barrel back the other way. That does not mean we slam our heads into the ground until we dissolve out of sheer irrelevance. It means we keep our chins up, answer the other side's lies, and reach out to the red zone with the principles and convictions that made this party the great humanistic melting pot that it is. So suck up, level-headed liberals. The cut and squeeze conservatives are the real wolves in the forest. And it's time for us to knock hard on grandma's door and show our fellow Americans what sharp teeth they have. 18 November 04 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is. 
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright Morphizm.com. All Rights Reserved. |
|||||||||||||||||
(Photo: AFP/Hector
Mata)
(Photo:
AFP/Jeff Haynes)
(Photo: Reuters/Gary Hershorn)
(Photo: AP/Jim MacMillan)
