Open letter

Here's an interesting letter from the editor of The Progressive Magazine
of Wisconsin.

A Letter to Incredulous Friends Around the World

November 3, 2004

Dear friends:

I'm sorry. I really am.

I know it must be impossible for you to understand the choice the American public made on November 2.

It's almost impossible for me, too, and I've lived here all 46 years of my life.

Why would Americans choose, by a margin of more than 3,500,000 votes, to return George W. Bush to office after all that he's done?

After he pulled out of the Kyoto Accords?

After he trashed the ABM Treaty?

After he ignored more than 40 warnings about the looming danger of an attack by Osama bin Laden?

After he failed to capture bin Laden?

After he circulated false information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's alleged links to bin Laden?

After he bullied the United Nations with slurs of irrelevancy?

After he violated the U.N. Charter by launching the Iraq War?

After he bungled the occupation of Iraq and dishonored America with the Abu Ghraib scandal?

After he promised billions of dollars to fight AIDS overseas and chose to fight condom use instead?

After the ranks of the uninsured at home rose to 45 million?

After he sided with the interests of huge corporations every step of the way?

After he was the first President to lose jobs in 70 years?

And after he redistributed wealth-to the top 1 percent of Americans?

Let me try to offer you an explanation, and then, perhaps, a ray or two of hope.

First, some brutal honesty: A large chunk of the public here doesn't give a damn about what anyone else around the world thinks about the United States. In fact, for many people here, it is a point of pride to ignore the wishes of the rest of the world. Bush played on this nativism by saying, "We don't need a permission slip from anyone" before defending the United States. In the post-9/11 era, this pitch was anespecially effective one.

Deep in the psyche of the American mind is the myth of exceptionalism: that we, somehow, are the greatest country on Earth, a shining beacon on a hill, placed here by God himself. This is the American superiority complex, a profound affliction that distorts our perceptions and enables manipulative Presidents to give the marching orders.

Bush himself suffers from an aggravated case of this superiority complex. In fact, he has elevated it to national policy, a policy I call messianic militarism. He actually believes that God has placed him in the Oval Office. And he believes, as he put it earlier this year, "God is speaking through me." God evidently speaks the language of war.

An illustration: According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bush told Palestinian negotiators, in that fleeting moment when he decided to involve himself in their issue, that God had told him to go to war against Afghanistan, and God had told him to go to war against Saddam Hussein, and now God was telling him to make peace between Israel and Palestine. (God must subsequently have told him to forget about it, because that's what Bush did.)

Another illustration: In his 2004 State of the Union address and in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Bush used variations of the line: "We are delivering the gift of freedom to the people of Iraq. But it is not America's gift. It is the gift of God Almighty." Bush is delivering that gift by the bomb load right now.

Yet his invocation of the Almighty falls on receptive ears in the United States, one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world, as Noam Chomsky has noted. About 90 percent of the American public believe in God, and about 40 percent identify themselves as born-again Christian. Three quarters of the born-again Christians tend to vote Republican. This is Bush's base, and he and his political adviser, Karl Rove, did everything they could to expand that base and bring it to the polls on November 2.

That is why, in one of the debates, Bush signaled that he would appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. That is why he came out for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and why Rove engineered referendums in eleven states on the issue. In each state, the referendum banning same-sex marriage won by a lopsided margin.

These issues are a great distraction from the everyday concerns of working people. But it was magic for Bush, persuading people to vote against their material interests. In Ohio, Bush prevailed in the county with the greatest unemployment, even though his policies helped to create that unemployment. He was the boss who threw the workers onto the street, but the workers voted for him anyway. Their unemployment represents the revenge of empire upon its own citizens, but they saluted the emperor nonetheless.

The churches played a huge role in driving their followers to the polls. Never in modern American history have the churches intervened so blatantly in an election.

When people weren't getting the message in church, they were fed it intravenously by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV and talk radio. This diet of misinformation was not good for the brain: A majority of Bush supporters said they still felt the war against Iraq was part of the war on terror, even after all the evidence showing no link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

This is the geography of Bush's victory.

But despite all that, Bush won by only a small margin, with 55 million Americans voting to turn him out.

55 million Americans said no to the Iraq War.

55 million Americans said no to Abu Ghraib.

55 million Americans said no to Halliburton.

55 million Americans said yes to working with the rest of the world.

We are with you in your concern for human rights.

We are with you in your concern for the environment.

We are with you in opposing the Iraq War.

We are with you in abiding by the U.N. Charter.

And people here on the progressive side are trying to translate these commitments into power. The broadly defined liberal and leftwing community in America was more impassioned, more determined, more organized, and more united than I've ever seen it before. People here know the stakes. And as citizens of the empire, almost all progressives felt an obligation to consider the harm that Bush was doing to you, the victims and subjects of the empire, and so they redoubled their efforts.

It was not enough, not this time.

But the coalition of forces-unionists, civil rights groups, environmentalists, activists of all stripes, from the old school and from the Internet-will not disintegrate. It will continue to cohere.

And there's another good sign: The alternative media here is stronger than ever before, with "Democracy Now" and "Air America" reaching tens of millions of Americans on the airwaves.

Plus, we can now exchange our messages on commondreams.org and buzzflash and Truthout and MoveOn, thus giving us the capacity not only to communicate but organize instantaneously.

Media activism is also at an all time high, with a new mass movement tugging at the trunks of the conglomerates.

And a cultural insurrection is under way: from Michael Moore and John Sayles to Bruce Springsteen and Eminem and Margaret Cho and Jon Stewart.

We are finally getting our act together over here. We are finally getting our message out. And there is a seriousness of purpose, an urgency to regain power, that is amazing to behold.

No one is rolling over dead.

Like the Red Scare of the 1920s, like the McCarthy period of the 1950s, like the Nixon years and the Reagan years, this too will pass.

And so there will come a day when you and I alike can once again recite the line from Neruda, "America, I do not call your name without hope."

In peace and solidarity,

Matthew Rothschild
Editor,
The Progressive Magazine
Madison, Wisconsin

US elections: global perspective

I decided to spend Saturday with my family. Had the traditional birthday dinner, etc., etc.. When I came home Friday evening, I was dreading a cold atmosphere where one parent was ignoring the other, but I came home to a normal household. So I played along with it and didn't make a fuss. Didn't even bring up the matter of my dad's being selfish and unreasonable. As I said, my folks' marriage is none of my business.

Randy David is my favorite op-ed columnist in the Inquirer. He's very sober and straightforward without being cold and pretentious. He certainly puts things into perspective for the global community with today's article.

Public Lives : Middle America

Updated 10:40am (Mla time) Nov 07, 2004
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service

Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the November 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


NO other country today affects the world the way America does. Americans have a full appreciation of their nation's immense power but, in general, they tend to have a retarded view of the great responsibility that comes with this power. Global in reach, they remain incredibly parochial in consciousness.

The presidential election last Tuesday brought out the power of insular Middle America. Conservative, deeply nationalistic, moralistic and wary of foreigners, this side of America found its voice in George W. Bush. The other America-progressive, cosmopolitan, pragmatic and tolerant-found itself buried by an avalanche of voters who could find nothing in common with the more urbane John Kerry.

The rest of the world was reduced to watching how American voters choose their leaders, faintly hoping that the results would somehow reflect global sentiments against American unilateralism under a Bush presidency. But in the end, Middle America's voters did not really care how their country behaved in the world stage. They looked at global conflicts through the narrow prism of their own domestic security. And so, while intervention abroad-whether benign or imperialistic-does not sit well with them, they understood what Bush was saying: America has to fight the terrorists abroad so that it need not fight them at home.

We were wrong to think that, with Iraq and the global war on terror emerging as the focal point in the presidential debates, voters would see the folly of having gone to war alone and the danger of further isolation. We forgot that the average American does not read the New York Times or the Washington Post or watch BBC. He would not be able to point Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines on the map. While he would be distressed by the number of dead American soldiers being brought home from the war front, he would be unaffected by any suggestion that his country has violated any international law. It is an ironic fact that foreign affairs remains foreign to most Americans. This election was inward-looking, and probably even more so than previous US elections.

But more than the insularity, it is the further drift to right-wing conservatism and moral absolutism that has been the hallmark of this election. Bush's strategists appear to have been fully aware of this shift in the cultural life of America, and they responded to it by weaving morality-based themes into their campaign agenda. But more than this, they succeeded in narrowing the meaning of moral values to suit the definitions of the Christian Right. One leaflet widely circulated in Ohio said it all: "George W. Bush shares your values: Marriage. Life. Faith." These words were printed on a picture of a typical American family going to a small church. Rural and traditional Americans came out to vote. They voted against same-sex marriage and abortion, and proclaimed the importance of moral absolutes in the nation's life. Yet they ignored the dishonest way Bush avoided the draft during the Vietnam War, and the dirty way in which political power has been used to advance the business interests of the Bush family and their partners.

There is no way Kerry could have won these votes. A divorced Catholic who married a divorcee, this progressive liberal from the New England state of Massachusetts shied away from sectarian pronouncements. The Democrats could not have found a better candidate than this level-headed man-a decorated war hero, a veteran senator who understood the nuances of global politics, and a statesman who felt squeamish about quoting the Bible to score a political point. In a world threatened by a clash of fundamentalisms, such a leader should be president of the United States. His defeat demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the Democrats have lost the ideological battle. In retrospect, perhaps, not even the charismatic Bill Clinton would have been able to override the moral stigma that his moment of weakness with Monica Lewinski appears to have stamped upon his party.

But it is clear that America remains an ideologically split nation. Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote, while Kerry took 48 percent. Kerry won the economic centers of the East and West Coast, while Bush carried the small rural counties of the Midwest and the South. Kerry won the black and immigrant vote, while Bush took a big majority of the white vote. Kerry won the intelligentsia but lost Middle America.

The Democrats must now re-assess their situation to be able to fight for a more tolerant and progressive America. Democracy is no good without an effective opposition, and an American Empire run by a triumphalist right-wing party is a big danger to the rest of the world.

It was no doubt in the spirit of fighting another day and preserving what is left of the support the party enjoys that Kerry graciously conceded the crucial electoral votes in Ohio instead of going into a prolonged audit of the contested provisional votes. No one loves a sore loser in American society, especially at a time when Americans need most to feel united. And so, as in the controversial 2000 election, the Democrats allowed the institutional process to dictate the electoral outcome and decently acknowledged their defeat.

America may have made a big mistake in re-electing Bush, but few will deny its admirable vitality as a democratic nation. We can criticize America for its arrogance in world affairs, but there is much to admire in the way Americans govern themselves. They follow the law and take their government seriously. They are unflinching in their beliefs. They love their country, and their country takes care of its citizens. Such is a strong nation.

Unilateralism. Strong nation. Neo-imperialism. All in the name of US homeland security. If that doesn't create horrific images in your mind, I don't know what would.

Trapped

You can't choose the color of your skin, or the country you're born in. You can't even choose whether to be born or not. To make matters worse, you can't then choose your parents.

I've always thought that I know my parents inside out; that I've gotten over the shock that parents are people, too. I didn't realize that parents -- my parents -- can be rotten people, too.

I'm talking about my dad. It's no secret in the family that he has his issues. He's such an insecure person. The root of this insecurity, I've never bothered to find out or think about. He's my dad. It doesn't matter.

He's such a swell dad, always wanting everything for his family. Kids, actually. And now, grandkids. He never had enough money to buy everything he wanted for us, for my mom. But he was a good provider. And my mom was a remarkable household manager. She still is, despite the meager resources (read: money). My dad's been retired for some years now. Retirement, however, didn't agree with him. It showed up his insecurities all the more. He's become selfish, self-centered.

There was a time early on in his retirement when my mom and he just bickered all day long, everyday, without fail. I thought they had settled into some kind of a routine by this time but I was wrong.

My dad isn't the kind of guy who kept drinking buddies. He came straight home from work; gave all his pay to my mom; never went out for socials, unless required. And when he did, it was very seldom that he went out without my mom. I never wondered at this until recently, a few years ago, when my dad said something about himself: that he was a social misfit who didn't have any friends.

I thought I saw him in a new light then, even forgave him for his idiosyncracies, and his patriarchal attitude toward everything. Until my mom got together with her good friends from high school a couple of years ago. Women friends.

My mom's the typical martyr of a housewife. Her family's the center of her universe. She slaves for her family without fail and without rest. Her hands are all arthritic from work. I've always said that my mom's the obsessive-compulsive type. She loves knick-knacks, those small things that you arrange and re-arrange on shelves in the living room that fall off and break at the slightest touch. Sure indication of ob-c behavior.

The highlight of her week is going to the market. Not the supermarket, mind you, but the wet and dry market, where you haggle with the rudest and crassest people on the face of the earth. I exaggerate but you know what I mean. I've always said that my mom would have been great in business. But, just like my dad, she's too parochial. Extremely so, the both of them. I suppose they deserve each other.

My mom kept in contact with her high school friends. They'd go out once in a while to celebrate birthdays. It's not a monthly schedule. After all, there are just three of them. And a couple of times, my mom took my dad along. These are women in their sixties, having lunch three times a year, and spending the rest of the afternoon chatting.

Today, my mom went to lunch with her friends to celebrate a birthday. Around four in the afternoon, she rang up and talked to my dad. It seemed that she was invited to go some place else, quite a distance from our place, by the celebrant. She called up to inform her family where she was and that she was going to home late.

For a sixty-three-year-old woman, late is not like midnight or tearly morning. My mom got home around ten. I didn't realized she was home until I heard loud voices coming from my folks' room. I turned the tv down and heard my dad saying he didn't approve. Of what, I couldn't hear.

I didn't need to hear anymore. I knew that my dad was making an issue out of this unplanned outing. I bristled all over with anger. Here is this woman who's given her entire life to him and she can't even have one day off for herself, to do whatever it is she wanted to do, be it walking around the mall sby herself or having fun with friends. It's not even a question of jealousy anymore. Don't get me started on that issue because my dad's just unreasonable when it comes to other men and my mom.

This time, it's worse. He doesn't have any friends, so his wife can't have any. What he doesn't have, she can't have. She can't be better than him; she can't be happy anywhere else but within the family. Because he's not. He has no place in the outside world. That is also the reason why he can't let go of any of his kids. Not his daughters and, especially, not his son.

I am shocked by the realization that if he were not my dad, I wouldn't like this guy at all. At all. I said that about my brother, too, several years ago. I wanted to divorce my brother. That was bad enough. And now, this. Do I want to divorce my dad?

I want to be free of my mother's marriage and married life. I suppose this is one compelling reason to move out of the family home, to not get involved in other people's married lives. When the kids become adults, their parents become other people who have a right to their privacy.

I have a right to my privacy, too. I have a right not to get involved in my parents' married life. I'm no longer a helpless child, unaware of what's going on, without any established value system to make a judgment call. I'm a grown woman who can only look on as my dad oppresses my mom by being so unreasonable as to take it against her that she had fun with her friends.

Other women have amigas and go to mahjjong sessions on a regular basis. There are wives who frequent the malls and salons and spas. My mom's not like that. She's become ugly by serving her husband and children all these long years. Her one big sorrow is that she doesn't receive the appreciation that she deserves.

My folks are both old and bitter, burdened forever by lack of money. And I see myself as a failure for not getting them out of this rut and providing for them in their old age. I want to give my folks the comfortable life they never had, and will probably never have. Not that they demand this from any of their kids. We know and see that they take pride in their brood. They've always taught us that parents don't own their children as these are merely on loan from God. Thus, they make no demands, monetary or otherwise.

My dad's gone to bed now, I hope. The cd player's quiet now. He was playing music loudly a while ago. At eleven at night, playing Sinatra loudly. I couldn't bear it anymore, this childish behavior, this rebelling. I ran down a short list of friends I could call at this time of night but, once again, thought the better of it. What would I say?

TC I could call but dread the cold treatment I just might get from him. I've lost that one, I have to accept that. IB would not be the same as TC. They felt so far away, so remote, situated in another universe. I decided I couldn't take this music-playing anymore and rang Tom's hotel room.

He was newly arrived and suffering from jet lag, I knew, but I had to talk to someone. As it happens, he had dropped off to sleep only an hour earlier and I had woken him up. I could only apologize and stammer. He sounded so sleepy, I didn't have the heart to pour out my angst to him. So I made an excuse of clarifying his Saturday schedule.

Saturday's my birthday. I don't want to spend it with my parents. I thought I'd go see Tom early that day but remembered that he has a date Friday night who would probably spend the night and sleep in Saturday morning. The earliest I can see him is lunch time. So I guess I'll just spend the morning somewhere, probably the office where I can do some work. Pathetic.

I want out.