An ironical blend of farce and tragedy, this election for president has as its icon the adorable wolverine in Juneau. The debates are a farce, and tragically, both campaigns are financed by non human, inhuman, corporations that are laying waste to every profitable square inch and soul on our little blue dot. The timing of the irony is remarkable in that so many things are going sour at the same time. Arctic methane is putting an afterburner on climate change, the Iraq middle class has fled, Palestinians are being dehumanized, species are going extinct at a rate exceeding the big extinction, the rain forests are over half gone, the NAFTA-con-Wall Street fiasco has newly pushed poor Mexicans into poverty, the fiasco itself has been “rewarded” while the people hurt by it have been ignored, and on October 15 at Hofstra University a mounted police officer deliberately trampled a protesting veteran of the Iraq war. Menwomen, as the farce plays on, the war on terror has come home.
But of course there never as a war on terror, nor a war on drugs, nor good intent in No Child Left Behind. We have been played for suckers. And so, like confined rats we have turned on each other, heaping abuse on good people like Kuchinich, Chomsky, Nader, McKinney, and Sheehan. It is put to you that we do not realize the size of what’s happening, and anyway that we disagree on the root cause. These are dangerous flaws, for it is we who always were the target of these “wars’. This election is important only for the confluence of trouble it puts a date to. And now as the farce plays on we are paralyzed. Suppose we step back and take a hard look at the “confluence”.
Elective effort by us Greens and by the great independents Nader and Sheehan is doing more good than could be mustered next year by designated savior Obama. Yet, as overly explained above, it’s inadequate to deal with the confluence. Lean on that for a few moments and out pops the conclusion that for the past eight or eighty years we should have been doing something different. One aspect that overwhelms all else is size, for the something has to be commensurate with the horrific size of the confluence. Some flickers of hope illuminate the direction:
The Brattleboro, Vermont, City Council voted to arrest Bush, January 2008.
The Lakota Sioux seceded from the United States in December 2007.
Hardwick Vermont has recovered from economic failure by “uniting around food”, NY Times October 8, 2008.
You thought it was going to be some kind of coalition, The Backbone, World Can’t Wait and Critical Mass all rolled into one, or maybe a Green Panthers? Hornets with afterburners! No, the direction is a swarm of “seceding” neighborhoods so large that when it calls for a general strike the corporate cancer will run out of blood. An image that comes close to the idea is provided by Aesop’s fable of the bundle of sticks: the bundle could not be broken. You ask, what connects secession with unison? Glad you asked: The “cancer” has by intent and cunning been dividing neighbor from neighbor in order to conquer. It follows that in “secession” the agents of division are rendered powerless.
Brattleboro found its communal voice when it ignored Public Television’s pablum.
The Lakota Sioux foreswore the charity that was smothering them.
Hardwick, bankrupt, boycotted cheap supermarket food.
Great idea, but how can it be spread given that the “cancer” has bought the media? Hmm, well, Aesop with tongue in cheek might remind us that the old English word for that bundle of sticks was faggot. Maybe somehow get our talented gays to queer the works? Pretty good start actually, because we have to come out of the box thinking. An eloquent expression of the difficulty of adopting a brand new view was provided the other day by Mike Davis who likened Obama’s inability to size up the financial disaster to the early Spanish explorers’ inability to comprehend the geological implications of the Grand Canyon. (!) Close to home, there is underway on Vashon a move to increase the scope of our Council. Myself, I’ll be searching for more Brattleboros.
Acknowledgements:
Mike Davis was found by Truthout: http://www.truthout.org/101508D
The Brattleboro story was found by
Rebecca Em Campbell, “Seattle whole-systems artist/thinker/activist":
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/marian_burros/index.html?inline=nyt-per