Thugs and Ostriches
I worked as best I could to ensure the election of John Kerry as President of the United States. I am a US citizen. I did my small part and then travelled to Seattle for election day. I did this not so much because I have a deep belief in the goodness of Kerry or the Democratic Party, but rather because I felt that the United States is controlled by a junta that is capable of pretty much anything. I felt that needed to be rolled back. As time goes by, that belief only gets stronger. The evidence continues to mount. The latest is recounted in Harpers’ recent article about vote-rigging in Ohio.
On election night in Seattle I sat with other Canadian friends who had travelled south for the election in the lobby bar of the Westin hotel, which was also the headquarters of the Democratic Party. I had spent the day walking around Seattle’s neigborhoods observing the election process and feeling confident we had defeated Bush. Nonetheless, we were drinking heavily, the whiskey and beer flowing fast. There was nervousness because the polls were very close. A dead heat in the crucial swing states. But the buzz in the hotel was great, and the US political atmosphere with the red white and blue everywhere was really energizing and infectious.
The Dems had poured all their final resources into lynchpin Ohio, and state polls showed them leading - slightly. Pennsylvania had gone the right way and a win in Ohio would secure the presidency and give the boot to Bush and his neocon cronies, regardless of the national popular vote. Later in the evening I returned to the lobby bar from my hotel room with the news that exit polls showed a Kerry win in Ohio, and thus a Kerry Presidency. The crowd was very pleased, but the numbers on the TV were not supporting that. We were behind in Ohio. My friends started to get nervous. I remained optimistic, and spun the line that Dem supporters were in poorer polls that would report last. This was true, but it turns out it didn’t matter. There is far more rigging going on than I would have expected. Enough to turn a close election. And that’s what happened.
An excerpt:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” Thomas Jefferson said, “it expects what never was and never will be.” That much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since “the news” has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove’s fevered dreams. Just as 2+2=5 in Orwell’s Oceania, so here today the United States just won two brilliant military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented, we live in a democracy (like the Iraqis), and last year’s presidential race “was, at the end of the day, an honest election.” Such claims, presented as the truth, are nothing but faith-based reiteration, as valid as the notions that one chooses to be homosexual, that condoms don’t prevent the spread of HIV, and that the universe was made 6,000 years ago.
In this nation’s epic struggle on behalf of freedom, reason, and democracy, the press has unilaterally disarmed–and therefore many good Americans, both liberal and conservative, have lost faith in the promise of self-government. That vast surrender is demoralizing, certainly, but if we face it, and endeavor to reverse it, it will not prove fatal. This democracy can survive a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to, or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded.
And yet, the majority of American lawmakers refuse to acknowledge these facts. They don’t want to go there, because the mainstream would characterise them as wingnuts and hurt their chances for re-election.
