Absurdity, Allegory and China

It’s well after midnight and I can’t get to sleep. The wind is whistling through the windows, which don’t quite shut. Never have. Later today I’ll head to Beijing and early tomorrow morning to Qinghai where the wind will be stronger and the temperatures colder. The sky will be brilliantly blue if it’s not raining or snowing, but it won’t be winter yet, except on the high passes where it always has a chance of being winter, even in August. Like Wyoming which went, as always, solid Republican.

Obviously politics is still on my mind. Though I am happy about the Obama win I am still smarting over the depth of the American plunge over the past decade, which I have spent in China in a permanent state of Cringe. From what I’ve heard from many friends in the US is that they too have been hunkering down. When I left America in 1998 the country was feeding on a young, hapless Jewish woman, an indiscreet Democratic president, a cigar and a stained dress, all of which combined to nearly bring our country to ground. As if that debacle weren’t enough, the General Election of 2000 did it’s best to dig the hole even deeper. The Bush presidential response to the tragedy of 9/11 and the subsequent lack of response to the near annihilation of New Orleans by hurricane were two of the incalculable travesties that not only took the winds out of the sails, but appeared to also consciously take a sword to them in what can only seem like a deliberate attempt to turn the ship of state into a dead-in-the-water creaking hulk. In the name of democracy and its criminally misguided neoconic programs of global “democracy” promotion I, along with much of the US and the world, have watched in horror as the senseless gutting of the nation’s ethical core seemed to stumble forward unchecked. My country, which I love and have fought for, appeared to be driven by a numbing fear, intent on utter wreckage. No matter how the first eight years of this century are eventually spun, there will no doubt be a consensus that it was the most incompetent and noxious White House in US history. The Bush/Cheney axis of disruption will forever be pointed to as the low point to which a democracy can plunge and still manage to officially spew. This administration has become the most convincing argument against the spread of democracy in the world. Why would any country, other than the most boorish, want to emulate a muscled executive branch as vulgar and mean as this one has been (and will continue to be for another two-and a half months). Their supercilious disregard for the Constitution has driven their national approval rating through the floor, and their unhinged shamelessness in pursuing what can only be described as a vigorous plutocratic global agenda has earned them, and, by national association all Americans, an international disrepute. We are lucky that there is no gauge to measure how far we have fallen in the minds of the global community. That this administration will soon be gone is, unfortunately, not soon enough. When they slink off to their respective secured ranches they will have left in their wake a country where only a privileged few will be able to say that they are better off now than they were eight years ago.

What we saw and heard in Grant Park on the evening of November 4th was the beginning of our recovery from national and international shame. It will be neither an easy nor a quick recuperation. And, unfortunately, it most likely will be hampered by the low-browed sniping from the permanently disgruntled and goofball extreme, which, I might add, is not the same as the Conservatives. This is what respectable Republicans know. And this is what they will have to confront in order to redefine themselves as more than just a magnet for the wing nuts.

I was raised in a large household that was politically divided: my father a Republican, and my mother a Democrat. I have no recollections of any parental political knock-down, drag-outs; there was a respect as well as diplomatic silence that allowed the two to not only live together in the same home, but to attend the same church and propagate at a baby-booming, Irish-Catholic clip. Personal politics rarely clouded the atmosphere within the home; there were other more pressing and urgent familial issues that managed to provide enough other weather to downgrade politic disagreements to sporadic drizzles. Though I consider my parents’ differing political opinions as both having come from reasonable – though not always highly reasoned (they were Catholics, not Jesuits) – interpretations of events and personal experience, I ended up leaning in the direction of my mother’s take on things. In 1972, when I briefly returned home from four years in the military, my father, a WWII vet, was so appalled by the Watergate scandal and the Nixon Administration’s mishandling of Southeast Asia, he actually voted for George McGovern, a seismic rip that afforded me a critical insight into the man who, from the crib forward, I had spent my lifetime battling, despite having inherited his love of baseball and the Phils. His admission on election night that he had pulled the Democratic lever (one of eight McGovern votes from that single household) taught me that change is actually possible, even if, at times, it seems more miraculous or humbling than we could have ever dreamed. It’s both the benefit and the cost of thinking. In the next two subsequent presidential elections I feel quite sure he went back to voting straight GOP. He didn’t make it to Reagan’s second term, though I cannot imagine him casting his vote for Walter Mondale.

The critical question for the Republican party now becomes how to deal with Sarah Palin, a self-promoting, revisionist fundie. How they handle this one will tell us if they will be able to recover. If they choose to continue sheltering and pandering to those who pride themselves on fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, and intolerant methods of understanding both politics and religion – “The way I see my god (and foreign policy out my window) is the only way to see god (and foreign policy), and if you don’t see it my way then there’s no need for further discussion” – will doom them to further muddling. This is not the basis for responsible political discourse. Haven’t we yet learned that hypocritical religious zealots are responsible for an inordinate amount of pain in this world? This sort of intolerance implies a basic fear of imagination, rather than the embracing and understanding of imagination as a tool that must be kept finely honed in order to responsibly respond to the constant changes that define all times. I expect “You betcha” and a wink at a county fair, not in the rooms where the serious business of governance and diplomatic negotiations take place. If the Republicans can’t see that they will deserve everything they will get. If they do not distance themselves from the whacko fringe then they will lose even more of their good faithful followers. This is not a secret.

So, that’s what I’m rehashing on my way to bed, listening to the wind.