Autumn Leaves Will Blow...

Election 2004: The Triumph of the Swill

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

11/04/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/election2004wrap.htm

I felt like I was in a bad movie yesterday.

It wasn’t the deep shock and unreality caused by the election results. It was the performance staged by our local weather, which was truly hackneyed and hackish.

The morning featured driving snow and near white-out conditions, followed by a bitter wind out of the east, over the shoulder of the Mountain, which sent wind chills well below zero, driving autumn leaves all over the place.

It’s hard to sulk properly when kismet turns life into a big-budget Ed Wood movie.

Several people stopped by my office, which was appropriately cold, drafty, and chilly, to commiserate over the election and figure out what the hell to do next.

One friend, who quit the Democratic Party in early 2003 and joined the Democratic Socialists, kept lifting an eyebrow at me. He knows that I’m fed up with the "Republican-lite" approach of the Dems, with their "oh, I’m for slaughtering innocent Iraqis and making Je-zus part of the Constitution too" routine. The problem is that things will have to get much worse before people will consider anything that has the word "Socialist" in its name, no matter how benign (and sensible) its objectives. Thanks to the corporate propaganda machine, people equate socialism to Stalin and Mao. But the DSA does have a great platform. I’ll grant you that, B.

We talked a fair bit about election reform. One reason Bush won is because one third of votes were cast on Diebold or Sequoia machines with no way to check the results they spit out at the end of the day. We have only their unsupported word that the results were what they say they were. As a result, the number of votes cast in Florida appears to exceed the number of people who are believed to have actually voted by some 350,000. In Ohio, we have no idea really of how many voted or how they voted, and can’t prove a goddamned thing. There’s no way to recount the votes. The media whores have been bending over backwards trying to discredit the exit polls which showed what people were doing, rather than what the crooked machines claimed was going on. I’m trying to confirm a report that touch-screen machine precincts with no paper trail consistently gave Bush an extra 5% of the vote.

If anyone acts gleeful about that in front of you, do what I plan to do: ask them if they can remember when they used to be an American, and then spit in their face. Diebold is the biggest disgrace in the history of American politics.

The whole campaign showed the need for Clean Campaign reform. Once again, America got to choose between one multimillionaire trying to act like just one of the folks, and another multimillionaire who was trying to act folksy. Rich people aren’t necessarily bad people, and indeed some are excellent people, but in a country where multi-millionaires only make up 1% of the population, maybe we should consider letting someone else have a go at it.

But even if Putsch won the election legitimately, and did a better job of playing the pious redneck card, one of the most troubling elements of the election was the four million new Christian fundamentalist voters that were supposedly registered in the past year.

The role of the rabid religious right in American politics has always been troublesome, but now that they effectively control the vote, it’s safe to say that America is nearly finished.

Throughout history, there has always been an impulse to let the church control society. The reasoning is that the church, being related to God or Allah or whoever, is more moral, and by running things, will make society more moral.

There’s no case in recorded history where this has ever worked out. Theocracies inevitably become repressive and corrupt, and usually they turn into bloodbaths.

It works like this. A religion seizes control of a country, usually at the invite of the followers. It settles in, making grandiose promises to transform the society into something that reflect the face of God, or upholds God’s rights, or some such balderdash. It’s all very idealistic and holy. So far, so good.

The only trouble is, you immediately have fundamentalists who are telling the new regime (if they aren’t already in charge of the new regime) "Look, the holy texts say that..." Divorce is wrong. A thief should have his hand cut off. Slavery is ok. A menstruating women is unclean, and may not sleep in the house. Pressure is put on the new leaders to implement such ideas as public policy.

Fundamentalists are good at affirming things the holy texts don’t say, as well. Jesus hates socialism. Abortion is murder. Fundamentalists are good at plucking their own particular biases and bigotries out of their own asses and declaring them to be the supreme and majestic law of the universe.

There is enormous pressure on the religious leaders to implement such notions and inflict them on the public. Religious leaders aren’t usually religious (religion doesn’t make for strong leadership skills), but they ARE politicians. They’ll make a good show of going along with what the loud-mouthed whackjobs with the pitchforks and bibles want.

One problem is when the putative leader of such a regime happens to be one of those whackjobs with a pitchfork and bible. It can happen: the Cromwells, Torquemada, and Charlemagne all come to mind. These are not reassuring examples. Reminder: Putsch is a born-again dry-drunk fundamentalist.

Religion, being autocratic and, no matter what the political table of organization shows, directed by one central authority (a guy who spends eons hiding behind clouds, only emerging every century or so to give a genial wave to astounded shepherds – not your "hands-on" administrative sort, so the underlings have to do a lot of interpreting). Because of this, it doesn’t handle dissent very well.

Eventually, a theocratic regime realizes that by failing to stop crime, both real (stealing, murder, etc) and imagined (blasphemy, atheism, etc.) it isn’t exactly doing a good job of representing the majesty of the divine, and a crackdown is in order.

This always happens with theocracies, and if there happens to be a sizeable "criminal element," a bloodbath inevitably ensues, along with harsh laws regarding dissent, which is equated to heresy and blasphemy.

You end up with a government that engages in an endless siege against the unholy, and thus has a siege mentality, and answers only to an invisible being who never answers back. Corruption, at that point, is inevitable.

If mixing religion and politics means destruction and corruption for both, fundamentalism, the mental disorder with its scathing contempt for logic and reason, is far worse. As Garry Wills noted, "More Americans believe in the virgin birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution." Fundamentalism is accompanied by paranoia and reactionism, the self-protective modes of any delusional mind-set system, and these traits are only strengthened by putting the afflicted in a position of power.

Fundamentalism has taken over the free and secular United States of America, and the death of the country is now only a matter of time.

But Ed Wood still rules the Universe: the sun has come out and the wind has stopped.