WHAT I WANT:

A SECULAR PRAYER FOR THE ELECTION YEAR

As I write this, Ronald Reagan is lying in state, George W. Bush has called for a national day of mourning on his behalf, and Usenet is full of people going crazy, on the right and on the left. I'm supposed to be working on material for the new area of this web site--called Reading and Writing--which is going to take up much of my summer. Instead, I find myself meandering back to newsgroups and e-mail discussion lists, reading through reams of prose all dedicated to the proposition that The Other Side is the Incarnation of Evil. I always thought Lucifer was the Incarnation of Evil, or maybe Britney Spears, but over the last few days I have come to realize that real evil resides in Welfare Reform and the entire concept of Social Justice. Except not both at once. Or whatever.

If I sound a little frazzled, I am. It's not even July, the parties have yet to hold their conventions, and the Presidential race is already a cess pit of name calling, accusations, dirty tricks and hyperbolic irrationality. The candidates themselves are careful to keep their trousers clean, but the advocacy groups on both sides are having a field day, helped along by the legions of followers who seem to have nothing better to do than to devise elaborate conspiracy theories about how Those People There are secretly plotting to take over the government and put all of Us People Here in secure military installations for a good round of brainwashing and thought control.

If you think I'm exaggerating, go out on the web and look. Ann Coulter thinks the country would have been better off if all liberals everywhere had been killed at birth, because they're all trying to turn the United States over to its Communist enemies as soon as it's feasible to make the transfer. Gore Vidal thinks that at the very least, the Republicans are using 9/11 to turn this country into a dictatorship of the rich. Neither side can see any reason for anybody to agree with the other side, and both sides think that the people who do agree with the other side are brainwashed, stupid or duped. We don't have a democracy any more. We have a nation of sheep being led to slaughter by psychopathic thugs whose true nature can be seen only by We Enlightened Observers. Just who you think fits into which category depends on which side you think is Enlightened.

Is it just me, or did politics used to be different? Not, it's not just me. In fact, politics is often different even now, at town meetings and local referenda where everybody remembers that the point is to figure out what policies the people want to institute to help them govern their own lives. We seem to have lost the sense that good-hearted, well-meaning and intelligent people can disagree on policy. If you're on the other side, you're evil and conniving at the worst, stupid and brainwashed at the best. As for the election, it's not an election, it's a Moment of Truth.

I've been sitting around this week, reading the headlines on everything from Buzzflash to Intellectual Conservative, and thinking that if this goes on much longer, I'm not going to survive until November. I seem to have this automatic Yes, But reflex that kicks into gear every time anybody starts making grand statements about the unrelieved moral degeneracy of any American public figure who isn't, oh, at the least Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, or the newest entrepreneur of child prostitution. And even there, I'm iffy. The Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan always seem like sad figures to me, working class white men who have been defeated by the modern world. Your usual entrepreneur of child prostitution tends to have a background full of physical abuse and casual familial brutality.

That being said, however--and my credentials as a bleeding heart wimp being temporarily secure--I'm sick to death of the way we talk politics these days, and I want it to stop. Of course, I rarely get what I want, but Santa Claus can't bring you a bag of goodies if you don't tell him what to wrap into boxes, so this is my wish list for this election year. I keep thinking that if we could just get a few basic principles down pat, we could--I don't know what. Keep me from going broke on ibuprofen, maybe. So here it is.

1) Stop it, already, with the All Apocalypse, All the Time. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton is the Antichrist. Clinton is a brilliant but essentially undisciplined man. Bush is a less than brilliant and essentially phlegmatic man. Each of them is the poster boy for a set of policies that the other side hates, but neither of them is either an Evil Criminal Mastermind or the puppet of Evil Criminal Masterminds. And Bill Clinton isn't even running.

2) While you're at it, try to remember that words have meanings. Socialism is a form of government predicated on the principal that there is no such thing as truly private property, and no limits on the regulation society may make over private lives. It is not the American public schools, the Social Security Administration, or Temporary Aid for Needy families. Fascism is a form of government predicated on racialist solidarity, authoritarian rule, and treating large business corporations as arms of the state. It is not race-blind admissions, the homeschooling movement, or even the Patriot Act, foul as it is. George W. Bush is not a fascist, and, trust me, Bill Clinton wouldn't know socialism if it bit him in the ass and offered him a cigar. Yelling socialism! and fascism! is a way to stop the discussion. You don't have to listen to the ideas, because you've already branded them as evil. Listen to the ideas. If you want to abolish "welfare," make your case on the merits. If you want to consider race in college admissions, make your case on the merits. It is the merits of the cases--not their guilt by association with whatever political philosophy you think is the spawn of the Devil--that are the only things that matter.

3) Among the gestures of respect we owe each other as human beings is to accept that people mean what they say and are being sincere in saying it. It's gotten to be a knee jerk reaction among liberals that whatever Republican President is in the White House this week is a complete idiot who knows nothing, cares about nothing, and is being fed his lines by a cadre of committed ideologues behind the scenes. It's gotten to be a knee jerk reaction among conservatives that whatever Democratic President is in the White House this week, or whatever Democratic candidate is running for President, is lying about what he says he believes while he orchestrates a cadre of committed ideologues behind the scenes to gather all power into the hands of the federal government and declare Christianity illegal. Bill Clinton really did think people would be better off with a guaranteed health insurance system than with what we have now. George W. Bush really made up his own mind to go to war in Iraq and ask for tax cuts. Deal with the issues, and stop trying to turn ordinary political disagreements into morality plays about God, the Devil, Heaven, Hell, Salvation, Armageddon, and The Secret Plot to bring about The End of the World as We Know It.

4) Hysteria is really, really, really exhausting. Self righteous hysteria is exhausting to the point of producing catatonia. Hysteria comes in two forms, both of them annoying. The first is the shock! horror! school of public discourse. It consists of people standing up, pointing a finger and demanding, "Look at what he did!" This can actually work if the audience the finger-pointer is addressing shares all the finger-pointer's moral, ethical and cultural prejudices, but when it doesn't--and in a country evenly divided between left and right, it won't--the tactic not only falls flat, it looks ridiculous.

A high-ranking member of the Pentagon brass went to talk to a church group and said that he knew we were going to win the war in Iraq because we worship the real God and the Muslims worship a false God, or maybe Satan. Shock! Horror! Look what he did! Most of America blinked twice and went back to watching Friends. An Internet columnist put out a report that John Kerry had been having an affair with a junior staffer. Shock! Horror! Look what he did! Most of America shrugged and went out for pizza. It's like William Bennett said: where's the outrage? I'll tell you where it isn't. It isn't waiting to be aroused in the millions of people across the face of the United States who have spent so much time over the last decade being told to get their knickers in a twist over one thing or another that they're ready to go permanently without underwear.

This is not to say that the issues aren't serious, or shouldn't be addressed. In fact, both of the issues in the paragraph above should have generated vigorous public debate. Neither of them did, because everybody was too busy either screaming shock! horror! or ignoring the endless noise. General Boykin, of Holy War fame, was later implicated in the Abu Grhaif scandal, and his comments were repeated across the Arab world to people who have already shown a tendency to think of this as a Holy War and the United States as fair game for suitcase bombs. The story about John Kerry was false, and there's good reason to ask if it wasn't planted with Matt Drudge by a dirty tricks team of Republican operatives hoping to sink Kerry's campaign before it could get started. If you stumble on something you think every American should be offended by, don't just demand we get offended. Explain the issue, explain your position, and see if you can convince people to see it your way.

5) The other kind of hysteria results in a continual stream of frenzied shrieking that we're about to see the death of the Constitution, if we haven't already. It's being destroyed by (pick your favorite): John Ashcroft, Bill Clinton, college speech codes, activist judges, the radical religious right, or liberal media elites. Sometimes it's not just the Constitution that's being destroyed, but the whole country. Then it's the fault of (pick your favorite): George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, anti-abortion terrorists, activist judges, the radical religious right, or liberal media elites. There's a pattern here, and it got old a long time ago. Make your case that the Patriot Act endangers the free speech rights guaranteed by the first amendment, or that affirmative action institutionalizes the racism it is supposed to combat. Making your case does not consist of running around the room with your hands flung in the air wailing "we're all going to die!"

6) Queen For A Day is not a sensible paradigm for national government. There are a lot of things government either should or should not do--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, school vouchers, faith-based substance abuse programs, small business loans, unemployment insurance, disaster relief, minority empowerment zones, catastrophic weather insurance, medical research, free prenatal care clinics--but "compassion" is not a reason for doing any of them. I don't have much use for compassionate liberals, and I really don't have much use for compassionate conservatives. Emotions are not a good basis for public policy. If there's some program or the other you think the government should support, come up with good reasons for the government to support it. Don't bring out the violins and the death scene in Love Story in an attempt to get everybody crying so hard that they'll give you what you want without figuring out if it's actually a good idea. And don't rest your case on the charge that anybody who doesn't want to give you what you want is obviously in favor of murdering puppies and small children.

7) Come to think of it, leave the children out of it altogether. Oh, there are issues where children really do have to be taken into account--in discussing public school funding for instance. My problem is that "the children" have become the catch-all reason for why we should establish one form of social control or another. Television? The Internet? Junk Food? Soft drinks? Video games? Quick, let's put some laws in place to clamp down on that sort of behavior! After all, children might get hold of any of those things! The fact that children exist in this world is not, in and of itself, reason enough to prevent adults from making their own choices about their own lives. If you want to banish gunfire and tank attacks from Grand Theft Auto or require McDonald's to post Surgeon General's warnings on its menu, come up with good reasons to do it instead of pious lectures about how any adult who resists just doesn't care about the children.

8) And finally, last but nowhere near least, try--really try--to accept the fact that other people make choices you think are stupid and they aren't duped, brainwashed, or misinformed when they do that. I should think that this would be democracy's bottom line. Democracy, after all, rests on the principle that ordinary men and women have the capabilities and understanding required to know what is in their own interests and to order their own affairs. I know you think that working class white guys in the South don't know what they're doing when they vote Republican, but they do. I know you think that all those people in your school district who think the public schools are wonderful just the way they are don't really understand the issues, but they do. When that working class white guy says the government is his enemy, not his friend, he hasn't been duped by lying Republican operatives. He's expressing something very real about his day to day dealings with everybody from the principal at his children's school to the bureaucrat who handles his mother's Social Security account. When that public school parent enthuses for hours about her daughter's fifth grade teacher, she isn't blind to the results of TIMSS study, she just wants different things out of public education than you think are important. Please, please, please, please, please get over the idea that if somebody doesn't agree with you, that somebody must not understand you. They understand you just fine. They just think you're full of it.

Looking back on the above, it really seems that there is only one issue--would everybody please stop screaming, pronouncing anathema, or consigning to Hell long enough to actually discuss things? There are a couple of problems we're dealing with at the moment that I'd like to see cleaned up.

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