2006 Elections results
Someone asked for thoughts about the local election results. The ghost in my machine generated an Auto-Response:
I’m glad Eliot Spitzer won as New York governor. Finally dispensing with the lap puppet Pataki.
Spitzer is a powerful moral force, already hated by Wall Street muscleheads for his piecework prosecution (as state attorney general) of their routinely corrupt business practices. I imagine he will begin to get the Cuomo treatment. We’ll see how he holds up.
(“Cuomo treatment?” Mario Cuomo, by means that remain mysterious but likely to my mind, was blackmailed out of politics as his time to run for president approached — told that if he tried to run for president something awful would be revealed/done. He quietly conceded and left public life.)
I’m a bit proud of Schumer, for having led the Dems’ nationwide campaign for retaking the Senate. I wish he had the guts to criticize Israel, but I suppose that’s too much to ask. (Not that it matters much at this point; the lamps have gone out. It did matter in 2003, when he supported the Iraq war with zest.) Re domestic policy he’s pretty good, I think.
And I’m glad Hillary won with such a huge margin. I would gladly see her sworn in as president in 2009. But the damage that will be done to discourse and the standards of civil life as a result of her candidacy will be so … damaging that it might be in the national interest that she not run. (?) Of course she will.
I’m certainly relieved by the elections. It’s an echo (albeit faint) of November 1992, when Clinton’s victory seemed an exorcism performed on the body politic. Ding dong, the seeming insanity of Reaganism is dead.
But that was premature. And now it seems we know better. The mask was pulled off in 2000. Frank Zappa’s curtain torn from the back of Democracy Theater to reveal the brick wall.
I don’t expect the trends that took shape in US politics and society during the 80s (only to flourish under baby Bush) to turn around in my lifetime. Insofar as electoral integrity, as a brake on the relentless devolving greed of the ruling class (for lack of a better word) was ever a reality in my lifetime, I feel we’ve all failed, and don’t see how the power can be reclaimed.
And the global movement toward war, which the american Likud Lobby and Oil Mafia led out of the gates post Soviet collapse — the embrace of war as a “legitimate” policy and philosophy, expressed not only by the Pentagon planners and the headlines but by the glee of teenagers who go directly from video games to killing real people with high tech gizmos laughing all the way and getting it on tape — this embrace of war seems not an echo but a much louder report of what was underway in the world precisely 100 years ago. I don’t expect to hear it diminish in my life, except by catastrophe on the order of the world wars.
(100 years ago: The young German Nation bursting its buttons to prove its mettle. Witty Futurists lavishing love on the Machine. Japanese militarists, springing out of nowhere with a modern navy, defeating Russia at Port Arthur. Spencerite “Survival of the Fittest” weightlifters spouting greed and genetics worldwide …)
My father and perhaps my best friend the past twenty years each died this year. I’m sure it clouds my heart. Nevertheless the facts of the public world seem clearly written on the wall. Perhaps the best one can do in such a world is Look Away (Freud’s phrase mistranslated into English as “repress”) as long as one can, take care of loved ones as best one can, and the Devil take the 97 of 100 hindmost. Pat each other on the head and the ass as newspapers juxtapose headlines reporting hundreds dead in Baghdad on Thanksgiving Day and “Black Friday” battles of American consumers, once citizens, waiting in the dark before Toys R Us.
