In 1995, when I was 17, I procured some funds from my school to go to South Africa (then a newly minted democracy). Ostensibly, I was to study the roles of
Asian and Muslim subgroups in the anti-Apartheid movement, but really, the expectations were pretty low: if I came back and showed some nice pictures in a slide show presentation at assembly I'd have satisfied my charge--which was fine by me, because, given my tender years and unshakable nature, I wasn't really one to labor over anything anyway.
Truthfully, I was going only because I wanted to be there in that improbable country in that astonishing moment--not because I wanted to write up a report for school.
Mandela had been transformed from prisoner to statesman, and, I don't know--I guess I just wanted to live in the milieu, amidst all that gathering hope. For me, South Africa was rife with vague possibility, and I became fixated with it. In my grant proposal I think I said something to the effect of never having lived through the 1960's, I couldn't really know what it was for a democracy to be born, and so I could but only take it for granted.
More than twelve years later,
Mandela's handpicked successor has shown the world what it is to take democracy for granted: he has bungled his way through a deepening race and class divide and
has denied prevailing medical science as HIV ravages sub-Saharan Africa. He's become so unpopular that
he was unseated by a notoriously
corrupt bigamist whose achievements include
resisting a rape conviction (and doing so only after
asserting that a woman wearing a skirt invites sex, and that once sex has been purloined from such a woman, one need only shower in order to stave off HIV). This is modern democratic South Africa. This is the country that Mandela's efforts gave birth to, and that my youthful, exuberant feelings of hope were pinned to.
But I shouldn't pick on South Africa. Our own country is in a state of severe indifference about that which we have wrought in the decaying world:
We de-Baathified Iraq and
disbanded its army and squeezed the Iraqi people dry to the bone, and then reelected
the President who perpetrated these acts and said of them,
"Freedom is on the march";
we say now that he's led us into disgrace, but we do nothing to punish
his unrepentant enablers; we call for men and women of ideas to lead us, yet
we're spasmodic with joy when ideas are traded for watchwords and hollow platitudes; in fact we refuse wholesale to process ideas, and we punish those who dare run for office solely on the basis of them.
As the embers of the World Trade Center scatttered about New York City, we were driven to bloodlust, and
Susan Sontag said, poignantly and most bravely, that we are not a mature democracy.
She was excoriated for this, but the fact remains we don't care about our democratic institutions, and so we've stood watch as they've eroded.
And this brings me to the Presidential race. Although
New Hampshire and
Nevada have not gone his way (well, at least
not the popular vote in Nevada), now comes
Barack Obama with promises to end all this malarkey. South Carolina, a bellweather state in the primary season, aims to vault him to the nomination,
if polls are to be trusted. (I'm being insincere--we know polls are not to be trusted, and we know
his opponent is an intensely disciplined campaigner who will parry his every move.) And If my generation and its Ritalin-addled, Playstation- atrophied collective mind is to be trusted--and of course, we know
it too is not to be--he's a symbol of hope, an agent of change, and on these wings he should glide into the White House, but I confess: he leaves me wanting and sad.
Firstly, it should be pointed out, that I don't care at all about character. Serious people are able to see that
a man who has had an affair, or
one who moronically provided receipts for pricey salon care, or
one who has snorted cocaine as a teenager can govern this broken country. Serious people do not stand around with "Oh, no, he di'n't" placed firmly on the tips of their tongues should
a hoarse candidate emote oddly into a microphone. And serious people don't base their vote on what they think their unserious colleagues think about a candidate's chances--that is, on the tyranny of electability. I don't object to Barack Obama because of nebulous ideas about his character; nor, conversely, do I care if nebulous ideas about his character make him appear like a man of consequence. In this regard, however, he does not sway me and I'm bewildered by those who are inspired by his speechifying. I care only about the substance of what he has to say, and to date he has said little that gives me hope for the future of our country.
He has declared open disdain for the sovereignty of Pakistan, a country that has been torn asunder by refugees and pro-Taliban forces, people who were driven out of Afghanistan in the first place by Bush's War on Terror, saying,
"There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will." The extent of the naivete of this statement is staggering: it is true that
Musharraf has over-reached in myriad ways the last year or so, and
hangs on by a thread, but
there are no viable political parties left to contest elections, and the Pakistani electorate is seething in frustration--yet one of the Democratic front-runners thinks that it's in America's interest to further galvanize dispossessed Pakistanis by making reckless claims about how he'd proceed in a post-Bush world.
Some have called this an extension of the Bush doctrine, but at least Bush understands
now how dumb it is to assert your will on to countries that can bite you in the ass.
Now,
I'm not naive. I understand that if
Osama Bin Laden popped up on the grid in a hut outside of
Peshawar, whoever's President's going to take him out, but announcing to the world--unprovoked--as Obama did, that he has no interest in preserving our tenuous ties to the Pakistani government shows that he misunderstands basic geopolitics--and he misunderstands what American interests are. Musharraf's an asshole, but if you alienate him, where exactly does he go to make alliances? Obama is willing to score the easy political points by running to the hawkish center, but as he promises to cowboy his way around dangerous and complex regions of the world, I'm left wondering--this, this, motherfucker, is the politics of hope?
I understand that this issue is simply irrelevant to the masses of Americans who want to resist Clinton-Bush imperial succession and that I'm uniquely interested in it; I understand also that many of us want to credit Obama for
his early resistance to the War on Iraq, and we want to celebrate his progressive bona fides because
he was a community organizer and led get-out-the-vote efforts, but shouldn't the Presidency require more? What does it mean to oppose the War from the beginning--like, by the way, I did and virtually everyone I know--and then
to vote unwaveringly in financial support of it once you've arrived in the Senate (in a fashion identical almost to Hillary Clinton)? What does it mean
to
stand for health-care reform but eschew a universal mandate , thereby excluding millions of Americans? What does it mean when
your great healthcare triumph in Illinois was brokered through insurance companies? What does it mean that
you've established yourself as a moderate in the Senate, voting to confirm three of Bush's judicial nominees? And what does it mean when
you've declared Ronald Reagan as your political role model?
There can be wide-ranging debate about these questions, but I think if, like me, you see the Presidency as something more than just a repository for rhetorical hope, then you have trouble swallowing the notion that Barack Obama will lead a progressive renaissance in the Executive. I don't want the next President compromising out of the gates with lobbyists, and I don't want him or her continuing to promote the failed notion that carpet bombing is the best way to deal with beleaguered and humiliated Muslims. (Hint: the best way is
to take a page out of Hezbollah's book and build hospitals.) And I don't want the next President selling me bipartisanship and calling it hope. I want the next President to be pissed off and brimming with hell-fury about the ways in which common Americans have been cheated, poisoned, and lied to by our government. And most important, with
the fracturing of the Republican coalition, I want the next President to eviscerate the other side, to expose it as the haven for
rank, moneyed hypocrites that it is. I want the next President to answer to no God but the people. Maybe like the Americans Susan Sontag saw in the wake of September 11th, I'm immature--I've been called it before--but that's what democracy looks like to me. And since I know it's not what's in store for us (or for South Africans or for Pakistanis), I can't help but think democracy is a failed enterprise.
