An unmannerly pre�Election Day splenetic
by Tony Kushner
Everyone knows everything and yet here we are. This is a
transparent election. The Bush administration is red-meat reactionary. We all
know that; and we all know the Kerry administration will be as liberal as the
senator himself has always been, more often than not inclined to be
progressive, and what an inexpressible relief and joy that will be! At times Kerry will disappoint and behave like a �moderate,� which means
that he will on occasion pursue an agenda barely distinguishable from the
sobersided Republicanism of long-gone days of yore, when the GOP was an
upper-middle-class white man�s civic organization/chamber of commerce. That
version of the GOP vanished after the Reagan counterrevolution shoved sobriety aside and initiated our current era of
orgiastic reaction. Today gray bankers cast off their suits and behave like pit
bulls let loose in a slaughterhouse, and no one is surprised.
Today the separation of church and state is plowed under, today the
coherence of the Constitution is sacrificed to provide a gewgaw for
fundamentalist bigots, today the lives of thousands are sacrificed to a
half-baked adventure foisted upon the world by a man who slid into the White
House with a r�sum� stained by a ruined school system, gun control laws curbed so that people can carry concealed weapons in churches, and
of course his nasty gigantic appetite for execution. Who would have dreamed
anyone would ever feel nostalgia for anything Republican? But some of us
remember when the party did not appear to be driven exclusively by ambition,
meanness, and a greed you�d call swinish if pigs weren�t undeserving of the association.
No one ever believed that the �big tent� GOP of George W. Bush actually
intended enfranchising gay people or embracing the struggles of any minority
group or community of the oppressed or anything beyond spewing balloon juice
about �opportunity� and �ownership� and how these platitudes matter more than
laws that protect minorities and courts that enforce those laws. No one was
ever credulous enough to think that �compassionate conservatism� was more than a punch line to a nasty
Orwellian joke. No one ever really thought that there were weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq or that Saddam Hussein, the hideous dictator and former
prop of the aforementioned Reagan counterrevolution, possessed the military
capability of attacking the United States. No one believes that anyone other than Bush would have landed us in the
quagmire in Iraq in which we are steadily sinking�no Democrat and not even
another Republican, McCain for instance, would have attacked Iraq, would have
committed U.S. foreign policy and our armed forces, as Bush has done, to the
fantasies of an arrogant gang of dangerous delusionals from right-wing think
tanks�the consequences of which appear to be living down to the worst anxieties of geopolitical destabilization
expressed by opponents of the war way back when this gathering catastrophe was
absolutely and easily avoidable.
No matter who wins in November, he�ll win by a hair, and that means
around 50% of Americans who vote will have voted for Bush.
Some Bush supporters are decent and intelligent, and yet they�re
knowingly returning to the White House an embarrassingly inept, ignorant,
incurious, and unfeeling figurehead for the worst conventicle of religious
nuts, plutocrats, and petrochemical bagmen ever to lay hold of our federal
government. Imagine! Decent and intelligent people will pull the lever for a
dull-witted, low-minded puppet of scaly machiavels like Rove and Cheney, of
frightening antidemocratic authoritarians like Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. People
who know what they�re doing are going to do something dreadful. And they know.
You don�t need to read the liberal and progressive media or to have read the
10,000 books published in the last two years cataloging Bush�s complete failure
as a president, his failed and child-abusive education policy, his fake health
care policy, his wicked environmental policy, his massive giveaway to the rich
disguised as a failed economic policy. You can barely escape the bad news even
if you only read, with a little skepticism and discernment, The Economist or
The Wall Street Journal as these conservative publications report the findings
of Bush�s own intelligence people, his generals, and even his own nominee for
head of the CIA. You can be a decent, sober, intelligent Republican averse to
all hyperbole and still hear what�s blowin� in the wind: �DISASTER! THIS CLOWN
IS A DISASTER!�
Everyone knows everything! Dear God, even the Log Cabin Republicans have
given up on him!
It�s not a mystery that the stupid and the godforsaken are voting for
Bush�he�s their ideal candidate. The mystery is that a few million intelligent
and decent Republicans can ignore the collective cringe and shudder Abe
Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ike are doing in the sweet by-and-by. The mystery
is why senators Olympia Snowe and Lincoln Chafee still call themselves
Republicans. The mystery is what happened to John McCain�s honor, dignity, and
self-respect.
One explanation for why the nonidiotic portion of the American
conservative community has chosen to swallow its disgust and vote for Bush is
this: These people think they can elect him and then control him. This is a
mistake the nonidiotic element in conservative communities always makes. The last four years should have taught us all:
You shouldn�t elect someone you know is a schmuck. Elect intelligent and decent
people, not necessarily geniuses or saints, just intelligent and decent people.
The Reagan counterrevolution antitax ego-anarchists succeeded in slandering the
very idea of governance and in the process downgrading the standard of
leadership low enough to admit the likes George W. Bush to the realm of
plausibility, where he clearly doesn�t
belong.
As you can see from the preceding paragraphs, I�m too angry to write
about this election. The calumny of this administration far exceeds anything
I�ve experienced in my 48 years as an American citizen (or rather second-class
citizen; I�m not fully enfranchised). The sheer destructiveness and
recklessness of domestic and foreign policy in the last four years exceeds
anything I�ve read of American presidential history. But I think what�s really
driving me nuts is that 50% of my fellow citizens are going to vote for Bush,
and I don�t understand it.
I�m regularly called an America-hater by right-wing types, but that�s
entirely untrue. I don�t much like the word patriot because the worst people
use it as a lead pipe to silence dissent, but I am a patriot�a progressive
leftist patriot with big internationalist dreams (in the tradition of
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton). I think
America frequently fails to live up to its best ambitions, but its best
ambitions are among the best ambitions a country can have: democracy, justice,
freedom, peace. I see luminous occasions for hope in our past, present, and
future. I�m a gay man, a sexual minoritarian, so I know that, because of the hard work of my comrades on
the left, from radical left to liberal, American democracy has brought me a
degree of freedom from oppression, and if I keep my eyes on the prize and work,
work, work, it will bring me some reasonable measure of social justice and as
much freedom as any other citizen has or can
expect to have unless she is an anarchist�quite a lot of freedom, it
seems to me. I even believe America can achieve a reasonable measure of
economic justice and can reclaim meaning for words like spirit and
community�once again, with determined struggle. I believe more than two
centuries of democratic striving has produced an electorate capable of this
struggle.
So why is one half, more or less, of the electorate voting for Bush?
Fear and greed and theocracy seem to be the toxic ingredients in the
answer. There�s post-9/11 war fever. There�s the gluttony caused by spiritual,
intellectual, and ethical malnutrition, growing weedy-wild after 30 years�
proselytizing of an ideology of sunnily upbeat amnesiac mean-spiritedness. And
there are the frightening incursions Christian fundamentalism has made in its crusade against the secular civic
rationalism that has been the historical basis of our country�s democratic
coherence. There are the wars it has waged against pluralism, the modern
egalitarian descendant of our originary Enlightenment principles. These lead to
a solid 47.5% for you-know-who.
There�s a line from Yeats�s poem �The People� that always moves me,
exactly the way it moved Yeats. He�s kvetching about how all his work for the
Irish Republic has earned him only �the daily spite of this unmannerly town�
and Maud Gonne reproves him. She too has suffered villainy. �Yet never have I,
now nor any time,� she says, �complained of the people.� Yeats admits that his
heart �leaped at her words� and years later, recollecting them, he still feels
�abashed.�
How can a democrat complain of the people? So I recite the punch line of
�The People� when I watch, on CNN, a woman in Keokuk or Terre Haute announce
she�ll vote for Bush because he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. �If I
elect a Christian,� she says, �the economy and the war will take care of
themselves.� How not to complain of the people when the people, at least half
the people, vote for Bush?
The wisdom of the moment holds that the unprecedented hatred for Bush
felt by people like me has helped create a campaign in which his opponent, an
estimable and worthy candidate, has been rendered invisible. This apoplexy,
however appropriate to the repulsiveness of its catalyst, is surely fueled by
powerlessness. The Left, in which I proudly include myself, since the end of its successful revolution in
the �60s, has spent its time doing invaluable local actions while wandering
down byways of revolutionary dreams, ignoring the electoral processes by means
of which real defensible progress can be made in a democracy. We can do better.
If we represent an enormous minority, we have the power to sway elections, if
not to persuade. And a few successive Democratic administrations, alongside a
Congress controlled by Democrats, together with judges appointed by Democrats,
in a democracy populated by grassroots activists can, by means of determined
concerted struggle, persuade a plurality of the people to abandon the politics of terror and orgiastic reaction for the politics of progress.
So I will muzzle myself and explain what I hope will be gained by a
Kerry presidency.
John Kerry will be a good president, maybe a very good one, if we push
him hard enough. He is an intelligent, honorable man with a distinguished
career of public service behind him�the sort of record that used to be deemed
essential for anyone aspiring to occupancy of the White House. Kerry has served
his country his entire adult life, as a soldier, a dissenter of conscience, and a senator. He will doubtless
bring back to the executive branch many of the decent, intelligent people who
did a reasonable job running things under Bill Clinton. Kerry served for 19
years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, so one imagines he will send
Condi Rice a big fruit basket as she heads back to her former undistinguished
academic career; one imagines Kerry will seek the counsel of real diplomats to
try to earn a repeal of our current status as the world�s scariest rogue nation.
One imagines him working to build a genuine and meaningful international
consensus with our former allies�remember having allies? I mean actual
countries, not just a disgraced British prime minister and an Italian
crypto-fascist bazillionaire. One imagines Kerry convincing our former allies
that we have regained our senses after a four-year collective national nervous
breakdown.
One imagines a Kerry administration pursuing serious negotiations to
craft not only a nonholocaustal exit strategy in Iraq but a participatory role
for America in the construction of a sane world order in which �democracy�
might once again sound like a good idea rather than a mad-dog cowboy war whoop.
Maybe President Kerry will resume America�s critical role in pursuing a Mideast
peace; maybe he�ll even find the guts to do better than we did back when we
were bothering, back before Bush. He will, hopefully, stop the drive to make
Bush�s antitax Mardi Gras permanent and heal the fatal wounds dealt in the last
four years to economic justice and the social net. He might, if he doesn�t obey
the pollsters and decides to behave like a president, even raise taxes for the
undertaxed rich and cut corporate welfare and corporate loopholes so that we
can have decent public education and child care and health care and a
functioning country in a world of growing equality instead of deepening
inequity. We might face a plausibly desirable future.
I do not know that Kerry will win, only that he can win. He can win if
we participate, each of us, every day till Election Day. We are being outspent,
so give till it hurts. We are being out-organized, so organize, volunteer. If
every one of us commits her- or himself to what has, sadly, become for us uncharacteristic behavior this time around, if
we abandon our comfortable accustomed posts, we backseat drivers, we sharp-eyed
immobilized media critics, we the padded powerless doubters of the American
left, if we put our talents behind Senator Kerry, and then stay ready to keep
him honest after he receives his power from us�
Well, it�s worth a try, and as they say, it beats the alternative.
Tony Kushner is the author of the play and HBO film �Angels in America�
as well as �Homebody/Kabul� and �Caroline or Change�.
�