May 6, 2008 by lonbud

How Low Can You Go?

This post was originally published at OpenSalon, a beta-test group blogging project of Salon Media.

I’m going to think out loud, if you don’t mind. I’ve been ruminating on something for a while now and I would like to indulge the openness and apparent civility of this forum to throw some very incompletely formed ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Maybe we’ll end up with a collective Rorschach test that can tell us something about ourselves, or maybe, as with making so much spaghetti back in college, we’ll just end up with strands of uncooked pasta and a mess on the kitchen wall.

The back-story here is that I thought Al Gore was a bit of a chump in 2000. I felt he ran a timid, lifeless campaign against one of the most eminently beatable pretenders ever to aspire to national office. He deserved to lose, even if he did win, really.

I also thought the five Supreme Court justices who decided Bush v. Gore should have been arrested and tried for treason, or at least for failure to defend and protect the constitution.

I agreed, in many respects, with Ralph Nader’s contention that there was very little substantive difference between the two candidates, even less between the two parties they represented, and that we Americans and our media had no stomach for discussing (much less actually tackling) the real issues we face as a nation and a society.

From the current vantage point, I believe George W. Bush has been more of a disaster than even the most pessimistic of us dared imagine eight years ago, and I am afraid my eight year-old son will be struggling to overcome the ill effects of the Bush administration twenty, thirty, perhaps even forty years from now.

In the 2004 election cycle, it was clear to me the only candidate approaching the task with any real combination of intelligence, vision, creativity and promise was Dennis Kucinich. I soon accepted that I was in an elite minority of single digit proportions, but took comfort in the fact that I would have been happy to sit down and have a beer with every single DK supporter I came across that year.

After the first Bush/Kerry debate I thought Kerry was a lock for the presidency. The gulf between the two men’s intellects was so vast and so stark, and we had already suffered such incredible depredations to our body politic, I thought, “how could any thinking person choose to stay the course we are on?”

And yet.

I wrote a song in the wee hours of election night that year, the chorus of which laments, “It’s gonna take a little time / to find some peace of mind / gazing at the great divide.” Listen to a very rudimentary recording of it if you’re interested.

So now we’ve had the four more years, and despite the ‘success’ of the surge, Iraq is no less of a quagmire than it was always predicted to become. There is credible expectation that we’ll begin aerial bombardment of, if not all-out war with Iran before Bush and Cheney leave Washington. The economy is on pins and needles, our stature in the community of nations is that of a laughingstock, and the outgoing chief executive has the lowest public approval rating of any president who was not impeached in our history.

One might think We the People are ready for something different. That we’ve come to our senses. That the indomitable spirit and can-do attitude which are the birthright of every American will step to the plate and by sheer force of will manifest the best and the brightest the world has to offer, that we might lead mankind in this new millennium on wings of invention, ingenuity and a refusal to be trod upon.

But, no. People are tired. People are weary. People want it to be over. People can’t stand the pettiness and the superficiality and the crassness of the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the right to try and define a new way forward.

Well, I hate to put it this way, but maybe we haven’t had enough yet. Maybe it’s got to get even worse before it can get any better. Maybe the dark heart of neoconservatism has to become so glaringly exposed there can be no doubt, even among those who agree on no other thing, that we must finally drive a stake through it to rid ourselves of the fear and greed and cruelty its grip on power engenders.

Maybe John McCain is just the guy to get us there.