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 SPEAKING
FREELY
The wrong side of
history
By Daniel Patrick Welch
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
SALEM, Massachusetts - We
were all lied to. We're used to it. If General William
Westmoreland's body counts and Watergate and Iran-Contra
and the savings and loans and the first Gulf War didn't
teach some of us, then I guess some of us were never
meant to learn. The fact is that some of us bought it,
and some of us didn't. It's a big, glaring, important
distinction, one that, without indulging hyperbole,
divides the whole of history and places us on one side
or the other.
This is not parlor politics or
polite, gentlemanly disagreements with our colleagues
"from the other side of the aisle". It's a long, older
struggle: call it revolution and counter-revolution,
progress and reaction - whatever you choose. But those
of us who froze our asses off while being herded like
cattle along 3rd Avenue in Manhattan a year ago were not
"misled". We, and the 10 million who marched with us the
world over last February 15, refused to be misled -
indeed refused to be led at all by the liars and their
sycophants who packaged and sold this war. The world, it
can be safely said from the overwhelming hostility now
aimed at the United States, was not misled. History
itself was not misled, only sidetracked by a power whose
bloated military "strength" defies all need or rational
excuse.
The world is waiting, too, to see on
which side of history post-Bush America will decide to
right itself. Will it abandon its insane military
buildup and actively disengage from its designs of
global domination? The question weighs heavily on the
futures of our children. For it does seem, despite its
tenacious hold on power and its almost limitless
resources, that the administration of President George W
Bush is despised not only by most of the world, but also
by most of the same electorate that never gave it any
mandate in the first place. All this talk of
"electability", as if it were some scientific postulate
that could actually hold some concrete meaning, all this
talk merely inflates defeatism. Bush the mighty cannot
be slain! Why not? He's a criminal and a liar, who in
any decent society would have been removed from office
long ago.
The question is, what will replace the
Bush junta? It is a sweeping question, one that, given
the pummeling the world has taken at its hand these past
few years, should be a grand one. Akin to the rebuilding
of Europe, say, or the end of the Cold War. There was a
similar opportunity then, when we talked of the "Peace
Dividend". But it was handled by men with small minds
and greedy palms, and the New World Order busied itself
instead with more wars and the global dominion of a tiny
handful of gigantic corporations roaming the globe,
looking for every last pocket of opportunity to pick for
cash.
Now we face a similar choice, and I
suggest we should entrust it to a government whose
vision is as broad as the epoch requires. Senator John
Kerry, alas, does not fit the bill, despite his meteoric
rise to front-runner status in the Democratic Party
presidential-nomination race since the Iowa caucus. I do
not dislike him; have voted for him against Republicans
when it seemed the wise thing to do, and I imagine I
could do so again if the alternative were an extension
of the Bush Destruction Machine. But I do not want him
to be my president, and until I have no other choice, I
will oppose his climb to the top of the anti-Bush heap.
A translator friend from Brazil, who has chided me for
focusing narrowly on the US elections recently, had this
to say: "The world doesn't want to know how or if the
president will be elected. What the world wants to know
is how Bush or Not-Bush will affect their lives. Think
about that!"
See - it is not, unfortunately,
just about Republicans vs Democrats. Both parties have
been complicit in the enormous bloating of the
military-industrial complex about which that famous
Republican, general/president Dwight Eisenhower, so
sternly warned us before leaving office. When push comes
to shove, we need people in government who ignore
expediency and do that which, in their hearts and in
their intellect, they know to be right. This is rendered
all the more important by the disintegration of
independent thought in the United States, the
consolidation of corporate media, the immense pressure
and resources controlled by the right wing in this
country.
There is an inner clock, one that keeps
time despite the seeming sway of history and the drums
of war. Some people have it, and most do not. I fault
Kerry in this regard. I am not bashing him, so please
spare me the hate mail - I am not capable of throwing
the election by pointing out obvious flaws. Senator
Kerry and the Democratic establishment may well do so by
overlooking them, however.
With regard to the
Iraq war, I am quite sure that I will never forget, nor
can I forgive, a vote in favor of the War Resolution. It
is not just about pride or my frozen ass, but a deeper
truth about leadership and trust. If indeed Kerry was
duped, then he missed something most of the world did
not, and is not fit to lead at such an important moment
in history. The excuse that such a vote could be based
on secret information to which the world was not privy
is scarier still, as it enshrines a penchant for secret
government and renders meaningless the very concept of
rule by the people. Not that I favor any particular
rationale for supporting a decision that resulted in the
loss of tens of thousands of lives and the shredding of
any remaining vestige of international cooperation - but
I think scariest of all would be if he knew it to be
wrong, but voted for it anyway, out of a willingness to
play the game, to be a good soldier.
This, I
have come to believe, is the most likely case, and it
settles too well with a few other instances where
conviction succumbs to expediency. Much has been made of
Kerry's status as both a war hero and a war protester.
The incongruity is not for nothing - they do seem to be
opposite in many ways. And on closer inspection, the
dissonance becomes apparent. Shortly after Kerry's Iraq
vote, Brian Willson, former supporter and fellow Vietnam
veteran, wrote a stinging "Open Letter to John Kerry",
which is as poignant as it is sad. Willson wrote:
The first hint of a bit of disconnect in
your style was when during your first Senate campaign
you denied returning your war medals, with a thousand
other veterans, in protest of the war during Dewey
Canyon III. That was a bit of a shock, since for most
veterans who returned their medals in that emotional
ceremony on Friday, April 23, 1971, it was a very
proud and healing moment. Your 1984 campaign response:
You had returned the medals of a [World War II]
acquaintance at his direction. All those 13 years
everyone thought you had had the courage and
leadership to return medals that to veterans who
returned them represented medals of dishonor drenched
in the blood of innocent Vietnamese who did not
deserve to die for a lie, any more than our fellow
Americans. I guess you knew then that you were to be
running for office. Then, more recently,
beyond the painful chapter that was Vietnam, comes the
issue of gay marriage. I'm not gay (though not, to quote
Jerry Seinfeld, "that there's anything wrong with
that"). I am, however, in an interracial marriage, and
the issue has a personal resonance for me. There are
those in this country who are still not ready for
interracial marriage. My own marriage would be invalid,
and indeed illegal, had not earlier leaders decided that
my civil rights need not wait until a majority was
"ready" to recognize them.
No one is "pushing
gay marriage", except, perhaps, for those couples who
are ready to make that commitment to each other. A true
leader does not allow the issue to be framed by the
right in this way. The courts have not been hijacked by
"activist judges" (except for the type that installed
the Jackass-in-Chief in the Oval Office). Jurists are
simply moving toward an inevitable historic moment: a
civil right enjoyed by one group cannot be denied to
another, no matter how uncomfortable it makes anybody.
Leaders who "seek the center" on issues of right and
wrong for electoral advantage are not agents of change.
We do not recognize religious marriage in the
United States, and every pastor, priest, rabbi or
justice of the peace must sign a civil license acting in
the capacity of a state official. This is exactly why
this issue sits at the nexus of the struggle to overcome
reactionary forces in the US. The correct framing of the
issue is right before our eyes: the right wing knows
that it must pursue the idea - think of this for a
moment - of a constitutional amendment to ban the
extension of this right to a certain group. This is an
outrageous concept, and should be met head-on. Most
people in the US now have family, friends,
acquaintances, or workmates who are gay; speaking of
"ready", I do not think Americans are ready to change
the law of the land to pursue a bigoted witchhunt that
would make Anita Bryant proud.
Kerry's so-called
"doghunters" have been concerned chiefly with covering
his right flank, always assuming that his left was
immune to attack. But these stands represent a pandering
to the right, which will be equally damning in a time
when such pandering is not only unpalatable, but
unnecessary as well. To return to the interracial
analogy, there's nothing to warm the heart of a
recalcitrant old white racist more than the brown face
of a mixed grandchild. I have a similar bellweather:
when Homer Simpson can ponder on prime-time television
whether his gay kiss or a kiss from his wife "is the
best kiss I've had all day", I'm betting that America is
not ready to put the genie back in the bottle - or the
closet, as it were.
In fact, I think Americans
are ready for much more than we are given credit for.
The experience of the past few years has truly shaken
people's consciousness. Broad sections of people are
increasingly wary of a distortionist, toadying press;
increasingly demanding of true health-care reform, and
not just a further bloating of the insurocracy. Even
some polls have shown that large majorities back key
elements of a progressive agenda.
In an irony
that must make the candidate scream, one caucus in
Washington ratified all 10 points of Democratic
candidate Dennis Kucinich's platform, while giving
two-thirds of their delegates to other candidates. The
world is full of cautious, blow-dried, Ken-doll
politicians with their finger in the wind. Caution and
timidity will predictably yield what they have thus far:
a suffocating stalemate fought on the right wing's turf
- and lost, often as not - where two halves of a giant
party wrangle over middle-class white votes. What we
need is the steely determination in the face of power
that makes real change possible. We will get that
through an election that electrifies a movement and
sweeps Republicans out of power with a broad vision for
real change.
Writer, singer, linguist and
activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in
Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia
Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse
School. His website is at danielpwelch.com.
(Copyright 2004 Daniel Patrick Welch.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
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