The Administration is reeling from the widening scandal resulting from the so far very partial exposure of its crimes and its lies, but the preservation of democracy, and the adoption of less suicidal and homicidal environmental and foreign policies, is far from assured.
It is a mind-numbing fact that the actual solutions to America’s problems (and even recognition of some of them) are taboo, are not on the table, are not mentionable by presidential candidates or in the mass media.
Single-payer health care, anyone?
How to end the terrorist threat to the United States?
• End the occupation of Iraq, and end support of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank;
• Support the demilitarization of the Middle East, and a general settlement;
• End the foreign military presence of the United States;
• Ratify and adhere to international treaties;
• Support the demilitarization of the United States, whose dollars spent on the military approximately equal the dollars spent on the military by all the other nations of the world combined;
• Apologize and pay reparations to the victims of United States wars and violence.
Apologize? Pay reparations? Dismantle the military-industrial complex? Unthinkable.
For a candidate to favor any of this would be political suicide.
But apologies, reparations, retreat, and dismantling the military-industrial complex would lay the foundation for world peace. (Thanks William Blum for calling attention to the emperor’s nakedness.)
Some might say that these solutions are not as simple and obvious as they appear to me, and that their implementation is more like impossible.
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It IS all but impossible that institutional structures today will by themselves deal adequately with international violence and global cataclysm. But strategic thinking does not end here. This is where it BEGINS.
There is an ongoing, rather masochistic, debate among progressives in the United States. Should we elect Democrats, who are better than their Republican opponents but who fail on litmus issues such as ending the occupation of Iraq; single-payer health care; preventing the bombing of Iran; dismantling the military-industrial complex; abolishing torture and the gulag…. Or should we support third-party candidates, indirectly helping to elect the Republican fiends?
The Democratic Party may be part of the solution. Its members of congress are getting rolling with congressional investigations of Administration lawlessness and deceit. Some of its candidates have admirable and redeeming qualities. But the Democratic Party is also part of the problem. Over the years, its primary constituency has become big money and big media. (Al Gore’s genius and salvation was to stop whoring and tell the taboo truth. If he becomes a candidate this time AND can manage to finance his campaign with minimal compromise, we will have a rare chance to vote for, rather than against, and to elect, a presidential candidate.)
But the bottom line is: kicking the Republicans out of office is necessary, but not sufficent, as logicians say. Read the not-so-fine print of the Democratic frontrunners’ positions.
The Administration has given democracy (which it purports to be pushing all around the world) a bad name. But democracy means working (and networking) at the grass roots, starting with ourselves. American democracy is imperfect, but it is real.
Hannah Arendt told me that the German bureaucracy could have brought Hitler down in a week in 1933. “All they had to do was not show up for work.”
Of course getting together is not easy. But it’s not impossible.
The idea that our political and environmental problems are too enormous to be solvable is what Ralph Nader calls A RATIONALIZATION OF FUTILITY.
The idea that our political and environmental problems are too enormous to be solvable is A CONVENIENT HALF-TRUTH.
Half-truths can be more deadly than complete untruths because they have a measure of plausibility.
The idea that our political and social problems are too enormous to be solvable is based on what I would call the fallacy of scale: It is impossible that you and I can solve these macro problems all by ourselves.
But that is not what we should be trying to do.
What we have to do is what we can do: act intelligently on our convictions.
Activism is not just for hippies and outsiders. It is for everybody.
As my old teacher, Margaret Mead, said, we can make history.
Walter Miale
Revised July 22