Magic, Ritual, and Belief

07 May, 2008
Posted at 22.11 PDT

As the years go by I find myself more and more intrigued by the political process here in the U.S. And this year, not surprisingly, I’ve been rabidly interested in seeing it develop. This year’s presidential contest is an historical step forward for us, no matter what way it’s looked at. Now I’ll admit right off the bat I’m rooting for Barack Obama. I’ve been rooting for him to run since seeing him give that famous speech at the 2004 Democratic nominations. I can still remember the goosebumps it gave me, and distinctly remember thinking, “Why can’t HE be the one running instead of Kerry?”

Still, Hillary Clinton’s bid for presidency is equally historic, being the first time a woman has been seriously considered as a front-runner. She’s always struck me as very, very smart, and (obviously) has the drive to be in the race. But I can’t support her, despite admiring quite a bit about her. This country fought a war a couple of hundred years ago, and after thought long and hard about how the government would be organized. And we broke with nearly 2000 years of Western tradition by rejecting a dynastic model of government, choosing instead a republic. It’s served us well, I’d like to think, and the influence our little experiment has had on the planet at large cannot be overstated. From France just a few years later, to the abortive European-wide revolutions of 1848, and onwards to modern time, our country’s decision to revive a republican form of government has gone on to influence nearly every country on the planet. How many monarchies are left? Democracy of some pattern or another is almost exclusively held up as the ideal towards which to strive. We should take a small bit of pride in that, despite our many failings.

Since 1981 there has been either a Bush or a Cllnton involved with the White House in some manner, either as president or vice-president. Forty per cent of Americans have never known anything BUT one of the two at the highest levels of our government. Nearly half. And for that reason alone, I found myself unable to get behind Clinton’s bid for the presidency. Bush-Bush-Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Clinton?-Clinton? No thank you. Dueling dynasties are not what I want to see in this nation. I’d rather we take our chances with someone else. Someone new. It could have been anyone. That it is Barack Obama as the viable option is, to me, just icing on the cake.

Magic, Ritual, and Belief was the name of one of the courses in the Anthropology department at the University of Central Florida. It probably still is; it’s a pretty common class to anthropology departments around the country, I assume, examining patterns of belief and behavior in human societies around the world. One side effect of studying cultural anthropology in depth, is that you can’t help but turn the lens of observation onto your own culture. It’s hard to get outside it mentally and look in, but occasionally things will stand out. Human patterns of behavior tend to follow certain trends from culture to culture, and it’s always fun to recognize things in your own culture that you’ve studied in others.

Being so interested in this election has had the direct result of me finding myself reading in depth the comments following many of the articles online concerning the election. I can’t help myself, they’re fascinating, despite the well-known phenomenon of people letting loose with the craziest vitriolic hyperbole, safe behind the internet’s anonymizing wall. It’s entertaining as all hell, as long as you can distance yourself from it, keep your temper, and simply enjoy it for the over-the-top factor of so many of the comments. (And it certainly helps to have an iron-clad will to never ever post your own comments).

But one thing in particular has gotten my attention the past couple of weeks. As it has become obvious that short of a major rejection of the will of the voters, Hillary simply can not win the nomination, many of the commenters have begun arguing their case using the dreaded ‘L’ word, attempting to claim Barack Obama is (gasp!) too..too..LIBERAL. What is fascinating to me is the utter lack of response this gets. People don’t even mention it in later comments. Even if we ignore the reality that what passes as liberal in this country would get your tarred as rabidly right-wing anywhere else in the Western world, dragging out the word “liberal” has been a staple of the conservative in the U.S. for the past twenty years or more. Until now, it has always, always, guaranteed a deep knee-jerk reaction, conservatives spitting it out like an epithet, and the democrats scrambling to distance themselves from it every time it gets trotted out. The historical reasons why this is the case are numerous, and would take a post of their own to even begin to explain why. Suffice to say it just is. This has just been one of those rules, like “the sun rises in the East.” Using the word ‘liberal’ as if it were some spooky rattle guaranteed to drive off the demons was par for the course amongst the right in this country for two decades. Its use was a ritual, the word pulled out every election cycle, a sure means of framing—and thus controlling—the argument.

It’s too early to say for certain, but I think the magic word has lost its mystic power. Like the boy who cried wolf, it just might have been used as the magic bludgeon for so long, that it no longer has the power it once had. It’ll be interesting to see if this is the case. Maybe, just maybe, we can shed some of the emotional baggage that conservatives have inserted into the word, and get back to its true meaning.

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