blog.macalicious:Ramblings:Politics

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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Choices

31 May, 2004
Posted at 12.56 PDT

From the Washington Post concerning the campaign against democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry:

Excuse me? They don’t have a choice? I’m not sure I follow the reasoning. The statement suggests our President is incapable of winning a fair contest. The fact of the matter is, they do have a choice. They could choose not to run negative ads, and instead campaign on their accomplishments. What a novel idea!

I have had it with negative ad campaigns—from both sides, mind you. I know I can’t be the only one, but when I see a negative ad, I now assume the candidate is lying unless I personally know the facts against which the claims are being made. The implication of that, naturally, is that the candidate being attacked either A) did no such thing, or B) the exact opposite.

Negative campaign ads, especially from the incumbent, have a definite feeling of desperation. I would think the Bush campaign, already suffering from a perception of inciting fear in the American populace for personal gain, would be chary of focusing so strongly on advertising that uses even more fear as motivation.

Just a thought.

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American Pride

17 May, 2004
Posted at 22.18 PDT

You know, there have been times when I’ve been embarrassed to be an American. Chagrined even, when our government or a citizen has pulled off a particularly ham-handed maneuver. But I can honestly say that until now I had never been ashamed of being American.

That has all changed.

The news of the behavior of some of our troops in Iraq has shocked me in a way I’d never thought possible. I do not consider myself either naïve or particularly worldly. Yet I understand that being reared in this country does not in some magical way make me or my fellow Americans somehow better than others, merely luckier. And I’m also aware of the 1971 Stanford University study that painted an unsettling picture of what the average American was capable of when placed in a guard/prisoner setting. But I had hoped that we weren’t really like that.

The Stanford study isn’t new. What it showed in no uncertain terms was that the very question of how the average German could take part in something as horrific as the Holocaust was a failure to understand the the question itself. The horrors committed by average Germans in World War II were not caused by some endemic failure of the German character, but rather by something inherent to humans in general, into which the Nazi régime simply tapped.

This failing of the human character does not make us as a species inherently evil; but knowing it exists, we must guard against it. And the fact we DO know about this tendency in ourselves makes our failure in Iraq to institute a mechanism preventing it even more horrifying. It would seem we have fallen victim to our own pride—a pride which made those in charge unable—or unwilling—to believe that Americans were capable of committing such acts. (At least I hope it was misplaced pride. The thought that those leading us in this war they’ve so eagerly prosecuted might actually consider the Iraqis subhuman is too saddening even to contemplate). It is KNOWN that strict controls are necessary in such a situation, that we as humans when placed in situations involving such a disparity of power are prone to abusing that power. Why did we not have such controls in place? This isn’t rocket science. We know how to prevent such abuses of power.

Make no mistake about it, there is NO excuse for violating the prisoners’ basic human rights. No argument can be made defending such behavior without undermining the very concept of human rights. ALL humans have them. Even suspected terrorists. To deny other’s basic rights and dignity is to become guilty of the very thing against which we are supposedly fighting. Is a contempt for human rights not a defining characteristic of the terrorist mind?

One of the saddest things about this whole sorry mess is that each and every one of the Americans shown is most likely a decent human being . Lord Acton was correct, power does tend to corrupt. The acts committed in Iraq were not made by monsters, but by humans acting in a monstrous fashion. The capability to behave in such an inhumane manner exists within all of us. A little simple oversight on the part of those in charge could have easily prevented this. All it takes to prevent such atrocities from occurring is a framework of expected behavior, and the discipline to hold people to it. This does not excuse the behavior of those taking part in those horrifying photographs, but knowing what we do about human behavior, it also places the blame squarely and equally upon the shoulders of the commanding officers as well. The abuse of the Iraqi prisoners is just as much their fault as it is the guards involved. A commanding officer is responsible for the actions of his men. This is an old and honorable principle, its usefulness proven over the course of centuries.

Shame.

I do not like this feeling.

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