Dear RN,
I'm afraid I would agree with L.A. Kaufmann that it is an insult to have
Bush, an "idiotic twerp and serial executioner installed as president". (cf.
RN posting of Dec. 14) [Of course, I am not in the US but still, it is an
insult to me too.]
The two postings below give different perspectives on where responsibility
for this disaster lies. It is important to look at this question of
responsibility in order to understand better how to work to improve things.
But it is also important to get beyond pointing the finger at others, and
look always at what we can do...
I mentioned in an earler posting this delightful practical joke Rick Mercer
(sp?) of the TV program "This Hour has 22 Minutes" played on Bush, when he
went up and asked him what he thought of our [Canada's] prime minister, Jean
Poutine. the "idiotic twerp" replied that he knows Jean Poutine well and
thinks he's great, or some such. (I forgot to explain that "poutine" is a
French-Canadian dish which, in most regions, consists of French fries with
melted cheese on top.)
Rick Mercer has played other practical jokes too, like going to Harvard to
ask people to sign a peptition to Chief Gordon Lightfoot to ask him to call
off the rhinoceros hunt in Ontario. First he got people going on what a
great university Harvard was... and then many signed, apparently even
professors! (Gordon Lightfoot is a well-known Canadian singer and,
obviously, there aren't any wild rhinosceroses in Ontario!) Anyhow, that
little joke shows that there is an awful lot of work that needs to be done
in terms of plain old education, eh?
Good luck to us all; we're competing against mind-numbing media, drugs and
human lethargy in trying to do this education work.
all the best, Jan
PS Just after I composed this, I found this lovely quote, which is pertinent:
'There is a quote from Raymond Williams, a British leftist who died some 10
or 15
years ago, that I very much like and so strive to take into my personal everyday
life. I pass it on to you if you are not already familiar with it--"To be truly
radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing."'
**************************************************************
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 16:53:52 -0800
From: CyberBrook <•••@••.•••>
Subject: responsibility for Bush's "election"
The first responsibility for Bush's election goes to those who voted for
him. The second responsibility goes to Gore whose lackluster campaign
failed to energize the 48% of the population who didn't vote. The third
responsibility goes to those who did not count the votes fairly. The
fourth responsibility goes equally to those Gore voters who failed to vote
for Nader, because with the Gore votes, Nader would have won, and to Nader
voters who failed to vote for Gore, because with the Nader votes, Gore
would have won.
But since so many people voted for Gore because they
thought that they were being "realistic," lets look at how wrong they
were: they neither elected Gore nor succeeded in bringing their own ideals
into public discourse; whereas the people who voted for Nader failed to
elect Nader but did succeed in standing up for what they believed in.
Don't be so sure that years from now the people who voted for Gore won't
be wondering why they threw their votes away for someone who neither won
nor represented their actual beliefs.
Rabbi Michael Lerner
****************************************************
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:49:21 -0800
From: CyberBrook <•••@••.•••>
Subject: I Voted for Nader as a genuine protest.
Published in the November 20, 2000 issue of Time Magazine
Don't Blame Me
I Voted for Nader as a genuine protest.
If Gore loses, he did it all on his own.
by Barbara Ehrenreich
The death threats keep pouring in. There are rumors that
Gloria Steinem wants me to turn in
my "Sisterhood Is Powerful" T-shirt, that Jesse Jackson
says my soul is toast. They didn't
even notice us Naderites for months — until, of course,
their candidate decided to prove he
isn't "wooden" by demonstrating how fast he could sink.
Then, quicker than you could say,
"Florida's electoral college votes," that great, flabby,
inchoate entity, the Democratic party,
morphed into a disciplined Leninist organization,
dispatching its leading cadre with the
message, "Vote for Nader, and you'll never eat lunch in
this country again."
I know there's not much point arguing with a party
spurned. Scapegoating is, after all, so
much easier than thinking. But, dear disappointed Dems,
why not vent your rage on, for
example, the union guys who voted for Bush because of his
easygoing attitude toward
firearms? (Oh, yes, I forgot, they're armed.) And before
beating up on the Democratic
defectors to Nader, wouldn't it be a good idea to pause
for a little numerical perspective?
According to exit polls, Gore lost 11 pecent of Democratic
voters to Bush, compared to only
2 percent to Nader, who also drew votes from Independents
and Republicans.
One of the major charges leveled against Nader voters is
that we pretended — in some
perverse kind of optical malingering — that we couldn't
see the difference between the major
candidates. Well, I'm capable of making fine visual
distinctions. But a lot of people who
probably never wandered near the Nader camp kept
muttering, "Bush, Gore? Gush, Bore?"
right up to election eve. This was, after all, the year
the parties did their utmost to resemble
one another. Recall that in August, after a Republican
convention full of "compassion" and
black gospel choirs, the pundits gave Bush high marks for
making the Republican party
look more like the Democratic party. But how hard was
that? He wouldn't have been able to
make the Republicans look like the Democrats if the
Democrats had not already spent
most of the past decade making themselves look like the
Republicans — embracing capital
punishment, unrestricted trade, welfare reform and the
need to abolish the deficit. You call
this a two-party system? I demand a recount.
The staggering thing about the Democratic party's sense of
entitlement — as in, "We own
your vote" — is that it has made so little effort to hold
on to its base. Labor, for example.
Would there have been any worry about union members'
defecting to Nader if the Clinton
administration had spent even half as much time fighting
to raise the minimum wage as it
spent on pushing free trade with China?
So back off, Democratic avengers. Nader didn't steal
Gore's election; he just mobilized
some of the mounting disgust for money-polluted politics,
with its battery-operated
candidates and look-alike, corporate-welfare-state
policies, whether they're labeled
Democratic or Republican. All right, maybe the Republican
disguise worked for the
Democrats in 1992. But if you go around long enough in
camouflage clothes, you're
eventually going to be mistaken for, well, a bush.
Copyright © 2000 Time Inc.
