August 2nd, 2016 by sandyadmin

dukakisWhen I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, elections really mattered. My parents were deeply involved in the political scene of the Democratic Party. In the late 1960s, at the age of 28, my mother was elected to the Electoral College for Hubert Humphrey. She became involved in the Women’s Caucus of the Democratic Party, and in 1970, played a pivotal role in International Women’s Day, and I grew up with pictures of my mother hanging out with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on that seminal day in the women’s rights movement of the United States.

I was born in 1970, but my mother continued her work in politics. Throughout the early 1970s, my mother worked for women’s rights issues in Boston in the employ of then mayor Kevin White, a patrician “blue blood” from the upper crust of Boston who nonetheless believed in the human rights struggle of women and minorities in his city and beyond. In 1972, my mother became the first “advance woman” for a major candidate for the position of President of the United States when Kevin White was putting out feelers for a run, and her candidate was short-listed as a VP nominee but was passed over by Thomas Eagleton and ultimately Sargent Shriver on the ill-fated George McGovern ticket. The bussing & desegregation crisis of the mid-1970s in Boston also derailed Mayor White’s candidacy for the governor of Massachusettes, but my mother had close ties to the winning candidate Michael Dukakis, pictured above with me after I had to turn him down when he asked me to be his running mate 🙂 After the general election in 1976, my mother joined a generation of idealistic young liberals in following James Earl Carter to Washington, D.C. with a strong desire to re-invent government with a leftist bent in the multicultural coalition left over from the turbulent 1960s.

In 1976, I was six years old. My parents divorced in Boston just prior to our move to Washington, and the collusion of events left an indelible impression on me. Elections don’t just play a role in the abstract social change issues beyond the scope of a six-year-old’s understanding, but they can also have a direct impact on a young boy’s personal life.

We left the house in the Boston bedroom community of Quincy and all the friends and family and neighborhood playgrounds I had grown up with, first to live temporarily in an apartment in Boston’s North End neighborhood before piling everything into our Toyota and heading to the Chevy Chase neighborhood of DC. My mother’s search for a job inside the Beltway led me to spend a lot of lonely nights alone in front of the television, live-in housekeeper hidden in her room, cut off from any kind of real community in the name of social justice. Ultimately, we moved to Alexandria, Va., and my mother became a municipal lobbyist, first for the city of Rochester, New York and later for the city of Hartford, Connecticut.

Between the ages of 6-11, with my mother ensconced in an office in the US Conference of Mayors building in downtown DC, mine was a heady and perhaps enviable life of weekend trips across the northeast, where I met mayors and congressmen and committee workers and union leaders, who were compatriots in my mother’s drive for social change, and there were many nights in fancy restaurants with such people as well exotic trips to places like Hawaii and the Virgin Islands and Ireland. I grew up reading The Washington Post cover-to-cover to keep abreast on current events in order to talk to my mother and her friends, knew journalists like Jack Germond as a friend of the family, and I spent my tenth birthday in the White House, eating baked Alaska in the White House mess and meeting Vice-President Walter Mondale. There was also a private “audience” with then Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, and later I was able to snap of picture of President Jimmy Carter, (whom I’d met already a year earlier) with my little Kodak camera on the shoulders of a kindly AP reporter during an impromptu Oval Office press conference.
In some respects, it was an idyllic childhood, save for a lot of time alone with the television, where privilege and access to powerful people was the norm. Spending time around serious and dedicated intellectuals geared towards social change through lobbying and legislative action led me to believe that politics was the central organizing principal of one’s life and that elections were the most important event of one’s life cycle. Meeting those folks at ten showed me not that “power is blue smoke and mirrors,” a circus trick of gamesmanship and Machiavellian acumen, but were instead the result of slow and plodding change through the acquisition of votes and the shift in opinion, one person at a time, in order to build consensus and coalition for the sake of societal shifts that could reverberate world-wide.

But as we all know, a ten-year-old has wholly different needs than the shift in the balance of public opinion and power struggles – no matter how many of the oppressed are ultimately liberated. A ten-year-old wants to watch Star Wars and play with action figures and plan campaigns in Dungeons & Dragons, and I did all of these things, but given the discussions with my mother and her friends over brunch and backyard BBQs geared around the political world of her work, the idea that I should have a child’s life and the fray of “the struggle” of whatever issue was going on in the pages of The Post.

In 1979, this world began to shift when radical students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took its employees hostage. “The hostage crisis” took center stage on national news on a daily basis, and President Carter, beleagured by this and other issues such as double digit inflation rates, began to plummet deep in the polls. Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, repeated his 1976 bid to become the Republican nominee. When Reagan took office in January of 1981, I was informed by my mother that this shift in national direction would also mean a shift in our lives as well, and that the community I had developed in my new neighborhood and school would be something we would need to leave behind. By this time, my father had relocated from Boston to Washington, and many contentious arguments were played out between them, particularly when my mother decided that rather than head back to Boston, she would make a “lateral” and somewhat altogether risky move of going to Santa Fe, New Mexico to work for Toney Anaya in his effort to become the first Hispanic governor of the US. A noble cause, indeed, but one that did not bode well for my relationship with my father, who came to Alexandria twice a week and to take me back to Capitol Hill to have dinner with his new wife and also had me for two full weekends a month.

My father and I already had a difficult relationship with one another – a tough guy defense attorney raised in South Boston, he, like my mother, had come to believe that the way up and out of the ghetto was to be found in a combination of higher education and an involvement in politics, but after a series of politically-related defeats in Boston, he’d wisely opted to stay out of the political arena and focus his attention on his law practice and his family. My mother, on the other hand, could not separate from politics as it was her career, and though a random shooting of President Reagan gave me brief hope that we would get to stay in Washington, we made our way to Santa Fe in the summer of 1982.

My political modus operendi – and my personality regarding the political arena – were thus informed by two national elections which occurred before I turned 12 and which ultimately had nothing to do with me but which clearly affected my life indelibly. Santa Fe turned out to be a whole other ball of interesting wax as many of the children I grew up with there were refugees of the commune-oriented counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. We too were charged with recognizing the value of social changes and social justice, but by 18 I was totally jaded by legislative politics after two terms of Ronald Reagan and so I turned my attention to subcultures, tribalistic ideas, and identity politics.

My activist imagination never left me, however, and in my early teens I was involved in a teenage anti-nuclear activist club and I was impressed by the guerilla tactics of Act Up and Queer Nation and was later a co-founding member of Conscious Youth, which actively protested the Gulf War of 1990 and gave me my start in journalism writing anti-war essays for a local newspaper. I briefly tried campus politics at the University of New Mexico and was elected to the student senate, but I quickly resigned, as I noted a visceral argumentative part of myself in what others saw as casual debate about everything from abortion to foreign policy. After an important student election in which “our side” took a beating, I ended up scathingly drunk and argumentative, howling incoherently about how Ronald Reagan destroyed America from the top of a tree. It is only lately that I’ve begun to realize that my deep hatred of the Republic party stemmed from how Reagan changed my life without ever knowing me, and ripped me away from a nice life in a DC suburb and everything I had previously known, and that really, Reagan had nothing to do with those changes at all.

Ultimately, I ended up graduating from the New College of California, an over-the-top experimental college in San Francisco where political and social change was the central emphasis. At New College, Saul Allinsky wasn’t just required reading, it was actively debated, and my undergraduate shelves were loaded with books by Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, whose lens on the United States as a cunning empire that extracted merciless tribute from its citizenry in order to embark on military adventurism to further the aims of transnational capitalism made me very sharp, very angry, and totally divorced from the normal concerns of middle class Americans, from whom I became increasingly estranged. On the other hand, the race/class/gender deconstruction movement was in full swing during my time at New College, and as a “white male of privilege” I was frequently upbraided for lacking true commitment to social change because whatever happened in the world, I would ultimately benefit. I had no idea what these people were talking about, but found that as I had no interest in mainstream politics, my race/class/gender clearly made me unfit for the Left as well, and when I graduated with a BA in Creative Writing & Cultural Studies, I built my thesis around the idea of being a Community Activist Journalist, one who would stay out of the day to day clash of political change via direct action, and would instead use the pen to focus on the concerns of whatever community I lived in. Owing to both an insatiable curiosity to “see the world” and a host of emotional problems from all these internal and external conflicts that made it difficult for me to form positive attachments and grow roots, I bounced around the country, submitting bylines from Santa Fe to San Francisco, Boston to Austin to Seattle, exploring interesting topics and ideas as they presented themselves, but never really acquiring either a permanent home or any kind of lasting professional standing.

In my wanderings across the United States, observing what I wryly (and somewhat bitterly) refer to as “what’s left of the American Left,” I have had countless opportunities to observe within lefty circles, (and I suspect the same thing occurs on the right,) the phenomena of people engaged in lofty ideas of “grand social change” while failing to resolve the crises within themselves or their immediate families. Both of my parents came from difficult emotional backgrounds with families of origins that had enough troubles of their own that getting involved in “the big picture” was almost surely a proxy set of problems to be solved “out there” rather than within. My father left home at fourteen after my grandmother’s drinking and attraction to volatile men became a situation he could no longer tolerate and he chose to strike out on his own – my mother, similarly, also had an alcoholic mother who would disappear for weeks at a time into her bedroom with a bottle, and by most accounts, though she remained at home, my mother more or less raised herself with some aid by her siblings and father. Both of them have hardened exteriors to the slings and arrows of life, and I don’t think either of them foresaw that the golden child they would have together, whom they would send to private schools and college, might not develop the same inner strength and fortitude, or that to grow up amidst affluence might mean that I might need something that neither of them could teach me, which was to develop a strong emotional core that neither of them possessed, but they both hid the chinks in their armor far more successfully than I ever have. Just as the issues within their own families must have seemed intractable and insolvable, both my mother and my father, and so many others I have met out there, turned to the political arena and the abstract world of “social change” to make a difference on the broader local, state, and national scene that they just can’t fathom how to address in their own families and relationships.

At the beginning of 2015, I felt certain that despite my general dislike of Hillary Clinton, borne primarily over her comments during the Monica Lewinsky debacle and her yes vote for the Iraq War of 2003, that I would quietly support and ultimately vote for her. Despite Bill Clinton’s transgressions on neo-liberalism, NAFTA, and poor judgment on multiple affairs that no doubt stem from his own unresolved personal self-esteem issues, Bill Clinton is a pretty class act in my opinion, a consummate politician and world-class charmer, as well as a true believer in the potential for legislative social change, and someone with the brass tacks political acumen that it takes to wheel and deal on Capitol Hill. That Bill wouldn’t actually be President again was irrelevant to me – what I imagined was the restoration of a political dynasty that had a combined set of skills and staffers who really understand Washington and national and international issues that no one else could hope to match.

And then Bernie Sanders entered the race, and like millions of Americans, I was captivated by this radical socialist from Vermont, a scrappy Jewish intellectual who would surely take the debate about the future of America to another level, even as Lefty philosopher-king Noam Chomsky blandly stated that “Bernie Sanders can’t save America.” That a socialist was running was novel and worth cheering for – that he filled stadiums with cheering crowds in a country that I had wrongly assumed – and had always been told – couldn’t even *spell* socialism and that it would instantly disqualify anyone from running – was inspiring to the deeply motivated activist within me that I had never felt emotionally capable of becoming in any other way than through my writing. But it wasn’t until the spring of 2016, when polls had him as a serious contender for nomination and the spectre of Donald Trump’s populist juggernaut was assaulting the airwaves that I began to see each of the candidates in a new light and see what each one represented to me on a personal level, as well as a political one.

In the past few years, I’ve begun a journey of personal recovery about my past and what I’d like the rest of my life to look like. At 46, I’ve seen fire and rain – I sometimes privately refer to myself as “deviant combination of White House and white trash.” My personal issues with both addiction and inner emotional turmoil, have basically had me living by the skin of my teeth for most of my adult life, as I’ve tried to forge a career as a writer while bringing together the myriad of forces that have created me and brought me where I am in the present day. Handed various psychiatric diagnoses in my early 20s, I’ve been hospitalized around a dozen times for psychiatric issues and attempted suicide at least three times (it’s easy to lose track – those who know know what I’m talking about) – but I’ve also seen my words in national publications, briefly worked in television, covered subjects as diverse as art, technology, business and the environment, and been involved in a dozen tech start-ups as both an employee and a consultant and I’ve had hundreds of private writing clients. As I’ve come to understand that much of what has driven both my professional motivations and my personal issues has much to do with the broken family that I come from, I’ve come to believe that much of what drives many people to join the push for political action is to band together with like-minded fellows to bring about change on a social level that an individual might feel helpless about achieving in their personal lives.

In the spring of 2016, when three candidates were left in the race, I found that I no longer cared in the slightest who won and actually began to wonder if I would vote at all, in order to allow the spectacular theater of the metaphoric excitement that each of these character/candidates represented to me began to emerge, and to instead just watch and see what the populace would do with these magnificent archetypes of the election apocalypse. If Election 2008 taught us that websites and having an app was essential to the election of Barack Obama, then Election 2016 was teaching us that CNN was dead, its 24-hour news cycle completely usurped by Facebook, Twitter, and the 15-second news cycle, where things changed minute to minute and was watched with great passion by people all day long on their mobiles – an eighteen month long World Cup for an America obsessed with politics – but only once every four years, (and then they completely forget about it, seriously.)

Donald Trump was very clearly the wrathful head of household father, a Zeus-like figure who laid down the law with a gruff “my way or the highway” approach that is clearly very appealing, either to people who were raised with that kind of patriarchal force – or wished they were, or even better, wished they were like that too. With no meaningful career in public life and a totally incoherent message, the media elite howled with laughter at Donald Trump’s candidacy – but ran his craziness front and center on a daily basis, proving once and for that the medium is the message and that if you can get enough headlines, it really doesn’t matter what you say, does it, so long as you can look appealing while you say it. The dirt on him doesn’t stick – Miss America scandals? Ho hum. Filing for bankruptcy multiple times? Who cares – a classic business trick to re-organize your assets and dispense with liabilities. Getting sued a bunch? Hey, who doesn’t in business? A demagogue? Chortle. Are you kidding? He can’t even spell socialism, much less demagogue. He’s a frat boy billionaire on a maniacal tear for a blood sport way cooler than thoroughbred horses – he’s slumming, man, like a commoner – real rich people don’t run for President in America in 2016 – they BUY Presidents. Just ask the Koch brothers.

So if Donald is Big Daddy, Hillary Clinton must be the mother, right? Perhaps. Sadly, however, Hillary Clinton does not come across as the caring, nurturing mother that Chelsea Clinton may have enjoyed. Her work in the Children’s Defense Fund and the push for health care notwithstanding, Hillary Clinton appears like the vengeful Hera to Trump’s Zeus. Like many women who came of age in the glass ceiling era of the 1970s & 1980s, Hillary Clinton was clearly forced to act “in a man’s world” whereby her inner femininity and nurturing qualities no doubt had to be balanced with the hardball nature of both the courtroom and the political arena. It’s no accident that women in politics wear “power suits” as they traverse the halls of Capitol Hill. Though it’s a left-leaning political ideal that “women in politics” can maybe bring a softer and more intuitive side to the halls of power, no woman in politics (not even Margaret Thatcher, I’d say) has ever presented herself as such a hard line hawk, rendering the “softer, intuitive” ideal null and void in the political marketplace of ideas. Soft on the inside, perhaps, but Hillary Clinton fronts a tough-as-nails exterior. As a result of this posture, watching the political public scrambling to rectify the notion of “the first woman President” and their perplexed confusion of the “man’s world ideals” that she presents in her brazen quest for power has led to many nights of uncontrollable giggling for me – and I suspect many others as well.

Whereas Trump’s messaging is meaningless – and thus very very simple – Clinton’s deep wonk-like understanding (which killed Michael Dukakis in 1988, don’t forget) makes her hard to follow for a nation that can’t pay attention long enough to follow a Twitter post or read a massive blog post like this one.

Clinton’s image is actually tarnished by her long career in public life because there’s so much dirt, scandal, and chaos to choose from. Her shadow role in the Monica Lewinsky debacle and the countless other sexual situations of her husband Bill suggest someone actively engaged in cover-ups that just don’t sit well with many people in America, including folks who survived incest and see in her something akin to a mother who ignores the fact that a relative is molesting her kids. {And if you think that’s a rare situation in America, then I have news for you.} It is often reported that Hillary wasn’t just silent in these situations, however, but actively engaged in covering up these sexual exploits (and sexual harassment,) even resorting to ostracism and name-calling of “fellow women” who went public with their affairs with Bill. Whether true or not, it has been widely reported that Hillary Clinton once referred to then 24-year-old Monica Lewinsky as a “narcissistic bimbo,” though whether that was before or after Bill Clinton lied to the entire nation that he “did not have sex with that woman” is unclear. Her defense of her husband goes a long way towards illustrating her loyalty to her husband, but it certainly doesn’t lend itself well to developing a role for her as a peacemaker in a national where a “healing mother” influence might be seen as essential to those of us being asked to vote for Hillary “because she’s a woman.” Moreover, it’s difficult for me to accept that loyalty to Bill was her sole motivation in these scenarios as much as a desire to protect and advance her own career – no matter who got hurt in the process.

Though it is well-known that Donald Trump has a deep “appreciation for the female form,” there have so far been scant few women appearing to tell us all about what a beast he is – maybe it’s because he paid them all off – or maybe, Donald Trump doesn’t have affairs that he needs to hide because sexual conquest and multiple marriages is an essential part of his image – which, by the way, is something that appeals to both men and women, because in my experience, alpha males drive all kinds of people from both genders crazy with desire and envy. Where sexual chaos worked for Bill Clinton and it surely works for Donald Trump, being on the cover-up crew is never a role that gains a lot of applause, and while it’s not entirely clear what exactly happened when with all of Bill’s affairs, the read in the public eye is that the Clintons have a problem in their own house, and that’s not just prim Christians in the heartland, folks – that’s a lot of people who need to be convinced of digging through the mess of the Clintons to actually pull that lever in their favor in November, no matter what the specter of Donald Trump looks like.

In the midst of the battle between these two absurdly entertaining lunatics from Olympus lay a wholly different choice – Senator Bernie Sanders. A “firebrand” socialist of Jewish descent, intellect, and sensibility whose very name evokes a kindly elder mensch, a national grandfather called up from the far reaches of time, presenting himself as a selfless gnome of reason amidst the clash and chaos of these two warring parents. From the very start, with his rumpled clothes and his “stumbling towards victory” aw-shucks presentation, Sanders appealed to all of us – all twelve million of us, DNC – with a kind of healing wisdom that might bring together the fractious warring extended family that comprises the United States of America. At once an outsider through descent and political definition as a socialist, as well as a consummate Capitol Hill insider thanks to his many years in the Senate, Sanders galvanized a stunning 12 million voters who were just dead sick of the kitchen destroying fracas of the warring mother and father of the nation – and of their own damaged lives whereby at least half of them saw their families torn apart by acrimony and divorce.

I came to this conclusion about who Bernie Sanders represented to me after deep soul-searching and comparing notes regarding my own family history. About a month before the primaries ended I came to understand that it was this unconscious desire to see a resolution of my own family crisis through a personification of order and direction seated in the Big Chair in the Oval Office that really led me to share pro-Bernie memes and anti-Hillary ones across social media for over a year before I realized what it was really all about it for me. And so at that point, I began to pull back from gazing at the election through mobile and laptop and began doubling-down in my twice weekly sessions of family of origin therapy and EMDR. And yet, like always, by then I knew too much. I was too engaged in the grand political theater of the race, and while I pulled Twitter and Facebook off my phone and did not scan Google News for hot new headlines about the race, I still got PMs from friends and still got tagged on memes bustling all over the 15-second news cycle about what “the movement” was doing.

From the moment that Donald Trump entered the race – seriously? he’s rich. why bother? – rumors flew fast and thick all over the Bernie Bros subculture and certainly all across Facebook that the fix was in in ways that seemed bizarre – yet totally plausible to nearly everyone I talked to. It was being widely speculated that the Clintons had asked their old pal Donald Trump (yes, he gave the Clinton Foundation $100K a few years ago, and yes, the Clintons were guests at his last wedding,) to run as a Republican as a diversion to narrow the RNC playing field and to give Hillary a boost with his wild antics.

Then, in the fall of 2015, it became clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz had limited the number of debates to six, and scheduled at least one of them to collude with NFL games, thus forcing viewers to pick between football and politics. As early as November of 2015, anti-Debbie memes were circulating around the Internet and people called for her resignation, and articles appeared that while her actions seemed biased towards Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama’s hands were tied for a variety of specious reasons, including stuff like her Jewish heritage, as well as a rumor that she’d claim sexism if she were dethroned and Obama didn’t want the hassle. When the California primary occurred and at least a million votes went uncounted, lawsuits were filed, sure, but it seemed clear that whatever chicanery went on at the DNC wouldn’t be uncovered until after the election, and it was entirely unlikely that we’d never really know at all what really happened.

But on July 22, 2016, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Wikileaks released the “Guccifer 2.0” emails, which were a folio of 20,000 emails exchanged between DNC staffers that clearly show that the DNC did not maintain neutrality in the execution of the Democratic primary, and that millions of people’s efforts, time, money – and hopes – were placed into a stinking vat of lies that I have simply dubbed “the illusion of choice.” Shock waves of tsunami size pounded the Internet and the message was the same everywhere I turned – no matter what Sanders has to say about it, we will never ever vote for Hillary. Such is the rage of the disillusioned. Hell hath no fury like a voter lied to.
I was told today that I am “naive” to think that the establishment would do anything but back their own candidate – but I believe that if the DNC wanted Hillary Clinton all along they simply should’ve not held primaries and never suggested that people had a vote that mattered.

And yet, a hallmark of dysfunctional families that people like me spend years uncovering in our own lives is that the maintenance of a dysfunctional family system is utterly dependent on lies. In this regard, the DNC has revealed itself as the ultimate dysfunctional family. And for a nation where many were raised in dysfunctional families and where more than a few of us have spent a lot of time uncovering the reality of those families, the hysteria about the emails and about being “cheated” and lied to by the DNC and Hillary Clinton is almost certain to unleash a backlash come November – no matter who the opposing candidate is.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned – then was immediately re-hired by the Clinton campaign, and she later bragged about having “taken one for the team.” Which suggests, of course, that in the event of a Clinton win, she’ll be well-taken care of – not unlike the child in the family who ignores the fact that Dad gets drunk and likes to beat his son or rape his daughter. Think it’s not playing out that way in the minds of people who put their hopes in Sanders and the analysis of what his candidacy might’ve meant to them? Think again.

I did everything I could not to react – I shut off the phone and the Internet, buried myself in episodes of Aquarius & The Black List and ate ice cream. But then, on July 25, 2016, I received a link to what I believed was a leaked spreadsheet from the Wikileaks dump that showed “proof” that the DNC had been paying Donald Trump and his family all along to stage the campaign, just like the rumors suggested, to knock out the RNC field and create a monster candidate that Hillary could defeat no matter what her record looked like. I received it on my mobile, and without checking it out fully, I re-posted the spreadsheet on my wall with TREASON written out in all caps, then called my step-father hysterical, then hung up the phone in anger and stayed up all night in mute terror and agony over the complicity of the Clintons and the theft of the Election 2016. It’s just like 2000, I thought, but now it’s our side – and then I began to consider this – the story was that the hanging chads did it, in Jeb Bush’s state so…the Bushes stole that race, but…who got Al Gore to cave that year anyway?

This is the kind of questioning that is now happening all over the US and is being examined on the Internet 24 hours a day. The following morning, I checked what I had posted and realized that it was an FEC document outlining the Trumps expenses, which I later discovered on reddit that the DNC obtained it to keep track of how the Trumps were spending their money. I deleted my angry posts and went back to life. As I had been maintaining in my mind for months, it really didn’t matter to me personally anymore who ended up winning Election 2016. As Noam Chomsky said at the beginning, “not even Bernie Sanders can save America,” and I certainly have issues enough of my own at the moment to deal with in my own life.

It is my belief at this point that if the Clinton campaign and the DNC were stupid enough to leave a paper trail of the chicanery for which they now admit to and for which they provided a formal apology to Senator Sanders to at the convention, then that’s their fault for not being better guardians of their secret actions of their dirty tricks campaign. Like Hillary Clinton’s private server in Chataqua, which was insecure and hacked, and her use of an insecure Blackberry while she was Secretary of State, it is now clear that neither Clinton nor her party understand the Internet at all, not as a method of sending messages, handling social media, or recognizing that the spin on social media about what they’ve done far outweighs the reach of CNN at this point in time. In their arrogance of being sure that they know what’s right for the rest of us by favoring Clinton over Sanders, they have also shown arrogance insofar as understanding that cyber terrorism is a deadly real situation. While Trump might not understand anything about being President, neither the DNC nor Hillary Clinton is someone who should be trusted with deep secrets either – because they lack the ability to secure those assets and keep the nation’s data safe from attack.

As I write this, I’m seated on my living room couch in Santa Cruz, California with my partner and our three cat children – Zelda, Gracie, and Dave. Right now, there’s really only one thing I know for sure about Election 2016. It may matter for a million reasons ranging from the fate of the ACA to abortion rights to the selection of Supreme Court nominees. But as was the case with the elections of 1976 and 1980, this year’s election will *not* tear my family asunder, it will *not* force me to move away from my partner and my cats and my therapist and my doctor. As I work in Walgreen’s and not in politics, it will not force me to look for a new job. In short, it won’t affect me in the way that elections of my childhood changed my whole life, and in that respect, I can assure you, this election doesn’t matter whereby its outcome needs to terrify me as much as I have been terrified in the past. This is the benefit of pulling attention away from “the big picture” and recognizing, at last, that in the words of Gloria Steinem – “the revolution is within.”

Posted in Family Politics Tagged with: , , , ,

November 14th, 2004 by sandyadmin

Inside the Golden Grenade
by Gregory J. Pleshaw, November 14, 2004

 

In the days preceding Election Day 2004, I would catch a glimpse of the Golden Grenade as I cruised down Paseo de Peralta and crack a cynical little smile. The Grenade, perched on a pedestal in front of the Linda Duham gallery, glistening in the afternoon light like a Gucci bauble, struck me not as a glorification of war but as a symbol of the ways in which we dress war up as the golden panacea to solve all of our problems.

Things not going so well? Go to war!
Can’t communicate with your neighbor or spouse? Go to war!
Need a distraction from the workaday grind? Go to war!

Because war, after all, is pretty – it shines in the sunlight like the spectacle of brass bands and young men in uniform, it is rockets-red-glare lighting up the skies of Kabul and Baghdad, it’s a spectacular show of force that gives rise to ratings on CNN and to the everlasting glory of these United States – and it isn’t just beautiful, it’s also sleek and stylish as well.

In other words, the Golden Grenade struck me as a kooky symbol of irony, the common tongue of the art of our time, and knowing Linda Durham as I do, as a brilliant kooky lady who loves a good bitter laugh as much as I do, I felt as if she were cracking a private joke and I was privy to the ironic laughter of it, because both of us know better than to consider war as a fashion statement, no matter what George W. Bush, Bill O’Reilly, or Coco Chanel might have to say otherwise.

In the days following the election, however, the Golden Grenade has become something else entirely as I ride past it on the Paseo. No longer a joke and certainly not very funny at all, the Golden Grenade has become synonymous with my own psyche and perhaps that of any reasonable thinking person in America. We are all a live grenade at the moment, sitting somewhere in the lonely darkness of the 24-hour-news-cycle and the broadband Internet connection, each of us secretly wondering why no one is marching in the streets for the myriad of injustices that have been revealed to us since Election Day, each of us faced with a whole slew of questions that few are daring to ask but which are lingering in our minds nonetheless.

The likelihood that any marching in the streets will be going on is slightly lower than nil – for despite our state-of-the-art communications systems and, um…”free” press, the questions that need to be asked reach into the very heart of what America is and what it means to be an American – and most people just simply aren’t ready for the kind of soul-seraching that this kind of national identity crisis might trigger.

Fortunately for you, since my life seems to be just one identity crisis after another, I am relatively exempt from such massive shocks to the system, so I will ask them and then maybe you can too:

1) Did the Bush administration rig the election in any way, shape, or form?

2) Did John Kerry have any a priori knowledge of the possibility that they might try to do so?

3) If he did not, then why did John Kerry concede the race so very quickly, before all the votes were counted and before any state (including our own) had certified their election results?

4) Was there a deal cut between the Bush administration and John Kerry for Kerry not to question the outcome of the race?

5) Does that deal include a pledge by the administration not to make any attempts to block former President Bill Clinton’s ascendency to the Secretary-General slot at the United Nations when Kofi Annan resigns early next year?

6) Do the answers to any of these questions matter to us any more, one way or the other?

7) Has creeping fascism crept up on us so quietly that we hardly notice it’s there?

8) Are we honestly being asked to accept, by the talking heads on TV and the headless wonders at the Democratic Party, that it was the “immorality” of gay marriage that drove millions of Americans to vote for warfare over healthcare, big money interest over an increased federal minimum wage, and an energy policy that has driven the cost of crude oil up to $55 a barrel, the highest price ever?

9) Do the majority of Americans really believe that the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attack on sovereign nations won’t come back to hurt us?

10) Does it concern any Americans (including us liberals) in the slightest that devolution in our social policies and a go-it-alone strategy in geo-political enterprises create exactly the right conditions for either the EU Euro or the Chinese yuan to supersede the dollar as the premiere global currency?

11) Has the digital divide of the Information Age really created an intra-national dynamic whereby the wealthiest and most well-educated members of the blue states are nevertheless at the utter mercy of the poorer and more socially ignorant red states?

12) And if that’s the case, then what precisely are we, as wine-swillin’, brie-eatin’, New Yorker readin’, private schools for our kids sendin’, college-educated, multi-culturated, cash-earnin’, equity-acquirin’, tax-payin’ American liberals going to do about the great unwashed out there, you know, the crank-snortin’, fried-food lovin’, truck-drivin’, wife-beatin’, ignorant racist homophobic mysognistic shitheads who HATE our values yet want our federal tax dollars, our movies, music, and television products, our teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors, defense attorneys, and everyone else who might choose one career over another because they’d rather Help Out Their Neighbor (altruism is not a trait of either a social or a fiscal conservative) than cash in and Screw Their Neighbor – who may be responsible for getting us into this egregious mess in the first place?

We can’t answer question 12 before we answer questions 1-5, so it really all comes down to the first five questions. All of those answers are out there, lying in wait deep inside the heart of the Golden Grenade sitting quietly in front of the Linda Durham Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, patiently waiting for someone other than me to start asking those questions, in the loudest and clearest voice they can possibly muster. Go ahead – pull the pin – the rest of us are just about ready to explode anyway.

{republishing this from my archive on November 17, 2016 – in twelve year, how little has changed, eh?}

Posted in Passage of Time, Politics Tagged with: , ,