When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek. Not the new fangled remake from the 80s and 90s, but the original show from the late 1960s. I know, I know, for the non-initiated in such pastimes the cheese factor is high. But I can’t help it. Pop culture has always had an insidious way of informing my experience.
I want to tell you about this one episode (for sticklers out there, it’s an episode called “A Taste of Armageddon”) in which the crew of the Enterprise arrives on a planet where two countries have been fighting a lengthy war. The weird thing is that the crew doesn’t encounter a devastated and war-torn planet. You see, the warring groups had gone and made their war virtual. They’d set it up so that each attack and counterattack occurred via computer game. When each side lost in the game, they’d send a group of their citizens to die (for real) in a sort of sci-fi body-pulverizing gas chamber. There you go. No fuss, no muss, no mess.
Well, Captain Kirk is so upset by this he takes it upon himself to destroy this virtual war system, even though the two countries believe it’s made their war more humane. Sure, they haven’t had true peace or diplomacy for generations, but they believe they’ve been managing pretty well. But Kirk rails that this is exactly the problem: Because there’s no real physical aspect of their war, they’ll fight it forever. From Kirk’s point of view, if you decide to be enemies, you have to deal with the real-world consequences – the death and loss and hurt that war actually causes. The key takeaway of the episode: It’s irresponsible to sanitize war.
In the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself thinking about this Star Trek episode. Why? Well, just listen to the TV and the radio, read our newspapers. How do we talk about war?
You know how it sounds. The language we use in the United States to talk about war uses a lot of technical and political terminology, words and phrases that didn’t really exist before WWII – things like “collateral damage”, “theater”, “actionable intelligence”, “non-state actors”, “unmanned drones”. Strange phrases that seem to have only vague meanings, and tend to just wash over those of us who go about our increasingly busy lives of school, work, family, community, and place of worship. Add to that the fact that we never see an actual war zone on the TV news (as people did during Vietnam), never see the bodies, the blood, the crumpled buildings, the coffins, the shell-shocked soldiers and civilians. It’s hard for people to get a real understanding of the consequences of war if they never have to come face to face with them. For better or for worse, human beings learn best by experiencing things.
I wonder sometimes if these sanitized phrases have come into existence – not just because of the media or political forces – but because it’s simply not that easy to talk about war (not even for soldiers) if you really confront it. Because confronting it involves looking at death. Not person-by-person death, say from disease, or auto accident, or old age. But mass death because of metal tearing apart flesh and buildings coming violently to pieces. It’s beyond disturbing and if you think about it too hard, if you put yourself there inside your mind, if you really use your imagination about what war is, you can quickly get overwhelmed with a whole host of unpleasant feelings.
If we, in our ostensible democracy, are going to make decisions together about stuff like war, it’s awfully hard to do what’s right for all of us if we don’t get a little more real in assessing the consequences. After all, they don’t go away just because we changed the names of some ugly things to make them sound not so bad and made sure some upsetting pictures don’t get shown in nice folks’ living rooms. You can blame the media or the politicians for our sanitized wars, but we also have ourselves to confront.
Getting back to the episode, I think what Kirk did was call out the cowardice involved in waging war while running from a reckoning with its brutality.
How do you talk about war? With whom? What do you think about how war is portrayed in the media? Does it matter?
Friday, May 29, 2009
Friday, November 14, 2008
Preconditions for third party politics
This is my first blog posting, though I realize now that I’ve been posting blogs inside my head since before there was an Internet, let alone a Web 2.0. So here I am, adding my disembodied voice to the multitudes here in cyberspace. My intention: to share some thoughts and ideas about politics, culture, consciousness and whatever comes to mind. I’d like to consider myself passionate, but not strident. Civil but not a pushover. And deeply aware of not having a monopoly on good ideas, the truth or any other such hifalutin’ grandiosity.
I’d sure like to consider myself these things, but my behavior during the course of this experiment will go a ways longer toward showing how accurate any of these “considerations” really are. That’s the reality we all live in – that slippage between who we’d like to be and where we’re really at. The better we acknowledge the slippage, the better chance we have of actually putting in the work it takes to even come close to embodying our most passionately held significations about ourselves. Anyway, blogs are for talking about stuff, so let's go.
I’d like to talk about third-party politics in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. Specifically, I want to address the issue of third-party candidates (It should be noted here that I do not mean presidential candidates, as third parties have not even come close at this point in time to gaining enough mass interest to make their presidential candidates part of widespread political discourse), their supporters and the relative viability of political platforms that lay outside our age-old two-party discourse.
To get to this exploration within some kind of context, we could easily get into a whole discussion about the history of third parties, particularly the farmers/peoples’ movement that erupted at the end of the 19th century and its impact on citizen consciousness and government policy, but what I’d like to do is start with a bit about the presidential election in 2000. To anyone who’s been inclined to pay attention to the general mood/outlook of the electorate since Watergate (and this can be a difficult thing to get a handle on, since the country is so large and diverse an we live our lives within limited circles), it’s been pretty evident that people have been feeling a level of dissatisfaction with both parties that makes it possible for third parties to have an impact on our day-to-day politics. This was apparent even in 1992, when Ross Perot made a huge dent (in a one-off fashion) as an insurgent candidate. Had he not been present to embody voter dissatisfaction, Clinton may very well not have won the election.
The 2000 election represented a major opportunity for a third party to gain more widespread acceptance of its ideas. There were several things happening at once at that time:
• A significant amount of people were severely disappointed by the Clinton admin, blow jobs notwithstanding – no systemic problems the country faces were honestly addressed during his tenure, especially for working people
• Tabloid-style 24-hr news cycles trivialized or ignored serious issues, leading many voters to seek info outside of official channels via the rapidly developing Internet (Indymedia for one)
• The shutdown of WTO talks in Seattle 1999 as a result of street actions taken by grassroots groups and individual citizens helped bring back the belief that citizens could have real influence on the national and international stage
• Al Gore ran a tepid, advisor-influenced campaign that failed to inspire the people. He underperformed against an easy mark in GWB.
• The overwhelming influence of money in politics became so impossible to ignore that the actual differences between the two parties seemed less apparent to many voters/citizens
• Ralph Nader, although he didn’t receive all that many votes, electrified disaffected audiences in huge rallies around the country and garnered a certain amount of attention for the Green Party, which actually had in many respects a persuasive, thought-provoking platform in need of greater development and attention. This was, I think, a significant achievement.
Despite the debacle of the 2000 election decision - and I would love a lawyer to weigh in here and explain to me whether or not the Supreme Court actually has the legal right to overrule the decision of a state Supreme Court – the energy of the Nader campaign opened the door for the Green Party to make a huge leap in acceptance and interest (over time) by a wide variety of citizens. Unfortunately, the subsequent moves by the Green Party showed that they either didn’t see, weren’t able or didn’t know how to capitalize on their opportunity.
I have a real interest in seeing the growth of a third party within a larger peoples’ movement in this country. And it strikes me that, as the debate rages over whether or not Barack Obama will be a true change agent (on which I won’t elaborate, as journalists, scholars and bloggers have been covering this territory plenty starting before the election), a third party with some kind of juice among the electorate, not to mention actual representation in at the very least state and town government, would be instrumental in enlarging mainstream policy debate and pushing an Obama administration (and possibly more importantly, members of Congress) towards more systemic solutions for what ails this country, this people, this continent and this planet. Just imagine if the Green Party had really enacted a strategy to build the party, its ideas and its constituency from the ground up over the past 8 years and what that collective power would bring to bear RIGHT NOW both politically and culturally. Hmmm…..
Now, in my next post I’m going to try and get a discussion going about how a third party could make a good start on building itself up and also get into some observations about the 60s and how we can learn from that massive period of change in relation to the building of cultural/political movements.
Thanks so much for listening, if you’re out there.
Best,
Rufus Xevious
I’d sure like to consider myself these things, but my behavior during the course of this experiment will go a ways longer toward showing how accurate any of these “considerations” really are. That’s the reality we all live in – that slippage between who we’d like to be and where we’re really at. The better we acknowledge the slippage, the better chance we have of actually putting in the work it takes to even come close to embodying our most passionately held significations about ourselves. Anyway, blogs are for talking about stuff, so let's go.
I’d like to talk about third-party politics in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. Specifically, I want to address the issue of third-party candidates (It should be noted here that I do not mean presidential candidates, as third parties have not even come close at this point in time to gaining enough mass interest to make their presidential candidates part of widespread political discourse), their supporters and the relative viability of political platforms that lay outside our age-old two-party discourse.
To get to this exploration within some kind of context, we could easily get into a whole discussion about the history of third parties, particularly the farmers/peoples’ movement that erupted at the end of the 19th century and its impact on citizen consciousness and government policy, but what I’d like to do is start with a bit about the presidential election in 2000. To anyone who’s been inclined to pay attention to the general mood/outlook of the electorate since Watergate (and this can be a difficult thing to get a handle on, since the country is so large and diverse an we live our lives within limited circles), it’s been pretty evident that people have been feeling a level of dissatisfaction with both parties that makes it possible for third parties to have an impact on our day-to-day politics. This was apparent even in 1992, when Ross Perot made a huge dent (in a one-off fashion) as an insurgent candidate. Had he not been present to embody voter dissatisfaction, Clinton may very well not have won the election.
The 2000 election represented a major opportunity for a third party to gain more widespread acceptance of its ideas. There were several things happening at once at that time:
• A significant amount of people were severely disappointed by the Clinton admin, blow jobs notwithstanding – no systemic problems the country faces were honestly addressed during his tenure, especially for working people
• Tabloid-style 24-hr news cycles trivialized or ignored serious issues, leading many voters to seek info outside of official channels via the rapidly developing Internet (Indymedia for one)
• The shutdown of WTO talks in Seattle 1999 as a result of street actions taken by grassroots groups and individual citizens helped bring back the belief that citizens could have real influence on the national and international stage
• Al Gore ran a tepid, advisor-influenced campaign that failed to inspire the people. He underperformed against an easy mark in GWB.
• The overwhelming influence of money in politics became so impossible to ignore that the actual differences between the two parties seemed less apparent to many voters/citizens
• Ralph Nader, although he didn’t receive all that many votes, electrified disaffected audiences in huge rallies around the country and garnered a certain amount of attention for the Green Party, which actually had in many respects a persuasive, thought-provoking platform in need of greater development and attention. This was, I think, a significant achievement.
Despite the debacle of the 2000 election decision - and I would love a lawyer to weigh in here and explain to me whether or not the Supreme Court actually has the legal right to overrule the decision of a state Supreme Court – the energy of the Nader campaign opened the door for the Green Party to make a huge leap in acceptance and interest (over time) by a wide variety of citizens. Unfortunately, the subsequent moves by the Green Party showed that they either didn’t see, weren’t able or didn’t know how to capitalize on their opportunity.
I have a real interest in seeing the growth of a third party within a larger peoples’ movement in this country. And it strikes me that, as the debate rages over whether or not Barack Obama will be a true change agent (on which I won’t elaborate, as journalists, scholars and bloggers have been covering this territory plenty starting before the election), a third party with some kind of juice among the electorate, not to mention actual representation in at the very least state and town government, would be instrumental in enlarging mainstream policy debate and pushing an Obama administration (and possibly more importantly, members of Congress) towards more systemic solutions for what ails this country, this people, this continent and this planet. Just imagine if the Green Party had really enacted a strategy to build the party, its ideas and its constituency from the ground up over the past 8 years and what that collective power would bring to bear RIGHT NOW both politically and culturally. Hmmm…..
Now, in my next post I’m going to try and get a discussion going about how a third party could make a good start on building itself up and also get into some observations about the 60s and how we can learn from that massive period of change in relation to the building of cultural/political movements.
Thanks so much for listening, if you’re out there.
Best,
Rufus Xevious
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