Transcendent Politics

In an ideal world the American public will awake to its higher nature, nominate Barack Obama, who will play the transcendent politics of reconciliation, leading to the humiliation and defeat of the dirt slinging fear mongering Rudolf Giuliani, bringing a new generation to power and providing a real surge toward the solution of our global predicaments.

However, unless Obama wins the caucus in Iowa and goes on to win in New Hampshire the Democrat nomination is probably a foregone conclusion. In the real world the next election will be yet another duel between the two radically polarized world views represented by the two most polished and dynamic politicians in their respective packs. In this corner, representing for better or worse, the feminized image of the postwar progressive imagination, is HIllary Clinton. In the other corner, representing the coalescence of the Republican winning strategy of inspiring fear and promising protection from the evils of the world, is Rudolf Guiliani. The election will likely be a somewhat strange battle between two New Yorkers, in a country where the political axis of both major parties has long since shifted to the south and the west.

You haven't heard from me lately. I've been listening to all of the drifting media flak, reading a whole slew of books, occasionally attending a movie or two, and catching up on all of those missed television episodes of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 via Netflix. 

Writing has been problematic. My already shortened and impatient attention span has grown even more brief. Holding an antenna out into the mediasphere and trying to detect a coherent and more or less linear message or narrative is a challenge at the best of times and, lately has been confined to short conversations with a select few who can tolerate the occasional burst of passionate incoherent craziness because they know me well enough to wait for the craziness to be replaced by some insight or other. 

Like my friend Peter, who now lives in a trailer park somewhere in New York State. He’s found some contentment among the retired middle class, which has also exposed him to the well meaning idiocy of Republican politics. Peter is an Englishman and, as such, cannot really fathom the depths of enmity which effects the body politic of these United States which, after all is said and done, is fueled by issues left over from the Civil War and even further back to battles between factions in the original war against the British Empire. In a recent Rolling Stone issue that contained interviews with a bunch of generational heavies there was an interview with Bono of U2, who has become a political activist with the ability to endanger his own street cred by rubbing shoulders with the likes of 'Condi' and Paul Wolfowitz, coming away talking about them as if they are fellow travelers on the path to a better world. Of course I understand his need to get these people to anti-up either in rhetoric or big bucks if his various campaigns against international poverty and genocide are to have any realworld traction. Probably, if I could actually get in the same room with the slouching beasts of the Bush administration I would find them to be quite sincere and dedicated people. That will never happen, and I can't help but feel that Bono's sentiments as he bemoans America's loss of respect in the world while suggesting this is the result of some misapprehension on the part of America's critics, exhibits either incredible naivete or an exposure to power and wealth that has caused him to 'cross over' into the alien dimension of the hopelessly out-of-touch. 

Maybe this is just an English thing. People like Bono and my friend, who spent their early years in Britain or Europe and later adopted this country as their home have an awareness that I can only viscerally imagine, of the contrast between personal freedoms that Americans take for granted and the oppressive pressure of Europe's many centuries of social stratification and institutional constipation. They are appalled when they behold our increasingly polarized body politic, where both sides accuse the other of threatening or undermining the very idea of what America means, while the Republic is threatened by so much greater forces than are reflected in these hair splitting arguments between 'liberal' and 'conservative.' While all of the impassioned prose and punditry pits brother against sister the whole world burns, and until America resolves it's family squabbles it appears to be less and less effective at leading the world to a better place. 

The same sort of sentiment arises in our own younger generations, who watch their elders slugging it out over arcane generational minutiae while apparently squandering the future. It's this feeling in particular that provides, for example, the momentum behind the Barack Obama candidacy. An article in the current Atlantic Monthly by Andrew Sullivan* (another Englishman, and a gay conservative) asks the question, “How do we account for the bitter, brutal tone of American politics?" Sullivan posits that "The divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn’t… between God-fearing Americans and the peacenik atheist hippies of lore.” Being both an Americanized Englishman and a member of the "post-boomer" generation Sullivan yearns for a time when this increasingly arcane struggle is over. “If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.”

Well, my message to the post-boomers and the newly arrived is that the struggles of the sixties both go much farther back and will no doubt carry their weight in this nation much further into the future. Don't take me wrong. I cheer on the coming generations, and truly hope that when they finally wrest the helm from our doddering old boomer hands they will have transcended our long festering struggles and moved on to actually doing some constructive healing for the world. I fear, however, that the time has not yet arrived when my generation gives up its passions or power, and in the meantime the rest of the world will just have to be patient while we duke it out. One must keep in mind that there have only been two presidents since Ronald Reagan who were from the post World War Two generation. 

It is necessary perhaps to explain he response of boomers to the present. This appears to me to break down into three major trends: The first and most common response is retreat and denial. This is the response of your average TV junky. We were the first generation to grow up in the realm of television. In sharp contrast to our parents we take in the world through an extra organ, the electronic media interface. As Marshall Mcluhan observed many years ago, our initial response to the grafting of a new organ onto our bodies is one of numbness. Television brings us out of the perceptual reality of logical narrative progression into a realm of rapidly shifting representations in imaginary time and space. Our direct connection with the sensory environment is thus severed, leading to a widening gap between perceiving and acting in the real world.  

In an interview with Norman Mailer for the radio program Open Source** he spoke of how reading was being destroyed by the television commercial, where the coherent narrative is continually interrupted by irrelevant and out of context messages that take us out of the narrative and force us into a disconnected and alienated experience. Al Gore (in a recent interview and his recent book, The Assault On Reason)  speaks of the past sixty years as a transitional time warp "in between eras," that is, between the 500 year old age of print and the newly arrived age of the Internet. Addressing his own reservations about the current state of politics. he comments that in the last election candidates of both major parties spent eighty percent of their campaign budget on television advertising which leads to the reduction of complex issues into simplified sound bites and the demagogic rhetoric of fear.

So, the first response to the intense bombardment of images and messages is to turn off one's rational facilities altogether, substituting for thinking the ready made narratives of those who dominate and control the airwaves. The average so-called NASCAR dad is a person who spends an inordinate amount of time in front of his forty inch flat screen television taking in the spectacle as it is presented while exercising almost no discretion or critical thought. It's easier to get one's opinions ready-made. 

The second response is to pretend that the world can go backward, by seeking refuge in some preset doctrine of fundamentalist religion or politics. We pretend that the world can be somehow 'normalized' if we simply reject the realities we are confronted with, or at least restrict them to areas that can be either avoided or fenced out. This is above all the reality of Mitt Romney, whose every act in life is devoted to being in control and under control. (According to the NewYork Times he eats the same three meals every day. Probably he takes a shit at the same time as well.)  

The third response is to learn the art of living in a postmodern world. This requires becoming aware of the process by which the world of the image is constructed, much like the trick of living in the literary world was learning how to read 'between the lines.' The more we can learn about the actual processes that lie behind the presentation of narratives and ideologies the more transparent they become and the more we close the gap between the world we perceive and the world that is real. The great challenge of the third way is that we are constantly reconstructing an identity in relation to what we perceive, and the ultimate arbiter of our identity and worth is our own evolving sense of moral authority in an ever shifting scenario of the real.  

In an ideal world the American public will awake to its higher nature, nominate Barack Obama, who will play the transcendent politics of reconciliation, leading to the humiliation and defeat of the dirt slinging fear mongering Rudolf Giuliani, bringing a new generation to power and providing a real surge toward the solution of our global predicaments.

However, unless Obama wins the caucus in Iowa and goes on to win in New Hampshire the Democrat nomination is probably a foregone conclusion. In the real world the next election will be yet another duel between the two radically polarized world views represented by the two most polished and dynamic politicians in their respective packs. In this corner, representing for better or worse, the feminized image of the postwar progressive imagination, is HIllary Clinton. In the other corner, representing the coalescence of the Republican winning strategy of inspiring fear and promising protection from the evils of the world, is Rudolf Guiliani. The election will likely be a somewhat strange battle between two New Yorkers, in a country where the political axis of both major parties has long since shifted to the south and the west. 

The outcome is impossible to predict. Guiliani will have the big money and the big media behind him. He's a ruthless fighter and will run a campaign that could pull down enough darkness and fear that a cowed American public will not be able to resist. Significant numbers of both Republicans and Democrats will viscerally react to Hillary because first, she's a woman and the sissy boys of the body politic are terrified of a woman in power, and second because she's a Clinton and we don't ever want to go back to all that. On the other hand a significant part of the electorate will be energized to vote for Hillary for these same reasons. If another major terrorist incident materializes before the election then the nation will no doubt respond with violent paranoia that will result in such a hellish spasm of military reaction that it won't matter much who is president. 

I have learned over the past forty years since the ascendency of Richard Nixon to hope for the best and expect the worst from the American electorate. Whatever the outcome of this current duel, never ask me to lay down my arms or my attitude toward those who would like to revise my history. I have seen what is possible, and will battle for those possibilities until I am dead. Meanwhile politics is the grateful solution to having shooting wars, and I salute all those who chose politics over the use of military hardware. Instead of blowing up the world and each other we can choose to have instead a war of words and images. Whether we resolve our differences in warfare or politics, the spirit of battle is no less passionate and the outcome no less perilous. I wonder if the talk of a spirit of 'transcendent' politics is mostly a fairy tale or a dream. After all, politics deals with oppositions, and we can't really turn away from these and still be true to ourselves. 

  
  
  

*http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama 

**http://www.radioopensource.org/thank-you-norman-mailer/