Knob Magazine

For nearly a year I have fought off every urge and impulse to post about the election.  With just a couple of days to go, I apologize for breaking my promise to keep Knob rancor free.  But I simply can’t resist.

The one hallmark of this election season has been the unanimity of undescribed significance of the election.  Both sides seem to agree that this election is more than just a fork in the road.  It is more than a public expression of choice, but an emblem of a political moment.  Every party knew that the any continuation of Bush politics would be political suicide, so we knew that this was an unusual election in that sense.  Once the Democratic primaries were down to a woman and a black man, it began to take on the air of history.  But the gender or sex of a person, to many, seemed a poor rationale for selecting a president.  It was as if the possibility of the first non-white, non-male president in history a forgone conclusion that the country has been comfortable with for a long time.  Then there was the meltdown of the financial system, which invariably raised the stakes, but it appeared there was little difference between the candidates on what to do on the bail out package.  We were left back at square one, knowing we were in a moment, but incapable of describing what that moment was.  Then came Joe the Plumber.

What was once a campaign about experience and change, became a heated debate on economics.  More than just what to do to free up the credit markets and prevent the economy from going into a recession, but a revival of the classic debate between liberalism and conservatism: whether to grow economies from the top down or the bottom up.  So when Obama said the magic words “spread the wealth around” it activated what appeared to be an automated response in the political discourse:  Is government involvement socialism?  To be sure, the socialism questions was already milling about the campaign on both sides regarding the financial crisis, but Obama’s statement was the first time it seemed a candidate identified with something that might be considered socialist.  So started the debate on the difference between “spreading the wealth around” and “from each according to his means and to each according to his needs”.

The debate was never intended to be about socialism.  Even liberals are without a clue as to what socialism is. Some say it is a high rate of taxation, others actual government ownership of business, Let’s be honest, when we talk about socialism, we aren’t talking about the economic system, but simply about an abstract and absolute threat to capitalism, or more appropriately, the American way of life.  Central to the accusations that Obama is an elite, socialist, terrorist or Arab is the idea that politics in the United States is a battle between nostalgic Americanism and forces attempting to tear it apart.  When the great consensus of World War 2 dissolved during the 1960s the country was divided on the basis of identity, not politics, into those who thought the country was fine, and those who thought it to be profoundly unjust.

This narrative has been the model for more than half a century.  It is about Socialism vs Capitalism, Unity vs Diversity and Crusade vs Jihad. We have come to think of our politics in binary logic as who we are and who we cannot become.  What if, politics in the united states was no longer this way?  This is not somehow an endorsement of any one candidates capacity to cross the isle or heal divisions.  This is the moment.

We sit on the cusp of the breakdown of the political duality that sustained both parties since Lyndon Johnson delivered the south to the Republican party by signing the Civil Rights act.  Slowly time has relegated the memories of the greatest generation to the reverent platitude of epitaph and their children who participated either fomented the cultural revolution of the 1960 or lamented its rise, recognize their time in the spotlight will soon come to a close.  Indeed the politics of the Bush and Clinton administrations were the political animations of theories crafted a generation earlier on the campuses of the Ivy League.  While Bill Clinton was smoking dope at Oxford reading Keynes as history, and Cheney was busy flunking out of Yale observing Henry Kissenger with the doe eyed awe of a virgin at a Rolling Stone’s concert.  Both were able to formulate their solutions to the cultural crisis by virtue of avoiding service in Vietnam.

Today, Cheney has quieted, and Clinton looks all the more the wandering but meaningless specter that is the ex-president.  The war in Iraq  has made Vietnam seem the more the topical matter of Ken Burns than Charlie Sheen.  And, for the first time in a century voters who never experienced the socialist threat will step into the voting booth.  For these 18 year olds, it is the supression of women in Afghanistan, not the imprisonment of Havel, the fall of the twin towers, not the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima which defines their understanding of the world.  These new voters are concerned with the IMF, not the CCCP.

Suddenly, it became clear.  What makes this election indicative about the moment, is not who is running, but who isn’t.  McCain isn’t just a war hero, but a hero war hero of the war that served as the dividing line between left and right in American politics.  Unlike Bob Dole and HW Bush, his decision to serve didn’t rise out of the sort of immediate sense of obligation, but as a identifying juxtaposition to the dishonor of those who refused to serve.  Obama, on the other hand, isn’t just a black man, but a black man who did not participate in the civil rights movement.  Whatever choice he might have made about what side to be on during the 60s, it was informed by changes that had already occurred.

It is unfair say that McCain is representative of a bygone era, the jury is still out on whether the ideas and distinctions of the 1960s still ring true to American’s today.  What we can say is that the choice of McCain as the republican candidate represents a retreat towards the the fundamentals of the conservative identity.  “Country First” is an express rejection not only of the liberal secularists, but the academic conservatives of the Bush administration.  Indeed, early in the campaign McCain decided to run on this story, tauting his first hand understanding of war as both the antithesis of an inexperienced Obama, but as the antidote to a trigger happy administration.  Perhaps his reluctance to criticize the Iraq war prevented him from successfully communicating the latter.

What is most interesting about the McCain campaign thusfar is how long it took to start talking about the economic differences between Republicans and Democrats.  Part of this is obviously has to do with distancing himself from the perception of Republican responsibility for the financial crisis.  But one can’t help but wonder if McCain also sensed that the magnetic stripe had long since worn off the back of the Socialism card.  Unlike, Bush’s two campaigns that seemed more than willing to deal in the currency of the cultural divisions of the sixties, McCain seemed to know that too much time had passed for people to relate to those analogies.  The days of saying you opponent got jungle fever and had an illegitimate kid seemed to be coming to an end.  The now famous photo of a panicked McCain reaching to grab a microphone from a frizzy haired old lady who was convinced Obama was an Arab, might be the perfect illustration that McCain was familiar with the greatest dangers of running a nostalgic campaign: dementia.

For those of us who were convinced after the election in 2004 that reason had been purged from politics, these recent events seem to show that it may be alive and well.  Many of three percent of the country that gave Bush his second term have died off and those still reveling in the patriotic fervor after 9/11 look more and more like the drunks who hang out far after the party has ended: loud, obnoxious and out of touch.  Even Fox News,  the network that liberals credited with the post-modern development of a separate and distinct conservative reality, seems to be coming back down to earth as at least some of their pundits see the world moving towards a dramatically different political landscape.

When our children open their history books in twenty years to read of how the world became what it is I doubt November 4, 2008 will say anything more than the winner of the election.  It will be in the one or two pages that follow, that some grainy image from a camera phone will depict some event that we will serve as the icon that the times are once again a changin’.  Nevertheless, in two days we will know if the cultural politics of the sixties have finally played themselves out.  While I some might say that this is a question of if this will happen, I think it more of a question of when.  This election has shown that the country is teetering on this generational divide.  It was placed there by time and time will inevitaby tip the balance.  I’d be lying if I said I hope this happens sooner than later.

On my walk home I pass the now ubiquitous Obama posters.  The blues and reds have already faded to gray and the images, in a fit of escalating irony, look even more like totalitarian posters that inspired them.  Even the word hope scrawled across the bottom has been largely abandoned, in favor of the more specific “change”  In this era of early voting, it seems that time has already passed the campaigns by.  Perhaps the problem was that we didn’t know what we were hoping for.  I like most everyone else, tired of the phrase and the election.  Hope, until a couple days ago was the last thing on my mind.

I often grow tired of seeing Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones again, The Rolling Stones sell out a stadium crowd and the ghosts of past heros cast about like trading cards. I am exhausted with a world where I’ve seen the the brightest and best of a generation lost retracing the steps of Hemingway, Abbey, Kerowac and yes, Ginsburg.  In the past eight years this sensation has been all the more acute.  9/11 was Pearl Harbor.  the Saddam statue was the Berlin Wall and the financial crisis the Great Depression.  We had been trapped under the dictate of our elders and sentenced to live out the tragedies that resulted when their metaphors no longer matched reality.

Regardless of what happens in two days.  Seeing a Vietnam vet go up against an 80s community organizer and watching the way the politics of the past has so rapidly degraded into senility gives me hope.  Not the hope that we will have universal healthcare, eliminate pork from the budget or get out of Iraq, but the hope that soon, it would seem very soon, I will be able to write about the world I live in with my own words.  Hope that we will all be freed from the shackles of metaphor, liberated from tyranny of our parent’s cultrual crisis.  This is real Hope.  It might not be Tuesday, but soon, we will ride into a future with just that we can carry with us, and we will describe it for what it is.