The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Nov. 4th, 2004 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe response to yesterday's entry, Exit this Roman shell, was overwhelming. Over a hundred comments, many poems, people talking movingly about big existential choices, their future, their disgust and despair at the way things have turned out.
Some disagreed with my 'just walk away' message, saying that in difficult times the thing to do is stay and fight. Others were looking seriously into their exile options. Well, Harper's magazine has just published Electing To Leave, a sombre and sobering guide to the real options Americans considering exile have. It's worth a read. As is this article about Canada's attitude to political refugees from south of the border. But don't let these reality checks put you off. They mostly focus on red tape and money. What Harper's doesn't point out is that you can leave in a much more sly, Shweikian way, leave with a foot in the door, leave for a while, using tourist visas or study programs. Living abroad, forever, according to the rules, is complicated, troublesome and expensive. But if you don't mind living abroad for a while, in a twilit hinterland of legal ambiguities, protected by a cat's cradle of stretched rules, keeping your options open, you can get away with it much more easily. And it may cost you less to live abroad than it does to stay at home.
Some people said that walking away from a problem is not the way to solve it. My response to that is, why should someone else's problem be my problem? We all have the right to choose the 'dialectical backdrop' of our lives. To choose what thesis to be the antithesis to. That's why it's important not to let other people's problems set your agenda. You've got to find your own. The danger today is that quite a small group of religious, resentful, educationally-deprived rural people, the 53 million who voted for Bush, seek to set the intellectual agenda for the whole world. They want their problems to become ours. And their problems, as far as they see it, are mostly cultural ones. They have problems with things like abortion, irreligion, homosexuality and liberalism. The more they suffer poverty, the more these people vote for governments which enrich the already-rich. The more they follow religion, the more they put themselves in the firing line of other religions, while ignoring religious tenets such as 'thou shalt not kill' and 'turn the other cheek'.
In today's Guardian, Jonathan Friedland puts it like this:
'Many Bush voters admitted their unhappiness on Iraq and confessed to great economic hardship - two issues which ordinarily would be enough to defeat an incumbent. But these voters backed Mr Bush, because he reflected something they regarded as even more important: their values. Those values can be boiled down to issues - abortion, guns, gays - but they represent a larger, cultural difference. One Republican analyst asks people four questions. Do you have a friend or relative serving in the military? Do you have any personal ties to rural America? Do you attend religious services on a weekly basis? Do you own a gun? Answer yes to most or all of those, and you are "a cultural conservative" and most likely vote Republican. Answer no, and the chances are you live on the east or west coast and vote Democrat. In 2000 this cultural split was dead-even: 50-50 America. This time it was 51-49 America, with the conservatives in the majority. Put plainly, the US is moving steadily and solidly to the right. That poses a problem for Democrats, who have to learn to speak to the people of those red states if they are ever to hold power again. But it also poses a problem for America, which has somehow to house two radically diverging cultures in one nation. And it may even pose a problem for the rest of the world's peoples, as they watch the sole superpower, the indispensable nation, chart a course they fear - and barely understand.'
Can blue America dialogue with red America? Sure they speak the same language, but will people with such different cultural values listen to each other? Can the stupid listen to the smart without smarting? Can the urban listen to the rural without sneering? What if the red staters already feel the 'urban elites' have lectured them too much? What if they feel they have power, through their self-proclaimed representative in the White House, and therefore don't need to listen to the 'liberals' ever again? The boot is on the other foot now, the donkey rides the man.
'A military giant yoked uncomfortably to a political dwarf', is how Mark Danner describes Bush's America. The political domination of the advanced blue states by the backward red ones now amounts to an extreme case of 'taxation without representation'. The insecure outsiders who complain about 'metrosexuals' and the 'left-leaning media' are firmly established as a new -- and moronic -- sort of elite themselves. But the whole thing is dangerously unbalanced. Because the fact is that education not only tends to lead to liberalism, it also leads to wealth creation. The economy does better under Democrats. It's liberals who generate the lion's share of the ideas, the products, the services, and the wealth that gives Bush's America its world status. Cut off from its blue coasts and its Democratic-voting big cities, America would rank somewhere behind South Korea in the league table of world nations.
That's why I think exile -- if only temporary -- is now the best option for liberal Americans. Travelling the world is a splendid thing to do, and a mass exodus of intelligent life from the US would quickly show the red staters who makes the money that pays for their president's wars. Depressingly, whereas the choice for America on Tuesday was Bush or Kerry, the choice for America now may be between two forms of bankruptcy: the kind Bin Laden described in last week's video, when he said he wanted to provoke Bush into calamitously expensive wars to undermine the US as he'd undermined the USSR in Afghanistan, or the bankruptcy that follows a mass evacuation of disenchanted liberals who feel that their way of living and thinking has become unfeasible in a country swinging ever-further towards moronic and murderous right-wing populism.
Some disagreed with my 'just walk away' message, saying that in difficult times the thing to do is stay and fight. Others were looking seriously into their exile options. Well, Harper's magazine has just published Electing To Leave, a sombre and sobering guide to the real options Americans considering exile have. It's worth a read. As is this article about Canada's attitude to political refugees from south of the border. But don't let these reality checks put you off. They mostly focus on red tape and money. What Harper's doesn't point out is that you can leave in a much more sly, Shweikian way, leave with a foot in the door, leave for a while, using tourist visas or study programs. Living abroad, forever, according to the rules, is complicated, troublesome and expensive. But if you don't mind living abroad for a while, in a twilit hinterland of legal ambiguities, protected by a cat's cradle of stretched rules, keeping your options open, you can get away with it much more easily. And it may cost you less to live abroad than it does to stay at home.
Some people said that walking away from a problem is not the way to solve it. My response to that is, why should someone else's problem be my problem? We all have the right to choose the 'dialectical backdrop' of our lives. To choose what thesis to be the antithesis to. That's why it's important not to let other people's problems set your agenda. You've got to find your own. The danger today is that quite a small group of religious, resentful, educationally-deprived rural people, the 53 million who voted for Bush, seek to set the intellectual agenda for the whole world. They want their problems to become ours. And their problems, as far as they see it, are mostly cultural ones. They have problems with things like abortion, irreligion, homosexuality and liberalism. The more they suffer poverty, the more these people vote for governments which enrich the already-rich. The more they follow religion, the more they put themselves in the firing line of other religions, while ignoring religious tenets such as 'thou shalt not kill' and 'turn the other cheek'.
In today's Guardian, Jonathan Friedland puts it like this:
'Many Bush voters admitted their unhappiness on Iraq and confessed to great economic hardship - two issues which ordinarily would be enough to defeat an incumbent. But these voters backed Mr Bush, because he reflected something they regarded as even more important: their values. Those values can be boiled down to issues - abortion, guns, gays - but they represent a larger, cultural difference. One Republican analyst asks people four questions. Do you have a friend or relative serving in the military? Do you have any personal ties to rural America? Do you attend religious services on a weekly basis? Do you own a gun? Answer yes to most or all of those, and you are "a cultural conservative" and most likely vote Republican. Answer no, and the chances are you live on the east or west coast and vote Democrat. In 2000 this cultural split was dead-even: 50-50 America. This time it was 51-49 America, with the conservatives in the majority. Put plainly, the US is moving steadily and solidly to the right. That poses a problem for Democrats, who have to learn to speak to the people of those red states if they are ever to hold power again. But it also poses a problem for America, which has somehow to house two radically diverging cultures in one nation. And it may even pose a problem for the rest of the world's peoples, as they watch the sole superpower, the indispensable nation, chart a course they fear - and barely understand.'
Can blue America dialogue with red America? Sure they speak the same language, but will people with such different cultural values listen to each other? Can the stupid listen to the smart without smarting? Can the urban listen to the rural without sneering? What if the red staters already feel the 'urban elites' have lectured them too much? What if they feel they have power, through their self-proclaimed representative in the White House, and therefore don't need to listen to the 'liberals' ever again? The boot is on the other foot now, the donkey rides the man.
'A military giant yoked uncomfortably to a political dwarf', is how Mark Danner describes Bush's America. The political domination of the advanced blue states by the backward red ones now amounts to an extreme case of 'taxation without representation'. The insecure outsiders who complain about 'metrosexuals' and the 'left-leaning media' are firmly established as a new -- and moronic -- sort of elite themselves. But the whole thing is dangerously unbalanced. Because the fact is that education not only tends to lead to liberalism, it also leads to wealth creation. The economy does better under Democrats. It's liberals who generate the lion's share of the ideas, the products, the services, and the wealth that gives Bush's America its world status. Cut off from its blue coasts and its Democratic-voting big cities, America would rank somewhere behind South Korea in the league table of world nations.
That's why I think exile -- if only temporary -- is now the best option for liberal Americans. Travelling the world is a splendid thing to do, and a mass exodus of intelligent life from the US would quickly show the red staters who makes the money that pays for their president's wars. Depressingly, whereas the choice for America on Tuesday was Bush or Kerry, the choice for America now may be between two forms of bankruptcy: the kind Bin Laden described in last week's video, when he said he wanted to provoke Bush into calamitously expensive wars to undermine the US as he'd undermined the USSR in Afghanistan, or the bankruptcy that follows a mass evacuation of disenchanted liberals who feel that their way of living and thinking has become unfeasible in a country swinging ever-further towards moronic and murderous right-wing populism.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-05 09:51 am (UTC)http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=251289&AG
H.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-05 10:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-05 09:07 pm (UTC)In the Guardian, Simon Schama on "The Two Nations".
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-06 09:30 am (UTC)