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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 03:38 am (UTC)word of advice to anyone seriously considering this:- the dollar is low and about to go one helluva lot lower. If you have savings and investments you could find yourself in my sister in law's position of watching them dwindle before your eyes.
Having said that, many a talented Continental European made their fortune moving to first Britain and later America, there's no reason to suppose America will continue to attract the World's most talented elite. Savvy Indians and Chinese started seeing which way the wind is blowing over three years ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 03:43 am (UTC)I totally agree
But the kind of mass exile that's necessary for that to happen is surely...imposible isn't it?some are ready to leave, but many more aren't
isn't there another way for a country to divide like a microscopic cell?
Another option: redraw the map ...
Date: 2004-11-04 04:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 04:17 am (UTC)i think one of the reasons that the people in the blue states get so mad at the people in the red states is because we think that, if we could only just make them listen, if they would just stand still for a second and actually hear what we're saying, theyd come and stand with us - like theyre simply walking around in some sort of trance, waiting for us to snap our fingers and say the magic word. and in fact we cant imagine how any educated person could possibly, upon hearing what we have to say, fail to agree with us. what this leads to is this enormous disconnect, this blinding rage. and suddenly, its not just that they disagree with us; instead they are simply incapable of holding their own nuanced views. theyre suddenly like savages in the new world, standing naked and dumb before the vanguard of christendom: if they wont get religion, then thats their problem. suddenly we're dealing with enlightenment versus simple idiocy, pearls before swine, right? wrong. while i suspect that conservative base is made of a lot of very stupid people, i could say the same for the liberal base - theyre just stupid people who, by chance, are on our side. the breakdown of any real dialog between the two sides in this country owes its existence, im sure, to factors mroe complicated than i can really understand, but to break it down to stupid versus smart is a tempting though dangerous gloss.
now, maybe im only saying this to play devils advocate, because im surely just as frustrated as everyone else at yesterdays turn of events. and the only explanation i could come up with was the fact that half this country is literally retarded. but i really dont think thats the case. theyre just operating from a different ethical standpoint, and until more people can appreciate that standpoint as an actual nuanced, legitimate belief system (despite itself) we're going to remain half red, and half blue. (the idea of this "permanent shift" towards conservatism, by the way, is a little exaggerated, i think. going from 50-50 to 51-49 is hardly a sea change, especially when the candidate who represented that change, who was responsible for selling it to the other side, was an ineffectual lump, almost pathalogically incapable of convincing anyone of anything; a man with a record incapable of inspiring faith in the progressive left, and totally, laughably, incongruous with the repeated claims of de-facto conservatism foisted on the right).
again, three million more people, out of about three-hundred million, chose to vote for george bush. the place is hardly going up in flames. if the progressive left simply abandons ship right now, then there might never be a better chance for change in the future. this country is drifting apart, yes, but the two sides are still quite close, still just 51-49. leave and come back years from now when its 60-40 and youll regret it, i think.
Re: Another option: redraw the map ...
Date: 2004-11-04 04:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 04:39 am (UTC)Isn't the point that four years is an awful long time to erode international relations, to destablise what peace remains around the world, to hack holes in civil rights, to lose more jobs, to raise even more national debt and to whip people into xenophobic hysteria? It's not just a temporary inconveniece. It's a mandate to destroy. Despite the evidence against Bush's self-interest and personal business agenda, more people still voted for him.
worry and <i>do something about it</i>
Date: 2004-11-04 04:57 am (UTC)the same thing could have been said about reagan, nixon, eisenhower...
of course the answer is yes, we are totally fucked for four more years. but we'll be a lot worse off if the attitude is, "two percent went with bush this time, i give up." when things were looking pretty dire in 1968, people were rioting in the streets, and that was with about a solid century or so of immaciated civil liberties, a boldly imperial foreign policy, etc. in the 1980s people were talking about governments in europe falling because ronald reagan, who enjoyed a good deal of support in america, puts nuclear missiles in europe. now, if that wasnt a cause to throw the towl in, i dont know what is.
heres my point: the next four years are going to be shit. we're going to be in at least one more war, but probably two. iraq is going to turn unbelievably ugly in short order. the economy will be fucked, and george bushes smirk only has so many miles left in it. when all that starts to kick in, the people who narrowly supported him this time are going to start looking around, and if theres no one else to look to, then we're really in trouble.
we're always on the verge of disaster, of destruction, of dissolution. but the reason we never quite go over the edge, is because people stay and fight and make their voices heard. if people hadnt stayed and made their voices heard, we would have carpet bombed iraq and flattened it a year ago. instead, people took to the streets and, despite the fact that we still invaded, the war looks nothing - nothing like what it would have looked like just 30 years ago. thirty years ago the government would have allowed drilling in alaska without so much as batting an eye. they would have acted without compunction, but now that there is a strong resistence, theyre agenda, which is being pushed through, is meeting a great deal of resistence and is going a lot slower than it would have elsewise.
so what do we do? take all our friends to canda and ireland? once your voice walks across the border it doesnt matter in this country. leave with enough of your friends and watch everything you ever feared in this country materialize right before your eyes.
Re: worry and <i>do something about it</i>
Date: 2004-11-04 05:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 06:43 am (UTC)I'm not saying this is always the case, but I do find that a lot of people (for example, all the undecided voters I knew) are too damn lazy about their roles as citizens - they don't understand that it is important to do some research, and, at the very least, to question their candidate's words against his or her deeds, and see how they match - the Bush campaign spent a lot of time accusing of Kerry of saying one thing and doing another, when Bush did it on a far more insidious level (appearing to be spiritual, rather than merely playing politics like his opponent).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 07:08 am (UTC)Sometimes perceptions are just grotesquely askew. I just don't know what conversation I would be able to have with a Bush voter that wouldn't reach, after about three steps into the argument, some difference of belief. In the end, we just have to say that there really is a culture war, and that it's political. Some people are just inherently right wing, and vote for right wing candidates whether their policies are in their interests or not, and whether there's internal consistency in their ideologies or not.
Re: Another option: redraw the map ...
Date: 2004-11-04 07:15 am (UTC)Neil
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 07:36 am (UTC)It's very true that conservatives in the red states are not necessarily stupid or uneducated -- it's just that they are not thinking in the way or were not taught along the lines that we wish them to be thinking. That doesn't make them bad, just different. Pull a lefty out of their blue urban paradise and stick them in the fields of Kansas to live for the next four years, and if they manage to survive they might very well find themselves more concerned about the morals their three year old children are being taught and the subsidies their neighboring farmers are getting, etc. Different areas require different kinds of living and education in order to survive, so it should come as no surprise that a different mindset is likely to follow.
Left America doesn't insult the religious farmers of other countries, so why do we insult our own neighbors? The more shit thrown, the less likely they will ever think our way, which is, after all, the way most of us want them to think. Just as sure as Bush and his followers often consider their way to be the 'right way' and the 'only way,' much of the left is guilty of approaching our own views in the same manner. Liberal dictators are no better than conservative ones.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 07:45 am (UTC)There has to be someone to speak up and argue with them; the world's superpower can't just be left alone to follow its awful agenda.
This this news on California providing funding for stem cell research (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3977347.stm) was a small but welcome ray of hope. The right wingers and pro-lifers have been peddling lies about such research, saying that embryos will be produced and harvested specifically for the research, when in fact the tissue comes from living donors, or existing embryos (abortions and necessarily discarded IVF embryos). They peddle lies about the cloning issue as well, obstructing good resaerch based on some horror story about mad scientists creating babies then cutting them up.
Someone needs to be around to argue and fight them, not just ignore them.
I do say this from the relative safety of the Uk though. Ahem. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 07:52 am (UTC)http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Election_04/html/new_9_29_04.html
There are many that show the same thing, but the PIPA poll is well regarded.
The Kerry supporters were fairly correct about his views and positions. My co-worker, a post-grad and one of the only Bush supporters in my office, was completely mistaken with about half of Pres. Bush's policies (for one, she thought that Kerry was for privatizing Social Security).
Face it, religion played a bigger role in this election than anyone could have imagined. Facts didn't seem to matter; neither did the economy or the war.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 07:56 am (UTC)youre right about people being inherently right or left. but the thing is, thats only a minority percentage. or at least thats what i think. i think the people who put him over the top are the more middling voters who did their calculations and came up, in the end, with bush. and these are the people, i think, who are susceptable to reason and debate. im pretty sure that a lot of those people simply have not been confronted with a debate on the ethics of killing civilians in a war. it could very well be that in some small farm town outside des moines, or in the rural dakotas, people have simply not been confronted very often with the question, "why are our lives more important than theirs?"
in all the political discussions ive had with george bush supporters - which are admittedly few - this has been the most likely place to find common ground; "would you support the war if your girlfriend or your mother or your son lived in a neighborhood in baghdad that was about to be bombed?" or something like that.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:02 am (UTC)in any event, i live in boston and john kerry has been my senator all my life. i hated him before he ran, and i didnt much like him when i cast my vote for him. whats more, im fairly well educated and follow the political debate in this country as it evolves. but despite that, i really dont know what john kerrys policies were. other than platitudes and things that were obvious, i based most of my ideas of what hed do in office on presumtions. that, sadly, is how politics works in this country.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:13 am (UTC)Because many of us have families and friends who will continue to live here, thus their problems will continue to be our problems no matter where we live. In a sense, your call to leave the problems that have beset my country for more friendly locales is an easy one to state considering you yourself do not have the same ties we likely have with it. I may decide to leave, but I know my mother and my sister will not. I know my gay friends will not. I know my most of my fellow Americans will not. To just leave for my own personal well-being seems like a selfish decision...one that fulfills all the accusations charged against those amongst the liberals.
Perhaps you should feel some hope and empathy that despite the cards stacked against us, there are many of us who are now driven with purpose. Or perhaps I might have to also consider you think you're watching lambs to the slaughter. Hopefully we can have your support and confidence, no matter where you call home.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:20 am (UTC)What happened yesterday is a new occurence. A large majority of Bush supporters felt that the economy was on the wrong track. A large amount of Bush supporters felt that the Iraq War was going poorly. However, the biggest issue in exit polls was "faith issues."
People were willing to overlook the economy and the war on terror because of faith issues.
When has that ever been the case? Perhaps Reagan? The religious right had a large say in Reagan's presidency, but most people LIKED and UNDERSTOOD Reagan's policies, and most people got them right in the polls. Most people got Clinton's policies right. And although Kerry was woefully unspecific, most people got his general policies right. People got Bush's policies completely wrong. They think he's for things that he's completely against. I can't stress that enough.
Also, well over 50% still believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. About half still believe that there is a connection between Saddam and 9/11. You can't blame this on the press and you can't really blame it on Fox News. This is something else.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 08:57 am (UTC)again, though, this is not the same as stupidity or religious fundamentalism. its really poor insight, a lack of investigative creativity, and a lack of healthy skepticism. i just cant bring myself to believe that half o this country is just plain stupid - despite the fact that i find myself fighting off the notion every day - because if that were the case, then all hope is lost. all of it.
i suppose that theres definitely a dialectic shift at work here, and history is still unfolding into weird shapes even now. but, i mean, i cant just chalk it all up to sheer stupidity. nothing is ever that simple, i hope.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 09:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 10:04 am (UTC)I'll keep that in mind when my autistic nephew's programs get cut.
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-04 10:21 am (UTC)