I could say that the infamous "Mission Accomplished" press staging is the media tidbit that most aptly encapsulates the eight years of "passionate conservative" lunacy that's dominated American (and world) politics for the past eight years. After all, four of the defining traits of George W. Bush's presidency are front-and-center: Glorification of the military-industrial complex, a keen taste of self and mass delusion, an obfuscated presentation of the truth to the public, and an unabashed tendency to over-simplify foreign policy.
Alternatively, I could think back to my first impression of Bush, way back in 2000 when I was 15—which is that he looked like a way goofier version of my father. (Sorry, Dad, you are very good looking. And I love you.)
Instead, the truth of the matter is that the image that most immediately comes to mind when I think of our soon-to-be dearly departed W. is from a series of photographs taken last summer during the Summer Olympics in Beijing—
And then these, of course, also from Beijing—
The man waving his country's flag in those pictures? He is so, so happy. He is so damned proud to be an American and watch his fellow citizens kick ass at sports on the world stage. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
The reason these images are so ingrained in my mind's eye is because this happy-go-lucky volleyball enthusiast is the President of the United States—the "Leader of the Free World." These pictures, at the time, screamed to me: "Let me out! I'm finished. Done! Can I go home now? Can I just not have to worry about being President anymore?"
And now, a week before he actually gets his wish? Well, the pictures say the same thing, but I admit that last summer when these pictures were published and re-published everywhere, I was already starting to breathe a sigh of relief: It's nearly over, it's nearly over. Of course, I should have known that Bush & Co. were not about to vacate 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue without a final coup de grâce emblematic of the prior seven and a half years, no matter how little time was left.
The havoc his administration has wreaked on the nation in the months since last summer—piled upon that unfurled in the years preceding, of course—are so gargantuan, so unwieldy, that, well... I'm struggling to figure out who might be the only person unhappy Bush is soon to be out of the White House, if even he's grasping to be let out the door.* And it makes me sad that our government doesn't allow for early retirement of an entire administration.
And so, when I think of George W. Bush, former president of the United States of America, I'll forever think of a sports fan who was promoted beyond not only his capability but also his interest. And I'll hope we've learned some sort of lesson.
*(Oh, right—Dick.)
-- Daniela Perdomo
I was raised an agnostic, have embraced atheism, and am pretty much entirely surrounded by other rejecters of religion. Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign I was awed—and not in a comfortable sense—by the way every candidate professed his or her adoration of Jesus Christ the Lord. Surely, I thought, they are merely being politically expedient. (This political expediency thesis makes it easier for me to understand how a man of Obama's intellect could say he believes in God despite being raised in a decidedly non-religious home and having remained non-religious until early adulthood.)
Despite the secular bubbles I travel in, I am not delusional about the existence of the god delusion in the United States. In this country—the most religious developed nation in the world —our dollar bills say it all: "In God We Trust."
I have no problem with others believing in Jesus, Allah, Xenu, Haley's Comet, what-have-you. I understand that religion is as old as mankind and even though I am certain we are trending toward secularization in the long-run, the United States is not there yet. If religion gets you through the night, the day, the life, so long as you don't impose it on me and the laws that govern my citizen life, then I absolutely respect your free-will choice to practice it just as I hope you respect my free-will choice to abstain from it.
All this meandering merely to say that if evangelicals and other believers want to work with progressives on issues ordinarily unassociated with the religious right, that's wonderful. Wonderful, indeed. But I don't believe that in order to attract their numbers, progressives have to pander to their religious beliefs. While it may be politically expedient in the short-term, it is neither politically nor morally expedient in the long-term to cater to fundamentalists' religious tenets, particularly not when those same beliefs have been often used to justify the stripping of others' rights.
If evangelicals are moving in our direction, it's because progressivism is inclusive where fundamentalism is exclusive. It would be wrong to exclude religious people from the progressive game but it also would be wrong to play by fundamentalism's failed rules and let religion referee.
-- Daniela Perdomo
"We must patiently explain why taxing or regulating noble things (like work, saving, and entrepreneurial risk-taking) means you’ll get less of what makes America great and why subsidizing other things (like idleness and single parenthood) means you’ll get more of the destructive behaviors that ultimately will drag us down."
— An excerpt from a piece in the National Review by the vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.
What struck me most as I read Franc's piece on the National Review's website, was how much of his prose could be turned around and used to make arguments that nullify his own.
For example, he writes: "All policy battles on Capitol Hill require an adult to temper the animal spirits and childishness that so often induce lawmakers to enact irrational and damaging laws." According to Franc, this "childishness" applies to people who believe in income taxes and providing temporary sustenance to those who can't find work. I can earnestly say the exact same thing about somebody who believes that single parenthood corrupts society and spreading wealth and opportunity destroys it. Further, I can't hesitate to call laws that tax the poorest people at the same rate as the richest or that make inheritances immune to taxation "irrational and damaging."
In a way, I could even write something like this, though in a less pompous tone: "We must demonstrate that, so long as our alternatives are grounded in a proper appreciation and understanding of human nature and demand the best from our citizens, Americans will rise to the challenges ahead." The difference, of course, would be that my understanding of human nature is completely different from his, because I don't frame my view of my fellow citizens in a binary, hard-coded moral spectrum.
Therein lies the problem with an argument like Franc's: It frames every policy discussion—including this economic debate over taxes and subsidies—in terms of moral inequalities, instead of in terms of structural inequalities. The fact of the matter is that issues like poverty, crime, and unemployment are the result of structural differences, not moral differences. One cannot vilify the poor, simultaneously lionize the rich, and expect the less fortunate to believe and fight for that old American Dream. Forgive me the Marxist tone, but this type of inequality in power and reward, quite obviously, leads to more of the same, more of the same.
The way I see it, Mr. Franc, the most "destructive behavior that ultimately will drag us down" is continuing to define our structural problems as moral problems. To continue to do so seems, frankly, immoral.
-- Daniela Perdomo
I admit that when faced with this hypothetical scenario, I am at a real loss. It's actually much more entertaining to think about what the last eight years of neo-conservatism have insanely over-funded, rather than think about what needs the money. Here are a few of my favorites: the War on Terror, the War on Stoners, the War on Undocumented Immigrants, the War on Pre-Marital Sex, the War on People Who Carry Liquids Onto a Plane, and, of course: the Crusade for Bridges to Nowhere.
The under-funded issues camp gets rather unwieldy: Public schools, sex education, all manner of medical and scientific research, market regulation, green technology, and essentially everything else.
I have to pick one issue that is deserving of an additional $5 billion in funding? The task is, regrettably, impossible. And frankly, just weeks after we handed a $700 billion bailout to Wall Street, the task is dwarfed to the point of being unimportant, which is unfair because $5 billion is more money than I'll ever really comprehend.
I know, I know, I should just play nice with the game here. I should remind myself that $5 billion is just a hypothetical number in a hypothetical scenario. I should forget the fact that it's obvious that this lame-duck administration has raped every important issue in the country all the while as it served champagne to causes that haven't brought any tangible long-term benefit to society at large. The task at hand, after all, is to simply pinpoint an important issue that is deserving of more funding and attention.
Well, if I'm going to put aside the impracticality of the hypothetical situation, then let me add onto the impossibility of the scenario by suggesting that the $5 billion be spent on something that would never, unfortunately, happen in the United States of America. Let's throw that money at a tribunal that would actually try the Bush Administration for its crimes against humanity, its violations of the U.S. Constitution, and its general swindling of the electorate.
In my hypothetical scenario, the tribunal would try Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, and all the rest of the W. minions—and George himself, of course—and they would be convicted of the crimes they committed in the name of all Americans. If this impossible tribunal actually wasn't impossible, these convictions would result in no sentences. But the crimes would be acknowledged in the public arena, and the convicted would acknowledge their crimes publicly.
You may wonder what the value of this amnesty-granting tribunal would be. In college I was particularly focused on and fascinated with the concept of nation-building in a divided society where human rights and the rule of law have been violated on a grand-scale. My argument then and now is that the first step in the nation-building process in such a place is to develop that absent appreciation for the rule of law so that the ensuing democratization process (whether it's a renewal or birth thereof) can take place. Particularized amnesty, which is what I described above, is the linchpin in establishing a strong human rights culture and respect for the rule of law. This kind of amnesty does not forsake justice because the justice to be gained from it is of a restorative kind; retributive justice does not work in a post-conflict, divided society setting—particularly given the language of hope that, with the election of Obama, has re-framed the White House. This scenario would forgive (and yes, that would be hard) but not forget, providing for the happiest medium between general amnesty and Nuremberg-style justice. And it's certainly better than what's definitely going to happen: Doing nothing, holding no one accountable, sweeping everything under the rug.
Too bad it will never happen, just as I'll never have $5 billion to spend on any one issue.
-- Daniela Perdomo
 I readily admit it: I don't know how to do it. Perhaps it's because I live four blocks from The Gayest Place on Earth; or because I went to a top 20 gay-friendly college; or because homosexuality—like everything pertaining to sex—was explained to me early on in purely biological (and rational) terms by my parents. No matter the reason, the fact of the matter is that I don't understand how to reason with people who vote against granting equal marriage rights to all citizens on moral grounds.
I can rationalize the legal reasons for why these bans may have passed. (For example: Why should government involve itself in "marriage," an institution born of religion? Marry no one in City Hall—grant only civil partnerships!) So that's no problem. My issue is I don't know how, or even whether it's possible, to argue with someone who holds such extreme moral views about homosexuality. I can say the same thing, really, for someone who believes a zygote to be a human being; or someone who literally interprets the Beatitudes.
It's one thing to dismiss extreme moral views as the result of ignorance, it's another to try to grapple with an otherwise well-informed individual who holds these sorts of views. I read, recently, a blog post by a smart, college-educated girl who went to grade school with me. A week before Election Day, in a blog post titled "What I Stand For," she wrote—
"I believe that legal marriage should only be between a man and a woman. I do not believe it discriminates against homosexual people to defend that time-honored definition. I do not dislike homosexuals; I will not stop being any of their friends. I will not call them names; I will not belittle them. But I will do all that I can to stop them and those who are for it from changing the definition of marriage that is the very basis of society and everything I believe in. A person does not have the right to marry anyone he or she wishes to. We do not have the right to choose anything or anyone. Men cannot marry men. Women cannot marry women. People cannot marry animals. A 40 year-old cannot marry a 12 year-old. A man cannot marry more than one woman, and a woman cannot marry more than one man. Marriage is a privilege, not a right. It is a word with a definition that I do not want to have changed."
The equating of consensual, mature, homosexual love to pedophilia, polygamy, and bestiality! The irrational fear that another person's marriage defines your own! I'm at a loss.
Some have asked me why I trouble with trying to decipher such views, and the reason is that I have been trying to decide whether it's of any use to even try to argue with such people, so as to try to get them to vote differently. Perhaps we ought to explain to them that a gay marriage ban is not really a ban on gay marriage, it's a rejection of marriage equality and a dismissal of human rights.
Over the past few days, I've decided that I will not try to argue with these people. Fortunately for all those who embrace rational thinking and who not only laud but actually enshrine equality, the arc of history and progress is bending in the right direction. The younger generation—my generation!—is overwhelmingly, by 2 to 1, for marriage equality. Every day, more people who grew up ignorant of or prejudiced towards homosexuality are turning around and either discarding those views, or simply acknowledging that this is a human rights issue. While this year California, Arkansas, and Florida did not move forward with the tide of progress, they will. Soon.
Top left: My Election Day voting stickers, unintentionally placed next to a photobooth reel depicting a happy time with friends, one of whom is a queer activist; Directly above: My "No" on Prop 8 vote.
-- Daniela Perdomo
The problem with a word like progress, and its derivatives, is that it's necessarily relative. While I believe in the significance of progressivism, I worry about the congratulatory, doe-eyed mood that's taken over the electorate. I worry that we'll settle and fall short of the most progressive progress possible.
The code word for progress in today's political lingua franca is, of course, change. It's been the theme of the past two years of presidential campaigning, as Barack Obama re-framed partisan politics into a choice between Washington-as-usual and Washington-as-it-could-be. After eight years of cronyism, bellicosity, and the debasement of civil liberties, Obama's resounding electoral success last week was as much a rejection of political sameness as it was a genuine confirmation of the need for change.
Yet despite messianic "Change Has Come" headlines, it is not enough to have voted in the first black president, or to be satisfied that Obama's White House will be more progressive than the one the neo-conservatives are about to vacate. (The former is, indeed, progress; the latter is simply obvious.) We can't accept the mainstream definition of progress as simply better-than-Bush. We need to demand that our elected officials seize this unique opportunity in American political discourse to progress significantly further to the left, and quit pandering to the center-right.
This is necessary because there's a stark difference between change we can believe in and change I believe will actually be enacted—
I believe in universal health care; but I believe what we'll get is an opt-in system that still panders to insurance companies' profit margins. I believe in energy independence; but I believe that we'll continue to heed inefficient, home-grown corn ethanol and so-called "clean coal" lobbies on our way there. I believe in the separation of church and state; but I believe that taxpayers' money will continue to be funneled to faith-based initiatives. The list goes on.
I harbor no illusions that all my progressive ideals will be met under an Obama presidency. He is, pundits' claims notwithstanding, decidedly not the herald of American progressivism (See: stances on death penalty, marriage equality, etc.), but he is the most liberal politician ever elected to the highest executive office. The political capital garnered by this election is an ideological mandate for progressivism that we've never had before. Gone is the need for Clintonian incrementalism—we can actually bet big.
The difference between progress I believe in and the progress I believe is most likely to actually occur under the forty-fourth presidency and one-hundred-eleventh Congress need not be so stark. More-than-better-than-Bush progress requires action: We must demand the most progress, not just enough progress.
-- Daniela Perdomo
|
RSS Feed
