Elections, II
Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon, he calls it ‘faith’, ‘strength’, ‘truth’.
– Rod Serling, from the opening narration of “He’s Alive”
This post is a continuation of the rumination begun here.
It is conference season in BC. This past week, Indigenous leaders across the Northern Region gathered here in Prince George to have their annual governance caucus. Near the end of the event, space was given for reflection on treatment of Indigenous veterans, as Remembrance Day loomed. A speaker shared some firsthand accounts from Indigenous voices dating back a hundred years – from those who had fought in world wars all the way to more recent conflicts in the early twentieth century. Soldiers who had experienced more equality facing bullets abroad than within systems and structures at home. The speaker imparted stories close to home, of family or community members whose sacrifice had gone unacknowledged or been taken for granted, as their fight for civil rights or against discrimination on Canadian soil continued.
The speaker relayed one tale of Indigenous soldiers being asked to stand aside from their peers during a memorial ceremony, while the Prime Minister and dignitaries walked past. All the veterans present, except for the Indigenous ones, being given a chance to shake hands with the politicians. A gesture congruent with contemporary societal stratification.
I was sitting in the audience and could not help but draw parallels between the true accounts being relayed and all-too similar fictional narratives in Toni Morrison’s Home, in which the protagonist Frank (a black man) returns from the Korean War, the first desegregated conflict in American history, to a country that refuses to acknowledge his humanity. Morrison rushes us through Frank’s encounters with numerous characters as he tries to search for his sibling. She barely mentions race, because she does not have to; the behavior of institutions and the people they envelope make everyone’s ethnicities blatant. A simple run-in with police is jarring enough for the reader, as the passage is as representative of black tribulations in the 1950s as it is today.
The stories conveyed at the caucus came two days after we all learned of the election outcomes in the United States. The world’s second-largest democracy having undergone hundreds of votes for its new leader, its upper and lower houses of congress, numerous state governors, and dozens of binding referenda on issues from healthcare to criminal justice reform. The thread that the stories carry – of the historical and ongoing deployment of discrimination by those in power – lies deeply intertwined with history being written as the results of these elections continue to roll in.
To understand all of this is to not understand it at all. How did we get here?
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Talk is cheap. And in a capitalist context with robust corporate media networks and limited access to education and opportunity, it is a popular commodity.
I wrote last time about the feeling of hypersanity (being under the impression that you have a clear line of sight to reality while those around you seem lost in delusion), and how that feeling was peaking while I roamed around Mumbai as the results of the 2014 Indian general election were called. I suspect many in the US are having similar inklings today. Half the electorate is jubilant, the other half distraught.
It may seem unbelievable to those who avoid certain media networks, podcasts, radio shows, even pulpits from which political proselytization is commonplace, that the Republicans would so handily win. After all, the speculative markets were communicating a unified picture:
But those avoided bubbles of influence also happen to be the most followed across the nation. And their impact on discourse ripples further into news broadcast and streamed to the rest of the populace:
The most annoying thing about partisan media and propaganda networks is that they function not from an ideological base, but one motivated by profit. In case films like There Will Be Blood had not made it clear enough through parable, the grand altar of faith and collective optimism at which expansionists worshipped no longer exists. That platform has long been razed and replaced by the altar of capital. One that has coupled a more individualistic outlook (and disregard for social welfare) with a lust for economic wealth. The latter’s harm proportional to the power of its holder. And when the editorial independence of almost every major news source is threatened by a small class of rich moguls, alternate realities become easier to build. The networks constructed to continue to poke and prod around cultural pain points and foment divisions do so to further inequality, not because they seriously back any philosophies or principles.
Aside from ethical black holes, this setup requires a horrendous feedback loop to sustain itself. It is perhaps not inevitable that conspiracies and scaremongering play a central role in coverage. But because they are effective in animating the viewer, fueling engagement, and rallying support for questionable causes, they are deployed indiscriminately. The need for profit demands a warping of cultural issues into unrecognizable forms, replete with misinformation and effortlessly exploited.
A lack of commitment to evidence-based reality is the product. And an enabling of extremist tendencies at all levels of political life:
So the populist message resonates despite the fact that no transformative dies will ever be cast. Talk is cheap. And it is selling well.
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If cultural pain points are so galvanizing, then why did women, non-binary individuals and their allies fail to keep the group that has promised to remove their access to healthcare from power? It seems like a litmus test that came up with a wrong result. After all, voter turnout had ballooned in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement and sharp rise in racial tensions across the US. The 81 million ballots cast in favor of Biden the closest the country has ever come to a candidate’s count outnumbering the ballots left uncast (82 million in 2020 and an estimated 89 million this year).
No confident proclamations forthcoming. Gender and race are two of a multitude of intersectional realities; difficult to quantify in political calculus. But let us consider that the Democrats assist the Republicans a great deal by not being the inspirational force that is required to meet their rivals’ challenge. A party that also aligns itself with the rich, regularly sidelining voices speaking up for the struggles of the working classes, and one that commits itself to the status quo at all costs. A party that so effectively and ruthlessly banded together during the previous general election’s primaries to ensure that Bernie Sanders, a self-defined socialist and then the frontrunner, would not be their nominee. Their entire framework is undergirded by similar forces to their counterparts. Outside of leanings on domestic cultural issues, they are markedly similar. The salient stances of both red and blue foreign policy almost identical.
As one of the videos above mentions, the propaganda pendulum is not equally weighted between the left and right. While the GOP base votes with consistency, others stay home more often than not, as apathy wins out. The same devotion to figureheads is more difficult to cultivate on the center and left – if the stereotype of more discerning and critical media bubbles holds. Knowing more about your favored in-group can also open up avenues of dissuasion. The curse that follows the Democrats through elections is the support they take for granted, falsely believing it is unlikely to erode or become desensitized to the perceived extremism across the aisle.
If you take a look at results in the US on November 5 excluding elections of officials to political appointments, you will notice a trend concordant with the hidden secret of American life. The majority are usually on the same page. Broadly, the American populace holds a consensus on seemingly polarizing issues such as access to reproductive rights. Even for states that elected GOP representatives, liberal measures passed by significant margins.
Consider Gallup and Pew polls: a majority of Americans are largely in agreement on increasing the minimum wage, improving background checks for gun purchases, increasing taxes on the rich, removing financial barriers to accessing healthcare, lowering pharmaceutical expenses, increasing environmental protections, and the list goes on. The difference between these polls and the failed ones alluded to earlier in this piece? They enjoy more consistently applied methodologies, their percentages sit outside any margin for error, and they have revealed the same results going back decades.
That the parties reject these widely held viewpoints in favor of bowing to lobbyists is, maybe, one reason for such low turnout. There are additional paths to power than by manipulating the electorate through political messaging. It must be acknowledged that a fair number are disenfranchised. For many, the promise of the United States may well not change with either party occupying congress. A nation where slavery remains legal and where there is still no gender equity enshrined in its supreme document.
But I suppose we should not make too many excuses for non-voters. Not casting a ballot is also making a choice. Whether it is motivated by lack of inspiration, lack of education, mistrust or apathy is analysis we can leave to future historians. What is tougher to stomach, even in the face of mainstreamed propaganda machines and moribund institutions, is that at moments like this, 89 million people refused to enter the political arena. To say nothing of those who found it so difficult to choose between the two candidates. There was no equivalency at all.
Credit: CTV News
In the land of talk-is-cheap politics, perhaps the high cost of not voting is not apparent. Whether capably hidden or incalculable, purely a semantic exercise.
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Take it from this student of religion and believer in none: fiction, no matter how fantastical, can be espoused, proliferated and adopted without evidence ad nauseam. It need only be comforting to its adherents. Using it as a crutch, however, is untenable. Mistaking it for the truth, unconscionable.
I can empathize with the need for the reassuring fable. The myths and rituals held sacred. But there are times when we must accept reality, no matter how unpleasant. Including the realities behind cultural mythology serving to whitewash the historical record.
To reiterate a point from the previous post, for me the most inexcusable aspect of modern political movements is any disregard for people’s humanity. Last week’s election result left many journalists and pundits dumbfounded. What they saw as a campaign that was exceptionally bigoted, led by a criminal outsider, appeared to others who have followed historical legacies as a recurring echo. Perhaps a louder echo than usual, but one that fits an unsurprising pattern.
The US, as mentioned above, still allows slavery. Universal suffrage is also not codified (many felons, for example, cannot vote). It is not too out of character for a country that has never truly reckoned with its holocaust to so casually fall back into the past.
I remember running across this video of a remote aired on Conan many years ago. On the surface, it is funny. Joking around with civil war buffs memorializing a pivotal time in American history. But this onion barely needs to be peeled before its stench becomes overpowering. Imagine Germans donning swastikas on an annual basis and reenacting the loading of trains headed to concentration camps while laughing. Or the Irish making a celebratory festival out of the memory of The Troubles. Or comedic performances of Partition on either side of the Indian or Pakistani border.
The US Civil War was over the preservation/abolition of slavery. To have a cultural venture like a reenactment put forth without a careful acknowledgment of its racially charged history is mindboggling. Light entertainment made from the most horrific of episodes. I have heard all the arguments to soften this annual exercise. They are not convincing. The hypersanity… is not ebbing.
Of course, the reenactments are just one example in a microcosm. One of the many cancers of American life that has been allowed to metastasize, emboldened by machinations in corporate boardrooms, scripts utilized by foreign troll farms, and speeches curated for megachurch stages. Yet, they hopefully convey the complexity of reshaping historical attitudes when the past is so immediate. The speaker described at the beginning of this post was providing accounts of (accepted) discrimination from public figures, up to the present day, who faced no backlash for their actions by the Canadian public. The last residential school did not close in Canada until 1997 and the attitudes promoted by the wardens of the system will take decades to address. Regardless, time between atrocities and the present should not be the primary gauge consulted when seeking to employ our critical faculties for interpreting modern social relations.
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Here is a physics problem that I return to sporadically:
To solve it, one has to develop equations of motion via Lagrangian mechanics. For me, this question is uniquely, darkly humorous. First off, it places an object on a knife’s edge before displacing it, assuring its fall. Second, whether I passed Classical Mechanics or not hinged on how well I could answer this question. Finally, this common metaphor – of something so perilously poised – was forever associated with this undergraduate test given its outcome.
All that to say, whenever I hear someone say “on a knife’s edge” or “on the edge of a knife”, my mind travels back to this question – sat through ten orbits ago – and a small smile makes its way to my face. That phrase was said multiple times during election coverage on November 5. Democracy was our cylinder that day; the angular displacement the election itself. Social, political and economic forces, rather than gravity, acting on our cherished cylinder. At least that was the picture painted by many journalists reporting on the numbers as they flooded in.
Which brings me to a closing comment. A cylinder sent spinning on a knife’s edge may be indicative of this political moment and its narratives. Everything is so precarious. Nothing is certain while we appear so powerless to sway things to a more stable or secure state. And yet, there are metrics at play here that can be easily mapped onto this picture. Measures of all the objects and forces that will allow us to catch the displaced cylinder and ensure it has sturdy footing for the future. All it takes is a little head-scratching engagement. Even with all our foibles, we have the ingenuity and wherewithal to figure this out.
For the United States specifically, a reckoning with the toxic currents that define its milieu: the bigotry and hatred repurposed as tools, co-opted by social networks to fulfill a profit motive. Their existence generations deep, awaiting an ambitious program of chemotherapy combining education, activism, political advocacy and collective organizing.
Or else.
Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare – Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Any place, every place, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.
– Rod Serling, delivering the closing narration from “He’s Alive”