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This guy walks into a bar and says... - Mar 22, 2004 - Printable Version
- Thanks, Brian!
by Ken Shade
I have been ready to leave several times. When the evil that fled into the Republican party in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act was passed, took control of the GOP, and Ronald Reagan was elected, I was ready to leave my country. It made me ill to see what was happening to it. I wanted to go where I didn't care about the country I was living in. I wanted to be completely indifferent to what was happening around me. I wanted to be blissfully ignorant of who the leaders were, and what they stood for. I never wanted to read another newspaper again. It hurt too much to see my country selling out our heritage of sacred principles for a bowl of tax-cuts-will-solve-everything pottage.
I didn't leave because I had a nice, exciting new career going, and because I was sure that people would see through Reagan before long.
I was ready to leave in 1984 because people had seen through him, realized he was a fake, and embraced him anyway because he made them feel good. I had cared and loved another four years, and been bitch-slapped. I wanted to go where I didn't even speak the language.
I didn't feel all that terrible after the 1988 presidential election. Michael Dukakis had run the most inept campaign possible, yet he had had the best showing of any of my candidates since Noah's daughters took him to the prom.
On election night in 1992, Gerald Ford's words kept running through my mind: "Our long national nightmare is over." How was I to know that a new one was just beginning? I could not imagine, on that night, the kind of trouble a small, widespread and well-financed group of fanatics would cause over the next eight years. I was unaware of what The Arkansas Project, The American Spectator, David Brock, Ann Coulter, Richard Mellon Scaife, Kenneth Starr, "Justice Jim" Johnson, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and Rev. Moon's newspaper, et alia, would do to a sitting president. Bill Clinton was a president who sometimes disappointed me, but eight years of vitriolic from the right drove me into the position defending him at every turn. There was no possibility of rational discussion of the man, or his policies. I couldn't mention Clinton's views on trade, with which I often disagreed, to anybody from the right because there was a strong chance that they believed he was the psycho-homo-killer-rapist that Rush Limbaugh claimed he was. When you want to exchange ideas with a person on any matter of public import, and all you can get from them is: "Yeah? Well, what about Vince Foster?," conversation stops. I couldn't criticize even the slightest thing about the man to a person who believed The Clinton Chronicles. I didn't want to give them an inch.
As the attacks, and public discourse with them, grew more insane and vicious, I sometimes thought that it hurt too much to care, and that maybe I should take up residence in Papua New Guinea.
Then came the stolen election of 2000.
I use the word "stolen" because it is the only word to use. It makes some people angry, but none of those people have read the United States Commission on Civil Right report on that election, nor have they read any of the investigative reporting into how we became the world's largest banana republic. With the four counties that pleaded guilty to intimidation of black voters, the Republican operative who illegally cast more than 130 votes on behalf of people whose preference she did not ask, the illegal voter list purge executed by Texas and Florida, the two counties that allowed GOP workers to alter applications for absentee ballots, the illogical majority opinion in Bush Vs. Gore, plus a few other events, I feel that "stolen" is the only term that applies. Holding to the notion that the election in Florida was legit is like being a member of the Flat Earth Society, or being Erich von Daniken. The facts simply don't support what you say you believe.
That theft threw me into a deep funk and, again, I wanted to stop caring. I wanted to be in a place where the only thing to care about was my family.
I didn't leave because my wife went into the hospital in March, and died in April. My mind was on other things.
Soon, like a quixotic fool, I again began to hope. Even as I watched the Bush administration use the terrorist attacks as a new excuse for their long-standing war against the exclusionary rule, Miranda and the Bill of Rights, I had hope. To me, the mid-term elections of 2002 were a referendum on the presidential election of 2000. With all the information coming out about what the Bush cadre did, I believed that people should, and maybe even would, send them a message.
They did. They sent several terrible messages: "Equate yourself with the country, and our eyes will be blinded by patriotic tears. Keep telling us the same lie, and we'll get tired of fighting it. Promise us a tax cut, and we'll surrender all the things we claim to cherish."
The message Bush got from the left was an old one, and no less disturbing: "Question our patriotism, and we'll fold like a highway map."
This time, I was leaving. I had nothing keeping me here. Realizing that a blatantly stolen election, the ugly fact that we are no longer living under a properly authorized constitutional government, didn't motivate people to eject the criminal and his cohorts was too much to take. Our devotion to the constitution had been of life support for more than twenty years, and now the constitution itself seemed to be moribund. I wanted to be somewhere that U.S. politics were seldom spoken of, and local politics were a mystery to me.
I chose a country that had most of the things I needed. Its weather was good. Its constitution was established and vital. It was far enough from the United States so that our affairs were not a major concern to the citizenry and, best of all, I knew practically nothing about theirs.
I prepared to hide my heart in another country.
Some of you, reading this line, will become angry and say that I am a coward. Some will bring up all the people who fought and died in our wars, claiming that they are the example of true love for our nation, and that I dishonor their sacrifice by even thinking of emigrating. That's OK if you want to say that. However, I know that my motivation has always been love. I also know how such people really feel about patriotism and military service. I saw what happened to Max Cleland in 2002. I saw you elect, and support, an effete, AWOL, flight suit dress-up doll who talked the same line. I know that it only matters when its your guy.
So, as I prepared, I told many of my friends of my intention, including Brian.
That was a mistake.
Brian has an uncanny knack for cutting through other people's bullshit. I love watching him do it to them. I hate it when he does it to me.
"No matter where you go, you'll care. You'll care, learn and be involved wherever you go because that's who you are," he said.
As soon as he said it, I knew he was right.
I had to ask myself "Why?"
It didn't take me long to figure it out.
I realized that my devotion was not to country, but to the principles my country was founded on. My heart was not set aflame by the sight of the flag so much as by the sight of a free person carrying that flag. My nationalism is aroused not by what we have accomplished, but by the fact that we pledged at the outset that what we have is for everybody, everywhere. This is who I am, and I could never leave that behind.
I will always care because there will always be people, wherever I go. I will always care about those people. I will work and pray for them to have freedom, security and enough to eat. I will always believe in Hobbes's social contract. I will always see government as a tool to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I could no more hide from that than I could hide from my DNA.
So, here I stood, frozen in my tracks. I couldn't go and I didn't know what to do now that I was staying. I felt powerless against jingoism, ignorance and the power that money always buy. (Attention conservatives! Please don't point at Alec Baldwin, Barbara Streisand and the UAW, and claim the liberals have money to buy power, too. The people who support Bush spend more money on their daughters' weddings than our donors will ever lay their hands on.)
As time went by, and the lies of the Bush administration began to mount, I saw that I was not alone. People like me, tired of having their patriotism and humanity challenged every time they pointed out that the president is not the nation, have begun to mobilize. Their energy has breathed new life into this tired activist. Maybe they are younger than I am. Maybe they have not been banging their heads against the wall for as long. Maybe they are simply stronger people. Whatever the case, they have inspired me. I see windmills on the horizon, and I have again taken up my lance.
The task is daunting. An electoral victory of fifty votes will probably be necessary to overcome whatever crimes the Republicans are willing to commit this time. The opposition has twice as much money, and we can be sure brutality and mendacity are tools they have not put away. Still, to my mind, there is only one goal, this year: the return to constitutional government.
It is a goal that is worth the fight.
No matter what happens, I know, now, that I will never leave.
No matter who wins the next battle, I cannot quit the fight. It is who I am.
My heart may always ache because of the injustices I see, but it will never ache because I have not been true to who I am, and what I believe. I hope that more and more of you will join me.
Thanks, Brian.
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