Imagine a better future – Liberal Street Fighter
… is naught but a failure of imagination.
The Four Horsemen don’t cause the Apocalypse. After all, they’ve been riding for centuries, hanging over our heads. They merely symbolize what life on Earth is already like. […]
There are some people with a vested interest in keeping the world as it is, because that is the world they have power over.” — Promethea – Alan Moore
These people own our entire political system, our economic system and much of our media. BOTH political parties are war parties. Those identified as “leaders” of the party of opposition, Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden and so many others, enable our aggressive stance toward the world, CELEBRATE our aggressive stance against the world, honestly believing that there is no other way to win elections OTHER than to out-sabre-rattle the Republicans. As Scott Ritter told Raw Story this past spring:
Raw Story: You suggest Americans vote out all who voted for these measures. If New Yorkers voted out Hillary, who voted for both the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq, and who is also leading pack of the Democratic Party for the 2008 nomination, what then?
Ritter: Hillary is the manifestation of all that ails the Democratic Party. She stands for nothing. She has been compromised by her voting record…how can she stand for anything worth supporting? And yet, she will be the Democratic nominee in 2008, thus guaranteeing another NeoCon/Republican victory. ‘Dump Hillary Now’ would be the smartest move Dean could make as the new Democratic National Committee Chair…. Like I said, it might take two or three cycles, but it will happen and it will take time.
Raw Story: What about Dean?
Ritter: Dean has to be part of the process of rebuilding and that will take time. Dean cannot run for President, because Dean cannot run as a Democrat–the party is not set up to sustain someone like him. He is one of the exceptions in a corrupt party. He is also not corrupted by his voting record. He is someone who represents something, he did not vote for the war in Iraq, for example.
The thing I fear most is that the leaders of the Democratic Party could very well be right. Perhaps we Americans have lost the ability to imagine a better world. Peace through engagement in world bodies, in a system of broadening international laws, in a world where we can learn to understand one another by TALKING to each other … perhaps those scenes no longer flicker across the back of the national eyelids. Judging by our bloody westward expansion, our adventures in Latin America and the Pacific Basin, perhaps they seldom did.
Throughout the supposed “progressive” blogosphere, we’re seeing more and more former military, former REPUBLICANS, put forward as the hope for the party’s future, while progressives who come from activist backgrounds are denigrated far and wide. Is this the people we really are, really want to be, WANT OUR CHILDREN TO BE? A martial people, seeing salvation only in the guise of a uniform?
This is not to say that many of these candidates might not be true progressives, or be great candidates, but it seems more and more that certain elements in our party think that these are the kinds of backgrounds that will lead to “victory”. Some, like Paul Hackett, are moving toward the left on the war, joining leaders like Russ Feingold in calling for a timetable for removing American troops from the Iraq War(crime). The majority of the party still seems unwilling to go that far.
After all, BOTH parties have made it their business to build up a strong, that is aggressive and powerful, military structure. Entire economies and political power bases are established in the building and maintaining and storage of the biggest and most destructive war machine the world has ever seen.
Is this the best we can imagine for ourselves, our country, our world and future and children and generations upon generations after them who will live under this bloody crimson shadow? Is Lewis Lapham right about us?
I don’t say that over the last thirty years we haven’t made brave strides forward. By matching Eco’s list of fascist commandments against our record of achievement, we can see how well we’ve begun the new project for the next millennium — the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin’s theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of “intelligent design”; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on the part of a complacent populace; the nation’s congressional districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient Rome.
An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early twentieth-century fascisms didn’t enter their golden age until the proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt — to say nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism — I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.
We squander our vast riches on weaponry, on retaliation, on retribution and vast prison complexes here and expanding secret gulags overseas. We act as a people with no faith or belief in redemption, in rehabiliation, in fresh beginnings or new starts. No olive branches will be clutched in the claw of the American Imperial Eagle, only another brace of poison-tipped arrows.
Are the leaders of our party right. IS THIS WHO WE ARE?
We will find out in the coming years, as the current monsters driving our war machine are weakened by scandal and their own hubris. Will we merely replace “their” chickenhawks with “our” chickenhawks? Republicrats for Republicans, or will we rise to our highest dreams and imagine better futures for ourselves? Will we follow the narrow and convictionless, like Hillary Clinton, or can we join Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star Mothers for Peace, Veterans for Peace and actual leaders like Russ Feingold to find a new kind of strength, the strength that knows that real power grows from convictions and belief in a peaceful future? Some would say that this is “hippy” thinking, but wasn’t the United Nations founded at least partly in this belief? Haven’t we built courts and diplomatic missions and international university exchange programs on this “hippy” idea? Are diplomats sitting around a table, a table whose shape and size was no doubt the result of extensive discussion, merely singing Kumbaya when they sign below words like these:
Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Damned hippies.
Can we imagine ourselves to be members of that society of hope again, or will we continue to place our support behind failed leaders: failures in conviction, failures in vision and failures in honorable opposition? Are we really the people that our leaders believe we are?
I choose to imagine that we are not.
Beyond the lunar sphere lies the mercurial domain of intellect and science, of magic and language. Humankind’s most precious gift, communication has its wellspring here. – Promethea – Alan Moore
