Looking for votes, finding America

[OneBlueSky]

"Scared, angry and needing to act, I left California to volunteer for John Kerry in Pennsylvania. I changed some minds -- including my own."

by Jonathan Alford
salon.com
October 7, 2004

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/10/07/volunteer/index.html

(snip)

It is easy to be dismissive of undecided voters. Who are these people? How can anyone be undecided in such a glaringly obvious election? But that feels patronizing and simplistic. Most undecided voters seem to me to be victims of a political process that seems alien and unresponsive. You can blame personal ignorance but it seems more systemic than that. People who are not ideological or well informed are not patsies or dupes. They seem to be honestly confused. These people represent in some ways the core of any country's population. They're mostly concerned with the daily business of life. They're not vindictive or judgmental. They're prone to respect authority, and naturally conservative in an unforced way. This is the mind that to the ideologue seems stupid and backward but which in a funny way is really a bulwark against extremism in all its forms. By voting their gut, making decisions based on "well, I just like him," or simply by looking at public life through the parochial lens of their personal story, they stand up for the simplicity, the honesty, of mere experience. They are the demos -- the people -- in a democracy.

(snip)

Kerry was actually the second choice for most people in the room. And everyone watching is evaluating Kerry not as a candidate, but as an actor. No one feels particularly inspired by Kerry's candidacy, but everyone is passionately concerned that he play his role well. We find ourselves at a strange moment in American political history. Most people have internalized the rules of the game; everyone is an expert in the gestures that denote "authority," "the common touch," "love of country," "excessive intellectuality" and so on. In this election, at least, no one even pretends that substance will win the day. Years ago, in his book "Mythologies," the French culture critic Roland Barthes wrote about the way that mass-culture consumer societies create and maintain images, gestures, discourses that act as the filters through which we perceive the world. It is the double gaze that all of us have to some degree. It is the world of spin. We have all become implicit spinners. No one likes it and no one knows how to stop it. We look simultaneously at content and predicted effect, at what actually happened and how it will play. If it doesn't play, it never happened. Conversely, even blatant lies, if they play, become true.

Watching Bush dissolve, I reflect that this phenomenon, abetted by a cowed and lazy press, has played into the hands of this administration to a fatal degree. The media, unable to confront the propagandistic web of distortions and lies the administration used to make its case for war in Iraq, falls back on simply evaluating its effectiveness. Abdicating their responsibility to find out the truth, they vanish into a never-never land whose apparent cynicism ("it's all spin anyway") conceals its moral and intellectual vacuity. They would still roll over for Bush in tonight's debate, if only he had told his lies crisply and with folksy assurance. Thank God he didn't.

By the end of the debate, two of the attendees, Karl and Lou, are pretty looped. After Bush had used the phrase "hard work" a couple of times, they decided to drink to it. Each subsequent time Bush uttered those immortal words the glasses had to be downed. Needless to say the liter bottle was polished off.

- more . . .

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/10/07/volunteer/index.html