Why I Voted Republican Yesterday

The words "I voted Republican" sputter from my fingers with trepidation. I killed my mother. I lost my virginity. I gave away my dog. That's how it feels. But I was driven to it by the Democrats' penchant for disaster when mere setbacks can be had -- and I feel I'm not alone. Watch out, Barack Obama, I may do it again in 2012.

The election I voted in was insignificant. In my Democratic-dominated city, there was a special election to fill a seat on the council and I was sick of voting for the same bunch of corrupt, unimaginative bumblers. "My" candidate lost, anyway.

Yet beware: Obama campaign analysts should see in my naughty yet harmless municipal voting the butterfly's wings aflutter that could set in motion an electoral tsunami in 2012.

I didn't expect too much better from the set of cronies who run City Hall. But I had developed dreams about Obama, with his seductive "yes we can" and his smooth palaver about "change you can believe in." Yet after a health bill without a public option, financial "reform" written in bank boardrooms, and the largest single-year set of cuts in federal spending in history along with the continuation of historic tax cuts, I feel like the voter who's woken up alone in a strange bedroom the morning after election night.

I won't say that Obama is corrupt -- although he got to the Oval Office with a suspiciously large amount of Wall Street money. But his White House could be mistaken for functioning unimaginatively, sometimes to the point that one thinks it's Bush still in charge. As for bumblers, what else should I call an administration that keeps bargaining against itself?

Even the unions, which are not the havens of the most saintly people ever known, have woken up. The International Association of Fire Fighters announced it was cutting off the campaign money spigot for Democrats given their failure to respond to the wave of labor policy rollbacks Republicans are pushing across the nation.

Hispanics and Asians sat out the 2010 elections, according to the latest news. As a Hispanic, I agree with Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) that Obama's immigration policy failures have a lot to do with it. Obama didn't even dare put forth a reform bill, sat on his hands during the DREAM Act debacle and then, to cap insult with injury launched the most intensive deportation sweeps since the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.

For me, the path to convincing myself to vote Republican in 2012, win or lose, begins with the notion that Obama has turned out to be very little better than Bush, if that. Yes, we now have a president who can pronounce the word "nuclear" and who isn't a sheer embarrassment to me in front of my foreign friends.

As with John F. Kennedy in 1960, we broke a prejudice barrier at the ballot box. Although, take note, African-Americans: no Catholic was ever elected to the White House since.

Beyond that, those of us who enthusiastically voted for Obama, who put pro-Obama bumper-stickers on our car (and not the Obama logo one, either), those of us who would like an America that is progressively better, more generous and more kind, we got extremely little.

Would McCain have let the country go to the dogs? Perhaps. This is what scares me about the Libertarian-leaning Tea Party. They're willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just watch what happens. We already know what happens when there's nothing standing between ordinary people and those with money: it's called the Middle Ages.

But there's another path to voting Republican in 2012.

Who united the whole world against U.S. imperialism best but George W. Bush? Who convinced people who gave up on the Democrats 30 years ago to do anything to prevent more Republican economic misrule, but George W. Bush? Who convinced everyone most potently of the utter failure of savage, untaxed capitalism, but George W. Bush?

The answer is clear: to radically change the United States we need two, three or more George W. Bush presidencies, driving at least half the country to live in trailer parks and work in gated compounds as maids and security guards (if they're lucky enough to be spared the sweatshops and the unsafe mines). In the 1960s this approach was thought of as intensifying the contradictions of capitalism to create revolutionary conditions, or as others put it, breaking eggs to make an omelet.

Maybe when most Americans live in Brazilian favela-like slums they will wake up. And get out of the way when angry Americans arise.

It's up to Obama. Show me what you've done to earn my vote by November 2012. You haven't yet.

The Great American Myth ... Is It False?

After all the debunking of the posts last week, perhaps it's time to take a good look at the spark that has set people dreaming for centuries: the myth of the United States, some call it the American Dream.

Myths, like dreams, are neither true nor false, but simply wishful thinking.

Some are necessary for sanity and survival. If we didn't have ways to mentally soothe our aches and worries or to assure us of a golden horizon somewhere ahead, we would surely commit suicide, cease our labors, give up the struggle of living, we'd lose hope.

Of course, the best-known myths are religious. The cavorting Greek and Roman gods, the powerful Egyptian goddess Isis, Noah and the flood, the Jehovah and Moses of Exodus are all mythical. In my opinion, even the Galilean woodworker the Romans called Jesus was a mythical figure.

These myths all attempt to answer primal archetypal questions of human beings: What am I here for? Who is in charge? What am I supposed to do? How do I seek help against disaster? Who's to thank for my good fortune? And so on.

The lore about these gods and prophets and heroes is all of our own making. We find ways to explain things to ourselves that are soothing and, at least at first blush, satisfying. The reality that God or gods are profoundly unobservable doesn't stand in the way of elaborate systems of thought based on one version or another of the cult of the divine.

I like the take of Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: "If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."

Much the same can be said about 'murrica. Most of what Americans learn as children about their country is patently false, as I have modestly shown. This is true of almost any country in the world.

The 19th and 20th century nationalist idea invented the myth that the Earth is populated by people who are distinct by virtue of somehow belonging to a certain territory, speaking a certain language, idolizing the colors of a certain piece of cloth and singing a certain ancient hymn that is almost always literally absurd. Americans, Frenchmen, Australians, Germans, Russians, Brazilians, Chinese.

The peculiarity of the American Myth is its the way the United States is cast in roles soaked in bibliolatry: Messiah and beacon of the world, Promised Land, Land of Milk and Honey. It's the dream image of wishful immigrants who braved a perilous journey and years of sacrifice to reach the American Dream, which most never saw.

In "Sail Away," Randy Newman has even composed a slaver's myth for Africans about to be enslaved:

In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Isn't that just the way of that hussy Lady Liberty? She swings her hips seductively and with a wink she makes us think the fire in her torch is made of gold. Just like the cobblestones on the streets from California to Staten Island.

Sure it's all bunk. But why else would we get up every morning, rush through coffee, drive to a cubicle, then reverse it after 8 hours, if there wasn't a rainbow there somewhere?

Why would the least favored Americans leave their hollows and their slums to bleed and lose limbs for reasons no one since December 1941 has had the decency to explain in terms that make plain sense, if there wasn't the red, white and blue to cover up recruiters' lies?

When I read the august words of Thomas Jefferson, I don't read a slaveowners' yen to be his own king in a society where everything was trick-sprung to keep only his own ilk on top. No, when I read words, sometimes entire paragraphs, that he borrowed without attribution from John Locke, I don't see the work of a plagiarist.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ..."

Hear the brass and the flute and the cymbals? Hear Aaron Copland and Jerry Goldsmith's musical paean to America?

That's the beguiling myth of America calling.

English? Male? Christian?

See spot run. Run spot run. See the neighbors, store owners and policemen. They're all white, square jawed men, some have blue eyes, a few have freckles. They go to (Protestant-looking) church. They work. Let's parse this.

The archetypal image of significant Americans as transplanted English, Protestant men goes back to the Constitution (read the whole thing, Tea Party fans!), which defined nonwhites as a fraction of a person, even though whites at the time were the minority in the United States.

English was never adopted as an official language; indeed, no vote was taken — English likely would have lost to German. In fact, the notion that Americans come from English stock is a myth.

Even among the U.S. white settlers who were English speakers by family tradition, most flew that false-flag nationality known as "Scotch-Irish," that is to say, they were from Ulster —not English at all. They sure as hell weren't Irish (ask the IRA). They were the descendants of the Scots sent to vie for the English throne, then left there.

The ones who came to America were the ne'er-do-wells who hadn't made it a century or two after landing as conquerors. They won the Battle of the Boyne and nothing else. That's why they hated the Irish who came during the Potato Famine in the 1840s: the real Irish knew what riffraff they really were.


And men ... Haven't men, in almost all societies, been somewhat less than the majority of the population? Why, then, did laws and custom presume that only men could work for pay, lead, vote, own property and so forth?

Lastly, there's the claim to being Christian.

When in history has U.S. society prized the poor, those who mourn, those who thirst for justice and those who make peace? When have we, collectively or individually in some significant way, turned the other cheek: is that what was done at Fort McHenry, at the Alamo, Fort Sumter, on the Maine, in the fields of Flanders, at Iwo Jima, after 9/11?

Thomas Jefferson, believed in a Creator — more or less. George Washington told the truth (but not in his expense accounts to the Continental Congress). Benjamin Franklin was a decidedly avaricious and pleasure-seeking man.

The reality is that the United States believes in money, was built by Africans, Spaniards, the Dutch, Germans, Irish and Chinese of a variety of religions; most Americans were and are women. That's the real America.