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Four score and some-odd years ago, when King George the Fifth had designs on half the globe and most of the tigers; when Joseph aka Stalin was pulling back from world revolution 'coz his indigenous death-lists took up so much of his time; when Alistair Cook, prime progenitor of the fourteen cadence sentence, was a mere hack on the back of the Hollywood dream; America, that is the northern, mostly caucasian, catastrophically industrialised, apartheid America, suddenly bumped into a crisis that put the whole capitalist dream up for grabs, and left a proletarian generation to the bread queues.
The 'Wall Street Crash', as the media would have us call it, stands for us to gaze at; a lesson in what it is to base your entire economic well-being on a bunch of sharks in neck-ties playing bookie's runner. The Depression which followed threatened to tear the young civilisation apart. It's worth pointing out that Wall Street itself got its name from a wall built there by settlers, to keep out the 'Indians', who, for some peculiar reason wanted their home back. It's worth pointing out that, during the Depression, American industrial unrest, violent protest, and proletarian membership of Communist and Socialist parties reached unequalled levels. It's also worth noting how, in less than twenty years, the U.S.A., with a little help from the Enola Gay, became elevated as a super-power, able to dictate to more than half the globe, able to lend vast sums for European reconstruction, able to drive an undaunted capitalist dream to the moon and beyond.
Today the U.S. faces a new crisis: on that both left and right can agree. The nature of the crisis and the prescriptive remedy is ephemeral. It is a Janus-head, a self-eliminating dialectic, a grotesque clown that plays for frights. The right wing in America will tell us what Fox and CNN tell them: since 'nine-eleven' we are at war; there are people who hate us and threaten us, and we have a crisis until we've 'brought them to justice'. That means killing people, in case you had to nip out. So they've gone about killing people, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but they don't feel any safer so they've started wondering, what with a dyslexic president, whether they really meant Iran. You'd laugh if you weren't worried about getting your head blown off on the Docklands Light Railway. Of course the right wing in America look very peculiar to any sane Londoner.
(a). You have the capitalists, the spreaders of the monetarist gospel, owners of about one third of all the money in the world, convinced they can sell Big Macs to Hindus and pork rinds to Jews, if only they have their famous 'level playing field'. Level playing field. What is level about a game of poker when one player makes $10 trillion a year? What is level about a game of chess when you've only got two borrowed pawns and the white guy has four queens and a helicopter gun-ship. The global economic field of play is about as level as Highgate Hill on a windy Thursday. This is of course because it's not a game: these guys play for blood; other people's preferably.
(b).Then you have the right-wing priesthood. Jesus hates buggers apperently. 'Love thy neighbour' appears to refer specifically to the fat white right-wing American living next door, and has nothing to do with foreign policy. 'All things bright and beautiful' does not include poppies, Cubans or 'flip-flopping' liberals. 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone', but let she who shot her violent boyfriend receive a syringe-full designed by Nazis. And while ox-coveting (an ancient bestial practice involving vaseline and a very large bucket) seems on the decline, it's quite ok for a tv preacher to covet Ferraris. The already well-bent English language creaks and snaps under self-delusional slogans like 'Pro-life' and 'Victims' Justice'. Modern American Christianity reminds us of those witch-burners, crusaders, inquisitors and torturers we've suffered as a planet since first the Romans discovered they could still keep all the money if they bowed down to a weird neo-Jewish cult. Bigots through the ages have proclaimed it is not their opinion but God's, some all-knowing unaccountable invisible bloke, that you should die and they should keep all the money.
Of course it is OK to be a Christian. I think it's daft, but there's all sorts of other human occupations I consider daft, including tarot and table-tapping as much as any religious endeavour. If you want to believe grandad is sat on some celestial settee watching you like you're Coronation Street then fine; you can even believe he doesn't smell anymore if you like. But please don't come it with the we've-got-a-divine-right crap to steal all my money. It's a shame for all those fluffy bunnies who do try to live by the New Testament that all these Old Testament nutters have gone off on one about George W actually being good for you, that it's high time for a bit of wrath. Of course the real nutters are still pissed off the world didn't end in 2000: now they'll probably get caught with all those church funds.
(c). The American media is so derisory that any game satirist merely side-steps the issue. 'Drama on Wall Street today' as some number changed into a slightly smaller number. 'US forces have neutralised' a whole bunch of Arabs who'd quite like their country back. It is only due to the foresight of the Founding Fathers, those revolutionary terrorists who made it all possible, that Senator John Kerry, the thin white duke of the hour, is able to criticise the holy war leader on any subject; and for the moment the subjects are abortion and 'flip-flopping', the only policies Bush is able to pronounce.
(d). The 'Neo-Cons' are what it's all about. Leo Strauss' capitalist revolutionaries, riddling the US administration like woodworm, with their carcinogeous message of a 'New American Century', which seems to mean a fairly shitty century for everyone else. Now let us not be fooled. For all Paul von Wohlferwitz' sledge-hammer sophistry, for all Dick von Cheney's excuses as he shrugs his billionaire shoulders, for all von Rumsfedlt's impersonations of George Smiley (twitch your glasses, twitch your tie, "you may think you know something I know but I'm not saying but I'm saying or rather I'm not saying I know more than you know 'coz I know I haven't told you anything", polish glasses, wipe tie), for all George W's trust-me-i'm-stupid routine; the current US ruling class is as bent on empire and conquest as any Caesar.
They have what is essentially a three-step programme - a sting operation to ensure economic and cultural domination. Step one is an old standard from the Hitler portfolio: Blitzkrieg. Now Hitler comparisons are unfair to just about anyone, but a military tactic is a military tactic: aerial bombardment, 'shock and awe', to induce submission on the part of a civilian population. We consider it a Hitler phenomenon, and I live among the ruins he left, but the fact is Churchill won a fair part of the war by employing the same tactic with a similar ruthlessness, as anyone from Berlin or Frankfurt or Dresden will tell you. So effective is it, in fact, particularly on urban areas, that Blitzkrieg is now the preferred initial stratagem for military analysts the world over. It was even a limited Blitzkrieg that so shocked the affluent world on 'nine-eleven'. The Neo-Cons intend to Blitzkrieg anyone, anywhere, who stands in the way of the 'march to freedom', or more accurately the march to Wallmart. This will take a few years. They figure if they can play John Wayne and look serious about it, then those awkward little pockets of resistance, like China and North Korea and Iran, will start to comply with the American capitalist trading system, simply because the alternative uses up too much toilet roll. Step two is cultural domination in the age of the trade-mark. Elvis will live, from St. Petersburg to Sydney. Microsoft, and the telecoms and that other black hole of capital Aol/Time-Merger, will proceed to use their level playing field to become the super-corps that replace taxation as the prime mode of exploitation. Today Blackpool; tomorrow Beijing. Step three is the easy bit: you sit on your arse and let the money roll in and hope the obesity kills you before our tired old planet simply farts and goes belly up from the pollution of six billion fucking motor cars.
But America is in crisis. They don't really have a left wing in the US, at least not just at the moment. There's Nader and Chomsky and Michael Moore, but these serve the right wing as witches' familiars: Orwellian outcasts to sneer at. The real left wing is submerged, since McCarthy, in a contextual mire bearing that tired old word: 'liberalism'. A liberal can be many things. It is an overly liberal concept. American liberals, considered the left of the Democratic Party, believe in capitalism, believe in markets, believe in God, and just about believe in a woman's right not to have that particular bloke's baby. But there is another left wing, supporting the Democrats because they have no realistic alternative. Black people. American Moslems. The intelligentsia. People who have been marginalised by dint of anything from economics to sexual proclivities. Indeed the subtext to the presidential race, with a week to run, is how far the Republicans dare go in disenfranchising this growing left wing as fast as they can get the road blocks up. This growing left wing also believes America is in crisis. But to them the crisis is precisely the nature of the right wing i've outlined above. George W Bush is the guy with weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them. The separation of church and state has become lost in a haze of liturgical soundbites from the Texas savant, the worshipper in chief. The economics of untrammelled capitalism, especially when it's slightly trammelled by bribes and insider contracts and Dick Cheney, leads only the greediest few to the kingdom of secure retirement, leaving the rest of us peasants to rot for a dollar.
Senator John Kerry daren't say any of this. He's stuck in a bizarre game of public relations. He has to appear sufficiently safe, and grey and trustworthy. He relies on the left to get him elected, but it won't work unless the right can tolerate his liberalism. In fact America's crisis is a political one, and, as it is with politics, not a new one at all. More than four score and some-odd years ago, political power in Western democracies was cornered by a distinct political class. Elections became no more than an affirmation for the pre-ordained, a choice of two, both anointed. This works fine in a stable country like Britain, where centuries of ingrained prejudice is used as a scourge by 'faithful' servants. But America is not a stable country just at the moment. It is a deeply polarised country.
It would be so great if the right was right. It would be so lovely if the death penalty prevented murder; if inmates in pink knickers in Texas jails suddenly became model citizens; if private healthcare produced less pain and death; if controlling immigration made better societies; if there was a heaven and there was a God, and you really were rewarded by some divine justice. It would show the glittering path to heaven on earth if only earthly problems really were simple enough for the average fat white bureaucrat. More cops, more jails, less tax? Lock up the lesbians and the shop-lifters and the spliff-rollers and burn down the abortion clinics? Not even the economic aspects of right-wing ideology, that ideology trumpeted as the winner of the Cold War, hold any more water than a holey bucket. Trickle-down? Fucking trickle-down? Give Bill Gates another billion and that will trickle-down to thirty million impoverished kids as a fiver off W*nd*ws XP? How about private pension provision, or internal contracts, or out-source-ing, or competitive tendering. Have any of these intrinsically deceitful schemes benefitted a society? Anywhere?
So the peoples of the United States have a narrow choice between two right-wing ideologues. One has a few medals and an almost perceptible moral conscience, while the other has billions of dollars and the keys to the office. This for the most divided and divisive campaign in the most divided and divisive America since its Civil War. So, what do we know, a week before polling? We know whoever lives at the White House will have less than half of America behind him. If Bush is re-elected the planet will enter its most difficult period since another minority president, John Kennedy, narrowly avoided a nuclear war. Civil liberties, not often the USA's strong suit, will vanish as each state spends all those taxes on ever more uniforms and ever more guns and ever more cameras and databases the Stazi would have gone moist over. US foreign policy, not often the USA's strong suit, will consist of blowing up other peoples' cities, the farther away the better, and then handing out contracts to themselves for all the tidying up. And we'll get to step three of George's buddies simple plan: simple enough even for a bore of little brain.
If Bush wins, President Kerry will immediately become unimaginable, and his olde worlde liberalism along with it. Finish yer cuppa tea, me old mucka, and dig out that tin hat, whydontcha. Kerry, we desperately anticipate, will bring a certain measured stability, a gravitasse, a military decorum so lacking of politicians who like playing with tanks. But his struggle will not be at some scenic waterfall in a deathly clutch with Professor Bin Laden. His struggle will be at home, wrestling the levers of power from those Republicans insanely convinced they'd been born to the job. Do we seriously think Condaleeza Rice will obligingly give up the dubious machinations of the Bush administration to some disconcertingly keen young Democrat lawyer? If she did it would do for Blair for starters. But cleaning out the diplomatic boobie-traps and finding where they hid the internal 'phone directory is the least that faces a Democratic president. Because the power in the land, as under Kennedy, as under Carter, will reside in shady huddles elsewhere. Why? Because the capitalists, the priesthoods, the US media monster, none of these are going anywhere. We'll still have a Nike workforce who'd need a year's wages to buy one pair of disappointingly fragile shoes. We'll still have credit card churches, all over America, preaching how Jesus bought a magnum, pretending the words 'anal' and 'sex' don't exist, and re-writing the nativity in a small town outside Houston. "Thar ain't no damn room in thar motel, Mariangeline. War'll have ta bunk darn with them thar Trigger and the Wonder Horse. And lo the angels sang 'Hi-Ho Silver Lining'".
We'll still have a US media, owned by Murdoch and his even less presentable ilk, spouting the mantras of the hang-'ems and flog-'ems, scouring every corner of Massachusetts for semen stains or slightly grubby share certificates. And we'll still have the Neo-Cons, hogging every microphone, spouting their taxi-driver imperialism to our young.
I'm predicting a Kerry victory, given that all a Bush victory would mean: the American people have been scared sufficiently by the War of Terror to stick with the same horse. But i'm predicting a Kerry victory based on my rudimentary knowledge of Newtonian physics. See, the trouble with the extreme right, the god-given reactionaries, is that they create a reaction of their own. The moderate right which constitutes much of America, will, I believe, feel alienated by the very purity of the Neo-Con doctrine, even in a sea of right-wing media babble, and see something in Kerry they can better identify with, at least enough to throw this half-wit out. If they don't, if Bush 'wins' a second term, then we'll enter Americas darkest time since the strife of the 1960s, as hard fought for rights and entitlements are fought for all over again. Just as the Neo-Cons aren't going anywhere, the marginalised, the discriminated against, the liberals, the societally aware.....Taking to the streets is becoming de rigeur all over the West. Those hard-pressed National Guardsmen will have yet more work to do.
Adolf Hitler mobilised a huge army of thugs to conduct a nationwide, attempted worldwide purge of murder and plunder. The Romans did that. The Spanish, the British, several countries and ideologies have had a go, from Mussolini to Amin, to Pinochet, to Saddam Hussein. Most of them get no further than a few years of the high life, as your nations' heaviest user of prostitutes and cocaine. History has a habit of levelling things out, whatever all those right-wing history books tell you. Most tyrants die in ignominy. Whatever four more years of Blair and Bush would do to the world, whether they are truly on a path of global tyranny, there are millions already whose minds are mobilised to struggle; even when what they're struggling against hides behind the veneer of populism.
The US forces are gathering themselves, we are told, for a 'final' assault on Falluja. But not before they've levelled the town from the air. After the occupation itself and the crimes in Abu Grahib: this is the third act we'd be calling a 'war crime' in this sorry play, were the actors anyone else. With Ramadi to follow. With no outcry at all from the media,
Bush is almost certainly creating a scenario both fait accompli for an incoming Kerry, and worrisome enough to remind everyone there's a war on. Indeed, with a tyrant's acuity, he's realised the more destructive and brutal he is, the better his chance of winning. Which raises the question: what would a US president have to do before it is a war crime? He's already, by any estimate, killed tens of thousands of mainly innocent people, to the extent that even the deaths at the World Trade Center become almost countable in some sick game of warmongers' Monopoly.
And then Bin Laden himself, at his most Fu Manchu, chips in with a video-message for all the voters, to the effect that the world hasn't seen the last of him, just when plenty of Republicans had convinced themselves with ostrich-like optimism that Bin Laden had died at the end of the last movie: surely, we'd seen the car go off the cliff.
Now are the hours of the dirty tricks. Now the 'phones and PCs are engorged with plots and black propagandas. The Bush camp points to cooked up polls. The Kerry camp appeals to some ethereal 'positive message' having decided bashing Bush is just too easy, and too 'unpatriotic' for that minority still dumb enough to be floaters. Some Democrats have fire in their bellies though. Kathryn Harris, Republican sop who called Florida for Bush in the face of the figures the last time, was shaking a few hands and greasing a few palms out on the street the other day, when a man tried to run her down with his car. He told the arresting officers he was just "doing his civic duty". More black people nationwide have registered to vote than at time in history, while Bush's claim to have cornered the black vote look like so much flim-flam at a time when truth is just pissing in the wind.
The profound difference between wanting a Kerry victory and expecting a Kerry victory occurs to me. European comment is unanimous to a degree the designer of the EU Constitution can only envy: they, that is we, don't want a John Kerry victory so much as a miserable grovelling Bush defeat. 'W' looks like uniting the world in ways even his own dark plotters will be a little shocked by. But clarity, for a change, embues the political skyline: a vote for Bush is a vote for World War Three.
But the question rises: do we, the European thinking-womans' crumpet, seriously expect John F Kerry to be much better, in these times of the global-super-corp empire? Well, there's two issues and the answer is a fundamental yes on both counts. For one thing his not being George Bush speaks volumes: Kerry is a polite believer, not a crazy fundamentalist; Kerry is a military realist, not a demented dictator ordering in the bombers on account of his own minuscule genitalia; Kerry knows the difference between people who dislike US foreign policy and people who don a jacket filled with dynamite at the drop of a prayer-mat; while Dubya tells us we're either with his partially-sighted Crusade, or he'll reserve rooms for us down at Guantanamo. Deluxe rabbit-hutch, fully unfurnished, a bucket to piss in and a stainless steel plate: accommodation includes keep-fit classes and free advice on your three thousand counts of murder from our friendly in-house legal staff.
The other thing is that most American of popular political issues: the sort of guy John Kerry is. Within the narrow, right-wing confines of US political acceptability, he really does offer a fairly liberal alternative. The Republicans hope he'll lose votes because he wants to leave abortion and gay marriage to the states. The Republicans hope he'll lose votes because he intends to rescind Bush's millionaire tax breaks. The Republicans hope he'll lose votes because he plans to have a foreign policy that actually takes into account the lives and desires of those people on the planet who don't happen to live on the stretch of land between New Mexico and New England. He has so much over the simian Republican from Texas that a boxing match between them would resemble a brief classic from the 1970s: like say Yorkshire's proud and pot-bellied Richard Dunn versus, er, Muhammed Ali. John Kerry can finish a correctly punctuated sentence in more than one language. John Kerry actually understands the basic arithmetic of a country's budget. John Kerry knows the right end of a guitar. John Kerry ties his own shoelaces; and he doesn't have to loosen his neck-tie over his head to keep the knot together overnight.
The Democrats have organised a party in the centre of Boston, that jolly old liberal town. Carole King at an outdoor gig piano. She avoids 'You're So Vain'. The BBC allow themselves a political joke: the first since UK foreign policy became a joke. "You have Neo-Cons in Canada, don't you?" "Yeah, but we punch them in bars. We don't fucking vote for them".
The queues in Ohio force the polls to stay open. i've never seen so many Americans not in their cars. I allow myself to believe these queues are New Americans: sensible Americans. Americans who understand the 'leader of the free world' has to be a leader, and has to believe in a free world. Still the glossy ravens rote: "too close to call". Republican heartlands look so strange to me. I can understand Texas - at least I understand that I don't understand Texans. I'll never know what it's like to have a history that consists of Roy Rogers and a dodgy anecdote about Patsy Cline. But how does a state like Mississippi, or Missouri, or Arkansas come to vote for a fat white rancher for whom it's fine that poor America can't have a doctor?
The predictions come in with a disconcerting predictability. Massive turnout but no swings nowhere. The Democrats keep New York, California, Massachusetts. The Republicans keep the Dakotas and the Carolinas, amid reports that Bush's popular vote has actually gone up. All the close states are keeping quiet, and when I finally turned in at 4am GMT, the commentators were talking even of a tied race. $2 billion dollars. Countless tv slots. Debates, exit polls, registration campaigns, movie star endorsements (even a poignant one from the grave courtesy of Christopher Reeve), and none of us are any the wiser. All we know is the curious cycle of public opinion: the wheel America has turned. Bush took over in a divided country in 2000, and; despite all the unifying grief of 'nine-eleven', he leads a completely divided country, for a few more hours at least.
Actually, God, who takes quite a lot of foreign holidays now he's semi-retired, tends in his political opinions in support of Barney the Dog and Ralph Nader. As far as the Divine Being is concerned, levelling carefully constructed forests and shitting in lovingly fashioned seas in order to improve your air conditioner is about as holy as rogering an unmarried horse while eating a bacon sandwich and reciting the poems of Aleister Crowley; as recommended by Charles the eternal Prince of Wales.
I was woken at about 9 am GMT by workmen fumigating the flat downstairs. Florida, known forever to my psyche as 'fucking' Florida, had declared for George Widiot Bush. Ohio was hanging about, but the little horn-ed one was ahead by a hundred thousand votes. It would either be a swift defeat for Kerry, or else a protracted, litigious, and grotesque defeat for Kerry. And the Republicans had the House. Bush had the kind of victory worthy of, well, Saddam Hussein. At the exchanges, shares in the pharmaceutical giants went through the roof. I don't know which way Halliburton's went, but i'd lay odds Dick Cheney made another cool million just from the election. And they say the meek shall inherit the earth.
Somewhere between Senator Kerry conceding and the dark case of head-fuck that descended in the autumnal gloom, a discordantly chirpy woman came on the radio, and explained to me what had gone wrong. It seems the record numbers who came out to vote weren't necessarily Democrats at all. It seems if you decide you're living in time of war, then you stick with your horse, even if he ain't some in the old brains department.
So as the sun set over my soggy city, the truth hit me. All those queues, the citizens stood to attention to exercise their rights, they weren't New Americans at all. They were Republican Widiots, first-time Republicans, mainly dim-witted evangelicals, drunk on some lie about duty, the same dim-wits who'll be queuing up if Dubya calls for the draft. These Americans don't usually vote on the basis that politics is a cess-pool of sin populated by Jews and New Yorkers. These Americans believe God is in charge if a true believer stands at the top and thinks as little as possible. These Americans no more support Michael Moore than they'd support Karl Marx or Che Guavara, or Charles Darwin for that matter. This was no moral majority. This was a cult, a Protestant wave of Protestant sympathies, from people who can't spell Protestant. Then the reality, the awful truth finally dawned. Like many realisations in time of crisis, the truth that confronted me had been in the back of my mind for a while, lingering in my peripheral vision like a ghost. The truth: that in America, that great big nation of America, there were millions of people who were just like George W Bush.
So roll on World War Three. Roll on the Neo-Con junta, further buoyed by the apparent endorsement from millions of Americans even more stupid than they are. They'll all live happily ever after. Dick Cheney will eventually explode due to the simple physiological fact that no one man can contain so much undiluted greed. Condaleesa Rice, Dubya's private nurse and Bible teacher, is set to move from Secretary of State for Lying to Secretary of State for Killing People. She gets an increased salary and hypnotherapy to make her completely forget the last four years. Baron von Wohlferwitz has gladly accepted an end of term bonus package that includes most of Bavaria. George Senior will flourish and thrive with the aid of Baby Bio and regular watering from Barney, until his granddaughter finally decides to dry him out and smoke him. Barbara Bush is currently appearing as a scale model of Buckingham Palace. Jeb Bush is hurriedly practising his ABCs and swotting every episode of Telly Tubbies he can get his hands on. Dubya himself will go out in glory, one day, riding in on a nuke, waving his cowboy hat, irradiated rodeo, Dr. Strangelove, just as soon as he can find an excuse to bomb Moscow. Or anywhere else in China.
If I think it's glum in the UK, maybe I should try Falluja. Or Ramadi. Or Baghdad. Or Tikrit. The Black Watch had "only" ten rockets fired at them today. Don't think America has made them any safer. Don't think America has made me any safer. I hope, as I drag myself to the bus stop, that the most i'll have to contend with the next couple of months is having no fucking money, cold fucking callers, and a fucking local supermarket that plays Winter fucking Wonderland with its overpriced cheese. I hear Blair now, conciliatory tones, right-wing eyebrows:
"Now, look. I know you think I'm a lying mutherfucker and he's the lying mutherfucker that put me up to it. But, you just have to realise, just so long as Jesus Christ speaks to me, and George, and to no-one else at all except maybe Esther Rantzen, then we'll just have to get on in this new world order, and, well, if you don't like it, then we might just be coming for you".
The most powerful man in the history of the world can't pronounce his own weapons systems. He thinks Moslems, homosexuals, abortion doctors and French people are agents of the Devil bent on preventing his divine will. He believes in money, money, money, and something else he can't quite remember just at the moment. And without his first lady he has a job finding his own lavatory, or 'policy briefing room' as he calls it. In terms of global security, he is a serious problem. In terms of human history, we just hope we're all still here in 2008. In terms of political philosophy, it seems the word 'secular' is now consigned to the scrap heap along with 'liberal' and 'social' and of course 'rational'. And it doesn't end there. With a Republican-funded education system for another four years, the American people will be just dumb enough to vote Republican again in 2008.
Hilary Clinton is hardly a candidate to unite the USA. Especially a USA that seems to think the Lord should only heal the sick upon submission of all the necessary insurance documentation. A USA that thinks a woman's place is in the kitchen if she's not doing the ironing. A USA that threatens all those who oppose their right to eat the most, shoot the most and shit the most, at least until all the oil runs out. In short, a USA that would vote for George W Bush.
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