xtcian

norman conquest

10/12/08

In our ongoing series of differing voices over the next few weeks, here's my brother Kent!

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I am older than most of the people who read this blog. For the record, 51 years old.

This (obviously) has not conferred much in the way of wisdom upon me. But it does mean that I was around for a lot of history that most of you learned about second hand.

The first Presidential election I voted in was 1976. Before that, I followed the elections with growing interest as they came along. I remember the 1964 election, when I was 7 years old, mostly because there was an impromptu plebiscite on the playground in Bloomington Indiana: those for Johnson pushed one way on a Merry-Go-Round, those for Goldwater pushed the other. Johnson won, and the rest is history.

In 1968, I went door to door with a friend of mine in our neighborhood with pamphlets for Eugene McCarthy. I don't remember who set that up, or if I did it more than once, but it is the point where I became something more than a passive participant in Politics.

1968 was one of those weird years -- some kids in my Elementary School were sent home for wearing Peace Sign buttons, and I was yelled at in the bakery near my school by the counter lady for carrying a copy of "The Autobiography Of Malcolm X." The police were beating up kids, the crazies were assassinating Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and an unrepentant racist, George Wallace, took away enough Democratic votes to give Nixon the Presidency.

Which is preface to saying this: This year may be even weirder. On the one hand, an African-American man has a good chance of becoming President. On the other we have the Republican Party in the midst of a full-scale implosion.

The McCain campaign's strategy at this point has devolved into a full on racist smear campaign, based entirely on distortions and far-fetched guilt by association. McCain and Palin have been inciting the ugliest, most ignorant faction of their party to the edge of violence. In a town hall meeting, McCain has to defend Barack Obama as a decent family man that people should not be afraid of. Here's a guy who has spent the last week on mean, groundless character assassination as his only strategy. Then, he has to contradict that strategy in order to maintain the merest shred of self-respect. And then his faithful supporters boo him for it.

The icing on the cake, though, is his running mate being found in a report commissioned by the overwhelmingly Republican Alaskan Legislature to have abused the power of her office. The campaign is forced to issue a rebuttal to this report that is a transparently, brazenly mendacious. I'm having to go to the Thesaurus for this little essay, just so I don't keep using the word 'lies' over and over.

A few weeks ago, when McCain had a narrow lead in the national polls, the talking heads on television had a consensus that the McCain campaign was succeeding in framing the election as a referendum on Obama, to Obama's detriment. Now the script is flipped -- this campaign is about two things: the stunning, unprecedented collapse of the world economy and its effects in the US, and how the McCain campaign has devolved into something sickening and ugly.

Mark my words -- you're living through the one that will be the benchmark of insane election seasons for the rest of your life. In some ways this is 1968 all over again; a polarized electorate, a troubled economy and an unpopular war. I don't even want to say the other thing I'm afraid 2008 and 1968 might have in common -- I just hope that it doesn't come to pass.

Oh, and if you want another parallel: McCain keeps saying "I know how to find Bin Laden. I know how to fix the economy" without being willing to actually say how he will do these things. In another parallel with 1968, Nixon said he had a plan for ending the Vietnam War, one that he wouldn't talk about. Later in his memoirs, Nixon denied ever having such a plan. Which leads me, as a student of history, to suspect that when McCain claims to know how to do something, but won't say how, he's just making shit up.

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above: Kent and Lucy Kent, Xmas 2005; below: August 2008

Posted by Ian Williams at October 12, 2008 11:29 PM