I grinned to myself as I walked out of the polling booth.
I always do; I can't help it. It doesn't matter if my candidate is going to lose by 30 points, or win in a landslide. It doesn't matter if it's a presidential election, or a state primary, or if I'm just voting for a friend's mom in a local school board race. There's something unbearably cheerful about voting, and I can't help myself. I always leave the polling place with a irrepressible grin.
I grinned to myself as I walked out of the polling booth.
I always do; I can't help it. It doesn't matter if my candidate is going to lose by 30 points, or win in a landslide. It doesn't matter if it's a presidential election, or a state primary, or if I'm just voting for a friend's mom in a local school board race. There's something unbearably cheerful about voting, and I can't help myself. I always leave the polling place with a irrepressible grin.
No candidate I've ever voted for has won the Presidency. I cast my first vote in the 1996 Illinois primary. I voted for Bob Dole, in what was by that point an uncontested march to the Republican nomination. I smiled as I walked out of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church where I voted. Fifty years from now, there will be no fun in telling a story of how I cast my first vote for Bob Dole. But I've always respected the man. Until this year. Until he came out of his retirement to jump on the Swift Boat Liars for Truth bandwagon. Bob Dole the Hatchet-Man was back. He can no longer snap about "Democrat wars", of course, so instead he gave us his learned opinion on the severity of Senator Kerry's war wounds. Brutus was an honorable man.
Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive
A world war can be won, you want me to believe
But I see through your eyes, and I see through your brain
Like I see through the water that runs down my drain.
- Bob Dylan
And so we voted for the strong candidate who stands up strong and can make a decision and knows that we have to be strong to stay the course and we've looked down from the mountain-top and seen the valley and freedom is on the march. We voted for the candidate who promised perpetual war as the price of peace.
I'm a child of the 80s, for whom Vietnam is nothing more than a chapter in a history book, as remote to me as the war of 1939 was to those our government sent off to Southeast Asia. But nevertheless, it is horribly disconcerting to hear the Bush administration talk about turning the corner real soon now, to hear them talk about enemy body counts, about how we're killing the insurgents faster than they can be replaced. I cringe when they talk about how we're slowly but surely training the Iraqi army to take over the fight. Vietnamization never goes out of style. Hello, Fallujah: we needed to destroy the village in order to save it.
I don't want to claim that God is on our side... I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.
- John Kerry
God is on our side. At least, this is what He tells the president. Through His right-wing surrogates, He has also informed us of His belief that there would be no casualties in Iraq, that the sanctity of life does not refer to prisoners or to dusky-skinned foreigners, that the sanctity of life does not refer to the poor and the sick, but only to the embryonic stem cell. He has warned us that allowing the lesbians down the street to marry will result in the destruction of Western Civilization.
Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
- Rudyard Kipling
What disappoints me most is not that we lost an election. We've lost many elections, and we'll lose many more. If one man says we should give tax credits to companies to encourage the development of cleaner technology, and another says we would be better off funding research through university grants, we are clearly talking about the same thing. We are agreeing on the ends, and arguing about the means. Both are clearly part of the same philosophical continuum. Losing just means that we'll try the other guy's idea for a couple years.
But this time, it often seemed like we were two nations talking at cross purposes to one another. We were arguing not about means, but about ends; we were arguing about the soul of our civilization. We were arguing about the future, and the past, and, unbelievably, about whether the Enlightenment was a good idea.
It's been nearly three weeks since the election, and although 210,000 votes in Ohio remain uncounted, it seems unlikely that the result will change. Slightly more than half of my country appears to reject in principle the idea that I am my brother's keeper. Do they reject, like Mordred, the idea that Right is more important than Might? They reject international law. Like Denethor, they see our nation not as one among equals, as a queen among queens, but as a mistress among slaves. How many divisions has the Pope?
I know that none of this is wholly true. I know that 115 million Americans voted, and had 0.06% of them voted differently, John Kerry would be the President-Elect. But it still feels like getting kicked in the stomach. And that long black cloud is coming down. John Ashcroft's replacement at the Justice Department will be the White House Counsel who argued that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint", and that "we need a less-cramped view of what torture is and is not". Bush is expected to nominate him for the Supreme Court, despite the misgivings of many conservatives who fear he is too moderate. They want to overturn Roe and strike down Griswold v. Connecticut. They want to roll back the Commerce clause on which the New Deal is based. They want strict constructionists. But have no fear, for our President has assured us that he doesn't support Dred Scott. Brutus was an honorable man.
Words fail me. To the billions of people in North America and around the world who so desperately wanted to see George Bush defeated, I'm sorry. Nous ne sommes plus des Américains. But we'll be back. And one day I will get to vote for a winner.