About a lot of things. The more I look back, the more and more I realize exactly how stupid I've been this past year. So, confession time.
I'm a pretty political animal, but only in a very specific sense. Being a student of history, and philosophy, politics is a natural extension of who I am. It is the remainder of the equation of the sum of my parts.
To be specific, Mirriam Webster defines remainder as: "the final undivided part after division that is less or of lower degree than the divisor".
To redirect, politics is the most obvious extension of greater movements within myself, and one of the easiest extensions of those movements.
But it is lesser. Specifically in regards to presidential politics.
Presidents are the figure heads at the top of the pile. They are the natural result of everything that comes underneath them. To put it in more superfluous language, the presidential race is the flower in the garden of the rest of American politics.
This flower, to continue an already obtuse analogy, can never be healthier, or more beautiful than the soil it springs from.
Most people on the left understand that politics, or to be even more general, the public sphere(as a poster on here who I have incredible esteem for calls it) is seriously fouled up. I think at a more basic level, everyone understands that.
We live in a society of strange dichotomies. Dizzying wealth for few, and abject poverty for many. A thin strip of citizens exist in the middle as a buffer. This is the way it has always been, to be sure, but this is getting magnified as time goes on.
We claim to love freedom, but daily submit ourselves to further and further constraints upon that freedom. We claim to love fairness, but export a strange chaos of economics, anarchic capitalism, across the world; a situation that is anything but fair to 90% of the world.
We constantly argue about values, as though the word had any inherent meaning, shocked and scandalized as Janet Jackson's breast get's bared, while simultaneously electing officials like Arnold Swarzenegger, who's movies glorify violence in some of the worst possible ways.
We stand on the precipice of danger at all turns. We seem to be transitioning from the Baroque into Kierkegaard all over again. We worship at odd altars, and act aghast when no one else does.
This may seem to be straying, but there's a point here. And here it goes.
For the last year I've been touting the process of Dean, suggesting that it can forment a revolution in the public sphere by its mere existence. But this is putting Descartes before the horse.
There's a mismatch between the process and the policy. The garden is still deathly ill, and slowly dying. Planting new flowers makes no sense.
You cannot alter politics by electing presidents. You can alter presidents by fixing politics at a more basic level. I had forgotten alot of what I had learned along the way, in my fervor for change.
But this change is largely illusory. It always has been. I was just never in the state of mind to be receptive to the knowledge before. I was too caught up in the horse race, and the back and forth. I couldn't see the garden for the trees.
Hear me, though. I am not knocking Dean. I still like him the best out of all the candidates, with the exception of Kucinich. The party structure abandoned DK even more than they did Dean, making supporting him irrelevent from the get-go. But I digress. I will still vote for Dean, should he be on the ballot when my state comes around.
But I've let go of the angst. Its okay if he doesn't win. Its okay if Kerry does. Because you cannot fix the process from the top down. You just can't. If anything, the Dean campaign should be illustrative of that. The Dean campaign was all about bottom-up, except, it was playing to be top-down. This cognitive dissonance never hit me before, like it has today.
So I let go of my anger, and sadness about the presidential campaign, and realize, its not the venue for nuance. Its not the place for reconstruction. It really is two parties, warring against one another. I shall return to the ether of the more ephemeral actions that occupied me before I got caught up in fervor of the campaign cycle. I belong there. Its the place for non-partisan people of both sides.
In other words, if you don't fit in the party, change it, or destroy it. Build something anew. That is the goal. Moreover, society needs to be changed to allow for the changes or creations that you want. You simply cannot force anything to change until you reconstruct that. Your efforts will be suffocated by the dead soil around them every time.
So that's that. My mea culpa. I apologize to all for being wrong. Its okay to dream once in a while, but not when that dream gets in the way of reality. And this time, it certainly did.
I'll still be around here, because I enjoy many of your thoughts so much, but expect a less partisan, and yet, perhaps more rancorous version. Time will tell.
I was cured all right.