The good news is that in the future American travelers will likely not be surrounded by people trying to get their dollars. At the rate the Bush Administration is borrowing on our future with the deficit, the dollar will go the way of the Russian ruble or the Italian lira. The bad news is that if you combine the poor economy with the poor standard of public education and the forms of social conservatism propogated by the Christian Right, we can look forward to a populace that must import technology it no longer understands well enough to create, that cannot afford to travel overseas, even, a nation of people in indentured servitude to their credit card companies, mortgages and taxes, ruled by a nominal democracy that sells weapons to people who later become our enemies, a fact we obscure when our diplomacies fail, and need to justify our wars, waged to fit the vision of our leader's private psychological theater. The war's reasons apparent to no one else.
Oh wait. We're there. Or at least, it's the next stop on this train.
James Carville spoke of the Democratic Party needing a narrative, and he's right. As to what that narrative is, well, I suggest something of the above. What I am talking about is how here in LA I had, before the election, a taxi ride from a Bangladeshi gentleman who talked to me about how the coming election was his first. He was concerned about the education of his 8-year-old son, because, as he said, his son could get a better education in the schools in Bangladesh. That's right. That's what he said. And yet he was still about to vote for Bush, because of the man's principles. I had some time as we drove and I connected the dots between the tax cuts and No Child Left Behind being underfunded, added that the Republicans had sent a group to the Utah legislature to remind them, as they were about to act against No Child Left Behind, that to do so would strip the state of millions in federal funding---These are people, I said, who don't understand the implications of their actions. Do you want them in power, the rest of us playing catch-up on their whims? By the time I left the car he was questioning his vote. He asked me if I was journalist, and I said, no, another kind of writer, but, I added, this kind of democracy asks us all to be as informed as possible. We need, in short, a narrative, very much. We need people to see cause and effect.
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