October 27, 2004
What's
Come Over Us?
Crammed
with Distressful Politics
By
JULES RABIN
Politics,
grown fat on popular outrage and indignation, has taken a seat
at the common table. Breakfast at our house often begins with
a rant by me, over some current astonishment that has dropped
down on us out of the overnight news; my wife enduring and sympathizing.
Hardly a dinner in company, or a convivial Sunday brunch, fails
to bring out a session of deploring what the crowd in and around
the White House have lately perpetrated: the rigged war in Iraq
first and foremost, that improbable man in the White House second,
and his Devilish Works third.
We
wonder: could his smirk and his duplicity and his strange manner
of simultaneously bullying and wheedling actually fit, with lock
and key exactness, some streak of character running through our
country? What have we become, that we could adopt such a visibly
warped man as maximum leader? To what dread place are he and his
faction taking us?
The
urgent hot breath of Southern and other rising fundamentalisms
has reached our faces even in chill, steady New England. The thinly
progressive attitudes and legislation of the three-quarters century
past that we have come to take for granted as a minimum basis
of ordinary civic decency and security, have been dissolving under
us like a sandbank scoured by a current grown suddenly swift,
dark, and powerful.
Hard-bitten,
turned inward, and scared ... will that be the new face of America,
a consequence of our cohabitation with this erroneous President?
Some of us with a lot of years on our bones remember the phrase
of the 1930's, "It can’t happen here," that expressed
faith in America’s absolute exemption from any imitation
on our part of the triple specter of Italian, Spanish, and German
fascisms. IT hasn’t happened here yet, but it may be drawing
upon us, piecemeal and in chunks.
***
At
dinner with friends, we find community and mutual solace in reviewing
details of the plight of American politics, for 10 minutes, 30
minutes, an hour. Schadenfreude and gallows humor play a part
in the grim entertainment. And then, easy still, after all, in
our condition in the year 2004, we resume talk about the meal,
absent friends, our gardens, our health, and the other easy-going
trivia of quotidian life. The food on the table is hot, the company
is comfortable, the flame of the woodstove is cheery, and the
door is shut against the weather outside.
***
Most
of the friends with whom I sit down at the table are in small
and different ways intellectuals: Luftmenschen of the kind who
love the Word and believe, even, that we lucky ones of the Abundant
Word have been set free by it. We almost all, probably, listen
to Public Radio, and to alternative radio as well, if there’s
any of that around. Through the day we pick up hot chestnuts of
analysis and other journalistic tidbits from the Internet, thanks
to friends who devote themselves to selecting the best from the
welter on the Web, and passing it on to their personal Lists.
We may read bastion publications like The Times, The New York
Review, The New Yorker, among others. We regard ourselves as well
informed people; many of us could sketch out a passable discourse
on any of the key vagaries that, the times being as troubled as
they are, keep turning up in the current news.
Vagaries
and concealed hooks are after all what we deal in: departures
from the confirmatory line taken by the major media and the afflicted
regime in Washington.
***
We
love the Word for itself and for its liberating effects. And yet,
these days, some of us are between being drenched and drowning
in the unremitting cascades of political words that come down
upon us. Lavished with scatter-shot hourly news broadcasts and
with the analytic summations that pop onto the Internet screen
as often as one could wish or could endure to download them, and
the pamphlet-length articles that also appear on the Internet,
and the plethora of books exposing and damning the regime that
are pouring off the presses, we are inundated by the politics
of the day in all its clamor and incessancy. Checking my email
inbox just now, I find there are 1381 unread messages there, gathering
electronic dust.
Rising
and retiring: for some of us one of the first act of the day is
to turn on the early morning news; and last, at night, comes a
reading of the late Reuters dispatches on the Internet. Like the
beleaguered folk of Europe in World War II who bent close to the
radio to hear the scratchy dispatches from the BBC (reports from
from Smolensk, from Normandy, from Monte Cassino), we are all
waiting for news of deliverance from the government over which
Bush presides as fool, liar, bigot, and destroyer of essential
social institutions.
Weltering
in politics as we are, one has to be deliberate to keep a sufficient
place open in the day for the finenesses of a Chaucer or George
Eliot, the complexities of a Foucault or a Raymond Williams.
***
Everyone,
Left or Right, with active concern in their heart about the politics
of the day, knows how to deplore and falls easily into that rhetorical
attitude.
Deploring
privately will assuage the emotion of the moment, perhaps, but
it does little towards satisfying the needs of the body politic
to which we’re willy-nilly always, and now scarily as well,
attached.
Political
efficacy necessarily wears a public face. In a mass society like
ours that is marked by deep privacies and estrangement as never
before in history, and that provides no popular Agoras or Forums
(our chief civic ritual, voting, is conducted privily, in a curtained
booth), for the ordinary citizen to "go political" is
an uncomfortable thing to do. Susan Sontag speaks of "onerous
citizenship." My own phrase for that is paying a voluntary
civic tax, which is to say stepping out of the habit of privacy
to fill and place one more sandbag on the threatened dike of our
composite American life.
Taking
a public political stand conjures up ideas of opening oneself
to wounding ripostes; of door-to-door canvassing (as some of my
Vermont friends have been doing in the neighboring swing-state
of New Hampshire), with the risk then of being confronted by who-knows-what-hostile-reaction
when the door is opened by the suspicious stranger; or of street
vigils where the protester may be called a slut as a rejoinder
to the sign she is displaying. (As happened to my friend Ann a
couple of weeks ago; she as inoffensive as a deer in the meadow.)
In some parts of the country, public exposure of one’s politics
ranks as an impropriety, like talk of sex or one’s personal
assets. It is disquieting to reflect how much the sanctified voting
booth and the toilet stall resemble each other both as architectural
forms and as ultimate resorts of privacy.
***
In
my own case: while deploring the politics of the day plentifully
in private surroundings where it’s safe to do that, I’ve
also taken my political protest to the public street in the tiny
city of Montpelier, Vermont, which is a kind of home town to me.
(I live – have lived for 35 years – up a dirt road
just 12 miles away from the city.) Since September, 2002, when
it still seemed possible to forestall the Bush administration’s
campaign to take us into war with Iraq, I have attended a weekly
noon-time vigil that, in the beginning, protested against the
idea of invading Iraq, and then, after the invasion, shifted to
exposing and protesting its gruesome actualities.
That’s
no big deal: 1 hour a week.
But
it feels like a great deal, for the visible effect we have on
passersby on what is the most crowded hour of the week in our
otherwise quiet little city. We are seen, acknowledged, respected,
scowled at, thanked, infrequently (these days) yelled at, and
sometimes embraced. In the Fall foliage season, the present time
from which I write, we see frequent knots and busloads of tourists
as well, from England and Germany and Missouri and elsewhere.
We have found on the street a way of broadcasting our thoughts,
our chagrin, and the political haikus we hand-letter onto our
signs, beyond our private dinner tables.
I
think that besides the anti-war message our signs and our leaflet
carry, our appearance on the street renders also the idea that
public protest is legitimate, practical, easy-going, and even,
sometimes, jolly, in the experience of ourselves, the protesters.
We’ve given up our early ideas of keeping silent during
the hour of the vigil, and have in fact become a convivial and
gabby lot. Without intending to do that, we foment a carnival
atmosphere on some Fridays, on our stretch of the block: dogs,
baby carriages, bright signs, and greetings. With 30 or 35 people
lined up side to side in front of Montpelier’s dreary-Modern
little Federal building, most of us regulars and familiars, there
are bound to be a dozen conversations going on at a time; some
of them with passersby who stop to chat with a friend they have
discovered on the vigil line, some with strangers. The prevailing
buzz reflects our solidarity. The three dozen of us who show up
on any given Friday in the comfortable seasons of the year, out
of 50 or so regulars, are ourselves a community of familiar and
sympathetic faces. Sifted out by time and commitment, we are like
a sodality that without a summons assembles regularly for a Minyan
or a 6 AM Mass.Our present steady number of 30 to 35 protesters,
incidentally, relative to Montpelier's population of 8,000, would
be tantamount to a demonstration in New York City numbering 30
to 35 thousand.
*
* *
Protest
is not all dreariness and duty. I believe, and I have learned
as well from conversations with regulars at our Montpelier vigil,
that participation brings relief from the twin futilities that
have become so widespread in our times, of deploring and biting
the lip in private. The heartburn, canker, and clenching olf the
spirit that those futilities can engender yield, a little, when
you move from private fretting to social action.
The
street and its brusque publicity isn’t for everyone. I know
a woman who has written a masterful book on the subject of war
poetry, a work that engaged her best talents for years; another
woman who goes in for the rumpus of party politics, and shakes
her head when she walks past our vigil, at the waste of good intentions
she sees there. I know a woman who rescues injured race horses
from the knackers, and another woman who (tirelessly at first
and now wearily) compiles and circulates a comprehensive calendar
of political activities in our area ("What’s a Citizen
To Do?").
Which,
where, how? Take your pick.
Jules
Rabin lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: JHRabin@sover.net
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