Prometheus 6

Professor Reed's piece was a tad too long for a website post and the paragraphs should have been made shorter and more concise but I did not disagree with his points. I will still vote for Obama because I truly regard McCain and his folks as dangerously incompetent. The most that I can expect from Obama, as P6 has written, is that he will prevent the Old Order from dissolving completely into chaos as I fear would happen if McCain and his cronies were at the helm.

Now that I have made my deal with the Devil (the Old Order, not Obama) and all that it implies, one of the few options left for me is to minimize my role in feeding this monster. No more financial contributions to the Obama campaign. He doesn't need my money and I have to maintain at least a measure of pretense that I hold some moral high ground here.

Reed's opening paragraph completely turned me around because I did not listen to Obama's speech on patriotism. I might be willing to listen Gore Vidal and the late Norman Mailer deliver speeches on patriotism. Both of them, after all, served in World War II and were opposed to the war in Vietnam but I do not listen to any politicians' speeches about patriotism.

I was not aware that Obama had repeated in his speech certain lies about the Vietnam-era and the 1960s that I consider "damnable lies." I marched and protested against that war and I openly resisted the draft. I was hit in the mouth by police swinging their batons and pursued by the FBI because I refused to accept the legitimacy of the Selective Service System. I was always glad to see friends and cousins who returned from Vietnam. I recall one cousin crying at my parents' kitchen table as he related a story to me about killing someone who was standing two feet from him at the time. Obama has no real notion of that period of time and so he should just STFU rather than run off at the mouth repeating various lies, myths and inanities.

Here is an excerpt of Reed's opening paragraph:

In response to Greenwald's sharp rebuke of Obama's FISA sellout, she acknowledged that he had "missed an opportunity to lead." Defending his June 30 patriotism speech that included a gratuitous rehearsal of the right-wing line about anti-Vietnam War protesters from the "counterculture" who "blamed America for all that was wrong in the world" and the canard about antiwar activists "failing to honor" returning Vietnam veterans, which Obama asserted "remains a national shame to this day" despite the fact that is an utter lie, vanden Heuvel pointed again to Hayden's endorsement as a sign that Obama's cheap move must be okay because, after all, Hayden was a founder of SDS.

"Trying to stoke hysteria around abortion rights and affirmative action looks more and more like a feeble attempt to deflect attention from that fact, and to convince people who don't stand to get much from a Dem victory that they should commit to them anyway - for the sake of those who do stand to benefit. I've finally realized what this move is all about: what makes the Dems every four years 'better' is always something that the hacks and yuppies are likely to imagine getting if they win, and their disgusting moralizing about the imperative to vote for their 'lesser evil' - which means 'I may get what's important for me, but you have to recognize that what you need is naïve or impractical' -- is all about bullying the rest of us into believing we have an obligation to vote for what's good for them."

"Frankly, I've begun to suspect that the election year version of the 'now is not the time' argument and its sibling, the 'get him elected first then hold him accountable' line, as well as their first cousin, 'Well, that's what they all have to do to get elected,' reflect nothing better than denial of the grim reality that we can't expect anything from them or make any demands of them. After all, how can we hold them accountable once they're in office if we can't do it when they're running, when we technically have something we can withhold or deliver?

After all, how can we hold them accountable once they're in office if we can't do it when they're running, when we technically have something we can withhold or deliver?

That's the one that made me link it. The same reasoning made me do the "Anyone But Clinton" bit. Although he forgot one second cousin: "If we vote for them they'll listen to us out of gratitude."

thanks for linking it, P6. This is the one that got me:

So there's no way I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my participation, and I'm ready to tell all those liberals who will hector me about the importance of voting that it's the weakest, most passive and least consequential form of political participation, and I'm no longer going to pretend it's any more than that, or that the differences between the Dem and GOP candidates are greater than they are, just to help them feel good about not doing anything more demanding and perhaps more consequential.

Of course, this means I must be willing to step up and walk the walk too.

So there's no way I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my participation

I will always disagree with this, to tel you the truth. I grant it's not individually empowering, but you have to learn to work all the controls you have access to. Voting is a collective move, and our major problem is we're the only ones in the country that actually believe that rugged individual crap.

More to the point: what benefit do you get from NOT voting?

I believe in the citizen's obligation to participate in a democracy, so when election time comes around, I feel a palpable pressure to pay attention, learn the issues and candidates and vote. But when I don't agree with any of the alternatives offered, that same pressure forces me to go against my own principles, my own logic. Last time, I voted simply against Bush, even though I had terrible doubts about Kerry and the Democrats. And ultimately, neither I nor Senator Kerry benefited from my vote.

Abstention is a legitimate part of the voting process, though at the citizen level, there is no way to mark our ballots as such. Instead, I'll have to be counted as that ever-growing percentage of people who "didn't show up" at the polls. Of course, we'll all be lumped together in one pool of "apathetic, unpatriotic, ingrateful" pseudo-Americans. So be it. My benefit will be a clear conscience.

And ultimately, neither I nor Senator Kerry benefited from my vote.

Who benefits from that? abstention?

Again, voting is a collective, not an individual, process. The less you participate the smaller the possibility of your impact is. Because one of those guys is going to get in there regardless.

in the "rugged individual crap" of MY vote, MY way... help me understand how I benefit from a collective voting for someone I don't think should be elected?

That's a long one, that I've been working on for a while. Let's see if I can do a short version.

Collective action does not benefit anyone personally. It changes the framework within which we operate. People benefit or lose by that change, but those individual shifts are not the goal of such action.

We've seen a bit of that. I guarantee you no Democrat will run a Southern Strategy campaign again. Had Hillary Clinton she won, every Black candidate would have faced it irrespective of party affiliate. She would have validated it. She lost, that did not happen, which is good. But you did not gain personally from the rejection of Hillary Clinton any more than I did.

Obama is running a pretty conservative campaign but it is not a racist campaign as (quite frankly) every campaign since Nixon was. McCain is trying to keep his nose clean but we know his party is the problem. Throwing them all out is the framework-changing game we are working on now.

Indeed, Obama represents a class politics, one that promises to cement an alliance anchored in the professional-managerial class (including, perhaps especially, the interchangeable elements of which now increasingly set the policy agendas for what remains of the women's, environmentalist, public interest, civil rights and even labor movements) and the "progressive" wing of the investor class.

I think that's right.

...the recent outpouring of enthusiastic support from all quarters - including on black academic and professional list serves and blogs and on op-ed pages - for his attacks on black poor people underscores the likelihood that Obama will be even more successful than Clinton at selling punitive, regressive and frankly racist social policies as humane anti-poverty initiatives.

I don't think so. This has already been accomplished under Bill Clinton. Unlike prior elections the usual tropes about affirmative action, entitlements for the poor, and illegal immigration are simply inadequate solutions to problems faced by the professional classes: job insecurity, rising costs of college and healthcare, home mortgage crisis, and soaring energy prices making all the accoutrements of middle class life unattainable. This election is not about poverty. It's about the uncertainties of the middle and upper-middle classes and whether whites in this group will follow their material interests or content themselves with nationalist ideology which sustains the white working class.

Again, I would say the task for my friends on the far left is to 'get in where you fit in' and/or follow and improve upon the model that Obama has put down but find a way to get the other fifty percent that don't vote to become involved. Either that or sidestep the formal political process entirely and advocate for revolution.

Both of them screw the people, the only difference is the GOP uses a sand paper condom with lemon juice lube while the Dems use a a little KY and whisper in your ear.
.....Exercising your right to vote increases your a chance to choose.