Election 2008

It's past 3am and I can't stop reading every last election news report, polling result, and op-ed online (I've already read the NY Times, Slate, Salon, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel and have gradually spiraled down to various Christian conservative websites). Obama's going to win today, and it's just such an extraordinary and pivotal moment that I can't quite focus on anything else.

I think this Sidney Blumenthal column (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/04/uselections2008-johnmccain) accurately and articulately describes why this election is so momentous. Basically, the current support for Obama reflects one of those major political realignments that hits the US every half-century or so, always prompted by utter catastrophe. The Civil War empowered the Republican party of the mid-19th-century; the Great Depression spawned the New Deal and put Franklin's Democrats in power until the "great fracturing" of the liberal coalition in 1968; the Vietnam War and the cultural conflicts of the 60s discredited the Democrats of the time; Nixon's tactic of appealing to the "silent majority" then inaugurated the long, corrupt, backlash-driven, plen-T-plaining era of Republican rule that culminated in Reagan and went nova with Bush.

I think it's pathetic that things had to get this bad before the Republicans lost widespread American support. Right now people are alert to the bad economy and (perhaps) to the pointless, ruinous war in Iraq. But by the time of the 2004 election the government had already proven itself to be laughably, grotesquely horrible and immoral; corrupt and staffed by incompetent clowns; obsessed with PR and image management to the exclusion of actual governance; and people still went and voted for the guy. I was in Philly at the time. I remember going to bed hopeful that Kerry had won and waking up in disbelief and heartbreak. Wasn't Abu Gharib enough? Wasn't the absence of weapons of mass destruction enough? Bush had too many blunders and damaging policies to mention, and Bush's 2004 campaign was itself a cringe-worthy hypocritical sham (the rich scion of a political dynasty is the one who represents the ordinary Joe? the president who attacked the wrong country is the one who's "tough on terrorism"?), but above all, the tragic, unprovoked war undertaken under false pretenses should have triggered national outrage and chased him all the way back to Crawford.

The past eight years have been so dramatic and surreal that they truly have been stranger than fiction. From the illegitimate election of 2000 to Sept. 11 attacks, from the invasion of Iraq to Bush's reelection, from the wiretapping civil-rights violations to the Wall Street crash, the whole Bush presidency reads like an exceptionally well-plotted tragedy. The period even begins at the start of a millenium. I'm fairly certain the decade will be studied as a unit in humanities courses in the future, much the way the 1960s are studied now.

It's sobering also to recognize that the Bush presidency has framed my entire young adulthood. September 11th occured during my second week of college. I vote for his successor as a married graduate student, in my last year as a "young voter." In between, my entire adult political awareness has been shaped by the culture wars of the Bush era and by the dominance of thugs in the federal government. When I was younger my shock and disbelief took the form of a cautious worry about my own political awareness--this can't really be the way the world is run, can it?-- although it has since morphed into a secure but despairing view of the American political establishment. In many ways I became convinced of the validity of English literature as a field of study because of the urgency of the Bush years. Satire, political allegory, propaganda, dystopia, and counterfactual narrative all take on a certain power when confronted with authoritarianism and the wholesale manipulation of truth by political leaders; I was incredibly impressed by how The Onion and Stephen Colbert rose to the occasion and delivered stinging critiques when other critical voices were absent (or being drowned out). Literature is ultimately about life; imaginative writing makes space for dissent, and thereby makes itself relevant.