Many of Obama’s constitutional violations that disturb Stoller and myself are barely known and understood by the general populace. It will take decades of education to build understanding of their importance and constituencies for them. However, education, carbon, global warming, nuclear issues, the rights of women, immigrants, minorities, etc., are immediate and pressing. In triage terms, an Obama presidency will allow time to work on these issues without sentencing another decade to the negative consequences of panic, despair and chaos.
I applaud Stoller’s concerns and his passion, but I think he underestimates how long political change actually takes. I certainly did as a young man, when I was calling for revolution and stockpiling weapons. My father was a wealthy man in the ’50s and early ’60s, a big-time Wall Street broker. His last words to me in 1970, when he was visiting the commune I lived on, remain prophetic and true. “You think America’s going down in five years, son; it’ll take 50 and you better be prepared to hang in for the long haul. There are huge historical forces at work, and the sons of bitches running things will do whatever they can to make sure they get theirs out of it before they die.”
A simple walk through any European streets will reveal plaques on the walls commemorating where neighbors were dragged from their homes and shot by partisans, by fascists, by communists, by falangists. True social upheaval is horrifying, it is being danced before our eyes on TV and in print every day. While in the abstract it may “cleanse” the political body or other comforting nostrums, for the dead, the wounded, the maimed and the millions who continue to suffer, those are the slogans of a removed, detached leadership. It is obvious that Stoller considers himself among them. “We need to put ourselves into the position of being able to run the government,” he says with no apparent irony, as if he and his friends were obviously “good” people and if the world were left in their hands, only good would come of it.
As a Zen Buddhist priest in my seventh decade, I know better. I know that each of us carries within us the capacity of all humanity for positive and negative behavior; we can be Hitler or Mother Teresa. We leak anger, jealousy, competitiveness on a daily basis and if we are not careful and do not monitor ourselves, our best intentions become murderous to others. (Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam.) Were the millions upon millions of deaths we caused in those places done only by “bad” people or a mistake? That’s a delusion.
I would suggest that the lesser of two evils is “less evil.” Sometimes in the real, impure world the bad man and the good are indivisible and morph from one to the other. It makes fixed judgments difficult. You take what you can get, and you organize to protect yourself. To deliberately create a political crisis as an organizing tool sounds remarkably like the old Marxist saw of “heightening the contradiction.” Been there, done that. It’s tough being human. Picking one’s way through reality moment by moment requires delicacy and finesse. Instead of preparing to ‘rule,’ I would be interested in learning more about Stoller’s desires to “serve.” In the meantime, I can only cling to the hope that his advice to vote against the president in swing states is not widely observed.
Salon