[Peace-discuss] Kerry

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The excellent Naomi Klein seems to me to have it right.  A version of
this appears in the good-bit-less-than-excellent Nation. --CGE]

	Published on Friday, July 30, 2004 by the Guardian/UK
	Anybody but Bush - And then Let's Get Back to Work
	With Kerry at the Helm, the Left might
	Focus on the Real Issues Again
	by Naomi Klein
 
Last month, I reluctantly joined the Anybody But Bush camp. It was "Bush
in a Box" that finally got me, a gag gift my brother gave my father on his
66th birthday. Bush in a Box is a cardboard cut-out of President 43 with a
set of adhesive speech balloons featuring the usual tired Bushisms: "Is
our children learning?" "They misunderestimated me" - standard-issue
Bush-bashing schlock, on sale at Wal-Mart, made in Malaysia.

Yet Bush in a Box filled me with despair. It's not that the president is
dumb, which I already knew, it's that he makes us dumb. Don't get me
wrong: my brother is an exceptionally bright guy; he heads a think-tank
that publishes weighty policy papers on the failings of export-oriented
resource extraction and the false savings of cuts to welfare. Whenever I
have a question involving interest rates or currency boards, he's my first
call. But Bush in a Box pretty much summarizes the level of analysis
coming from the left these days. You know the line: The White House has
been hijacked by a shady gang of zealots who are either insane or stupid
or both. Vote Kerry and return the country to sanity.

But the zealots in Bush's White House are neither insane nor stupid nor
particularly shady. Rather, they openly serve the interests of the
corporations that put them in office with bloody-minded efficiency. Their
boldness stems not from the fact that they are a new breed of zealot but
that the old breed finds itself in a newly unconstrained political
climate.

We know this, yet there is something about George Bush's combination of
ignorance, piety and swagger that triggers a condition in progressives
I've come to think of as Bush Blindness. When it strikes, it causes us to
lose sight of everything we know about politics, economics and history and
to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd personalities of the people in
the White House. Other side-effects include delighting in psychologists'
diagnoses of Bush's warped relationship with his father and brisk sales of
Bush "dum gum" - $1.25.

This madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect
John Kerry, not because he will be different but because in most key areas
- Iraq, the "war on drugs", Israel/Palestine, free trade, corporate taxes
- he will be just as bad. The main difference will be that as Kerry
pursues these brutal policies, he will come off as intelligent, sane and
blissfully dull. That's why I've joined the Anybody But Bush camp: only
with a bore such as Kerry at the helm will we finally be able to put an
end to the presidential pathologizing and focus on the issues again.

Of course, most progressives are already solidly in the Anybody But Bush
camp, convinced that now is not the time to point out the similarities
between the two corporate-controlled parties. I disagree. We need to face
up to those disappointing similarities, and then we need to ask ourselves
whether we have a better chance of fighting a corporate agenda pushed by
Kerry or by Bush.

I have no illusions that the left will have "access" to a Kerry/Edwards
White House. But it's worth remembering that it was under Bill Clinton
that the progressive movements in the west began to turn our attention to
systems again: corporate globalization, even - gasp - capitalism and
colonialism. We began to understand modern empire not as the purview of a
single nation, no matter how powerful, but a global system of interlocking
states, international institutions and corporations, an understanding that
allowed us to build global networks in response, from the World Social
Forum to Indymedia. Innocuous leaders who spout liberal platitudes while
slashing welfare and privatizing the planet push us to better identify
those systems and to build movements agile and intelligent enough to
confront them. With Mr Dum Gum out of the White House, progressives will
have to get smart again, and that can only be good.

Some argue that Bush's extremism actually has a progressive effect because
it unites the world against the US empire. But a world united against the
United States isn't necessarily united against imperialism. Despite their
rhetoric, France and Russia opposed the invasion of Iraq because it
threatened their own plans to control Iraq's oil. With Kerry in power,
European leaders will no longer be able to hide their imperial designs
behind easy Bush-bashing, a development already forecast in Kerry's odious
Iraq policy. Kerry argues that we need to give "our friends and allies ...
a meaningful voice and role in Iraqi affairs", including "fair access to
the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts. It also means letting
them be a part of putting Iraq's profitable oil industry back together."

Yes, that's right: Iraq's problems will be solved with more foreign
invaders, with France and Germany given a greater "voice" and a bigger
share of the spoils of war. No mention is made of Iraqis, and their right
to a "meaningful voice" in the running of their own country, let alone of
their right to control their oil or to get a piece of the reconstruction.

Under a Kerry government, the comforting illusion of a world united
against imperial aggression will drop away, exposing the jockeying for
power that is the true face of modern empire. We'll also have to let go of
the archaic idea that toppling a single man, or a Romanesque "empire",
will solve all, or indeed any, of our problems. Yes, it will make for more
complicated politics, but it has the added benefit of being true. With
Bush out of the picture, we lose the galvanizing enemy, but we get to take
on the actual policies that are transforming all of our countries.

The other day, I was ranting to a friend about Kerry's vicious support for
the apartheid wall in Israel, his gratuitous attacks on Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela and his abysmal record on free trade. "Yeah," he agreed sadly.
"But at least he believes in evolution." So do I - the much-needed
evolution of our progressive movements. And that won't happen until we put
away the fridge magnets and Bush gags and get serious. And that will only
happen once we get rid of the distraction-in-chief. So Anybody But Bush.
And then let's get back to work.

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