Settled

So, it’s settled. After what seems more than a year (really more than ten years) worth of campaigning, it will be Obama versus McCain. Back in the old days when the campaigns were just starting, I sort of supported Clinton. Some of my reasons were good: she is obviously a smart candidate, much smarter than what we’ve been used to the last eight years; she is a democrat; she had some interesting notions on healthcare, back in the nineties, even though they were crushed by the propaganda machine. Having lived in a propaganda regime for sometime I have come to know that propaganda always reaches a point where its contrast to felt and lived reality is so blatant that it, propaganda, loses its power of persuasion. I believe the American healthcare system is fast approaching such a point, and slogans having proved worthless, actions will have to be embraced, and action will mean, to the desperation of those still in the grasp of propaganda, the American embrace of the European and Canadian model of healthcare, where patient are not “customers”. Oh, the tangents and their irresistible attraction. Some of my reasons for supporting Hillary were not so good: she is a woman – one should never vote gender or race or religion or personal life; if elected she would have been the bane of the legions having mindlessly voted for Bush (twice) – one should never vote out of spite.

By the time the primaries rolled around in Georgia, I was becoming an Obama supporter, but not strong enough to actually bother voting for him. Hillary completely lost me when she started her Michigan and Florida sophistry.

I like Obama. I will vote for him wholeheartedly, if uselessly, given the electoral system and the political predilections in this state. I am not “inspired” by him, but then, nor have I ever been inspired by a politician, so it’s probably me. Paradoxically, one thing that endeared him to me was his leaving his church the other day. There have been repeated instances of crazy stuff spewed out by bona fide church leaders or church members these days, so much so that I’ve been weighing lately putting together an anthology of the craziest sayings to reach the mainstream via the mass media. Left and right, people in churches think and say crazy things. Like the government wanted to kill blacks and invented AIDS; or, the one about Hitler shepherding the Jews back to the promised land, which is all the more horrifying to me in so far as it seems to be sanctioned by erudite interpretations of I don’t know what line in I don’t know what prophecy in I don’t know what book of the Bible. Although, of course on the other hand I should not be horrified: the ultimate consequence of the Bible-informed view is that the worst outbreaks of human monstrosity are the result of “God allowing them to happen”. (Remember the older one about God punishing us with 9/11 for our gays and lesbians and with Katrina for our “abortionists”? Nor do Christians have a monopoly on this sort of stupidity: Sharon Stone, on behalf of some religion yet to be identified, had to put her foot where her mouth is, about the China earthquake as karma for the way Chinese treat her friend, the Dalai Lama… I bet he won’t be too eager to return Mrs. Stone’s Karma cards come the holiday season.)
So there… for all these reasons I am glad Obama is churchless. I would be even happier if that was the result of a philosophy of life not of a contingency. The contingency though is pretty telling: crazy stuff goes on in churches and in church-infected minds all across America. People trying to swift boat him will use that crazy stuff against him, forgetting the crazy stuff that goes on in their own churches, of which the examples above are only a pale and minuscule sample.
The other reason to feel good about the coming election is that opposite Obama sits McCain, who is the best one could have hoped from the Republican Party at this juncture. So even if the electorate does its worst again, come November, we should still be a lot better off than now. That's the one good thing about hitting bottom: you can only go up...