anybody?

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

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

Naomi Klein
Friday July 30, 2004
The Guardian

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 summarises 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 pathologising 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 globalisation, 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 privatising 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 galvanising 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.

* Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows. This
column originally appeared in The Nation

thenation.com 

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine