is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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WWJMcGD?
Man, there has been some nastiness all over my television for months now, with a growing onslaught over the last week. Of course, I do live in Pennsylvania�s 6th District for the House of Representatives, where Democrat Lois Murphy might unseat Republican Jim Gerlach. I also live in the state where Democrat Bob Casey might win the Senate from Republican Rick Santorum. (However, Bob Casey is an anti-gun-control Democrat who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade but allow domestic partnership benefits, though not gay marriage, to gay couples� a strange kind of a beast.) (But Santorum wants to require that intelligent design be taught in schools, disapproves of homosexuality and thinks decisions about it and abortion should be left to the American public, not �nine unelected, unaccountable judges��which, if you ask me, betrays a serious misunderstanding of what judgment about law is supposed to be�and he also doesn�t believe the Constitution supports a right to privacy.) So the conflict between Santorum and Casey�S and C�reminds me of another S&C situation without much hope of having a good choice offered: I find myself in a political Strait of Messia, between a Scylla and a Charybdis. But there is a larger issue here, called �control of the Senate,� so I�ll tow a party line, even if that party is often so very disappointing. Anyway, so this might be the first time in my life I�ve voted in a non-presidential election with really high stakes of this sort. (Politics in San Francisco has a whole different set of stakes, most of which are idiosyncratic, I think.)
Today in class one of my students asked, rhetorically, in the midst of a broader discussion of how we define political responsibility, whether it�s possible to think of a form of government that didn�t leave so many important responsibilities outside of law. And then she wondered whether having fewer laws or more laws would be better, in terms of how we handle our responsibilities for each other and for justice. I pointed out that the history of the conflict between anarchism or libertarianism and liberalism was pretty much about that question, and both made good points. Then another student asked whether QuakerBubble wasn�t itself an example of a community run by an understanding that respect was a requirement. And then another student pointed out about how last week I had spoken of the joys and the perils of consensus, and what does and does not get solved when the only recourse in unsolvable conflict is to end in having someone �stand outside the consensus.� Today I just pointed out that, though QuakerBubble has its problems, its consensus principles are very lovely indeed, compared with much of how the rest of academia and the world runs itself. I added that it was Rousseau�s dream realized, on some level. And then I added: and it is only possible because this is a community of about a thousand people who have elected to be here and in doing so have agreed to share the values around which they are gathered. And also, it�s a college, not a city or a state. Add thousands and millions more people, and the complications of governing more than an institution of higher learning, and the disagreements that are necessary to politics (it�s not that disagreement is an unfortunate side-product; disagreement is integral to politics, and to justice)�add all that, and QuakerBubble pops.
Disagreement is integral to politics, and to justice. But do you know what isn�t integral? Dirty, sleazy, underhanded, world-destroying, endless attack-ads on television. I feel as if I have been persecuted by all four candidates, not to mention all the candidates for New Jersey, whose ads I get to see since Philadelphia is right on the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Perhaps I don�t understand what kind of constituency an American politician really has. Perhaps I really don�t. But how could it be the case that any of these ads could work? Especially when you take all of them together! There are the attack ads, and the indignant defense ads, and the reaction-to-attack attack ads, and so on, ad infinitum. And they lie. It seems to be the case that they all lie. And that is supposed to get me to vote? Maybe it could be some kind of strategy to encourage write-in candidates?
Of course, it�s just a symptom, not the sickness itself. The sickness is what Hannah Arendt would call the death of politics. Disagreement turns into polarity and is taken not as evidence of a rich public life where people come together to converse about what it means to have a public realm in common, but rather as endless division of people into diametrically opposed camps of persons who don�t really share a public realm because they no longer have anything to communicate about. They share nothing in common. That, it seems to me, is the United States of America. Not even a perceived outside enemy (always a good tool for uniting �the people,� historically) changes this.
That could be a romantic idea about politics, that it is people working together for something they share in common. Perhaps people have never, ever, been willing to converse with those who have different views on life and what is important, and perhaps no one really, ever, happily compromises on some issues for the sake of the greater good. The next sentence should read: And perhaps no one ever really tries to imagine how something looks from the perspective of someone else. And yet how could that be true? What is language other than an agreement that we share some things in common, as well as a way of establishing how we think differently? Let�s just hope that American English doesn�t, somewhere down the road, end up being like Serbian and Croatian�the same language, but spoken differently enough, and with enough violent difference, that, in some situations, you could end up being shot for choosing the wrong word for �hello.� (WWJMcGD?)*
And now I�m off to a party to watch election returns and see if anything happens in the make-up of our national representation. Let�s just hope that this party isn�t disappointing.
* Ha. What would Jerry McGuire do?
8:27 p.m. - November 07, 2006
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