Dystopian Paradox

The campaign is going well here in Roswell, Chavez County, NM. I have no idea what that means in terms of whether Obama will take Chavez county. What I do know is that the people who have come here from out of town and out of state are working hard.

The Obama field coordinators, John and Whitney, are putting in 14 hour days. I’m a slacker, doing only about 7. But in my defense, I’m old and my single task is to canvass door to door which is tiring no matter what age.

But some of the volunteers are canvassing like me and then coming in at night and putting in a couple of hours inputting the day’s canvassing results into the database. Yep, I’m a slacker.

Which brings up the canvassing program that begins tomorrow, November 1. It’s a new round with about 4000 doors to knock on over the next two or three days. That’s a bunch of doors. But that’s the way a grass roots campaign works.

This campaign strategy is a legacy of Barack’s community organizing experience in South Chicago. I can see his administration operating with the same efficiency, and with competent people in place at every level.

Probably the most satisfying aspect of this experience is working with people who know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and whose primary agenda is getting Obama elected. I see no self-seeking here. Not only are the paid people professional, but also the volunteers. All of us know without telling one another that we are working in a professional, efficient campaign for a common cause. That’s a joy.

But all work and no play sucks. The spirit of Halloween is with us. I walked in this morning at 9 am and Robert is at his computer donning a white witch’s wig. He’s young but looked almost as old as me. Maybe I should die my hair. Maybe we’ll have a Halloween party tonight. I won’t have to wear a wig to scare people.

Chapters 13 and 14 of By the Sword are up

Lot’s of news and all of it’s related.

GM officially unveiled the Chevy Volt today, set to go on sale in 2010 for $40,000, about twice the price of other models of the same size. But this is a plug-in electric, designed to go 40 miles between charges. That would get most people to work and back without using any gas.

The big question is whether GM will be around in 2010. Because of the financial sector implosion, GM’s financial woes haven’t make headline news lately. GM has been burning cash like crazy and it’s going to be looking for liquidity sources before long.

Which brings up AIG. It’s got to get a lot of cash quickly or it may be heading into bankruptcy as early as tomorrow. GM may be hoping that the fed will participate in bailing AIG out as a sign that the fed will be available when GM’s number comes up.

As to the nominees take on the Wall Street sinkhole, Obama says the problem is faulty regulation of Wall Street while McCain blames it on greed. I guess the number of houses McCain and Cindy own doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not one or both of them are greedy. Maybe the only affect their wealth has on them is their seeming insensitivity to the plight of Americans who are out of work, or who do have work but can’t afford necessary healthcare.

Back to the Volt. GM isn’t expecting to make a profit on the vehicle initially. Moreover, Toyota and Honda are working on plugin electrics so the market is going to be competitive. The question is whether GM has a strategy with respect to the Volt any more rational than what has been it has always been, which is show the stockholders a profit this quarter and to heck with the future.

The strategy is different with the Volt in that it seem to include forgoing profits immediately in favor of becoming more competitive in the future. Some say it’s a big gamble for GM. It can’t be much of a gamble since GM is likely headed for the recycle bin irrespective of whether the Volt or its offspring ever shows a profit. Sources of liquidity are drying up worldwide. How much longer will China hold up the fed? Or does it have a choice?

Over the last week, I’ve been feeling an absence of energy in the Obama campaign, hearing all this stuff about the Republican VP candidate, McCain attacks that seem to go unanswered, and Obama slipping in the polls. I expressed my concerns to a close friend yesterday.

And then I watched Barrack on Letterman last night. He was as cool as ever, quick witted and outgoing. If he’s worried, he’s not showing it. I was feeling better.

This morning I scan Gail Collins’ column noting that a lot of Obama supporters are freaking out and that they are overreacting. Later, I get an email transmitting an msmbc pundit’s list of all the things that Obama has done wrong: not taking public money; declining McCain’s offer to hold town hall debates; ignoring the Clinton’s; Obama’s 22 state strategy; no sweeping yet concrete policy idea; professor speak; failing to attack McCain early.

On balance, I’m going with hope and two assumptions. The first assumption is that the Obama people anticipated a Rovian smear campaign.

The second is that Obama is a strategic thinker. Three facts support the second assumption.

The first is that Obama implemented the strategy of community organizing that successfully improved a community in South Chicago. Get the community involved and work from a baseline of hope rather than acceptance of hopelesness.

The second has to do with the blitz strategy of winning the first four primaries. Clinton had the same strategy and they split the first four primaries.

But Clinton had no backup plan and her campaign fell victim to infighting and Hillary’s failure to act quickly and decisively. Obama, on the other hand, had a plan B and it worked.

Third but the most important strategy is non-violence, which is intrinsic in Barack’s campaign rhetoric and persona. I came to know only recently that non-violence is a political strategy when I heard a lady interviewed on NPR who was a part of the civil rights movement in the sixties along-side Martin Luther King.

It’s real simple. When you fight people, they resist and dig-in.

But when you turn the other cheek, it takes the political power out of violence in a relatively free society. People die, but not nearly as many as in an armed revolution.

So McCain keeps up the attack. And he gets a good bounce out of Palin. But McCain’s attacking a strategy that will absorb the negative energy of hate and fear and take the power out of it.

And so I go with the hope that the non-violent strategy of Obama’s campaign will prevail.

One of McCain’s criticisms of Obama is that Obama is not qualified to be commander in chief. The problem with this argument is that the logic is faulty. It’s based on several underlying assumptions that are not necessarily true. One is that McCain’s military experience makes him more qualified to be commander in chief. Another is that the president as such holds a military position. If that’s true, he or she should be decked out in military attire at least some of the time.

I accidentally bought a book by Andrew Bacevich copyrighted in 2005 entitled The New American Militarism. Bacevich is a Vietnam war veteran and a professor of international relations at Boston College. I had intended to purchase his new offering Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, but I got Militarism by mistake at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago. So I’ve been reading it. My comments here include views Bacevich expresses in Militarism.

At the end of the cold war, the U.S. remained the sole super power militarily. Post cold war, the U.S. has displayed that power both as show and in two wars to demonstrate what we can do in a conventional war. Our military power became the single facet of our foreign policy under the Bush administration. Diplomacy was out. You’re either for us or against us and we don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. It would seem we got to where Hitler wanted to be.

The problem with this attitude is that it didn’t and still doesn’t reflect reality. We were not the world hegemon in 2003 when we invaded Iraq nor are we now. But the problem is that militarism has become a part of our mindset. It’s a an accepted, and embraced, component of our mainstream culture. The citizenry for the most part, and irrespective of whether so called liberal or so called conservative, has bought into the idea that we have been imbued with the divine right and duty to make history.

Moreover, the president has been catapulted from the position of commander in chief as a citizen to commander in chief as the top military officer. Bacevich states that the “framers of our Constitution designated the president as commander-in-chief as a means of asserting unambiguous civilian control.” He notes presidents George Washington, Grant and Eisenhower went out of their way to avoid their prior military identity while in office.

So what does Bush do, one who was in the reserves and maybe awol from that light duty? He dons a Navy flight suit and hits the deck of an aircraft deck as commander in chief of the military in a grand photo op in which he states “Mission accomplished,” referring to the Iraq war.

In a recent Bill Moyer’s interview, Bacevich said that a new president will change nothing regarding how we deceive ourselves into believing that we are destined to be the world’s police (one of our many misconceptions). Bacevich’s statement is supported both by Obama’s and McCain’s campaign rhetoric. Obama said in his acceptance speech that he would rebuild our military. McCain’s campaign continues to tout his Vietnam experience as a credential for qualification as commander-in-chief. Both candidates know that campaigning on a promise to reduce our military is political suicide.

What’s suicide is spending money you don’t have, both personally, at the business level, and at the governmental level. And that’s what we’ve been doing at all three levels for the last eight years. GM for example owes tons of money because its management thinks that it must show its shareholders profits each quarter; they did that with SUVs and trucks and now where are they. We did it personally with homes and cars we can’t afford and credit card debt. The fed creates money to keep this insane economic model in place as long as possible so that they keep their jobs and get reelected. We have a huge military with 100 or more bases around the world allegedly to keep oil coming in to keep the cars going we can’t afford financially or environmentally.

There are similarities of the to the run up to St. Helens explosion in 1980, to warning signs of an impending financial disaster now.

With Mt. St. Helens and other explosive volcanic eruptions (Krakatoa for example), the warning signs were tremblers. Maybe not so big on the Richter scale, but a warning that something’s going on underneath a volcano.

With our economy, and our standing in the world as alleged hegemon, we have warning signs: extremely volatile markets that indicate nobody knows where things are going to be in the relative short term; a challenge to our military might by insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan along with Russia’s new assertiveness militarily.

David killed a giant with a rock. Achilles was done in by an arrow to his eponymous heal. Patrol boats sank heavy cruisers in WW II. A few missiles with conventional warheads can take out our aircraft carriers. A well placed bomb in a weak spot killed the Deathstar in Star Wars. The bigger and more complex our military hardware and organization designed to fight conventional wars, the more vulnerable they become to unconventional, cheaper, less ostentatious warfare.

A lot of bullies find out they’re not so tough just because they’re bigger. Kick ‘em in the crotch and suddenly they’re shorter than their intended victim. It’s fantasy to think that a huge military is going to keep us out of trouble. In reality, it’s a big part of our problem. Our main challenge doesn’t lie outside our borders. Our challenge is to come to grips with reality, to recognize that the problem is systemic- a disease within several aspects of our mainstream culture, and to take steps to treat not the symptoms but the disease itself.

Neither Obama nor McCain can bust our bubble during the campaign, the bubble that we are world hegemon, the bubble that was Dorothy’s vision while out of touch in lala land and in which the Good Witch of the North arrived. An apparition. As between Obama and McCain, the question is which one is more in touch reality and once in office will do something positive to get the U.S. headed in a sustainable direction.

For me the answer unequivocally is Barack. He’s demonstrated his executive skills in community organizing, and in his presidential campaign fueled on the audacity of hope.

Moreover, there’s no way I can buy into McCain’s Rovian guided, fear based campaign rhetoric. He plays on our citizens fears and prejudices. I can get a good feeling talking trash about somebody, especially a public figure that isn’t going to sue me. But I know it’s cheap to do so.

And I have hope that the U.S. citizenry will see above the baseness of McCain’s smear campaign, and elect Barack Obama, someone with proven organizational and executive talent.

Grace Ashby is entering some of her works in a new show tomorrow in Salt Lake where she presently resides. I’ve known Grace all my life. We are sister and brother. She has a masters in fine arts from the University of Utah. Grace is multi-talented, having previously been an editor for Sandstone Magazine for ten years. Her most endearing qualities are her great sense of humor and love of family, friends, and some animals.

Here’s a sneak preview of one of her oil-on-canvas entries, Paramount Invasion.

It’s complete serendipity that the colors and shades are nearly identical to those included in this blog’s theme. Thanks to Grace for allowing this post of Paramount Invasion.