The (S)election
Those of you who are overseas are likely looking at tomorrow's U.S. Presidential election and wondering what on earth is going on over there? The feeling here is much the same. Our country is divided in ways many of us here in the U.S. either didn't see or didn't want to see, the crack in the mirror now becoming a collection of shards laying broken at our feet, far too many to count and each able to cut us with impunity. How could this almost laughable rancor between our "top" candidates have become reality where one of them will actually be running the country; how did we --a nation of nearly 350 million people-- come to decide that these two people were probably the best we could hope for? It has left our nation divided once again, one brief pause coming only for something a bit more powerful, our World Series of baseball in which the Chicago Cubs won after a 116-year drought. Hooray for the underdog, we cheered, and hooray for not hearing any more rattling from the candidates (those of you who don't understand baseball, the "world" part of the World Series is really just in name for there are no other countries participating and it is strictly a U.S. invention that never quite caught on elsewhere, at least not in the way soccer has done).
History is like that here, the pollsters and pundits emerging to "accurately" predict the outcome of such events; but those who guessed wrong with the baseball championship have gone suddenly quiet, and likely the same will happen with those in the media now predicting who our next president will be (or that Brexit would actually pass). Nearly 40 million people have already voted and their results have been given to the candidates but not to the pollsters who are churning out their numbers almost hourly (there are over 400 recognized pollsters in the U.S., each company getting paid for their "accurate" information); and this is where the true winners of the election really rest, with the media. As the actor Tom Hanks described what comes to town every 4 years as "the circus," the old school advertisers of print and broadcast are selling tickets like mad. Signs and commercials are so plentiful that a Grand Canyon divide of supporters and non-supporters has emerged, one side almost in a fury while the other side is simply struggling to decide what to watch on Netflix. But for the aging candidates in all aspects of our government (both candidates will be in their seventies as are many members of Congress and the even older members of the Supreme Court), this may perhaps prove to be the last hurrah of a generation that promised to change things but didn't want to get out of the spotlight. This might also be the final hurrah of the white vote as 2011 showed the gradual reality and trend of more non-white babies than white babies being born in the U.S. The only power left to control for this current round of fading politicians (and in Trump's case, those born to wealthy inheritances) might be in income inequality and to some this election would appear to be both one of both candidates grasping almost desperately for that final straw before giving way to both age and a younger crowd. The next president might face a new Congress, and also perhaps several new appointees on the Supreme Court...but he or she will also face two major leaders with economies in decline, Russia and China (not to mention North Korea). As Jessica T. Mathews (former President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and now serving in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the White House) wrote: Nationalism and insecurity are a dangerous mixture.
This has all happened before, not only in the U.S. but in history well before any of us. Glen W. Bowersock (Professor Emeritus of Ancient History) told the New York Review of Books that despite the words of our Statue of Liberty, we have hidden wounds that have yet to heal: We live in a democracy that owes its origins to the ancient Greeks. Candidates for office like to invoke the will of the people and defer to the people’s choice, but anyone who lived through the election of 2000 knows that the presidential candidate who received the majority of the people’s votes did not take up residence in the White House. The founders of our nation were much more influenced by the representative democracy of the Roman republic than they were by the direct democracy of the Greeks. Yet both democratic systems incorporated institutions and prejudices that are wholly unacceptable today. These included slavery, which was an integral part of Greek and Roman life, as well as a disposition to keep women in the shadows...Nevertheless, the people, whom the Greeks called demos, whence democracy derives its name, can be easily swayed by plainspoken leaders who speak directly to their deepest anxieties.
In another take on American history, a review in The London Review of Books writes about the new book by Alan Taylor titled American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner writes a different version of the road to the Constitution with Congress allowing the wealthy to avoid the draft, states such as Virginia struggling to preserve slavery (recruits were offered 100 acres of land plus a slave), and that the original 13 colonies represented less than half of Britain's holdings, his proposition being that Britain sent more troops to defend its Caribbean/West Indies colonies rather than those on the continent for economic reasons (slaves outnumbered owners in the West Indies by a ratio of over 5 to 1). The British victory on the islands and the subsequent loss on the continent amounted to an exodus of "...Tens of thousands of Loyalists, many of them prominent lawyers, merchants and Anglican prelates...opening the door for ambitious new men to step into positions of authority," says reviewer of the book, Eric Foner. Alexander Hamilton (star character of the hit play on Broadway) and George Washington allowed laws to stay on the books that kept the importation of slaves in the country (says Foner: "...after independence slavery expanded dramatically, until the Old South became the largest slave society the modern world has known."). But here's where both Foner (and Taylor) summarize our early history: By the mid-1790s the political nation was divided between Federalists, led by Washington and Hamilton, and Jeffersonian Republicans. Neither took the high road. Federalists demonised immigrants as a threat to the new republic. In 1798 they pushed through Congress the Alien Act, which sharply increased the waiting period before an immigrant could become a citizen and authorised the president to deport any alien whose presence he believed threatened the nation’s ‘peace and safety’. In the campaign of 1800, Federalists described Jefferson as a dangerous atheist (with a slave paramour to boot), whose election would encourage ‘murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest’. Republicans, led by wealthy Virginia plantation owners, denounced their opponents as elitists and emphasised their own commitment to political equality and economic opportunity for ordinary white men, while at the same time whipping up the electorate’s feelings of superiority to blacks and Indians. Adds Foner: It all seems depressingly familiar.
Tomorrow's election might bring something new to the U.S. or it might merely become another blip in our roller-coaster ride of history. Some are saying that they simply won't vote, or will vote for a third or fourth or unknown party candidate. To listen to the pundits (or perhaps more appropriately spelled pun-ditz), this may prove to be one of the lowest turnouts of voters in U.S. history...or not. The truth is that nobody really knows...but come tomorrow, a large group will likely count on people forgetting as a new rallying cry emerges, that of "I was right." And in some dark corner somewhere, perhaps echoing what might matter more on a personal level, a soft voice might be heard to whisper hoarsely, "How 'bout them Cubs."
History is like that here, the pollsters and pundits emerging to "accurately" predict the outcome of such events; but those who guessed wrong with the baseball championship have gone suddenly quiet, and likely the same will happen with those in the media now predicting who our next president will be (or that Brexit would actually pass). Nearly 40 million people have already voted and their results have been given to the candidates but not to the pollsters who are churning out their numbers almost hourly (there are over 400 recognized pollsters in the U.S., each company getting paid for their "accurate" information); and this is where the true winners of the election really rest, with the media. As the actor Tom Hanks described what comes to town every 4 years as "the circus," the old school advertisers of print and broadcast are selling tickets like mad. Signs and commercials are so plentiful that a Grand Canyon divide of supporters and non-supporters has emerged, one side almost in a fury while the other side is simply struggling to decide what to watch on Netflix. But for the aging candidates in all aspects of our government (both candidates will be in their seventies as are many members of Congress and the even older members of the Supreme Court), this may perhaps prove to be the last hurrah of a generation that promised to change things but didn't want to get out of the spotlight. This might also be the final hurrah of the white vote as 2011 showed the gradual reality and trend of more non-white babies than white babies being born in the U.S. The only power left to control for this current round of fading politicians (and in Trump's case, those born to wealthy inheritances) might be in income inequality and to some this election would appear to be both one of both candidates grasping almost desperately for that final straw before giving way to both age and a younger crowd. The next president might face a new Congress, and also perhaps several new appointees on the Supreme Court...but he or she will also face two major leaders with economies in decline, Russia and China (not to mention North Korea). As Jessica T. Mathews (former President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and now serving in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the White House) wrote: Nationalism and insecurity are a dangerous mixture.
This has all happened before, not only in the U.S. but in history well before any of us. Glen W. Bowersock (Professor Emeritus of Ancient History) told the New York Review of Books that despite the words of our Statue of Liberty, we have hidden wounds that have yet to heal: We live in a democracy that owes its origins to the ancient Greeks. Candidates for office like to invoke the will of the people and defer to the people’s choice, but anyone who lived through the election of 2000 knows that the presidential candidate who received the majority of the people’s votes did not take up residence in the White House. The founders of our nation were much more influenced by the representative democracy of the Roman republic than they were by the direct democracy of the Greeks. Yet both democratic systems incorporated institutions and prejudices that are wholly unacceptable today. These included slavery, which was an integral part of Greek and Roman life, as well as a disposition to keep women in the shadows...Nevertheless, the people, whom the Greeks called demos, whence democracy derives its name, can be easily swayed by plainspoken leaders who speak directly to their deepest anxieties.
In another take on American history, a review in The London Review of Books writes about the new book by Alan Taylor titled American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner writes a different version of the road to the Constitution with Congress allowing the wealthy to avoid the draft, states such as Virginia struggling to preserve slavery (recruits were offered 100 acres of land plus a slave), and that the original 13 colonies represented less than half of Britain's holdings, his proposition being that Britain sent more troops to defend its Caribbean/West Indies colonies rather than those on the continent for economic reasons (slaves outnumbered owners in the West Indies by a ratio of over 5 to 1). The British victory on the islands and the subsequent loss on the continent amounted to an exodus of "...Tens of thousands of Loyalists, many of them prominent lawyers, merchants and Anglican prelates...opening the door for ambitious new men to step into positions of authority," says reviewer of the book, Eric Foner. Alexander Hamilton (star character of the hit play on Broadway) and George Washington allowed laws to stay on the books that kept the importation of slaves in the country (says Foner: "...after independence slavery expanded dramatically, until the Old South became the largest slave society the modern world has known."). But here's where both Foner (and Taylor) summarize our early history: By the mid-1790s the political nation was divided between Federalists, led by Washington and Hamilton, and Jeffersonian Republicans. Neither took the high road. Federalists demonised immigrants as a threat to the new republic. In 1798 they pushed through Congress the Alien Act, which sharply increased the waiting period before an immigrant could become a citizen and authorised the president to deport any alien whose presence he believed threatened the nation’s ‘peace and safety’. In the campaign of 1800, Federalists described Jefferson as a dangerous atheist (with a slave paramour to boot), whose election would encourage ‘murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest’. Republicans, led by wealthy Virginia plantation owners, denounced their opponents as elitists and emphasised their own commitment to political equality and economic opportunity for ordinary white men, while at the same time whipping up the electorate’s feelings of superiority to blacks and Indians. Adds Foner: It all seems depressingly familiar.
Tomorrow's election might bring something new to the U.S. or it might merely become another blip in our roller-coaster ride of history. Some are saying that they simply won't vote, or will vote for a third or fourth or unknown party candidate. To listen to the pundits (or perhaps more appropriately spelled pun-ditz), this may prove to be one of the lowest turnouts of voters in U.S. history...or not. The truth is that nobody really knows...but come tomorrow, a large group will likely count on people forgetting as a new rallying cry emerges, that of "I was right." And in some dark corner somewhere, perhaps echoing what might matter more on a personal level, a soft voice might be heard to whisper hoarsely, "How 'bout them Cubs."
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