A Brief Retrospect/Looking Ahead

It was early in the summer in the year of Y2K that this column was born; halcyon days indeed compared to this grim political era. For eight years, America had in the oval office a president with an uncanny knack for remaining relatively likable even to those with little reason to like him. Small "l" liberals thought he was their man, even as he sold the American worker out to corporate interests and dismantled the last vestiges of social safety nets protecting America's poor. Despite his being no less conservative than his predecessors, big C conservatives considered him an enemy, and after years of trying to destroy him politically, had to be satisfied instead with merely humiliating him in public, forcing him to admit before god and the world that he'd had an intern suck him off, and that he'd reciprocated by doing strange things to her with a cigar.

Yet with all that was wrong and ugly in American politics, there was a certain sense of optimism in the collective unconscious. The economy was so strong that, hard as it is to fathom just four years later as our country falls deeper into a record deficit, a major issue in the election that year was what the next president should do with all the extra money in the treasury In the summer of 2000, the idea that a political lightweight like George W. Bush could beat a vice president who had served during nearly a decade of prosperity seemed slim indeed. Al Gore was beloved by few, and considered the lesser of two evils by many, but his victory in 2000 seemed fait accompli - so assured in fact that a substantial chunk of progressives, idealists, and other dreamers (myself among them, as readers of the Colorado Daily might remember) had the temerity to think that we could send a message to the machine itself by voting for a third candidate, someone who reflected our hopes and ideals.

There was no way, we thought, that even with a few percentage points siphoned from his total, this lesser of two evils candidate could possibly lose in a fair election.

How right we were. And how tragically wrong.

Four years later, we find ourselves stuck with an administration so outrageously venal and self serving that our worst fears have not merely been met, they've been reinvented. The Bush White House is so shamelessly corrupt that it doesn't even bother to deny the malfeasances brought to light almost daily. To an administration so totally corrupt and beholden to the interest of their corporate patrons, a whiff of scandal enough to bring down most democratic governments has as much impact as a fart in a hurricane.

It's gone beyond choosing the lesser of two evils. Americans of conscience will need to throw their support behind whichever candidate emerges from the rock tumbler that is the Democratic party, as uninspiring as this individual may be. We have to put aside the naïve notion that voting, in our gravely imperfect system, can even come close to being an expression of moral purity. The America that George W. Bush leaves behind after four years in office will be a vastly changed country; a badly weakened bill of rights, increasingly blurred borders between church and state, an environment being totally raped for corporate profits, a hemorrhaging of American jobs and a rapidly diminishing American standard of living.

Grim as that seems, it's nothing compared with the America he'll leave behind after eight. In addition to commenting on Crusade '04:Anyone but Bush, in the weeks and months ahead this column will also look at the social, economic and environmental impact of another four years under Dubya.

We have eight months in which to put aside our cynicism.

C 2004 Joshua Samuel Brown