Tomgram: "The Spectacle of Campaign 2008" ....A Great Read!

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Tomgram: The Spectacle of Campaign 2008

Exit Poll
Your Enthusiasm and the Media's By Tom Engelhardt

You want an exit poll? Well, here it is: Americans are now stuck in the world that George W. Bush had a major hand in crafting and a sizeable majority of them, sensing doom, want out.

All of this, however, can only be blamed on Bush and his pals at our peril. After all, they simply tapped into a deep vein of American exterminatory fears. In the "good times" of the 1990s, those fears were less obvious. In a sense, most people probably didn't know they had them. But look at the young today and you can sense how they've been ensnared in an exterminatory grid of some sort. For them, dreams of the future have essentially been replaced with dystopian fears of global warming, global pandemics, global depressions, and other forms of planetary doom and disaster. Through no fault of their own, they have been living without hope.

In this election, Barack Obama in particular has seemed to show a number of them a possible exit and, beyond it, a little daylight, a tiny swatch of blue sky (as, for a smaller number of young people on the right, did Republican candidate Ron Paul). If, of course, you can't imagine building, or saving, or investing in something for your children or grandchildren (no less someone else's), then it's hard to imagine doing anything lasting. To lack a future is to have an enormous weight of despair placed squarely on your shoulders. If, even for a moment, it seems to lift, you suddenly feel free to dream; hence (I suspect) the burst of enthusiasm and hope seen this year -- and the outpouring of new primary voters which has gone with it.

I had my own youthful moment in which a sense of doom lifted and it was indeed a liberating feeling. Back in my day, there was only one danger to life as we knew it -- nuclear war (which, in the twenty-first century, has to elbow its way into a roiling queue of world-ending possibilities for its 15 seconds of exterminatory fame). When the Atomic Test Ban Treaty of 1963 finally drove nuclear tests out of sight and out of mind, the nuclear issue disappeared from political debate and popular culture. The last end-of-the-world films of that era appeared in 1964, just as bomb-shelter and civil defense programs were heading for the graveyard. By 1969, the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy had even eliminated "nuclear" from its own name. And, for a brief period, you could look to the future with a sense of hope, which was exhilarating.

Think, in this context, of the import of that affirmative call-and-response chant Barack Obama so often uses with crowds of young supporters at his rallies: "Yes, we can…!" "Yes, we can…!"

At my age (63), I tend to be struck by the lack of objects in Obama's uncompleted sentences: Yes, we can… what exactly? But who can deny the chant's appeal, conjuring up as it does a can-do future and, implicitly, a past America in which "we can" seemed like a given. These days, newspaper headlines like this one from the Washington Post are commonplace, no matter what part of the government is under scrutiny: "U.S. Park Police Rebuked for Security Lapses: Force plagued by low morale, poor leadership and bad organization has failed to adequately protect iconic landmarks, government report shows." (And remember, it's the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and the Lincoln Memorial we're talking about.) So the sense that "we" can "do" anything is bound to be refreshing.

You can't help being moved, because you know that, underneath a rising tide of youthful enthusiasm lies the vortex -- a United States, and possibly a planet, transformed beyond recognition. In such a situation, even a hint that the burden of futurelessness might be lifted should send anybody searching the sky for a good omen, for a dose of -- in the mantra of every candidate at this moment -- "change." That's why another vague Obama formulation -- that he represents "the future," not the "past" -- is potentially so powerful. When was the last time an American presidential candidate invoked the future and seemed to mean it?

That perhaps helps account for the upwelling of enthusiasm in our electoral moment, even after the elections of 2000 and 2004.

more at......

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174890