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Back in 1988, when I was a junior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I worked on the ill-fated, much-derided presidential campaign of then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis (ho!ho!ho!). Dukakis was of course running against the "original" George Bush, who was Ronald Reagan's vice president at the time. As an idealistic leftist, I was convinced of the urgency of sweeping aside the corrupt era of Reaganism that had seen the US terrorize its Latin American neighbours and domestic underclass alike. And I thought - in all likelihood naively - that getting the Democrats back into the White House would help to restore compassion and integrity to our government. I didn't believe the Democrats were perfect, but they certainly seemed better than the Reaganites. Then one night I was invited to a party by this tie-dye wearing, self-styled radical girl, in an anonymous-looking student apartment where all of the other Berkley-in-the-60's Abbie Hoffman wannabes were gathered. Politics were, of course, high on the agenda of conversation topics as we swilled cheap-ass beer (anyone remember Meisterbrau? Or Milwaukee's Best?), and I remember this guy named Jamie, who later led a well-publicized hunger strike against Gulf War I, telling me with an abundance of passion and fervour, "Forget about voting! What America needs right now is another revolution!" He genuinely believed that the only realistic way to a better America was for the people™ to take to the streets in a Bolshevik-style revolt against the government and the powers-that-be. My rebuttal to this was to say that if such a popular uprising ever did take place, it would be ruthlessly suppressed and the people in charge afterwards wouldn't be the Abbie Hoffmans or the Huey P. Newtons but the Oliver North's and Iran-Contra criminals of the world. Well, it's 15 years later and the revolution that the radicals dreamed of never came. But even despite the lack of a Leninist revolution to suppress, a glance at who's in power in Washington shows that the Iran-Contra criminals REALLY HAVE taken over the country. Defense Secretary DONALD RUMSFELD, UN Ambassador JOHN NEGROPONTE, and erstwhile Director of the "Information Awareness Office" JOHN POINDEXTER are all within the presidential administration of an un-elected, Supreme Court-appointed Big Baby Bush. The scarily-but-appropriately-named OTTO REICH (!) is now Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, a role in which he recently helped to ferment a failed coup against the leftist President Chavez of Venezuela. ELIOT ABRAMS is a member of the National Security Council. OLIVER NORTH himself is now a "celebrity" war correspondent for Fox News, a channel so conservative that for all intents and purposes it may just as well be a branch of the Bush administration anyway. And so on. These same people and their collaborators are now behind legislation and policies which are openly depriving Americans of their hard-won Constitutional rights and robbing others around the world of their very lives, through the so-called Patriot Act at home and the increasingly-dubious "War On Terror" abroad. The only hope for America - and, indeed, the world - is that with the US economy in meltdown and more and more citizens deprived of decent jobs, reasonable benefits and their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the socio-political pendulum will swing back and sweep the neo-conservatives aside. The anger throughout society is growing, however much the big corporate media attempts to deny or deflect attention from it. Whatever
the case, the central irony remains: the best argument against a new American
revolution in 1988 has become the strongest argument for it in 2003. Vive
la revoluccion! |
Greasy
Jesus
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