A Thing About Choices
Yes, this is a political post. Some people will like where this is going and some people won't, which is part of what I want to talk about.
You know those trompe l'oeil pictures of the duck/rabbit, or the vase/faces? Look at them one way and the meaning is one thing; look at them another and the meaning changes completely.
I had those pictures thrown back on my memory a few years ago when I attended an informal lecture (with a cute Powerpoint presentation and everything) given by a man who studies words for a living and whose name I forget. He figured out who wrote Primary Colors based on the patterns of its syntax and vocabulary, and was asked by the FBI to help them try and find out who sent the Anthrax letters in October 2001. His presentation dwelled on the truism that even things that ought to look clear still fall prey to the duck/rabbit problem of interpretation, and concluded that though they had made some headway in looking for the suspect, the clues they had were not as singular as they seemed.
But back to his work on Primary Colors. When he published his analysis in the press and outed Joe Klein as the author, Klein vehemently denied the charge for a few months before finally giving in and copping to the authorship. In that few months' period of time, our professorial hero suffered a few difficulties in credibility, to put it delicately. He was jibed, and many people expressed doubts about the possibility of divining truth between the lines.
As far as I can tell, there's no point saying that such analyses and publishings ought not to have a personal angle, because there's always a personal angle regardless of the professionalism of the participants. Feminists say that the personal is political; and of course politics, by corollary, are personal.
It's the last month before a heavily-contested and highly contentious presidential campaign comes to an end. And surfing around, I can see that people have drawn their lines in whatever sandbox they're playing in. People who watched the same debate I did last Friday have come away without their convictions shaken, that George W. Bush is authentic, admirable, and righteous, and John (what the hell is up with that "F." the press keeps sticking in there? are they trying to make his name sound like Kennedy's?) Kerry vacillating, weak-chinned, and unjustifiably pugilistic. As for these undecided voters I keep hearing about, the things they say seem no less entrenched; it's just that they can't stand either candidate and are trying to make up their minds which one they hate least.
It's a duck/rabbit scenario with a vengeance, as far as I can tell: anyone who keeps track of my blogging and journaling these days knows that my opinions of Bush and Kerry are diametrically opposed to those adjectives I assigned to them above. I see people -- who both enjoy and appreciate the rights of women, care about the environment, and have a fairly catholic appreciation for various other liberal points of view that clearly do the world good -- defend Bush with fierce loyalty, and I feel an urge to shake them: "You are such a smart, liberal person; why do you keep saying his shit tastes like chocolate????"
And then I feel a check. I didn't like being on the receiving end of these sorts of comments back in the day. People would say to me, "Clearly you have a fine mind and a good grasp of reality. Tell me why you believe in God, again?" Or, "How can you defend a philosophy/religion/worldview that is clearly racist/sexist/classist/heterosexist?" I had no answer to queries like these except angry muttered responses like, "So you can be too intelligent to believe in God, can you?" The real answer to these queries, however, is that for better or worse I had made a choice.
The last time I voted in a high-profile election, it was during my last conservative hurrah, in which I still harbored anxious visions of a Supreme Court stocked with godless liberal ghouls who would slaver over increasing numbers of abortions, cancel Christmas, and poison the cultural air of our nation with talk composed of mindless, anti-hierarchical, colorless, genderless syntax. Sickened by the Florida brouhaha and secretly ashamed of the candidate I felt I was supposed to want, I said, "Well, Bush may talk like a parrot, but at least he won't blow up the world in four years."
Famous last words, she says hollowly.
The fact is that I had done all my franchised life what I pretended not to by registering Independent and never choosing a party ticket at the polls: more often than not I ended up marking every blank with a Republican choice, feeling vague guilt about not informing myself, as any good citizen of a democracy should, especially one registered Independent, about the candidates and issues. I figured that when in doubt, the Republican candidate, or conservative position, would best serve my own values wherever I had no surveillance or control.
Which is one reason why I feel extremely betrayed.
I won't go into why I now believe the conservative platform doesn't serve either my needs or my values; it would require a feat of autobiography I don't yet have the hindsight to perform. I still feel vaguely ashamed when voting about issues that don't have an obvious partisan angle, as if I ought to know deeply and with perfect acuity what would help my city, or my county, or my state, or other people's cities and counties, as the case may be. But when a voting issue arises that is supported or opposed by one party's platform, I know much better where I am at.
Hello, my name is Lisa: I believe in God, I worship Jesus Christ, and I now vote the straight Democratic ticket.
The thing is, I feel much less like a sellout than when I was trying to pretend I loved Republicanism. I don't have to feel like the Judas I did when I dubiously agreed with conservative friends who say, "I don't understand how people can be liberal and call themselves Christians!"
And I won't be hypocritical enough to ask how people can love God, and love the people God loves, and vote for Bush. I know perfectly well how they can do it: uneasily, proudly, maudlinly, worshipfully, numinously. Any or all of the above. How can people trust the President? Because it's what we do. We respect the office, we want its occupant to be good, to be authentic and righteous and more or less Okay. There's nothing wrong with that and we couldn't have a country like ours if it were otherwise.
It's just that for some people, the disconnect ripens and what we're eating stops tasting like chocolate. This is how election defeats happen. We make choices, and we line everything else up with those choices. And what we don't have control over lines itself up in its turn.
I wanted Dean, not John Kerry. I thought the Saga of the Iowa Scream was a sophomoric and cruel characterization of a man I thought was trying to do right by his country -- much the same way I hated Clinton for benefiting from what (in my high-school years) I thought was ingratitude of the American public for not reelecting the first George Bush, who presided over a war for heaven's sake.
In other words, I made, and still make, choices in my franchised decisions based on all sorts of things -- policy, and an underdog's sense of fair play, and what I think serves my values and interests, and personal preferences in appearance, bearing, and erudition. And based on my own experience I don't actually think there are any undecided voters: I think there are voters whose choices make no Velcro contact with the available candidates.
I will not undertake the hubris of believing that because I feel it so, a reelection of Dubya will result in the appointment of Supreme Court justices who leer and sneer and hate women and poor people and intellectuals and gays and will poison our nation's cultural air with pious and two-faced, Orwellian, Nazi syntax. On the other hand, I kinda think that's happening even without the Supreme Court appointments. All over this country, as I see it, smart people are making choices based on what they think they're supposed to want. Step outside that safe zone of believing the President, and all kinds of hell could break loose -- and I do mean hell.
Joe Klein denied writing Primary Colors. But he did. For that window of a few months before he capitulated, the world didn't tilt on its axis, but people did wonder if all this work at getting to the bottom of people's written and spoken identity wasn't just an exercise in futility. Did they all recover from their doubt when Klein fessed up? Of course not. Did people stop trusting the President when he fessed up here and there, in dribs and drabs, under cover of more important press items, to making stubborn mistakes about 9/11, about Iraq? Of course not. To trust -- in a person, an office, or an intellectual endeavor -- or not to trust, requires a choice that is not easily undone.
But I can say that people who choose to stop tasting chocolate might find John Kerry a little more steady, a little more righteous, a little more committed, a little more humble -- in a word, a little more presidential than they might have thought before. It's funny how things look different, when you make a certain choice.
But though I'll be disappointed, I won't be surprised -- or overly disrespectful -- if some smart people I'm thinking of don't suddenly choose to see a rabbit where they saw a duck before. In an election year there isn't time for stuff like this, but I'd suggest they do what they do when trying to solve a trompe l'oeil picture -- look away from it for a minute. Look inward, look at yourself, at what you really think about things; look at the middle distance and see what's there. It changes you. It makes your focus different.
Here's something else. God's not going anywhere. I started honestly believing in God after I realized that all my wishing and thinking and articulating couldn't shake God's existence or non-existence one inch. Elections won't do it either. We could elect some Commie pinko raised from the DNA of Lenin and Patty Hearst, and it wouldn't stop God's mission to bring more love into the world. Equally, I have to believe that even if every horrible thought I have about Bush is true and he is elected, the world won't stop humming with the love and justice with which it was created.
Not that I don't think he won't make it difficult, or miserable for a lot of us. I'm never saying again that he can't make catastrophic wrongheaded mistakes. I'm ust trying to keep a balanced perspective for one blog entry, because the rest of the election cycle? I'm not pretending to be independent.
That's a choice I've made.
Yes, this is a political post. Some people will like where this is going and some people won't, which is part of what I want to talk about.
You know those trompe l'oeil pictures of the duck/rabbit, or the vase/faces? Look at them one way and the meaning is one thing; look at them another and the meaning changes completely.
I had those pictures thrown back on my memory a few years ago when I attended an informal lecture (with a cute Powerpoint presentation and everything) given by a man who studies words for a living and whose name I forget. He figured out who wrote Primary Colors based on the patterns of its syntax and vocabulary, and was asked by the FBI to help them try and find out who sent the Anthrax letters in October 2001. His presentation dwelled on the truism that even things that ought to look clear still fall prey to the duck/rabbit problem of interpretation, and concluded that though they had made some headway in looking for the suspect, the clues they had were not as singular as they seemed.
But back to his work on Primary Colors. When he published his analysis in the press and outed Joe Klein as the author, Klein vehemently denied the charge for a few months before finally giving in and copping to the authorship. In that few months' period of time, our professorial hero suffered a few difficulties in credibility, to put it delicately. He was jibed, and many people expressed doubts about the possibility of divining truth between the lines.
As far as I can tell, there's no point saying that such analyses and publishings ought not to have a personal angle, because there's always a personal angle regardless of the professionalism of the participants. Feminists say that the personal is political; and of course politics, by corollary, are personal.
It's the last month before a heavily-contested and highly contentious presidential campaign comes to an end. And surfing around, I can see that people have drawn their lines in whatever sandbox they're playing in. People who watched the same debate I did last Friday have come away without their convictions shaken, that George W. Bush is authentic, admirable, and righteous, and John (what the hell is up with that "F." the press keeps sticking in there? are they trying to make his name sound like Kennedy's?) Kerry vacillating, weak-chinned, and unjustifiably pugilistic. As for these undecided voters I keep hearing about, the things they say seem no less entrenched; it's just that they can't stand either candidate and are trying to make up their minds which one they hate least.
It's a duck/rabbit scenario with a vengeance, as far as I can tell: anyone who keeps track of my blogging and journaling these days knows that my opinions of Bush and Kerry are diametrically opposed to those adjectives I assigned to them above. I see people -- who both enjoy and appreciate the rights of women, care about the environment, and have a fairly catholic appreciation for various other liberal points of view that clearly do the world good -- defend Bush with fierce loyalty, and I feel an urge to shake them: "You are such a smart, liberal person; why do you keep saying his shit tastes like chocolate????"
And then I feel a check. I didn't like being on the receiving end of these sorts of comments back in the day. People would say to me, "Clearly you have a fine mind and a good grasp of reality. Tell me why you believe in God, again?" Or, "How can you defend a philosophy/religion/worldview that is clearly racist/sexist/classist/heterosexist?" I had no answer to queries like these except angry muttered responses like, "So you can be too intelligent to believe in God, can you?" The real answer to these queries, however, is that for better or worse I had made a choice.
The last time I voted in a high-profile election, it was during my last conservative hurrah, in which I still harbored anxious visions of a Supreme Court stocked with godless liberal ghouls who would slaver over increasing numbers of abortions, cancel Christmas, and poison the cultural air of our nation with talk composed of mindless, anti-hierarchical, colorless, genderless syntax. Sickened by the Florida brouhaha and secretly ashamed of the candidate I felt I was supposed to want, I said, "Well, Bush may talk like a parrot, but at least he won't blow up the world in four years."
Famous last words, she says hollowly.
The fact is that I had done all my franchised life what I pretended not to by registering Independent and never choosing a party ticket at the polls: more often than not I ended up marking every blank with a Republican choice, feeling vague guilt about not informing myself, as any good citizen of a democracy should, especially one registered Independent, about the candidates and issues. I figured that when in doubt, the Republican candidate, or conservative position, would best serve my own values wherever I had no surveillance or control.
Which is one reason why I feel extremely betrayed.
I won't go into why I now believe the conservative platform doesn't serve either my needs or my values; it would require a feat of autobiography I don't yet have the hindsight to perform. I still feel vaguely ashamed when voting about issues that don't have an obvious partisan angle, as if I ought to know deeply and with perfect acuity what would help my city, or my county, or my state, or other people's cities and counties, as the case may be. But when a voting issue arises that is supported or opposed by one party's platform, I know much better where I am at.
Hello, my name is Lisa: I believe in God, I worship Jesus Christ, and I now vote the straight Democratic ticket.
The thing is, I feel much less like a sellout than when I was trying to pretend I loved Republicanism. I don't have to feel like the Judas I did when I dubiously agreed with conservative friends who say, "I don't understand how people can be liberal and call themselves Christians!"
And I won't be hypocritical enough to ask how people can love God, and love the people God loves, and vote for Bush. I know perfectly well how they can do it: uneasily, proudly, maudlinly, worshipfully, numinously. Any or all of the above. How can people trust the President? Because it's what we do. We respect the office, we want its occupant to be good, to be authentic and righteous and more or less Okay. There's nothing wrong with that and we couldn't have a country like ours if it were otherwise.
It's just that for some people, the disconnect ripens and what we're eating stops tasting like chocolate. This is how election defeats happen. We make choices, and we line everything else up with those choices. And what we don't have control over lines itself up in its turn.
I wanted Dean, not John Kerry. I thought the Saga of the Iowa Scream was a sophomoric and cruel characterization of a man I thought was trying to do right by his country -- much the same way I hated Clinton for benefiting from what (in my high-school years) I thought was ingratitude of the American public for not reelecting the first George Bush, who presided over a war for heaven's sake.
In other words, I made, and still make, choices in my franchised decisions based on all sorts of things -- policy, and an underdog's sense of fair play, and what I think serves my values and interests, and personal preferences in appearance, bearing, and erudition. And based on my own experience I don't actually think there are any undecided voters: I think there are voters whose choices make no Velcro contact with the available candidates.
I will not undertake the hubris of believing that because I feel it so, a reelection of Dubya will result in the appointment of Supreme Court justices who leer and sneer and hate women and poor people and intellectuals and gays and will poison our nation's cultural air with pious and two-faced, Orwellian, Nazi syntax. On the other hand, I kinda think that's happening even without the Supreme Court appointments. All over this country, as I see it, smart people are making choices based on what they think they're supposed to want. Step outside that safe zone of believing the President, and all kinds of hell could break loose -- and I do mean hell.
Joe Klein denied writing Primary Colors. But he did. For that window of a few months before he capitulated, the world didn't tilt on its axis, but people did wonder if all this work at getting to the bottom of people's written and spoken identity wasn't just an exercise in futility. Did they all recover from their doubt when Klein fessed up? Of course not. Did people stop trusting the President when he fessed up here and there, in dribs and drabs, under cover of more important press items, to making stubborn mistakes about 9/11, about Iraq? Of course not. To trust -- in a person, an office, or an intellectual endeavor -- or not to trust, requires a choice that is not easily undone.
But I can say that people who choose to stop tasting chocolate might find John Kerry a little more steady, a little more righteous, a little more committed, a little more humble -- in a word, a little more presidential than they might have thought before. It's funny how things look different, when you make a certain choice.
But though I'll be disappointed, I won't be surprised -- or overly disrespectful -- if some smart people I'm thinking of don't suddenly choose to see a rabbit where they saw a duck before. In an election year there isn't time for stuff like this, but I'd suggest they do what they do when trying to solve a trompe l'oeil picture -- look away from it for a minute. Look inward, look at yourself, at what you really think about things; look at the middle distance and see what's there. It changes you. It makes your focus different.
Here's something else. God's not going anywhere. I started honestly believing in God after I realized that all my wishing and thinking and articulating couldn't shake God's existence or non-existence one inch. Elections won't do it either. We could elect some Commie pinko raised from the DNA of Lenin and Patty Hearst, and it wouldn't stop God's mission to bring more love into the world. Equally, I have to believe that even if every horrible thought I have about Bush is true and he is elected, the world won't stop humming with the love and justice with which it was created.
Not that I don't think he won't make it difficult, or miserable for a lot of us. I'm never saying again that he can't make catastrophic wrongheaded mistakes. I'm ust trying to keep a balanced perspective for one blog entry, because the rest of the election cycle? I'm not pretending to be independent.
That's a choice I've made.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home