FOLK MUSIC – THE GATEWAY DRUG

It all started with folk music… or at least that’s the theory my friend Paisley put forth.

Several years ago, she called my house to find that I had gone to a folk music concert of some sort. Considering who I was and what I usually did at that time, she was reasonably shocked. In a discussion with a couple other of our friends, they decided that this was arguably one of the first three signs of the apocalypse.

Within a few months, they heard that I had marched in a parade handing out political propaganda to on-lookers. In my defense, I was handing out pencils and nail files for my soon to be mother-in-law who was up for re-election as county commissioner. Knowing her as a person and as a politician, I felt totally Ok endorsing her on-going career as an elected official.

At this point, however, my friends could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the horsemen approaching.

Then, a couple of years later, I voted. Up until then I maintained that our voting system, especially for presidential candidates, was about as legitimate and "real" as big time wrestling… I mean, what or who is the electorate college anyway? When I queried a political science professor many, many years ago hoping that he would put my paranoid conclusions to rest, he more or less reinforced and validated everything that I feared to be true.

Nevertheless, in the 2000 election I voted for the first time, mostly because I liked Winona LaDuke. Ironically, the "who really won?" controversy I had discussed with my political science prof when I was fifteen manifested itself in our dear little consensual reality, just as I had known it eventually would. Coincidence? Or just another case of the butterfly landing in the rain forest?

Now a bona fide registered voter, my friends just reviewed their spiritual convictions and waited to be whisked away to wherever the really cool people go when the scourges overcome the world, waving blithely as the horses thundered past on their way to the polls.

And now, again, I have done something I would never have believed myself capable of several years ago. Yes, I have my very first sign in my front yard advocating a political candidate. Certainly, the trend started all those years ago by listening to live folk music for the first time has surely had its toll upon my lifestyle.

At this point I would like to interject that, at its essence, I believe that it is actually my partner who is the true "gateway drug." It was his band that I went to see that night, his mother for whom I handed out political propaganda, and late-night debates with him which led to me registering to vote and showing up at the polls so many times now that the ladies who always volunteer no longer have to ask my name. He is tremendously well informed about politics, world news and the general events of the day and we talk quite a bit, he and I…

Sigh. Who knew that great sex could possibly lead to all of these ramifications?

But I digress…

Yes, there is the sign, proudly displayed on top of the chain link fence surrounding our front yard. Not only is it there, but I actually went out of my way to find out where to get one and happily paid money to advertise for a candidate.

As my partner and I drive around town, we play a little game with these signs, keeping "score" in each neighborhood. We predicted that certain neighborhoods would have more of one candidate advertised while other neighborhoods would be likely to endorse the other.

Interestingly enough, we have not really found this to be true. No matter where we go, we find nearly an equal amount of each candidate represented – sometimes both in the same yard. It seams that the political lines are drawn across more than just socio-economic standing this season. Sometimes one whole block will endorse one candidate, while just one block over seems to be in favor of the other.

We have also noted a higher number of these signs than in years past, as if more people actually have a strong opinion one way or the other. Ironically enough, there are actually more undecided potential voters now than there were six months ago – very unusual poll results in a presidential election.

There are some issues which just seem to lend themselves to high degrees of polarization, and this election appears to be one of them. While many people are still undecided, it seems that the people who have made up their minds are so completely sure of their decision that any other choice seems illogical and unthinkable to them. Admittedly, I can certainly also say this of myself – thus the sign in the front yard.

To me, this polarization mirrors the ideological split which has occurred, or at least become more evident, since the 9/11 tragedy a few years back. From the very unmediated position where I found myself standing, it seemed like the whole country had gone insane.

Maybe it was because I didn’t see any of it on TV and didn’t have the benefit of repetition and mass cultural trauma to color my thoughts, but I seemed to react very differently than the public at large. Perhaps if I had allowed the news people to tell me what to think and believed their "emotionally loaded oversimplification" (to quote Noam Chomsky), then maybe things would have been different. Maybe I, too, would have felt the comforting illusion of security and solidarity with my fellow Americans, waving our fists from where we huddled behind our newly minted made in China American flags.

I was afraid, but not of terrorist attacks – I was afraid of the other Americans around me who were spouting so much paranoia, hatred, nationalistic zealotry and blood-lust that I found it too painful and sad to actually be around any of them for several weeks. Just going out in public to the store was depressing – everyone seemed to have turned into the vicious animals that perhaps we all are under our guise of civilization, and I couldn’t deal with it.

Wanting to avoid the masses, I waited one day in the car while my partner went into one of the local convenience stores to audit the displays as part of our job. It was warm, so I had the windows down, and was able to clearly hear the occupants of the car next to me.

The Man came out of the store and informed his wife and child (who had waited in the car) that he didn’t want to leave yet because "some shady looking character with a turban and a computer" had just walked into the store. That "shady looking character" was my partner, the "turban" a bandana head-wrap and the "computer" a clunky, mostly ineffective counting device we used to take inventories.

I just started crying. It was all so incredibly sad – my partner is probably one of the most peaceful, non-violent, level-headed human beings on this earth, but because of the "terrorist under every rock" mentality which was so prevalent at the time, he was looked on with mistrust. Had he been wearing Dockers and a baseball hat with a sports team logo on it, such assumptions would never have been made.

During that time, I was shocked at how shocked everyone was. I mean really – come on. I do not condone violence of any kind for any reason, but people in America must be living under one huge collective rock to not understand the reasons why so many people in the world hate us. (And they have even more reasons to do so now.) Sure, we like to believe that they’re just jealous, and maybe some of them are, but that certainly doesn’t begin to explain the complexity of the real reasons behind those kinds of actions.

I also found that people would ask questions pertaining to these issues, though in retrospect I think that they were intended to be rhetorical. "Oh why would someone want to do that to us?" they would lament with sincere grief.

However, woe unto the fool who actually tried to answer them. I saw (virtually and in real life) several people attacked and figuratively torn to shreds if they even began to answer this question – sometimes that person was me. There are and were reasons for people in other parts of the world to hate us. Considering the atrocities we have either committed, funded or looked the other way while they were happening, I cannot imagine that anyone in this country would or could even question why we would be hated.

Is this country’s collective psyche really so tied up in its own deluded self-image that it is totally incapable of seeing reality? Have we really been so inducted into the propaganda perpetuated by the media that we are incapable of anything other than the knee-jerk self-congratulatory patting on the back when we hear words like "freedom" and "liberty"?

Though on an intellectual level I must have realized many things about the country I live in, the level to which the American public has been indoctrinated and brainwashed was still very shocking to me. I was deeply disturbed by what the editor of the Utne Reader labeled the "flag flapping hysteria" after September 11th.

Now, here we are a few years later and ready for the next presidential election. During this time, I have been trying very hard to look on the political bright side, if such a thing can be said to exist. Just a few short years ago, I didn’t usually even know the names of the presidential candidates at this point in an election (I have a very funny story about not believing in the existence of Bob Dole for a while when someone told me about him), but now I know what’s going on all the time.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing – I like to think about it as more of an intellectual experiment. If I find that my life truly was better when total apathy and mistrust was my political stance, then I can always go back. For now, though, the stakes seem too high for me to ignore them. Though I have always had a certain level of disdain for the truly stupid and cruel things that humans do, these days it is so obvious and apparent that we (if I can, for a moment, pretend that I include myself as part of this culture) really are the bad guys in many cases.

I am not comfortable with this. I do not endorse any of the decisions this government has made over the past several years, whether they be regarding foreign policy (or lack thereof), environmental issues, healthcare, the economy or fundamentalist agenda pushing. I simply cannot believe that I live in a country which will tolerate this kind of over-the-top cowboy behavior from the head of their state. I am shocked and appalled… though intellectually I know that I shouldn’t really be surprised.

I have so many mixed feelings… Part of me just gets exhausted by trying to understand how any sane, ethical, thinking person could be all right with this. Then, other days, I know that they have just been conditioned to believe what they are supposed to believe, that most of them sit there hypnotized by the blinking refresh rate of their television screen while words and messages pour into their receptive minds. They believe what they are told to believe and often do not realize that there is anything else.

Or, as is often the case, they know that something about what they are being told to believe isn’t quite right, but they are either too busy, too stressed out or too lazy to go looking for actual information about the world on their own. It is much easier to ingest the cool, bland pap on the evening news than to search out other outlets of information.

Doesn’t everyone know that the TV stations are owned by major corporations? Doesn’t everyone know that nearly all national media sources are owned by nine huge businesses? Doesn’t everyone realize how homogenized our popular "free" press really is?
Just because we say the word "freedom" over and over doesn’t mean that we actually possess it or have the right and/or ability to give it to / force it upon the rest of the world. In this culture, "democracy" is synonymous with "capitalism," though in truth these two things can exist separately… perhaps they’d both be happier that way.

It often seems to me that our most pronounced freedom is the freedom to choose between twenty different shampoos, fifteen feature films at the theater, small, medium or large, or if we want fries with that. Yes, we are free to say what we want, to believe what we want, etc., but are we really? So much of our experience is mediated by the media – for a large part, it is big corporations who choose what we do and don’t know, what we believe, what we know about the world. Is that really freedom?

For the most part, we are not given Total Freedom; rather, we are offered a list of acceptable possibilities from which we are to "choose" our preference. Anything on the list is all right, thus satisfying our need to feel that we have a choice. However, culturally speaking, if it isn’t on the list it either doesn’t exist or is outside the realm of social acceptability. Most of the time we are so fully constrained by the confines of The Box that we are completely unable to even recognize that there is something, anything, outside of it. The Box has become our reality; we cannot long for something which to us does not even exist. Is this, really, freedom?

This presidential election is no different. Do we want Bush? Or Kerry? Sure, there are other people who "could" be president, but no one is delusional enough to believe that any of them would or could actually win.

Do you want a Republican or a Democrat? Conservative or Liberal? Right or Wrong? Good or Bad? Us or Them?

So many times, our choices are artificially narrowed down to some arbitrary either / or choice, causing us to believe that life really is that ridiculously simple, contradictory and conflicting. These choices are not really choices – they are what we have instead of choices. Certainly, we can pick one, but it must be one from a list of two.

Ahh, freedom. I have the freedom to choose between This Guy or That Guy. Wow! Democracy sure is liberating!

You know, this isn’t really a democracy – democracy is just a word we like to throw around to make us feel good about ourselves. We have (as most nations of the world have) a republic of some sort, technically not a democracy at all.

We have, at best, a representational democracy. Two hundred years ago, logistically speaking, it was the best that we could do. Since all of us couldn’t fit into one big town hall and raise our hands to vote on every issue, we elected people to raise our hands for us.

Of course, the Founding Fathers never really intended that the "unwashed masses" should or would be capable of governing themselves – the belief that they felt any other way is nothing more than American Mythos at is very most delusional. They wrote lots of letters to each other while they were debating the start of this nation – go read them.

Now, however, there is no good reason for us not have an actual, real, direct democracy. Just as most things which would actually work, make sense and be good for the largest amount of people, it would never be allowed. If we all really do have liberty and justice for all, lots of very wealthy people / corporations would cease making millions of dollars packaging and dishing out our freedom to us, and we couldn’t have that, now could we.

If politicians truly were public servants (as they should be and as some of the rare few are) then their only job would be to carry out our wishes. And by "our" I mean us, all or most of us, all the time. Current technology makes this possible – just log on and click a button.

However, as this will not be an option come November, I will just have to make my "choices" based upon the arbitrarily limited reality presented to me. When I was younger and harder-headed, I refused to participate until there was an actual fair, REAL system in which to participate. To me, participating in the system was in some way endorsing the system, which I did not then and do not now endorse.

Be that as it may, sometimes I find it important to choose the lesser evil. Hell, if Kermit the Frog was on the ballot, I’d vote for him, too. A puppet is a puppet, right? It’s more about whose hand is shoved up its ass and who is pulling the strings…

I really, genuinely believe that W is perhaps the worst president since Warren Harding, though just as in those days, this fact won’t be discussed until he is long out of the White House. He scares me – he’s stupid, mean, macho and stubborn and thinks that God Is On His Side. I cannot (and will not) begin to go into the huge list of why I believe that this is NOT the man for the job… I think that the reality we live in speaks for itself.

My partner put it very well when he said, "There is a short list of about two hundred people I’d rather see in the White House than John Kerry. GW Bush is not one of them."

It’s funny – I have no strong feelings about Kerry at all. To me, he has a few good things going for him:

1) He’s intelligent. He can read, use three-syllable words correctly and reason well enough to change his mind once he has new information.

2) He is aware of and sensitive to other cultures, governments and societies around the world and is very educated about such issues. Though gawd help him if anyone hears him speaking French. Now that we’ve let our backwards large-scale hick attitudes out, we don’t like them anymore. Whatever…

3) He claims that he wants to make sure that people have healthcare. As someone who hasn’t had insurance for more than a decade, this would be way cool. Unlike W, Kerry doesn’t believe that people can actually afford health insurance but just choose not to have it. Um, yeah. Right.

4) He went to Vietnam and protested it afterward. Murder is murder; damn straight. In my opinion, someone who has been there and actually seen the horror with their own eyes has every right in the world to have a strong opinion about it. War sucks. Kerry knows this first hand and had enough guts to say so.

5) His wife is way cool. This is actually his biggest selling point to me. If he screws up, she is the person he will have to answer to. Knowing this makes me feel much better.

My biggest question as this election approaches is how am I going to deal with it if W is reelected? He represents a drastic pendulum swing in one direction… how long do we have to be at this extreme until people start to come around and see that this path goes nowhere good? I’ve always been somewhat embarrassed to be an American, but during his presidency I’ve become full-out ashamed to be an American.

Do you know what horribly dangerous goof-balls we look like to the civilized world? We are an eighteen year old football playing hick with head full of Bud Light and a trunk full of guns who thinks he’s right, no matter what. W and his regime have done more to promote and increase terrorism in the Middle East than anyone else… who’s the real terrorist in this picture?

But Americans are told over and over again that we’re The Good Guys so that is what they believe, no matter what. It is difficult for anyone to admit that they’ve made a mistake, but to do otherwise is to continue to make that mistake over and over and over. And in the case of the most powerful person in the most powerful country in the world, those mistakes equal death after death after death.

When I think of W, I just feel sad. I know that, deep down, he really thinks that he’s doing the right thing. He’s a cowboy – he was raised with that idea and has embodied it fully. He has been unsuccessful at every business venture he ever supervised, though he has never taken any responsibility for this or had to bail himself out. His life is a near-total failure – no wonder he chooses blindness.

Someday, as is the case with all of us, he’ll have to answer for his choices.

And so will we.