Political apathy has given the administration too much power
by Geov Parrish

For the past ten weeks or so, I've been trying to pinpoint my sense of growing unease with being part of a society that is plunging into a dystopia I've encountered before.

Part of the unease has been due to an anniversary. It's been just about a year since That Election played its ugly, sordid self out. I was no Gore fan, but even last year one of the things I found most noteworthy about Dubya's sanitized but highly visible coup d'etat was the lack of outrage that attended it.

Here's a passage from a Seattle Weekly column I wrote at the time, under the heading "Where Are The Torches?":

One of the most striking aspects of the slow-motion electoral hijacking by the Forces of Dubya is that everybody watched, but nobody cared.

Where were the 50 million Gore voters? Where were all the anti-Nader Democrats that were bleating so loudly that a Bush regime would be an apocalyptic nightmare?...More people were enthusiastic about Bush than were enthusiastic about Gore, and more people by far -- unlike most countries -- didn't even vote.

Ultimately, most Americans don't care passionately about which oligarchs work overtime to grease the extraction of labor and wealth from us.

Over the past year, everyone has continued to watch. Politics in America no longer means participatory democracy; it now means television. As Peter Sellers (playing Chance the Gardener) memorably responded in Being There -- for my money one of the best political movies ever made -- we like to watch.

In that same column, I assessed the prospects for the reign of King George II in part as follows:

We already knew that we were going to get neoliberalism, military interventions, Star Wars, conservative court appointments, environmental degradation, stagnant wages, more prisons, and so forth, no matter who won; the differences were a matter of degree....Get ready for our bipartisan ruling classes...to issue one triumphant, snarling "Fuck you" to the world's poor.

That was harsh, but accurate, both in our government's message and its bipartisanship. Over the last year, we watched as Bush used his non-mandate to, among other things: appoint the most reactionary, corporate-friendly Cabinet in modern history; ram through a tax cut package almost entirely dedicated to further enriching the wealthy; pull the United States out of a stunning variety of international agreements, treaties, negotiations and protocols; and essentially bury anti-trust law and a whole range of environmental protections.

All of these radical actions were taken with a minimum of fuss from most Democrats and not much in the way of organized activist opposition. In many countries where democracy is less taken for granted (and, hopefully, most countries where it's assumed), the apparent theft of an election would result in angry denunciations by the political opposition, and/or masses of people in the capital city. None of that happened in the U.S., a year ago or at any point since. And then came September 11.

Since then -- setting aside the notion of opposing a war that is inevitably going to be widely supported -- we've learned that Al Gore really did get more votes in Florida last year. And, we've learned that the resulting government is detaining people without charges, evidence, or access to lawyers or family, sometimes solely on the basis of age, gender, ethnicity, and religion; reserving the right to wiretap, monitoring e-mail, and even searching and seizing property, all without meaningful judicial review; and promising to try "suspected" terrorists in a military court, without recourse to due process. (Think of how the U.S. would feel if an American, accused of spying, were tried in such a manner by China.)

Meanwhile, another big fat gift for the rich, gussied up as "economic stimulus," is being pushed through Congress, with fasttrack, Social Security privatization, and a corrupt energy policy waiting in the bipartisan wings.

Where are the torches? Does the shock of recognition that there are evil people in the world, some of whom hate the U.S., so rearrange our notion of democracy that we're willing to walk away from fundamental rights, or basic understandings about how a representative democracy should work?

It's not like apathy is new. The number of Americans ignoring any given election has been enormous for years. The public's willingness to sit on its hands while atrocity after atrocity meets bipartisan approval has been evident for the entire last year (if not much longer). But as remarkable circumstances produce (or provide the justification for) ever more radical action, this is the time for more, not less, discussion and representation.

I am less frightened by terrorists, or even by political leaders whose values I disagree with, than by the apparent political complacency of most Americans. For whatever reason -- satisfaction, cynicism, helplessness, apathy, all of the above -- our ability to chart our own destiny is being taken away from us, and like the sleeping infant whose parent is carefully prying a favored toy from her fingers, we're not even noticing.

The resulting nightmare is less “1984” and more “Brave New World” -- a dystopia that we welcome with open arms. Instead of learning to love Big Brother, we have a Big Brother custom-designed so that we'd love him from the outset.

Tomorrow, the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, visits the White House. Sure to be the top agenda item is Spain's decision last week not to extradite eight 9-11 terrorist suspects unless the U.S. promises not to try them in military courts. Here is a country that fancies itself the world's beacon for freedom and democracy, being lectured on it by the home of Franco and the Spanish Inquisition.

It all brings to mind a slightly revised version of yet another famed political dystopia: Pogo.

We have met the enemy. Whatever.

1988: Activists paint anti-military graffiti on war planes due for delivery to Turkey. Woensdrecht, The Netherlands.