Appalling, depressing, revolting
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL WIWDS John Garvey APPALLING, DEPRESSING, REVOLTING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION oth of the conventions are over now. The only consolation is that we will not have to put up with that...
...It was a little like a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, with the little kid who's made a shambles of things trying to distract his mother's atCommonweal 25 September...
...I wouldn't have voted for him either, but I would like to see his supporters try to explain how my not voting for him is the equivalent of voting for both Bush and Clinton...
...It would be hard to think of a more ineffective focus for a partisan political platform than ultimate values (short of a platform which demanded a change in the annual mean temperature of the plains states) but it is all the Republicans have left, having been in charge and having made a thorough botch of things, making us the world's greatest debtor nation, with the highest unemployment rate in a decade...
...the banality and emptiness of both performances may point different ways, but they are equally appalling directions...
...They can't call it apathy if there is a reasonable turnout, and a clear turnoff at the top of the ticket...
...There is always the issue of Supreme Court appointments...
...If that were true, Bush partisans could not accuse me (as they do) of doing something that is equivalent to voting for Bill Clinton and the policies of the Democrats...
...What is most annoying is the way in which both sides have made any discussion about values so crudely predetermined that honest thought about the public implications of such difficult issues as abortion and discrimination against homosexuals has been made even more difficult than it would normally be in a pluralistic society...
...When Bill Clinton presided over the execution of a man who was arguably retarded—he could have commuted the sentence to life in prison, as governor of Arkansas—I decided then that I couldn't vote for him...
...And what scabby hands those are...
...The campaign becomes a form of ritual behavior, in which we are asked to pretend that something significant might happen if one or the other candidate is elected...
...so if you want to stay home, it's certainly all right with me...
...A respect for life as something God-given, something inherently holy, doesn't include the lives of those Iraqis who appear only as distant computer-blips on the dulled consciences of the people who still celebrate Desert Storm...
...Leave aside for the moment the fact that Clinton's stated agenda doesn't look significantly different from that of Michael Dukakis in 1988, except for trying to appear even more conservative, or the fact that like Dukakis and Democrats generally he is in hock to the least creative sectors of the union movement, the teachers and government employee unions, and will do nothing to shake them up or make them think (assuming thinking is something they can do...
...This was before his fervent support of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) and before abortion rights became the touchstone, the litmus test, the way of proving your true Democratic credentials...
...This is a combination of cynicism and idolatry that makes you know, anyway, that the fundamentalist God doesn't exist or Houston would have been reduced to ashes...
...This is a terrifying thought: like a slug developing vertebrae, or a squid learning to fly, there is something unnatural and unnerving about the thought of George Bush as a man of conviction...
...Write in someone at the top, or vote for a friend...
...Don't vote at this level...
...Because the economy lies in ruins after years of a Republican borrow-and-spend program, their focus could not be on the economy (except for one brief and obviously silly assertion that we are better off now than we were four years ago), and so the Republicans decided to stress values, which are, with the death of the cold war, the last refuge of scoundrels...
...formulation: God and country, God and this or that value, with God as a vital ingredient...
...When the Democrats would not allow prolife Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania to speak, but pushed a prochoice agenda and allowed a defense of gay rights, they played into the hands of the worst Republican tacticians...
...Commonweal...
...The differences that do exist will force a lot of us to waive the franchise, at the level of the presidency anyway...
...In fact, the Democrats will have to raise taxes or cut into entitlements if they are to deal with the deficit, but Clinton doesn't have the courage to say this...
...He won't need them in Congress, since they won't be there...
...The single issues people warn us away from, when we vote, are usually the issues they don't care much about themselves...
...Things are worse for the poor than they have been in years, and life is getting tougher for almost all of the rest of us...
...government wasn't serious about the deficit...
...When Bush announced tax cuts at the Republican convention, the dollar fell to its lowest point against the German mark, a result of the correct perception on the part of currency speculators that the U.S...
...So are civil rights and racism...
...leave aside the fact that enthusiasm for Clinton seems to have more to do with the fact that he is not Bush than with any positive virtue (though not being Bush does have its positive aspects), and that he has abandoned any reasonable approach to limiting entitlements, like means-testing for Social Security—leaving these things aside, the Democrats offer so little, and offend so deeply, that I can't vote for them...
...The Republicans came up with a "God and...
...As the old saw has it, it only encourages them...
...The only consolation is that we will not have to put up with that sort of thing for another four years...
...Once again, the search for a lesser evil seems pointless...
...If Clinton were elected he would appoint someone prochoice to the Court—he has made his litmus test clear, his single issue...
...The conventions make it clear, however, that there is a party-wide acquiescence in the whole disgusting process...
...Vote, by all means, for anyone who deserves it at the congressional and local levels...
...It isn't true to say that there is no significant difference between the parties, as some have, though there is less than partisans will allow...
...These things, capital punishment and abortion, are single issues...
...And the reporters who look at all of this continue to deal with it as if it were a horse race: who is doing better...
...so was the war in Southeast Asia...
...He's been pro-abortion before, and who knows what he might do once he really doesn't need the Republican Right to get elected...
...Not to vote is, in fact, a statement...
...It isn't true, as some friends have suggested, that this is equivalent to voting for the status quo and for George Bush and his policies...
...Bush would probably veto any attempt by Congress to enshrine Roe v. Wade...
...992: 9 tention from the smoking rubble pile: Look at what those horrible people are doing over there, he says, pointing frantically, isn't it terrible...as if politicians and political platforms could ever deal in any serious way with cultural values...
...The Court and its actions, past and future, may be the single reason to cast a vote in this election...
...I'm sorry Ross Perot dropped out...
...They should be asking, whose cowardice is more apparent now, whose venality and pandering more obvious...
...To ask whether Bush has the courage to say anything is laughable...
...But what if Bush were suddenly to discover, during a second term, that he didn't need to care anymore about what people thought...
Vol. 119 • September 1992 • No. 16
