Green with disgust

...Bill, and this provided greater scope for my junkie activities...

...Essentially a third-world state with pockets of sophistication and high tech, it has a political system which combines the absurd and sinister with the simply archaic, and is still sufficiently small in population that one might make an impact...

...Frankly, I don't like most of what I see...

...Senate against Richard Nixon...

...During all these years, I never strayed far from the Democratic party which, I felt, best represented my origins...

...Like most other drugs, the drug of politics is a harsh mistress...

...I grew up in Queens...

...On the so-called "social" issues, Dole and Clinton are fighting to see who can call for more prisons and police to "solve" the real but over-hyped "crime problem...

...This may well be my last presidential election, and this time-at least-I don't want to waste my vote...

...On economic issues, the differences between them are largely based on the rhetoric of political tradition...

...On rare occasions I might support a Republican for state or local office, or even for Congress, but I was never tempted by the heresy of voting for a Republican presidential candidate...

...Politics is, of course, largely a matter of lesser evils...

...Bill Clinton spent four years at Georgetown while I was teaching political science there, but apparently was never in any of my classes, and I can't recall ever having met him either...

...I ask you: What is a poor junkie to do...

...Presidential elections only occur every four years, after all, and though my health still seems reasonably good, I don't know how many more elections God will keep me around for...

...My political views were largely determined by my socioeconomic background-urban lower-middle class, with the accent on the lower...

...Despite the visceral unwillingess of most of the business community to fully embrace someone with a Democatic label, Clinton is probably more effective in their interest because he is not only more economically literate than Dole but has precluded any spokesman for the traditional Democratic working class from arising to real power in the party...

...Most of my life I have operated on the prudential principle that when faced with two evils, chose the lesser...

...But most environmentalists do not trust him and with good reason: His heart is not in it, just as it is not really in any issue except reelection...

...I was born and raised primarily in New York City...

...I understand and sympathize, but I get my kicks largely from politics...

...But one always has deep in one's psyche the desire to find something really good...

...Like most addicts, I started young...

...Victor Ferkiss, the author of Nature, Technology, and Society: Cultural Roots of the Current Environmental Crisis (New York University Press), is a member of both the Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs and the Planning and Zoning Commission of the Village of Corrales, New Mexico.rales, New Mexico...

...Now in 1996 I suddenly find myself on the verge of remission, and the pangs of withdrawl are agonizing...

...Heaven knows that New Mexico, where I have lived for the last half decade, is a fertile field for action...

...But it was not the urbane and sophisticated New York most think of...

...Both Dole and Clinton strike me as purer political animals than most, pragmatists who may have different ideological centers of gravity but who are more than willing to sacrifice any convictions they hold on the altar of political expediency...

...once embraced, she is almost impossible to escape...

...When it comes to the environment, Dole doesn't have a clue...

...You all know the results, immediate and long-range...

...My head tells me that faced with a choice of Dole or Clinton, I should support the latter as the lesser evil...

...War is the father of all things, some ancient Greek wrote...

...Senators...

...At present, scenting public revulsion at the attempted excesses of the Republican Congress, he is trying to make it an issue...

...The social critic Norman Podhoretz once wrote that the longest journey in the world was the subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan...

...True, I cast my first presidential vote in 1948 for the Socialist party candidate, Norman Thomas, and wrote in the name of Eugene McCarthy not once but twice on the presidential ballot...

...One could of course have recourse to the maxim, "Think globally, act locally...

...Over the years I have come to regard environmental issues-resource depletion, pollution, population growth- as the real keys to the future of both the United States and the planet as a whole...

...Neither has shown any real understanding of what ails the country and what to do about it and both are, in effect, spokesmen for corporate America...

...In high school, I was going to political meetings...

...Though I was a lowly rifleman in the same battalion as Bob Dole in Italy, and probably not more than a thousand yards away on that fateful April morning when he received the wounds that changed his life and did much to form his character forever, somehow we have never met...

...It was the real New York...

...In the long years since, I have attended local and state conventions, rung doorbells, watched polls, registered voters, distributed literature, and worked phone banks in California, Maryland, and New Mexico...

...I was one of millions of Americans raised to real middle-class status after World War II by the G.I...

...But my heart tells me something else...

...But once you have tried the heavy drug of national politics, the softer drugs of state and local, though they can provide a rush, have limited appeal...

...I was a precinct captain for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her fight for the U.S...

...The future of abortion will be decided by public opinion and the courts, not by whether Dole or Clinton is elected...

...The Green party is now a legal major party in New Mexico...

...When most kids my age were reading comic books, I was memorizing the names of the then ninety-six U.S...

...Like most Americans then, all of what I know about either of them comes through the media or by rumor...

...Clinton's record on abortion may be abominable, but all the signs are that the Republican party is leaning in his direction, even to abandoning the rhetoric with which Reagan and Bush conned the prolife movement...

...If they put Ralph Nader on the presidental ballot, I will probably vote for him...

...Some people have a passion for art or music, literature or philosophy, fine wines or lustful sex...

...My political history was one of loyalty as well as addiction...

...Though I was on the board of directors of Americans for Democratic Action in the early sixties, most of my work was that of an anonymous foot soldier in the political trenches...

...In my lifetime I've been in direct contact with political figures as diverse as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Ted Kennedy, but Dole and Clinton I've never seen in person, even if our paths have in some sense crossed...

...Clinton's record in Arkansas was horrible, his first years as president mediocre...

...When I was a grad student at Berkeley I engaged in my first real political work, which showed a special facet of my political addiction-a quasi-romantic affinity for lost causes...