I think my mojo, my edge, my annoying self is returning. Don’t worry, fellow bloggers! I’m not going to go where not welcomed.
I set out this morning to write about this constant dialogue I am having with people about the importance and effect of voting. It’s a broad subject, but to sum it up, there is an old saying that if voting mattered, it would be illegal. Indeed, in Chile in the early 1970’s, voting was effective, so the US murdered the president and installed in power a man who then outlawed voting. The other example I used over at Intelligent Discontent* this morning was Father Jean Jacques Aristide, who came to power in Haiti in the early 1990’s by means of a popular movement that was then crushed by the Bush and Clinton regimes. Voting can indeed be effective, and in those two cases it forced power to come out in the open and use its only real sustaining device, violence.
What on earth makes people think that the leaders of the US, who so despise voting in other countries, respect it here? Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro also sustain(ed) their regimes using the façade of electoral referendum. Somewhere between the a real referendum in Chile in 1970 and the fake one in North Korea in 2009 lies the US voter. We do have a system in which voting can be effective, but we are trained to use it in the most ineffective manner possible, choosing among candidates offered to us by the oligarchy.
For that reason, in the United States in 2011, voting does not matter. Voting for munchkins in a world run by Wicked Witches is not much of a choice.
In retrospect it appears that the Obama campaign was constructed with the knowledge that there would be a backlash against Bush. He was groomed, and did not appear out of the streets of Chicago by accident. He’s highly intelligent, but I am wondering now if he even wrote those books that made him famous, his profiles in courage. Now elected, he has assiduously worked to make sure that every major advance made under Bush is either maintained or intensified.
In other words, in terms of regime Change in 2008, our votes were as important as a vote for Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Hope on that.
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*I just realized as I wrote these words that Polish Wolf, who wrote the post over at ID, committed the fallacy of the missing middle, which I just wrote about below. Blew right by me!
Piece of Mindful 