希望还是恐怕?
Voted the other day, absentee, of course. Never have I felt so much trepidation about an election, not even in ‘04 when the stakes seemed so impossibly high. Despite the rosy projections on pollster.com, I think it’s going to be a nail-biter. I want Obama to win so badly it makes my bones ache.
It’s a little surprising that it should turn out this way, as I still really haven’t changed my opinion that he wasn’t among the best Democratic candidates in the running in January. At the time I actually found all his “Hope-mongering” vacuous and a little arrogant…as if he were the one and only hope of ending the 8-year tragedy of the Bush presidency, and that Chris Dodd, say, would be “more of the same.” This was parodied on the Right as a messiah-complex—unfairly, of course, but not randomly.
But these last weeks have finally given “Hope” a true resonance for me, because the other candidate has been running in a very real sense as the candidate of “Fear.” His rallies have become exhibitions of paranoid, contemptuous, xenophobic, Birchist lunacy. But it was the 3rd debate that showed it in highest relief: the subtext of every word McCain said, the message behind his every grimace and eye-roll, was “Be very, very afraid.” Never in my lifetime has a major-party candidate run on so explicitly craven a platform.
How did it come to this? How did a man once known for integrity and courage become the candidate of lies and cowardice? I stood in the cell he occupied at the Hanoi Hilton—or one very like it—and know that it must have taken all kinds of guts to survive there; and as recently as this spring I harbored a grudging admiration for the man, even if I was rendered queasy at the prospective policies and appointments of a McCain administration.
No more. As Macbeth teaches us, the quest for power can corrupt as absolutely as power itself. We’re now in about Act IV, scene I, and the American polity, like a hell-broth, boils and bubbles. Is that Birnam Wood on the Nov. horizon? I have the audacity to hope so.
