Next Tuesday?

Sorry to be late with this, but I promised some friends here and at home to go quiet for a time. I read this article a few days ago, wanted to post it right away, but deferred to the promise. The frenzy of the campaign today, Tuesday, October 28, one week before we vote, impelled me to post it now.

This article is by Jonathan Schell, whose brief background is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Schell.

He wrote it on October 8, for the November 3 edition of The Nation, and is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081103/schellS.

Truthout posted it on October 15 at: http://www.truthout.org/102608d?print

Entitled "When the Gloves Come Off," it is the best summary of the presidential campaign I have read. It is worth the while for any person here who is struggling under the load of all the stuff dumped on us by both campaigns, all the pundits, and the rock-ribbed republican next door to the right and the wishy-washy liberal who lives in the house on the left. Up front, it is pro Obama, but in such a way that it clears the campaign trail of all the rubbish strewn along the way.

Schell has the gift of writing, but more than that, he is gifted with a deeper talent, insight. The first paragraph is magnificent, and is topped more than once or twice in the following eight to ten pages, depending on which website you choose for downloading. The Nation's has the better graphics.

That first paragraph was like the rolling of the drums, sounding deep within me to the point where I had to go back and begin reading it out loud. Then I stood up and read it out loud again, punctuating each sentence with a vocal bullet as I spoke. It reads like this:

"Every tree in the forest will fall," said James McCord, the Watergate conspirator, as he prepared to blow the lid off the cover-up of the scandal, leading to the forced midterm resignation of President Nixon. The phrase comes to mind as one surveys the condition of the United States today. The country's military power is evaporating in failing ground wars in two pulverized, impoverished countries, leaving its recent pretensions to global imperial grandeur in ashes. Its economic power is crumbling daily as its banking system collapses and its instruments of credit seize up in what Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has told Congress may be a "heart attack." (To which Pope Benedict has helpfully added that the world's financial system is built "on sand," explaining that "only the word of God is the foundation of all reality.") Its constitutional foundations have been weakened to the breaking point by a lawless executive branch and a supine Congress. Its moral authority has been compromised by military aggression and the institution of torture. Its ecological underpinnings (which it of course shares with the rest of the world) are being put at risk by global warming and the entire panoply of harms that the overgrown human enterprise is inflicting on the natural order. (On October 6 a study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reported that almost a quarter of mammalian species are now at risk of extinction.) "Change," indeed!--not the kind "we can believe in" or even the kind we "need" that Barack Obama promises but the kind that bears down upon you like a Category 5 hurricane, whether you believe in it or not. Not change but salvage--and salvation--are the need of the hour: rescue we can believe in.

Reading this article a few days prior to the day we vote will help us clear our minds so that we may vote our preferences and our consciences. It will also renew our decision to vote and not stay home or pass on by the polls, because the lines are long. It will show us simply and clearly that we have an obligation to vote on Tuesday, November 4. It will dispel the complacency or disgust we may feel that the next president has already been chosen.

Not until the votes are counted, though, including ours.