- In the wee small hours of November 3 2004, a new country
appeared on the map of the modern world: the DSA, the Divided States of
America. Oh yes, I know, the obligatory pieties about "healing"
have begun; not least from the lips of the noble Loser. This is music to
the ears of the Victor of course, who wants nothing better than for us
all to Come Together, a position otherwise known as unconditional surrender.
Please, fellow curmudgeons and last ditchers, can someone on the losing
side just for once not roll over and fall into a warm bath of patriotic
platitudes at such moments, but toot the flute of battle instead; yell
and holler and snarl just a wee bit? I don't want to heal the wound, I
want to scratch the damned thing until it hurts and bleeds - and then maybe
we'll have what it takes to get up from the mat. Do we think the far-right
Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, in the ashy dawn of his annihilation
in 1964, wanted to share? Don't think so. He wanted to win; sometime. And
now, by God, he has.
-
- "We are one nation," the newborn star of Democrats,
Senator-elect Barack Obama, exclaimed, even as every salient fact of political
life belied him. Well might he invoke Lincoln, for not since the Civil
war has the fault line between its two halves been so glaringly clear,
nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Even territorially
(with the exception of Florida, its peninsular finger pointing expectantly
at tottering Cuba), the two Americas are topographically coherent and almost
contiguous. One of those Americas is a perimeter, lying on the oceans or
athwart the fuzzy boundary with the Canadian lakes, and is necessarily
porous and outward-looking. The other America, whether montagnard or prairie,
is solidly continental and landlocked, its tap roots of obstinate self-belief
buried deep beneath the bluegrass and the high corn. It is time we called
those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat, for their
mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and Shia,
or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and
Worldly America?
-
- Worldly America, which of course John Kerry won by a
massive landslide, faces, well, the world on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts
and freely engages, commercially and culturally, with Asia and Europe in
the easy understanding that those continents are a dynamic synthesis of
ancient cultures and modern social and economic practices. This truism
is unthreatening to Worldly America, not least because so many of its people,
in the crowded cities, are themselves products of the old-new ways of Korea,
Japan, Ireland or Italy. In Worldly America - in San Francisco, Chicago,
San Diego, New York - the foreigner is not an anxiety, but rather a necessity.
Its America is polycultural, not Pollyanna.
-
- Godly America, on the other hand, rock-ribbed in Dick
Cheney's Wyoming, stretched out just as far as it pleases in Dubya's deeply
drilled Texas, turns its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world
and proclaims to high heaven the indestructible endurance of the American
Difference. If Worldly America is, beyond anything else, a city, a street,
and a port, Godly America is, at its heart (the organ whose bidding invariably
determines its votes over the cooler instructions of the head), a church,
a farm and a barracks; places that are walled, fenced and consecrated.
Worldly America is about finding civil ways to share crowded space, from
a metro-bus to the planet; Godly America is about making over space in
its image. One America makes room, the other America muscles in.
-
- Worldly America is pragmatic, practical, rational and
sceptical. In California it passed Proposition 71, funding embryonic stem
cell research beyond the restrictions imposed by Bush's federal policy.
Godly America is mythic, messianic, conversionary, given to acts of public
witness, hence the need - in Utah and Montana and a handful of other states
- to poll the voters on amendments to their state constitution defining
marriage as a union between the opposite sexes. But then Worldly America
is said to feed the carnal vanities; Godly America banishes and punishes
them. From time to time Godly America will descend on the fleshpots of
Worldly America, from Gotham (it had its citadel-like Convention there
after all) to Californication, will shop for T-shirts, take a sniff at
the local pagans and then return to base-camp more convinced than ever
that a time of Redemption and Repentance must be at hand. But if the stiff-necked
transgressors cannot be persuaded, they can be cowed and conquered.
-
- No wonder so many of us got the election so fabulously
wrong even into the early hours of Tuesday evening, when the exit polls
were apparently giving John Kerry a two- or three-point lead in both Florida
and Ohio. For most of us purblind writers spend our days in Worldly America
and think that Godly America is some sort of quaint anachronism, doomed
to atrophy and disappear as the hypermodernity of the cyber age overtakes
it, in whatever fastness of Kentucky or Montana it might still circle its
wagons. The shock for the Worldlies is to discover that Godly America is
its modernity; that so far from it withering before the advance of the
blog and the zipdrive, it is actually empowered by them. The tenacity with
which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is just that - a theory
- with no more validity than Creationism, or that Iraqis did, in fact,
bring down the twin towers, is not in any way challenged by the digital
pathways of the information age. In fact, such articles of faith are expedited
and reinforced by them. Holy bloggers bloviate, Pentecostalists ornament
their website with a nimbus of trembling electronic radiance and, for all
I know, you can download Pastor John Ashcroft singing the Praises of the
Lord right to your Godpod.
-
- Nor, it transpires, is the exercise of the franchise
a sure-fire way for the Democrats to prevail. The received wisdom in these
Worldly parts (subscribed to by yours truly; mea culpa) was that a massively
higher turn out would necessarily favour Kerry. P Diddy's "Vote or
Die" campaign was credited with getting out young voters en masse
who ignored the polls in 2000. We saw a lot of Springsteen and Bon Jovi
and ecstatic upturned faces. Who could possibly match their mobilisation,
we thought? Answer: Jehovah and his Faithful Servant St Karl the Rove.
The biggest story of all in 2004 is the astounding success of the Republicans
in shipping millions of white evangelicals to the polls who had also stayed
at home four years earlier. We thought we were fired up with righteous
indignation - against the deceits of the propaganda campaign for the Iraq
war, against the gross inequities of the tax cuts - but our fire was just
hot air compared to the jihad launched by the Godlies against the infamy
of a tax rollback, of merely presuming to diss the Dear Leader in a time
of war. And the battalions of Christian soldiers made the telling difference
in the few critical places where Godly and Worldly America do actually
rub shoulders (or at least share a state), Ohio above all.
-
- By the lights of the psephology manuals, Ohio ought to
have been a natural for the Democrats: ageing industrial cities such as
Akron and Dayton, with big concentrations of minorities, suffering prolonged
economic pain from out sourced industries. Cleveland and Cincinnati are
classic cities of the Worldly plain: half-decayed, incompletely revived;
great art museums, a rock'n'roll hall of fame, a terrific symphony orchestra.
But drive a bit and you're in deep Zion, where the Holsteins graze by billboards
urging the sinful to return to the bosom of the Almighty, the church of
Friday night high school football shouts its hosannas at the touchdowns,
and Support Our Troops signs grow as thick as the rutabaga. At first sight
there's not much distance between this world and western Pennsylvania,
but were the state line to be marked in 20ft-high electrified fences the
frontier between the two Americas couldn't be sharper. The voters of the
"Buckeye State" cities did care about their jobs; they did listen
when Kerry told them the rich had done disproportionately nicely from Bush's
tax cut. But they were also listening when their preachers (both black
and white) fulminated against the uncleanliness of Sodom and the murder
of the unborn. In the end, those whose most serious anxieties were the
state of the economy and the Mess-o-potamia were outvoted by those who
told exit pollers their greatest concern in 2004 was "moral values".
-
- Faith-driven politics may even have had a hand in delivering
Florida to Bush by a surprising margin, since it seems possible that Jewish
voters there who voted for "my son the vice-president" Joe Lieberman
(not to mention Hadassah, oy what nachas) in 2000, actually switched sides
as a result of the president's support for Ariel Sharon. It wasn't that
the Kerry campaign didn't notice the confessional effect. It was just that
they didn't know what to do about it. Making the candidate over as some
sort of altar boy (notwithstanding directives from Rome instructing the
faithful on the abhorrence of his position on abortion) would have been
about as persuasive as kitting him out with gun, camouflage and dead Canada
geese; a laboriously transparent exercise in damning insincerity.
-
- In Godly America the politics of impassioned conviction
inevitably trumped the politics of logical argument. On CNN a fuming James
Carville wondered out loud how a candidate declared by the voting public
to have decisively won at least two of the three televised debates could
have still been defeated. But the "victory" in those debates
was one of body language rather than reasoned discourse. It registered
more deeply with the public that the president looked hunched and peevish
than that he had been called by Kerry on the irrelevance of the war in
Iraq to the threat of terror. And since the insight was one of appearance
not essence, it could just as easily be replaced by countless photo-ops
of the president restored to soundbite affability. The charge that Bush
and his second war had actually made America less, not more safe, and had
created, not flushed out, nests of terror, simply failed to register with
the majority of those who put that issue at the top of their concerns.
-
- Why? Because, the president had "acted", meaning
he had killed at least some Middle Eastern bad dudes in response to 9/11.
That they might be the wrong ones, in the wrong place - as Kerry said over
and over - was simply too complicated a truth to master. Forget the quiz
in political geography, the electorate was saying (for the popular commitment
to altruistic democratic reconstruction on the Tigris is, whatever the
White House orthodoxy, less than Wolfowitzian), it's all sand and towelheads
anyway, right? Just smash "them" (as one ardent Bush supporter
put it on talk radio the other morning) "like a ripe cantaloupe".
Who them? Who gives a shit? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way
to the polls. Thus it was that the war veteran found himself demonised
as vacillating compromiser, the Osama Candidate, while a pair of draft-dodgers
who had sacrificed more than eleven hundred young men and women to a quixotic
levantine makeover, and one which I prophesy will be ignominiously wound
up by next summer (the isolationists in the administration having routed
the neocons), got off scot free, lionised as the Fathers of Our Troops.
-
- Well, the autumn leaves have, just this week, fallen
from the trees up here in the Hudson Valley and the scales from the eyes
of us deluded worldlies. If there is to be any sort of serious political
future for the Democrats, they have to do far more than merely trade on
the shortcomings of the incumbents - and there will be opportunities galore
in the witching years ahead (a military mire, a fiscal China syndrome and,
hullo, right before inauguration, a visit from al-Qaida). The real challenge
is to voice an alternative social gospel to the political liturgy of the
Godlies; one that redefines patriotism as an American community, not just
a collection of wealth-seeking individuals; one that refuses to play a
zero-sum game between freedom and justice; one in which, as the last populist
president put it just a week ago, thought and hope are not mutually exclusive.
You want moral values? So do we, but let them come from the street, not
the pulpit. And if a fresh beginning must be made - and it must - let it
not begin with a healing, but with a fight.
-
- © Simon Schama. Hang-Ups: A Collection of Essays
on Art, by Simon Schama, is published by BBC books, Price £30. Guardian
Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1344144,00.html
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