"Get out there and vote for John Kerry to stop Bush." This little statement, apparently simple, harmless, and well-meaning, is loaded with assumptions that keep the American people neutered, predictable, and utterly controlled.
First is the assumption that your one vote will decide the election. It will not. No national election has ever been decided by one vote. The 2000 presidential election would have demolished this fallacy if anyone had been paying attention: If a major election gets anywhere near being decided by one vote, even if the difference is a thousand votes (as many votes for president as you would cast in 4000 years), then it's no longer decided by counting your vote, but by the courts.
My one vote once did decide an election, a local school board election with fewer than 2000 total voters. So study the local issues and vote in the local elections, where your vote might actually do something. In statewide and national elections, the only effect your one vote will have -- and it's an important effect -- is in shaping your own psychology, setting a precedent or maintaining a habit for how you live your life.
It's no accident that you are once again being asked to vote for the "lesser of the two evils." It's not your bad luck, not a little storm that's going to pass. It is a permanent condition, built into the system that rules you. As long as that system stands, you will never, ever get a chance to vote for a candidate you really like who really has a chance of winning. One reason is that such a candidate would win. I think Dennis Kucinich, if taken seriously by the media and not assassinated, would motivate the people who haven't been voting, beat Bush by 30%, and ruin the lives of the criminals who benefit from the present system. So they have developed ways to filter out or overwhelm anyone with courage, honesty, and intelligence.
But the more important reason is that "lesser of the two evils" psychology keeps people in negative mental space, weak, passionless, ruled by fear and suffocated by despair. It's the same technique used by cult programmers and torturers: Do something you hate, something that violates your deepest values, or else we will punish you with your worst fear. Now do it again.
It's how your parents broke you by threatening to withhold their love, how a world of grown-up bullies made you go to school, sit still and shut up hour after hour for years, how the system still makes you go to your job and pay your rent by threatening to withhold food and home and respect. It's why we'll consent to a police state because we're afraid of destructive spectacles, and why we'll vote for absolutely anyone if only the opponent is a little bit worse. The whole picture is so dreadful that most of us never really look at it, because we couldn't take the grief.
There's a scene in the film Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon's character tells how his dad used to beat him, by making him choose which object he'd be beaten with, a belt, a stick, or a wrench. He says, "I used to go with the wrench." Robin Williams's character, a nice liberal, is aghast, and asks him why. Matt Damon says, "Cause fuck him, that's why." He can't articulate his choice, but I can: Being beaten with a wrench instead of a belt is mere physical pain, trivial compared to the psychological abasement of going along with the game, doing what your abuser wants you to do, participating in your own degradation.
In this presidential election, Americans are being told, "You must ask to be beaten with the Kerry. Go out there, punch a card, touch a screen, asking John Kerry to please maintain the obscene military spending, the unprecedented gap between rich and poor, the suspension of civil liberties, the worst social services in the industrialized world, the prison population greater than Stalin's Russia, the patient and steady extermination of nature, the increasing power of giant corporations, the brutal military interventions to maintain American supremacy... ask to be hit with the Kerry, or we're going to hit you with the Bush!"
Kerry and Bush are not the same. Kerry is a sensible hard right-winger, similar on the issues to Barry Goldwater. Bush is a psychopathic theocrat, the Dominionist Messiah. Leaders don't get any worse. But what country, what people, allowed him to rule them for four years? And why? And if he does get to be President again, what will we do then?
This brings us to the final disturbing message hidden in the voting ritual, one that would still be there even if it was Bush against Kucinich. We are being told that the President is a dictator, that the President has absolute power unfettered by any democratic process other than choosing that President. By focusing on the election, we are telling ourselves that the full extent of our power, the one and only thing that we have a right to do, or the power to do, is to wait four long years to spend a few minutes casting a ballot that will fail to decide the election and then be thrown away.
Voting for national candidates is the most useless, pathetic pretence of democracy ever invented. Your power is limitless. Your labor and money keep this country running. If you don't like the President, you don't have to sit on your hands for four years and then support some asshole who's not quite as bad. At the very least you can get Congress to slap down everything he tries to do -- that's what they're there for. And if they won't, you can take it into your own hands, organize a tax strike, a labor strike, a rent strike, a media boycott, a secession movement, a revolt, a revolution. You have the power to shut this country down or turn it on its head -- or on its feet.
If Bush is as bad as the Democrats say, shame on them, and all of us. When he stole the last election, we should have started rioting in the streets and not stopped until the bastard was out. We should have done that even if he had won fairly, even if we didn't vote. They say "if you didn't vote you can't complain," but strikes and riots are not complaints -- they are actions, powerful democratic tactics next which voting is a feeble distraction.
The President is one person. You are one person. He is more powerful than you by nothing but social convention, by all of us agreeing to give him that power. Suckers! You can stop any time.
