copyleft 2005

by Zbignew Zingh

While Mister Bush plays the political sousaphone stomping around the world with his Uniformed Marching Democracy Band, the graduates of his alma mater – America, the supposed birthplace of modern democracy – have failed to make the grade.

America's citizens, graduates of a 225 year old democracy school, have regressed back to kindergarten, or so it appears from our servile acceptance of the hijacked 2000 presidential election and the peculiar Ohio vote in the 2004 presidential election.

Oh, there have been some bright spots: Donna Frye's toppling by write-in vote of San Diego's pro-business mayor Dick Murphy – ultimately undone by judicial interference and then given a second chance by the April resignation of Mayor Murphy under clouds of malfeasance – and the election of San Diego's non-establishment City Attorney, Michael Aguirre.

There have been some blind spots: the Democrats rolling over for nearly every one of Mister Bush's Torquemada judicial appointments while the Dems crowed about their victorious preservation of the filibuster that they would not dare to use.

And there have been some polka dots: In Washington State, the November 2004 gubernatorial race was not decided until June 2005 when, as is becoming commonplace, a judge had to decide the election for one pro-business mainstream party candidate versus the other. The Washington post-election litigation tread heaviest on the least significant issue – how many felons illegally voted for which candidate – and never addressed the bigger questions: why did the mainstream parties field such weak, ideologically similar candidates, were the vote counts even remotely accurate,and was there any realistic way of actually recounting or verifying the votes tallied on the electronic voting machines?

Through it all, America's graduates of democracy school yawned and went shopping. There was golf to play, this Hollywood movie to see and that Hollywood movie to see, clothing to buy, baseball games to watch, Michael Jackson to titillate, popes to pontificate, American Idols and more American idles. There was no tumult. There was no uprising. There was more an attitude that, well, thank goodness that election is finally over, rather than the righteous outrage of a cheated democracy; because, in fact, America's voters have become functionally, politically illiterate. They have flunked out of democracy school.

Meanwhile, in other lands, the pupils are outshining their fabled, but stupefied tutor.

In Mexico, more than a million citizens turned out to shut down the capital city and prevent the ruling mainstream parties from contriving through judicial machination to extinguish the presidential ambitions of its popular, left-leaning politician, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, . In Ecuador, the people rose up and overthrew the Janus-faced president Lucio Gutiérrez, while later, in Bolivia, a coalition of indigenous and working class people rose up to throw out an American-kowtowing leadership who had sold off the nation's mineral and energy patrimony to western corporate interests. In the years while Americans sleep-walked through the limped electoral contests of Bush versus Gore or Bush versus Kerry, the citizens of Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay also exercised their democratic muscles and swept their political houses clean.

In Europe, the EU proposed a constitution that was, in essence, a carte blanche for multinational corporate rule. Overriding the cajolery of their leadership, the citizens of France and Holland overwhelmingly voted NO, thereby killing big business's attempt to undo Europe's social safety nets and remake the continent in America's neo-liberal/neo-conservative image.

The EU constitutional vote was similar to the debate in the post-Revolutionary War United States when federalists proposed a stronger, pro-business union of the 13 states and anti-federalists advocated for a weaker confederacy of 13 independent, culturally distinct nations. In the United States, the federalist argument won out, although many of the more than 200 year old predictions made by the anti-federalists about the eventual evolution of an oligarchic, corporatist, civil-rights-challenged ubergovernment have come true. In Europe, perhaps mindful of what the United States have become, the citizens voted against a constitution that could lead to a similar fate.

In both Europe and in South America, the people apparently have also recognized that votes are irrelevant unless they mean something. And they have also learned that democracy sometimes requires more than mere voting when the will of the voters have been thwarted.

The essence of the Mexico City million person march to prevent the political tar-and-feathering of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was not violence – indeed, the march was ominously silent – but the fact that their sheer numbers did shut down the capital city... and, implicitly, that they could shut down the government in the future. In more violent terms, the people of Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia have also proved that they, too, would shut down their countries' economies and governments, if the peoples' democratic will was thwarted.

In the United States, the last threat to shut down the government and the economy was in 1968. Back then, Martin Luther King proposed a Poor Peoples Campaign to march on Washington D.C. to demand an Economic Bill of Rights... but he was assassinated shortly before he could pull it off. Since then, America's students of democracy school have become progressively more docile, more disorganized, more manipulable, less willing to use civil disobedience as an option from the menu of dissenting politics, and more politically insignificant.

Although the occasional Rodney King-type riot periodically breaks out, it is usually the symptom of unfocused, spontaneous, misdirected rage. Violent outbursts are quickly dismissed, by American liberals and conservatives alike, as “counter-productive” and they are smothered in the marshmellowy spirit of mediation and reconciliation that often leads to the dissipation of political energy and the institutionalization of progressive, snails-pace half-remedies for acute injustices.

Imagine that, all else being the same as in our present time, it is 1776 and the Thirteen Colonies are still just a motley assemblage of British colonies militarily occupied by an Empire bent on extracting its natural resources and preserving the commercial non-competitiveness of its overseas subjects. Imagine, too, that the pantheon of American “patriots” - the ones who advocated liberty or death, economic emancipation, the end of foreign military occupation of America, freedom of religion and of political speech, and a free and unimbedded press – that these patriots arose and cast about looking for role models for their revolution against King George.

They would find their role models, not in these modern United States, but in the democracy schools of Europe and in Mexico and in South America.

The students have outdone the master and they have gone to the head of the class. It is time for Americans to return to democracy school.