The Year of Living Endlessly <http://www.eastbayexpress.com/yearinreview/yir_bensky.html> Finally we were ushered into a victory celebration where gray-haired, somber, expensively tailored Republicans murmured comradely remarks.... By Larry Bensky Forty years ago: A chill New York November morning, despite bright sun bouncing from the tall, red brick walls across the wide upper Manhattan avenue, through the dirty bay window of the tiny, one-bedroom apartment I shared with two other guys just out of college. The three of us rotated our six-month shifts in the coveted narrow bedroom with its attendant sexual privacy privilege, the other two crashing on the cot and couch in our shabby living room, scheming our intimate liaisons for times when the others were supposedly away. It's only safe to get out of bed a half hour at least after the heat clangs its way to the third of four floors in the narrow brownstone building. Up too early, you'd measure the seconds by your breath steaming in the overnight air. But, today, cold be damned; it's election day! That sunny wall across the street belongs to an armory; inside it is a polling place. A warm glow suffuses the cold, dry sinuses, radiating from the fact that I'm finally old enough to vote for the first time and today's the day I get to vote against Richard Nixon! Yes, even on my Election Day One, it was not about voting for that year's windbag phony, the designated scion of the insular, prejudiced, narrowly materialist Kennedy clan. It was about voting against Nixon, that ever-shifting, ever-discomforting, ever-ambitious, ever-grim purveyor of the deadly, divisive anti-communist demonology which smothered social discussion, intellectual debate, and communal development. Kennedy's minions managed to steal that election for him, one of the closest in history to that point, with classic vote count manipulations in boss-rotten Democratic Chicago and parts of running mate Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Texas fiefdoms as well. And, of course, Nixon, far from disappearing, lurked around politically, to reappear and claim his presidency eight years later in plenty of time to continue the world-wide carnage Kennedy and Johnson had escalated from Dwight Eisenhower, who, in turn, had received the tools of cataclysmic, ideologically inescapable overt and covert conflict from Democrat Harry Truman. I knew of this disillusioning bipartisan disgrace, of course; it was hardly a secret at the time (and has been even better documented now, almost half a century later). Nevertheless, I continued not only to vote, but to organize others to vote. When it was time to cast my next presidential ballot, in 1964, it was as an absentee, while I was living in near-homeless poverty in Paris. Crashing in two-dollar-a-night hotels with single fifteen-watt light bulbs and no visible means of heat in a dark northern European winter, I learned which cafs were likely to have the best collection of the newspapers I couldn't afford to buy. Between the lines of those papers one could read that the man I was organizing and intending to vote for, Lyndon Johnson, was a vulgar, corrupt power junkie, whose pious rhetoric belied his miserable personal and professional behavior, only occasionally leavened by some vestigial concern for human welfare. But here again, it was time not to vote for LBJ, but against Republican Barry Goldwater, known, however falsely, as avatar of humankind's direst potential: nuclear war, environmental degradation, ethnic apartheid. By 1968, newly arrived in San Francisco with its intense menu of electoral and non-electoral leftisms, after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the milding out of Eugene McCarthy, my choice was between Dick Gregory and Eldridge Cleaver (I chose Cleaver, who, as the years evolved, arguably turned out to be as despicable an option as Nixon or Goldwater would have been). The last Democrat on my electoral resum, and probably the last one who will ever be inscribed thereupon, was George McGovern in 1972. Here, for once, I was not just voting against someone (Nixon, redux, now having acquired the power, which he used fully, to turn his heretofore rhetorical bellicosity into vast oceans of real blood and horror) but for a man I had interviewed at length, and whose comportment I had observed close-up during the campaign. (Nixon clobbered him, of course, with a vicious campaign that succeeded in submerging McGovern's sensible, gentle humanism in a fog of pseudo-patriotic blather and youth-bashing.) I had by then developed quite an obsession with electoralism, leavened with a massive skepticism about its practitioners. In fact, that skepticism may have dated back to an encounter that predated the casting of my first vote, when I met the father and now grandfather of ex- and elect-Presidents Bush. It happened when I was a sophomore in college the very same college which allowed both Bushes to glide through on their pedigrees and privileges but which was, for a very unprivileged and certainly differently pedigreed first-generation son of an immigrant family, a daily encounter with all-male class-based isolation, confusing intellectual horizons (we didn't read poetry, much less philosophy, in my high school) and political indifference. "You fought like hell with me and just about everyone else in freshman philosophy seminar," a Republican judge recalled at our 25th Yale reunion. "You thought human equality was the highest ethical principle. We thought Plato and Aristotle, as we read them, proved just about the opposite." If those indeed had been my thoughts, my visit to the Bush mansion in the wealthy enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut on election night, 1956, would have tested them sorely. Although I was, as life progressed, to experience other equally or even more elaborately splendid dwellings, the Bush domain has always stuck in my mind. It was all polished wood and chandeliers, with tastefully framed family portraits hung amid stern, representational New England historical art. The furnishings consisted of what looked to be never-sat-in chairs and couches poised upon never-trod-upon carpets. There we were, three reporters from local newspapers (there was no mobile radio or TV broadcasting then) kept in a cold hallway for many minutes, before being ushered into a victory celebration, where gray-haired, somber, slim, expensively tailored Republicans were murmuring comradely remarks, interrupted by an occasional loud squeal of laughter probably reflecting not so much a rare moment of wit as a recognizable surfacing of the alcoholism which plagued (and plagues) their precincts. No one offered us anything to eat or drink, so we watched as the champagne flowed and the finger food circulated, until Senator reelect Prescott Bush, a quintessentially sculpted 62-year-old banker, his presence garbed in soft tweed and oxford cloth, deigned to thank his followers for his crushing victory over a long-since-forgotten opponent. His remarks which probably resembled remarks on such occasions made millions of times before and since failed to make my notebook. But I did jot down and write in the next day's paper his wife's smiling observation that "Greenwich did it for us. It always has the nicest little vote!" Several of my classmates (two-thirds of our class were prep school guys, mostly from Andover and Exeter and what my buddy Calvin Trillin, whose pedigree was similar to mine, referred to as other "St. Grottlesex kind of places") threatened physical retribution for what they perceived to be my ungenerous betrayal of Madame Bush's titter. But the scandal blew over. Not so my knowledge of the Bushes and their ilk. Although, as soon as college mercifully ended, I left anything approaching their social orbit forever, I've experienced their socio-political toxicity ever since. What I think about them, and it, is: these are not necessarily unlikable people. If you happened to have a flat tire on their road, they might use a cell phone to call you some help. On neutral grounds say the Senate dining room in Washington, they'll even spend time explaining to you what they think, and why, or exchange stories about their families and adventures. But when it comes to doing what they feel they've got to do, they will lie, cheat, steal, and kill without so much as an introspective moment. Our next president, George W. Bush, is one of those guys. His Yale fraternity, DKE (there were few fraternities at Yale, and men of intellectual consequence or academic accomplishment rarely belonged to them) was a notoriously drunken gang of jocks and jerks. On a daily basis, the campus newspaper which I eventually edited was down the street, I walked past its landscaping with the previous night's beer cans and the consequent contents of their members upchucked stomachs. It was all, of course, lawless; the drinking age was 21, and almost no one had reached that age much before graduation. Equally lawless was the common practice of doing each other's homework, writing each other's papers, taking each other's exams. But it happened. All the time. It happened because it was allowed to happen. The myth of Yale (or of the United States) as a meritocracy was and is an amusing inconsequence for the Bushes' ilk. Not for them experiences like, for example, mine, when I ventured to Washington in search of my first post-college job, my carefully pasted scrapbook of newspaper articles and columns under my arm. There was a supposed tradition that all the major editors of the Yale Daily News would automatically be hired as cub reporters by the Washington Star, a since-disappeared daily rival of the Post. I dutifully dropped off my scrapbook the day before my interview with the editor in chief, one of the old-boy Yale blue network. It seemed to go well (perhaps I was smart enough not to include the Bush campaign night story). On my way out of the building, I ran into a guy I'd known in college who already worked there. We had a drink, then a couple more. Finally, he told me not to get my hopes up. "Don't you read the bylines in this paper? They don't like to hire Jews here!" Yeah, that again! Not that I didn't know and believe then (and now) that the Rosenbergs, had they been named, say, Johnson or McSweeney, wouldn't have been executed. Not that I hadn't followed, with the same passion for details that I normally saved for the Dodgers, the names, records, and statistics of the Jews persecuted by Senator McCarthy. Not that I hadn't been absorbing, all my reading life, and hadn't internalized in vivid, nightmarish detail, the Holocaust. Not that the parents of the first girl I ever loved hadn't forbade her from seeing me because I was^. But still. George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, they don't share such experiences. They impose them. Random acts of kindess? Sure, no problem. Have a beer. Take a ride on my sailboat. Even, maybe, these days, times do change, albeit painfully slowly, marry my daughter. But don't get in the way of my operating system. Or you'll pay the price. The lure of electoral politics is that it offers the possibility of becoming an equalizer for all of the massive, humiliating, deadly state power that enables, generation after generation, the Bushes of the world to keep their privileges. For my parents' generation, it provided the beginnings of what is variously called a social safety net, or an entitlement. The theoretical underpinnings are not complicated: if you're capable of working, you should be guaranteed health and sustenance all your life. If you aren't capable of working, those who are capable pledge to take care of you. The mechanisms by which working and non-working people are guaranteed protection are designed and administered by an entity called a government. That government responds to the will of the public, as expressed in elections. The often messy and infinitely manipulable practice of creating, through elections, governments capable of imaginative, collective alternatives to what the Bushes will continue to try to impose by birth-derived fiat remains filled with fascinating, if chimerical, possibilities. Which is why, if one wants to be optimistic, this year's messy electoral process has been, or at least could be, a valuable one. Obviously this technologically advanced society, which can tell you in a nanosecond how much money you can take out of your bank account in Oakland while you're standing at an ATM in Chicago, is capable of deriving a less-prone-to-error balloting process than that endured in Florida. (Especially since the same companies that make those ATMs stand to derive significant benefit from the manufacture and maintenance of better vote-counting products.) But in addition to improving the counting of those Florida ballots that no doubt would have made Al Gore president had Bush not been saved by his and his daddy's cronies on the Supreme Court, it is time to raise other issues in addition to perfecting the vote-counting machinery. Instant runoff voting, for example, would have allowed a democratically decisive decision this time, by allocating Nader and Buchanan and other non-winning candidates' votes to secondarily preferred candidates. Free TV time in (at least) five-minute chunks would break through the stultifying merchandising of brand-name political products through manipulative advertising. Same-day registration might boost voter turnout. And, above all, full public financing of campaigns needs to be brought onto the national agenda, as it has begun to be locally. The present, obscene escalation of corporate and wealthy individual megabucks donations is more than ever out of control. Will any of this happen? Probably not, especially if the reaction to what's just took place is further withdrawal by an already disaffected public (half those eligible continue not to vote) from electoral politics. Certainly not, if people follow the dreadful Al Gore in believing that when elections end, "the time for politics is over." On the contrary, Al, the time for politics should just be beginning. A politics, however, defined much differently from the soiled and disgraced electoralism just concluded. -end-
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