No Peace candidate this year

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swantosez                                                                                 8-08

 

Pick a Card, Any Card

 

 When I was a child, it would not be unusual for anyone in my presence to suddenly find me standing before them with a deck of cards in my hands. They would soon be asked to "Pick a card, any card."

 

 While my skill at prestidigitation never progressed beyond the basics needed to get my head patted on rainy days, other children have had great success in learning which card you were going to pick before you picked it.

 

 Almost all of us seek to be free from disease, to be comforted from pain, to sleep snugly in a bed at night. To some extent, the political process is our attempt to insure in advance that the future will bring us those things. We seek to place the aces of health, wealth, wisdom and happiness in the deck and to remove from those cards which cause us harm.

 

 Most of human history has been dominated by the few who have arranged events to further personal appetites. Modern history is the attempt to limit that power and the damage done by these narrow-minded autocrats. What was once hailed as glorious or divine, is now seen clearly as mental illness. We measure human progress by the success of these efforts. The struggle to assert the "common" interest over the personal is the noblest of all.

 

 The goal of identifying war as an undesirable element has been given added impetus as our destructive powers have increased. Madmen can now end all life on earth. This realization has given urgency for the creation of institutions and organizations that seek to promote alternative behaviors. The carnage of the First World War, for which no rational cause has ever been found, may be marked as a milestone in this new consciousness because it spurred the idea of world peace and the creation of the League of Nations. The carnage of the Second World War and the Holocaust reinforced and accelerated efforts to institutionalize a new consciousness that peace was an essential object of civilized society.

 

 However, this concept of a goal for civilization goes through cycles. When the concentration camps were fresh in our minds, and the mushroom cloud was still hanging over us, the clamor for sanity was widespread. But as those events become distant in our minds, we tend to forget and downplay the horrors of modern warfare.

 

 Where the battles were fought, and the destruction was the greatest, an appreciation for tranquility flourishes and militarism has been in decline.

 

 This is not the case in the United States. Those who promote peace are a distinct minority here. There is no objective statement by any serious political party which asserts peace as a goal. Our two parties, when taken as a whole, exercise a monopoly on political power in the United States. They both convened this summer to pick a candidate and produced a statement of values which they call a "platform." We need no sleight-of-hand to know that no leader has been selected who is identified as a "peace" candidate, and neither platform will include a strong "peace" plank.

 

 That is not to say there are no candidates that seek the votes of those of us who seek peace. The trick is to get that support without actually having a policy towards that end.

 

   The end of the Cold War represents a highpoint in the hope to re-direct human endeavor towards perfecting civilization, and away from the traditions of conflict.

 

  People spoke openly of a peace "dividend," of once again returning to the saner pursuits of perfecting our society; of leading not only in arms but in health care and education, of ending the worse than Third World ordeal of our inner city poor, of enjoying the fruits of victory, our quality of life and the American Way.

 

 At about this time, when Yeltsin stood on a tank and doused the last flames of Soviet Communism, a little remembered debate took place in the United States. It was between the late humorist and social commentator Art Buchwald, and a noted and distinguished member of the conservative cold-war press, Robert Novak. Thinking that peace was finally about to break out, Buchwald teased Novak. "What are you going to do now," he chided, "now that you don't have the Soviets to alarm us about?" Novak smiled, as if talking to a witless child and let Buchwald in on the new reality: "We have Saddam Hussein."

 

 Commies? What commies? We have a new enemy. Simply cross out "Evil Empire" and write in "Rogue States." Without skipping a note, the beat goes on.

 

 In the eight years of the new millennium we have been at war for seven. War reports are as regular as rain and less lengthy and detailed than the sports scores. Three wars do not command one-third the attention as the Olympics. The Olympics happen only once every four years; war is an everyday commonplace and an accepted part of our routine.

 

 In the service of a new cause, the trusty Cold War rhetoric has been dusted off.

 

 Once again, the great Americans actors of that era are icons; their polished images placed on the candidate's podium. Kennan. Acheson. Marshall. Truman. Once again "we face a threat as great as the Soviets." We "cannot be protected by oceans." "We must increase the Army and Marines by 92,000." We need a new strategy for a new World."

  Most powerful of all, in the tradition of the "yellow cake" WMD scare, is "Centrifuges are spinning beneath Iranian soil" 

These are the words of Barack Obama, and at this low ebb in American consciousness, he is passing as the "peace" candidate. Like "collateral damage" or "pre-emptive," both peace and antiwar have acquired new meanings.

 

 Mr. McCain likes both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Obama prefers Afghanistan. The war in Iraq is bad war; the war in Afghanistan is good war. Having put his spiritual adviser on the shelf, and presumably sent Jesus off to summer camp to sing "goombayah," the Democratic candidate, who has leapfrogged to the front of the line largely on his "anti-war" stance, does not oppose our invasion of Iraq on religious grounds. He does not raise moral objections. The Iraq War must be ended because it isn't very bright. What we are doing there is not wrong; it is simply not clever enough. We do not need to be better people, simply more intelligent..

 

 In Berlin's Tiergarten, Mr. Obama began the last act of his World Statesman Tour by palming his identity.

 

 "I am not here as a candidate", he said.

 

  He flashed the card they had all come to see. "We must reject the cold-war mindset".                                   

(Now you see it) 

 With his eager-to-believe audience now focused on that image, he pulled the switch.

 

 The old coals, perhaps the very same ones flown into Templehof in 1948, were raked over again by way of "rejecting" the cold war mindset. "Sixty years after the airlift, we are called on again." "Today's dangers are no less grave." "The Twentieth Century taught us we share a common destiny." "Today's dangers are no less grave."

 

                           " ...just as we succeeded in the cold war.."

(Now you don't)

 

 The crowd went home believing they had heard what they had come to hear. In America, the change they longed for was happening. They believed that Obama would reduce conflict despite the fact that what he actually said was "we need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites and more predator drones." They thought they had found a new partner for a peace loving Germany.  They missed the call for Germany to re-arm, to once again send it's armies to foreign lands, and to support a military alliance seeking to expand its borders to Germany's ancient enemy, Russia.

 

 Not every deck of cards has thirteen each of clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. There is another deck. This is the deck that fortune tellers and gypsies have used since time began. This is the deck that tells us the future.

 

 Those that deal from that deck have been working the Tiergarten for years.  Berlin has always been one of their favorite stops. In November they'll travel to the States, appearing at a voting booth near you. Look for the smiling faces. They know how much we Americans love a good joke. They especially like that old saw of Henry Ford's. "You can order your Model A in any color you like, as long as it's black."

 

 And because they know how much we love democracy, and that democracy is all about making choices, they'll have two cards in the deck this year. We are free to pick either one. They're both war, of course, but we still get to choose.

 

"Pick a war, any war"

Authors Bio:
shopkeeper 1976-2001