Kerry and Bush almost hugged last night.
They both got laughs at their own expense in reference to the assets of their wives.
Neither one of them were capable of presenting a picture of the current state of the United States that really included the darks and lights of the moment in which we live.
Kerry seems to have given up on nailing Bush to the wall. His recitation of the facts of "95% of cargo containers coming into this country don't get inspected" etc was in fact a litany of complaints. I don't know where Bush got that line but it was uncomfortably spot on. Actually, Bush said "A plan is not a litany of complaints."
Bush started out balanced and strong. He rarely sank to his bafflegab wandering hoo-ha that has characterized key moments of every public speech in his administration. Bush was still preaching to the choir, however. He made no effort to liberalize his message in the hopes of swiping a few more undecided votes into his column. He seemed to be making an heroic effort to raise the level of discourse by referring to Kerry as "The Senator from Massachussets" instead of the "Weasel Waffle Dispensing Obsessive Spender", and Kerry only called Bush a damn liar maybe twice.
Kerry should have been a lot better about domestic issues. He couldn't paint a clear picture of what he would do, however. It seemed as though the hard jabs from the right over the last few weeks have weakened him, but it might be that he really doesn't know what he would do if he had the reins of the country. He is good at spewing out the shortcomings of the Bush administration, and they are legion, and need to be taken more seriously. But when it came to explaining what exactly he would do for the schools, the hospitals, the unemployed, nothing really stood out as a new or workable alternative.
Kerry stayed too close to his point of the 87 billion dollar tax cut to the rich, as though that in itself was a skyhook which would lift him to victory. Bush refused to be baited, and continually reassured his believers that he wasn't an idiot or bumbling moron. That is all the reassurance they need, apparently.
Bush is not a bad guy. I sensed that early on, even when I felt the outcome of the Florida debacle was a national nightmare. Kerry is probably one of the most decent and courageous men we could have for a president from among all the candidates in the last hundred years. But he seems to be missing a gear when it comes to economics. He leans too hard on the taxes, doesn't seem to really understand the national bloodbath that occured with the dotcom crisis.
Both candidates are preening in the rear view mirror. And they probably are addressing an electorate that doesn't know how to look even a few months ahead,much less several years. We don't have any voices in this country that are trying to figure out what the hell is really going on.
The wound in Iraq is festering and infecting a lot of other areas. It threatens global equilibrium. The Islamists are not going to topple the major regimes in the world, but the Muslim unrest and reaction to Iraq contibutes to the teetering of dozens of regimes, and makes it more likely that other conflicts and problems will surface more quickly. That is a major problem that neither Kerry nor Bush are dealing with.
The devastation in Florida from the hurricanes revealed the shortcomings of our national emergency relief systems, and the vulnerability of our cities and regions to sustained disruption. Instead of bringing that forward, the disasters were kept off the front page and forgotten as soon as half the insurance claims had been filed.
Homeland security has gone from a novelty to a decadent morass of political infighting without going through a mature, productive phase. It is another porkbarrel.
The school systems are collapsing. They aren't just in trouble. They are falling down and crushing people in their ruins. They will not be fixed tomorrow with a band-aid today. Bush seems to think that by cheerleading for the idea of education he is actually doing something. Kerry doesn't have any insights into the problem. The culture of teaching in our country has received blow after blow from the demands created by budget shortfalls; from laws protecting the expensive and difficult to teach; and a generally hostile and leaderless community at odds with itself along racial and gender lines.
There is no leadership in this country for education, health, the military, community infrastructures, national emergency readiness. There is no leadership in this country that can heal the street-level conflicts of diversity and poverty.
Without that leadership, we are in a pot coming to a boil. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs it.
In my last post I said elect KerryBush: the Yalie. I was slightly amused by that. Today I am not amused.
Today I respect the men who talked earnestly and at length about our country last night. They showed that they respect each other and the voters of this country. And they showed that the political leadership in this nation has reached the brink of insolvency when it comes to real ideas about what is wrong, what is right, and what to do.
Complexity is overtaking our bromides and stereotypes. The intransigence of the world itself is pulling the pulling the tablecloth out from under our meal of middle class hash.
But you know what? I am not that pessimistic. Sure, I don't think the guys running for President can deliver anything they promise. Bush won't win the war or peace in Iraq. If he is reelected, he will ride the shambles of the war to defeat in a few years, and pull all our forces out with even less grace than the retreat from Viet Nam. If Kerry wins, the inner city schools and the economy will provide their own scenario of domestic reality, a scenario with no room for Kerry's edits. If he is a quick enough study he might be able to improvise fast enough to prevent riots and insurrections, and the complete melt down of whole regions.
But I am not that pessimistic.
In the early 19th century cities around the world started to explode in slow motion from the steroid-like growth of industrialization. Manchester England ballooned from 30,000 to close to 400,000 people in 40 years. Minneapolis Minnesota grew from 17,000 to close to 300,000 people in 30 years. We can't imagine the mayhem this caused for millions of people. In 1917 the influenza epidemic wiped out over 20,000,000 people in the world. Even as I write that number I can't believe it.
Humanity has survived unbelievable disruptions of "the ordinary." Some philosophers might assert that there is no such thing as ordinary life, or ordinary people, (Judith Guest's irony noted here).
In the few weeks I have been back in school studying the subect of cities, it has finally gotten through to me that human complexity is, finally, self-healing. All the plans and promises of all the leaders in history amount to a few pages of footnotes against the massive encyclopedia of fixes and work arounds the common people of the world have devised. And often enough they have devised these fixes to fix the shambles of some leader's plan.
Humanity has shown an unlimited appetite for growth, and a rage for chaos that defeats faith and order over and over again.
Even greater than these forces, however, is the force for healing. We are born ready to be injured and recover. We are educated being wounded and insulted, but absorbing the injury. Bones knit. Skin grows back. There are scars, but there is healing. There is fear, and sometimes holes in our hearts that can never be filled again.
But we do heal. Families heal or spin off and become new and fall and get up again. Children remind us that healing is the first principle of life, not a commodity on the market of the health industry.
Today I am cut and bleed. Tomorrow I am reaching out my hand to the same knife or kitten claws that betrayed me today.
We heal. Complexity heals itself. We are complex, and there are forces at work in our society beyond the knowledge of any school or political party. There is darkness in the human day and something shines in the human night.
You may take away my freedom. You may take away my illusions. But you can't tax or imprison my ability to heal.
I respect both candidates, with a growing sense of detachment. It doesn't matter whose spoon stirs the pot as it comes to a boil. I know that we are born to err, and that everyone who dies has spent more time healing than dying, more time repairing things than breaking them, more time active in hope than paralyzed in the grip of hopelessness.
Where is the party of healing? They will get my vote.
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