Saturday, September 11, 2004

Will We Win this Election?



The "we" meaning the powers of good (borrowing the language from the other side here) and the "election" being the U.S. presidential one. The question is a serious one, and I want to try to answer it here from the point of view of a minor goddess.

The answer is that I have no idea. The powers of darkness are strong and getting ever stronger, and anybody who is willing to employ anything, simply anything, in the internal politics of a country is hard to beat. For most of us, politics has to do with the care of common affairs, but a few isolated souls think that politics is a game where the winner gets all, a game of greed and cruelty and lying and twisting an unethical pretzel into even more bends and reverses if it serves some point in the campaign. That's what we have in the other corner of the ring. So be prepared for many rounds and much cheating and things like stones in the boxing gloves. And be prepared to hear that it's our guy who had the stones and that he must have punched his own face. That's why there is all that blood.

Add to that the referees, the media, who are pretty much on the take and have already printed out the final victory certificates with the other guy's name.

So I don't know. On logical grounds, on ethical grounds, on rational grounds we should win easily. But these are not grounds much trodden here, so anything is possible. What is not possible is giving up. This is a match, however long, on which the shape of our world depends. It will determine what, if any, rights we all are going to have, and it will determine whether we will repeat some of the horrendous history of the human race. So the towel will not be thrown in, the match will not be declared as over until we win.

Or perhaps the sporting metaphors are wrong here. The job we have in front of us is more like getting an operation for a precancerous mole or for shoveling out the shit in the stables. Unpleasant, not something we'd want to do, but a job that needs to be done anyway. No choice about it. Either we do it this year, or the year after, or the year after. It's as simple as that. Some things are.