-
Welcome to Netroots Nation
read more
The convention has started. There are apparently around two thousand attendees, this year. Outside at midday, parked at the curb of a small, entirely nondescript park across from the convention center, Howard Dean is speaking. He is a powerful speaker, in any format -- a true master of the motivational and optimistic. He has attracted a crowd of perhaps two or three hundred.
These conventions are always odd things, for me. Conventions breed optimism, a feeling which I continually distrust. Conventions smell of organization, which for the blogosphere is a notion so foreign that I have spent the first day of each of the last three conventions doing little but marveling that the feat was actually accomplished.
I have spent the idle hours of the last three days pondering the overall narrative of this year's convention. not the overt narrative -- the theme, as chosen by the event organizers -- but the inner narrative, the internal, introverted one that is different for every participant, and that remains only half-formed under the best of circumstances. Those are the more interesting narratives to me, and the ones I tend to dwell on. The first year, the most obvious narrative (both overt and internal) was we exist. Simple, to the point; all these people who write online are, indeed, real activists, and the influence they seek to have can be measured and expressed in the real world, not merely anonymous musings. The narrative of the second year (again, both the public and the private one) was that we are powerful. The convention hosted a conversation with all the Democratic candidates for the Presidency; Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dodd and the others; they came, and presented themselves to the netroots just as they would to any other influential Democratic constituency. And it was, to be honest, not even surprising. The blogs have indeed become substantial shapers of political narrative. It is no longer unusual to see the thoughts of bloggers expressed in quotes and interviews throughout the wider press.
Still, this is the first year in which my inner narrative has clashed so substantially with the outer one. This year, the overarching feeling (at least now, before the first sessions have started, and before anyone has contemplated fully the wide spread of things currently before us) is one of optimism, the expectations high for the coming November. It would seem next to impossible for the Democrats to do anything but gain seats in the Senate; the House, too, seems hardly in danger. Expectations are that, regardless of the closeless of individual national polls, the presidential race is Obama's to lose, and he would have to eat a puppy to have much danger of losing. The inner narrative, though, the personal one through which I cannot help but view the rest of the convention, coloring everything slightly duller than it should be, is one of impatience, and a slight frustration, and even, perhaps, a hint of desperation. If the narrative of the first two years was that of our mere existence, and our ability to shape events, this narrative is just as primitive: towards what end?
The feeling is slightly abrasive... a sliver in a finger, a twisted joint; something naggingly just not quite right, something that will not quite go away but has nothing to do with anything else.
It seems evident, at this point, that there will be no comeuppance as a result of the excesses of the Bush administration. There will be investigations; they will investigate. There will be subpoenas; they will simply be refused. There will be conclusions reached; they will stop just short of the laying of actual blame, or of prosecuting anything discovered to be a crime. We will eventually know three-quarters of the truth, and that will be deemed good enough. We know misrepresentations were made that led us, apparently inexorably, into war. In the end, we are as a nation (public, press, and government) not particularly interested in hearing the particulars of how or why; the truth is that we were aching for a good war, and the rationale was an afterthought not just for the Bush administration, but for most of their audience.
We know the rule of law itself was politicized, made into an apparatus of partisan advantage, a weapon for the ruling party to use against opponents. We know who did it, and we know it was not just unethical, but illegal. But to push it farther than that would require taking the last step -- from investigation, to prosecution -- and that step seems illusory, at best. In a blasphemic irony, it would require the most partisan of political appointees to agree to enforce the law against themselves; either that, or an act of Congress. Not an Act of Congress, but an act, small 'a', an explicit act to force movement where none exists.
We know we now conducting surveillance against Americans that, a few short years ago, was unequivocally illegal. It was acts by the abusive, paranoid Nixon that inspired the strict narrowing of such powers three decades ago; in response to the intentionally illegal acts of the current President, we instead have changed the law to better suit him.
We know we have tortured the innocent.
That last one seems worth singling out. We know that it has happened, for a fact, and we see muddy tracks leading to and from the White House, giant footprints that even a bumbling cartoon dog could easily follow, but which the rest of us will, it seems, simply not. We know, indeed, which government officials played which parts in determining which laws were and were not relevant, and in determining that in fact absolutely none were, whether American laws or international conventions or merely the most obvious of moralities. We are in a war unlike any other, after all.
The net result of all of this, it seems, will be the status quo. The best we can hope for is that perhaps we will stop torturing; upon anything even approaching that, we will be expected to celebrate it as a victory, since even "stop torturing potentially innocent humans" is at this point a controversial premise. We will perhaps stop politicizing fragments of government that should never have been politicized, and the result will be to dilute the existing corruption, letting the poisoned buffoonery and incompetent hackery slowly work its way through the system for the next decade. Perhaps we shall stop abusing the very foundations of science and government, the premise that facts dictate conclusions, and not the other way around. If we are successful, if all goes well in November, that is. All we can reasonably hope for is that incompetence is diminished, and criminal acts are reduced, and more facts will out. Hoping for anything more is, at best, foolish. There will be reconciliation, and reconciliation will be defined by the conservative punditry as letting bygones be bygones -- anything but that will be unacceptable and partisan, in itself. There will be things to do, and budgets to pass, and laws to create, and the Democratic party will assert that accomplishing those acts is far more important than confrontation over past acts. The Blue Dogs will assert that their own particular brand of electorally premised cowardice is in fact the most noble path; they alone will squash anything deemed too confrontational, or too controversial.
Why seek revenge for torture, where "revenge" as defined as allowing the law to be followed as it would be in any lesser case, and seeking prosecution of the guilty? Why determine if past domestic espionage crossed the line from legal to illegal, if a Democrat is then given the reins to that power?
We could have ten political conventions, or twenty, and the end result would be the same. We are the fools, the idealists. We know full well that there are two sets of laws, one for the powerful and one for the citizenry, and yet we take the asinine position that perhaps that should not be the case. We know full well that the Democrats have not shaken the complacency that first led them into the wilderness, and we know full well that the last eight years of history has taught absolutely nothing to anyone, but merely occurred in a vacuum divorced from their past advice, and assertions, and position papers.
I think we are supposed to celebrate our prospects, right about now, but it seems empty. Most people saw the revision of FISA as a secondary issue; myself, I saw it as nothing less than symbol of new Democratic government. Most people have been reduced to laughing at the unending stream of sternly worded letters, from the Congress to members of the administration, whether in the White House, the Department of Justice, other agencies, or retired from the administration altogether; for myself, it seems not even worth satirization. We are locked in a cycle of sternly enforced futility, and told we are preposterous if we expect anything more. The elections of 2006, while a victory of a scope that can honestly, accurately be described as historic, accomplished little but to partially staunch the bleeding. I am waiting for a convention speaker to address that, and make an optimistic future again sound credible. After eight years of -- let us be blunt -- a stupid press, and celebrations of the petty, and continually orchestrated fury at notions of progress, or noble government, or even mere crude accountability, and above all an administration that seems to absolutely revel in its own ideologically motivated, carefully nurtured governmental incompetence, I am hoping for a speaker that can address that, and make it seem like anything else will happen but the predictable. A little optimism would be welcome. Foolish, perhaps, but welcome. This has been an exhausting two years, and I would be happy to be lied to for a little while, if only someone could do it convincingly.
Still, there is only a little time for such things. For the rest of it, work has to be done. Obama could lose; Democrats could bungle; events could change. Opportunities for disaster abound, and even the smallest steps forward will require astonishing amounts of work. Forget purely electoral concerns, policy issues cannot wait until then. The economy is in the tank, and requires attention. We are still in Iraq, and the only thing the Surge accomplished is to kick urgently needed conversations down the road, while the dying continues.
The hotel lobby here a subdued pumpkin orange; not a direct match for the colors of Daily Kos, but perhaps the closest you could come without risking a shootout with the enforcement agencies of interior design. It is mere coincidence. It does have free internet access, though, which makes it a popular gathering place. Across town, conservatives are apparently having their own small convention. The theme is "protecting our prosperity", or some such, and prosperity is so great that the organizers have arranged free bus rides to transport potential attendees from around Texas, so those attendees do not have to pay their own way. They are there to talk about how successful conservatism is, and how horrible liberals are, and revel in their own assured convictions of how the world works. And there is absolutely no possibility that any of it will change.
Hunter
Netroots Nation 08
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:42:36 GMT
