A Guide to Election 2008

By Waheeduddin Ahmed Ph.D.

Truth is a casualty of politics. The longer one lives in the cradle of capitalist democracy, denser does the mist of disillusionment become. Ideals evaporate, choices mingle and images get fused, to present a panorama of endless absurdities. Elections are a liars’ quadrennial tournament like the Olympics. The system, which operates our lives cannot tolerate truth; even its proximity  shatters it to pieces. One would think that in any legitimate system, the choice should be, not between various personifications of falsehood but between truth and untruth. Until we are face to face with such a choice, we are living in a world, where there is no hope but a melancholy of conscious self-deceit.

The language of electoral politics itself unveils a grand hypocrisy. Take for instance the word electability (a word not found in Webster’s dictionary)  What it means is that a candidate, whether good or bad, must conform to the public’s taste, which is assumed bad. A candidate’s name may prejudice the public. A person with a Muslim name has a birthright to run for office but beware! the joke will be on him. A Black and a woman are a novelty; never happened in the annals of history and may still end up as something that never happened; long live the American Dream. Blackness has a clear and unambiguous definition: a candidate, half black and half white, with all the traits and qualities of the white culture, is Black, not White nor Half-white, even if he is brought up by all white grand parents and ends up in Harvard. That is a manifestation of charity, which both, the beneficiary and the benefactor must endure.

Dick Morris is a name to remember. Bill and Hillary in their White House days were the friends of Black America and vice versa. Bill, not only needed the Black’s votes but also those of the White Middle Class, who, while in grocery stores saw and resented those passing out food stamps as money. So, in a remarkable feat of  Dick Morrisian electobatics, he achieved a personal triumph setting aside party principles. Now once again, when election was at stake, Bill and Hillary went back to Morrisian politics, pulling out the race card: Barak and Jessy look-alike  Conclusion: The Clintons have a propensity to destroy institutions for personal gains.

Jeremiah Wright has been made out in the media as one whose views caste a shadow on the electability of Barak Obama. Who is Jeremiah Wright? Is he a drug dealer, a gangster, a terrorist? No! He is an outspoken political reformer, who uses, at the pulpit, the language of the one, whose name he has taken and of Amos, Mica, Isaiah and other angry scolding prophets. His honesty and integrity should be judged by the truthfulness or untruthfulness of his statements and his rancor deemed a barometer of societal mores. In fact, we should be thankful for such voices arising from churches, synagogues and mosques, without which the nation’s conscience will go to sleep.

What does bipartisanship mean? It clearly means duplicity and hypocrisy. For example, the Republicans painted Bill abusing his cigar in the Oval Office, while ignoring the images of Newt Gingrich‘s amorous indulgence on the Capitol Hill  It was a waste of time however, since in the tantalizing aura of licentious culture, it offered the public a glance in the mirror and the public found it entertaining not menacing.

In America freedom is a myth. Yes there is freedom to say what I am saying. It is only so because it is inconsequential in the final analysis. In America, the rulers and the ruled are dehumanized. There is no human face to the ruler; therefore there is no ego, no sense of insult or gratification. Criticism doesn’t hurt because there are no feelings to be hurt. Americans are ruled by a tyranny of financial interests. They are free to speak, act and move on the surface of their stratum. However, they cannot transcend from their confines and the rulers and the ruled always remain widely distanced.

John McCain is giving the world a new slogan: war against Radical Islamic Extremism. He is a nuanced strategist. The new slogan fills the vacuum created by the exit of the Red Menace and the Yellow Menace. One of the pillars of American capitalism is the behemoth of the arms industry. If it is dismantled, the system collapses. Arms can be neither manufactured nor sold if there is no enemy. However, the enemy in this context, doesn’t have to be corpuscular but ideational. It is phantomized in the psyche of the citizens, where it is nourished by the daily doses of propaganda and becomes a monster growling and tossing and turning. John McCain promises to wage a  hundred year war against this phantom. His challenge will be to keep the fear alive for  one hundred years, with the enemy manufactured in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, which uses IEDs (improvised explosive devices),  striking fear into the hearts, needing expenditures of trillions of dollars on cruise missiles, navy and air force. At the present rate of expenditure the country will become bankrupt in a decade Its super power will evaporate, rendering it a country behind many in the power of arms as well as in economics. Remember Europe after the Second World War!. As McCain’s chances of winning the White House brighten with the passage of each day of Clinton-Obama campaign, the future of the country gets bleaker and the superpower gradually falls into a different prefix.

The Jewish Lobby is supposedly an overwhelming factor in American politics and the Muslim populace is overawed by the acumen of the Jews in advancing the cause of Israel.

In fact, Jews are more a victim of the arms industry’s avarice than are the Palestinians, or Arabs or Muslims. The conflict in the Middle East is the bonanza the industry can ill-afford to lose. It sells trillions of dollars of arms to both the sides. What is ironic is that the Saudis and the Gulf countries buy arms, thanks to the agencies of the princes, which they never have to use. The Jewish lobby is foolishly working against itself, in so far as it tries to maintain status quo. Peace in the Middle East is not in the interest of America, at least not in the interests of the industry. Both, the Jews and the Palestinians are expendable. Israel is sitting on a powder keg; history is not on its side and the Jews are smart enough to know it

Now a word about ourselves: We need no enemy on the way to humiliation and shame; our mouths will take us there. Let me illustrate this with two examples. Some of us Islamic stereotypes make a fool of ourselves by throwing quotes from scriptures, out of place. Such uneducated and stupid diatribes show us in a very bad light.

Every Muslim child knows that a Muslim may not kill nor harm anyone, who is not in armed conflict with us. And there are those who say, without any proof, that 9/11 was planned and executed by Jews or the agents of the U.S. government. Such are opiate gossipers, whose preponderance in the Muslim community presents a serious challenge to our educators.

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