OUR STAR-SPANGLED TATTERED FLAG

John Moore

With less than a week to go before November 5th, the final stretch of our presidential campaign has turned into a maelstrom of roiling drama. The accumulation of stupid and ugly that passes for last-minute politicking does less to convince anyone of anything, simply leaving most people in a terrible mood.

Believe it or not, politics should be sort of fun and exciting.

But the gap between what should be, and what is, is staggering. And no, it hasn’t always been this way; yes, the 18th Century equivalent of the Enquirer speculated constantly on Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings, but you have to give it to them that at least they had the story right. There have always been attacks, and lies, associated with politics. But nothing like what we have now, with social media boosting our worst instincts and erecting barriers to critical thinking. In an effort to save your nervous system, the best thing at this point might be to turn it all off until the day of the election. Once you’ve voted, just listen to music and walk through a park until the darkness dissolves (please God, may it dissolve).

I voted today, sighing, and like millions of others just felt grief and frustration that America could not do better.

Telling it like it is, even when painful, is an ameliorative. Truth is like medicine, and constant lies are a disease. But truth seems to hold little sway with politicians or with media today. It’s just a word, seen at best to be relative. What’s really happening in America is less important than what the spin doctors want you to think is happening. Just forget the quaint notion that anyone owes anything to the public good. Give up the old fashioned illusion that politics should be about “creating a more perfect union,” or media about the elucidation of truth. That was a fairy tale, and this is reality, baby!

Politics today isn’t Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Politics is The Hunger Games.

The game today is all about power, saying and doing the thing that will win at all costs. A political-media industrial complex is driven not by principles but by marketing, laughing at the mere thought that you should say or do anything simply because it’s honest or true. Politics is a ruthless capitalist enterprise now, cynically hiding behind the guise of public service. And it’s not just that its soullessness is a sickened condition, threatening to obliterate the conscience and abolish the ethics of those who promote it. The bigger problem is, its influence is so ubiquitous it’s given many others a soul sickness too.

In 2008, we were so excited at the thought of “hope” and “change.” I remember Denver. I was there. There was an electric sense of possibility in the air, ultimately to be betrayed of course. Today we have a politics of hopelessness and a commitment to never changing.

National politics today is a puppet show, its strings pulled by puppet masters whose names they would rather you not know. Better you should believe these are serious political players surrounded by serious journalists, all thinking deep thoughts and doing the best they can with the awesome responsibilities they hold toward the body politic. You’re not supposed to see behind the curtain: the cynical talking points, the lists of who to amplify and who to deamplify, what stories to squash, what narratives to promulgate, what lies to tell, whose careers to destroy, what facts to pervert, what dots to disconnect.

Never has “the lesser of two evils” been more literally true.

There are exceptions, of course, truly soulful people aware of their ethical responsibilities to the public. But more often than not, political truth-tellers get eaten alive today. They become corporate roadkill. They got in the way.

And the voters, that last line of defense against tyranny? Well that’s a problem too, as many seem trained to go along with the show, not so much because they believe it as because they too, somewhere along the line, got the word that failure to comply would cost them. Want to be accepted by the elite, protect your brand, have your calls returned, not get laughed at, make your donors happy, keep the job, gain some power? Pretend you didn’t see what you just saw.

I did my duty and cast my vote, but November 5 - no matter who wins - won’t be a triumph of the people. It will be the triumph of marketers, major donors, and corporate chieftains who have leeched our democracy of its life force. Our task - and it will not be easy - is to transform the whole business. It is a business, and a ruthless one at that. Our politics today is a multi-billion dollar scam, an unworthy container for the yearning of our hearts and a completely inadequate model of response to the challenges of our time. People do know this, instinctively, and many are absolutely sick about it. It’s a sickness of the system that’s caused a sickness in the American mind.

But the sickness won’t last. When you mess with American democracy, you’re messing with something you shouldn’t mess with. Too many people have struggled, and sacrificed, and even died for that ideal for a bunch of soulless Stepford types to be able to shred it so easily without someone, somewhere, putting up a fight.

It’s like a reiteration of the Star-Spangled Banner, this time British warships in the War of 1812 replaced by media or political cannonballs lobbed by our corporate masters. It’s a perilous fight again, let me tell you. Is the land of the free and the home of the brave going to survive all this? No differently than in 1812, we’re watching from the ramparts. In the dawn’s early light, will our flag still yet wave…?

In truth, it’s not a given.

We’ll have to show up for what’s happening now, just as our ancestors did, if America as we know it is to survive. Our victory this time won’t come through war; it will come through an internal resilience to the lure of manufactured reality. A resistance to its spiritual contagion. We won’t receive orders from a battlefield captain; we’ll receive guidance from a small still voice within. True patriots aren’t running around with flags shouting slogans today. We’re waiting quietly, preparing ourselves inwardly, reading about history and stocking up on courage.

November 5th will come and go, the result of the election signifying little more than a continuation of falsity. A system so morally hollowed out is bound to implode, the lies that infuse it too much weight for its pillars to sustain. But truth has a way of making itself known; it doesn’t stand around and just hope for the best. A revolution in political consciousness is forming even now. May it one day be said that in the final analysis, we, whose hearts have been shredded, became who we needed to be and did what needed to be done.

May we give proof through the night that our flag is still there.