One of my favorite old jokes is about some scientists studying optimism and pessimism.
They did the study with children. They found two kids, one a pessimist and the other an optimist. They put the pessimist in a room full of every great toy you could imagine. But the kid doesn’t play with the toys. He just sits among them, scowling.
After a time, the scientists walk in the room and ask the kid, “Why aren’t you playing with all these great toys?” The kid replies, “I’d just have fun and start to really like them and then you’d come and take them away from me and I’d just be sad.”
Then they bring the optimist into a room filled to the ceiling with horse manure. The kid’s face lights up with delight and he dives into the pile, flinging the manure aside with both hands. The scientists stop him and ask why he’s doing that.
“Hey,” the kid replies, “with all this crap, there’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere.”
Welcome to the state of American politics in the early 21st century. For most of us, electing a president is going to be an exercise of looking for a very tiny pony in a very large pile of manure.
It’s going to be depressing and boring, occasionally enraging. Unless you’re a hard-core political junkie or a Tea Bagger, it’s going to be pretty hard to get interested in any of the candidates, and that includes the incumbent. For us liberals, the brightest hope (“brightest” being a highly relative term) is that Obama will get re-elected and, freed of the pressure of having to run for anything ever again, will start acting like the progressive we voted for and stop acting like the political wuss we fear – and that our hearts tell us – he is.
It’s hard not to believe that Obama is the last, best hope this country has if we want to avoid becoming a right-wing banana republic writ large. There is no meaningful liberal wing in this country; when the best you can offer is Dennis Kucinich, it’s pretty obvious the war is over and we lost. The best we can hope for is that whomever we elect is less conservative than the other candidate.
As an observer, it’s just distressing how much of the political discussion in this country is driven by simple greed and shortsightedness. The problem is that both of those things work in the short term, no matter how much they hurt this country, and for some reason people – or at least people who vote – don’t have the character or patience to do anything that works in the long term.
Just this week, a piece in Salon (admittedly a liberal website) once again pointed out the most depressing aspect of the current state of affairs, the spreading divide between the haves and have-nots. The writer, Andrew Leonard, takes the long view, though, pointing out the really distressing part of that:
“Keeping taxes low on the wealthy has become a higher priority than funding the kinds of social welfare safety net programs that would at least partially compensate working-class Americans for their failure to keep pace with the gains enjoyed by the richest Americans. Supreme Court decisions now routinely favor business-class priorities. Eager to keep the corporate campaign finance contributions flowing, both Democrats and Republicans strive to keep regulation as light as possible on corporate America.”
But politically, the problem is much more basic. One of the posters in the comments thread on Leonard’s piece nailed it:
“It’s going to go on as long as people realize that government is not the problem, government is the solution. The purpose of government is to ensure an equal law for all, both rich and poor. For as long as Americans believe that the government is the problem, it will be unable to fulfill its prime purpose, and this will go on.”
For 30 years, going back to the execrable presidency of Ronald Reagan, liberals have allowed the right wing to set the terms of political debate. Part of that is to paint government as evil, which makes a lot of sense if greed is your primary motivation. If government regulation prevents you from accumulating all the cash you want, sure you’re going to think of it as the problem.
What’s distressing is that somehow, the have-nots can’t see that their interests are radically different from those of the haves. You could chalk that up to the right wing’s cynical pursuit of social issues voters. But you would think, or at least hope, that most people would see that the red ink in their personal checkbook is more important than whether creationism is taught in public schools. That’s apparently not the case.
Maybe we’ll muddle through. If you study American history, you realize there was no golden age, when everybody got along and agreed on solutions to our problems. Hell, things have actually been worse than they are now. For all of the occasional gassing about this or that state seceding from the Union, we’re not on the brink of another civil war. Yet.
And anyway, maybe there’s no solution. Maybe that greed and shortsightedness will ultimately be the death of this country, or maybe things will get bad enough that people will finally realize that the interests of 1 percent of the population don’t really coincide with the interests of the other 99 percent. Maybe, as awful as it’s been, the Great Recession will wake people up.
Pessimistic? Maybe. But I’d rather be a pessimist than spend my life looking for a pony that isn’t there.