Getting Out the Bling Vote (Joe Bageant)

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From Kibby’s Cool Spot in Belize, politics makes sense -- sort of

By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

-- HOPKINS VILLAGE, Belize -- I know it’s unpatriotic as hell, but I just cannot get a hard-on about the ’08 American presidential elections. As in, I haven’t read or heard a word about them in a couple of weeks and could care less whether Hillary showed publicly some emotion, which was the big news when I left the States. The will just isn’t there. And it’s even more difficult from here in this Central American village where so many people have real problems. The kind that come with being born under one empire, the British one, and living in the shadow of the present American walled fortress of armed privilege. One of those problems is who to sell your vote to and for how much.

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Belizeans love the hell out of Obama, mostly because he is black, or somewhat so. When I remind them that nearly all their own politicians are black, they are not impressed. Poor Belizeans follow the U.S. presidential race more as entertainment than anything else. And so as long as Obama can buy TV ads and deliver greeting card platitudes that have a sort of righteous sound, he has entertainment, emotional and dramatic value here, as well as to liberal couch 'taters up there in the Nembutal Republic. As for Hillary, entertaining she ain’t. (“A hard an’ sour wooman,” agree the Kibby’s drinkers, “like de green orange.”) Frankly, I’d like to see Clinton wear Lewinsky’s blue dress on American Idol and sing "A Man Ain't Nothin' But A Man" as a campaign ad, or maybe deliver Lady Macbeth's "Out damned spot!" lines in an episode of American Housewives. But I suppose that’s asking too much, even from the rancid freak show of American politics.

As Lady Macbeth quipped, "Hell is a murky place." Politics is even more so. The capability for any president to make big progressive changes has become nil in the United States, and maybe here too, although the capability to fuck things up remains boundless -- to wit, Sparky the Chimp. If all of the U.S. Congress cannot effect change because they are owned men, no candidate sucking down corn soup on the Iowa campaign trail is gonna either. And besides, America is dead broke and in hock up to her eyeballs. Even little changes in America country cost big money because there must be big profit in it for Big Corp. or big dough to slosh around inside the gullet of big government bureaucracy. For instance, a Katrina victim reader of mine, who happens to be a cost accountant, tells me that it cost the U.S. government $38,000 NOT to get his family into one of those emergency FEMA trailer homes, hundreds of which are still sitting in storage areas unoccupied. He moved to Panama and swears the quality of life there is much cheaper and far better, and that despite inefficiencies and fixes, it is more bearable. Which is rather the way I feel about this tiny country.

I dunno. Come November '08, assuming I can find the stomach for it, I will vote. My choices are not even as good as in Belize, where the candidates are flesh and blood people, not holographic media illusions. In November I can cast a vote for the manufactured candidate of my manufactured choice, vote Democratic as they vote PUP, on the grounds that at least some of the national swag will land in poor people’s laps, after it passes through the innards of bureaucratic waste, the fraud of government contractors and privatization. I can write-in vote my conscience as I have traditionally done, which would necessarily mean Kucinich. That’s assuming I don't get cut from the voter list through fraudulent voter caging tactics (not too likely, since I am white and few felons are likely to be named Bageant). I'll be punching a touch screen voting machine with no accountability because no recount is possible. And my vote will legally be reduced a set of digits that instantly become the undisclosed intellectual property of Diebold.

Neither a Ron Paul, nor a McCain nor a Huckabee nor Obama or anybody else going to blow the trumpet and have the walls of Jericho’s corporate gulag/surveillance state fall down. They’ll fall down as the walls of empires always do, when the rot inside them becomes too great, when it is stretched too thin and runs its course. Until then, if a single righteous candidate ever does make it through the bullshit to get close enough to throw a Molotov cocktail over the walls of power, I’ll light the goddamned wick. But maybe it’s the sub-tropical heat. Maybe it’s the distance from the fray. But right now, when it comes to voting, I’d take five hundred for my vote and head back to Kibby’s Cool Spot,

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