In reality, however, the contradiction doesn’t exist. In the real world the present is always imperfect and the future is (almost) always a region of hope. The problem lies in the way we all now insist on reacting to the news. Is it a Good Thing? Is it a Bad Thing? What’s in it for us? What do they tell us about ourselves? Or about the other guys? Where’s the angle? Who’s to blame? Gimme the zapper. Let’s surf! In her famous essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag pointed out the dangers of thinking in this quasi-mystical way, of, for example, seeing curses and judgments in sickness and disease. This argument also applies to the news or, rather, the current obsession with finding symbolic meaning in headline-worthy events. News as Instant Metaphor turns a random catastrophe like an air crash into a generalized cultural signifier or, more dangerously, over-interprets events like the Camp David negotiations until the overlaid resonances and echoes complicate and obscure the difficult, half-resolved, half-stymied thing itself.
News as Instant Metaphor is excessively emotive, often politically slanted, inevitably shallow. It idealizes or demonizes its subjects and dulls or inflames our responses. (The vile murder of young Sarah Payne in Britain, totemically represented as a symbol of innocence endangered by evil, has turned sections of the British media into a frothing lynch mob.)
The British government—among others—has recently been attacked for its preoccupation with spin rather than substance, presentation rather than reality; with, in other words, Government as Metaphor. But if the comment-heavy news media themselves—provocative opinion columns, however glib, are so much cheaper than old-fashioned journalism—were less eager to spin the news the moment it happens until it becomes a dazzling, hypnotic blur, we might see more clearly through the political spin doctors’ smoke and mirrors.
SEPTEMBER 2000: SENATOR LIEBERMAN
According to Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic manual of realpolitik, The Prince, a prince ought not to be religious but should be adept at simulating religiosity. It would come as something of a relief in this year’s god-bothered American election campaign if it turned out that when the various candidates profess their various degrees of spiritual devotion, they don’t really mean it. If they were just trying to look good in the eyes of the notoriously religious American electorate, one might almost be able to forgive them their protestations. To be cynical is merely to be a politician, after all, and anyhow, cynicism is greatly preferable to sanctimony.
No such luck, I’m afraid. Bill Clinton may very well be the most devout of believers, but the sheer enthusiasm and frequency with which he has confessed his sins, the brilliant volubility and star-quality performance of his fallen-sinner-sees-the-light act, has elevated the belief practices of the Leader to the level of major showbiz. His successors, none of them blessed (or cursed) with the fabled Clintonian charisma and pizzazz, have no option but to say what they mean, which means, unfortunately, that they also mean what they say.
The truly Machiavellian candidate would, for example, have noted the opinion polls that followed the announcement of Al Gore’s selection of Senator Joe Lieberman for the second spot on the Democrat ticket. This American Prince—spotting that, while more than 90 percent of eligible voters said they had no difficulty in imagining themselves voting for a black, Jewish, or gay presidential candidate, only half of them were willing to consider voting for an atheist—would instantly pump up the spiritual volume, and if he wasn’t already adept at feigning a deeply held faith, he would make darn sure he learned how to do so double quick.
So here, right on cue, comes Senator Joseph Lieberman himself, hauling George Washington out of his grave to cry that where there is no religion there can be no morality. But while Senator Lieberman may be many things, he’s no Machiavelli, as is amply demonstrated by the two-left-feet clumsiness of this attempt to make religion even more important an issue in American public life than it already is. After the Anti-Defamation League’s attack on his remarks, he’s been backtracking fast. Now he’s all for the separation of Church and State, always was, always will be, and no, he doesn’t think that people without religious belief lack moral conviction, even though he did raise poor old George from the dead to say exactly that.
All this is alarming to those of us (the citizens of the rest of the world) who can’t vote in November but whose fate will be profoundly influenced by the U.S. voters’ choice. We’re already disconcerted that only about 30 percent of American voters feel it’s worth bothering to vote at all, and the thought that the relative perceived holiness of the candidates may be of decisive importance does nothing to reassure us.
In John Frankenheimer’s classic sixties thriller The Manchurian Candidate, America’s enemies try to seize control of the White House by getting a brainwashed American politician to run for president. Today, even the United States’ friends are beginning to wish a Rest of the World candidate were permitted to run. We all live under the aegis of the American Empire’s unchallenged might, so the victorious candidate will be our president, too. Of the actually available duo, it’s plain that the Rest of the World’s best bet is Al Gore. Not only is he smarter than his opponent, but he also does appear to know where the Rest of the World is, which gives him a definite edge in our admittedly self-interested opinion. For many of us, George W. Bush’s failure to name the president of India was a mistake as irredeemable as Dan Quayle’s “potatoe.” Bush’s fondness for frying his fellow human beings is also a reason for unease. If it was tough to forgive Clinton for executing a mentally retarded man, it’s even tougher to accept George W.’s frequent human barbecues.
What a shame, then, that the sidekick chosen by Gore to prove he was “his own man” should turn out to be a moral throwback. Lieberman’s attack on the movies in the name of “the family” should have been a straw in the wind. Neither this nor his use of Washington as a ventriloquist’s dummy will be any easier to forget than Bush’s ignorance of President Narayanan’s name. Al Gore urgently needs to remind his running mate that people can be moral without being godly for the simple reason that morality precedes ideology—religion is a way of organizing our ideas about good and evil, and not necessarily the origin of those ideas. And to mention to Senator Lieberman that the Rest of the World would like him to be a little less of a putz.
OCTOBER 2000: THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT
In the late 1970s, during the passage of the infamous British Nationality Act, I was a member of a delegation that lobbied the Conservative minister Geoffrey Finsberg. The proposed act, we argued, was not only racist in intent but a piece of constitutional highway robbery as well. It would arbitrarily abolish a nine-hundred-year-old birthright, the so-called jus soli under which British citizenship belonged to all those born on British soil. This was to be replaced by a new, multi-tiered concept of nationality as a gift of the state. “Full” British citizenship was to be based on a murky notion of “patriality”—i.e., having at least one British citizen among your four grandparents—which would allow most white South Africans and Zimbabweans to claim it while denying it to many British passport holders whose skin was black or brown and whose grandparents had unfortunately grown up in “the colonies” far away.
In the absence of a written constitution, Mr. Finsberg and the Conservatives were able to shrug the protests off, and the bill duly became law. It was presented as a defense against a flood of alien immigration, and under cover of such scare-mongering an ancient right of all citizens, white as well as black, was stolen away.
That experience convinced me that Britain’s vaunted “unwritten constitution” wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on. As a child of the post-colonial era, I knew that the British left every one of their colonies with a written constitution; why was Britain thought to be somehow above having one itself? Americans and Europeans have long found the British preference for vague, undefined freedoms not only anomalous but bizarre. If these things were worth having, why on earth were they not worth writing down? Yet movements for constitutional reform, suc
h as Charter 88, of which I was a founding member, initially attracted media derision and met with political apathy. That we are celebrating the entry into British law of a statutory Human Rights Act a mere twelve years later indicates a great shift in British political consciousness, and for that shift pressure groups like Charter 88, Liberty, Index on Censorship, and Article 19 can take much credit. Membership in the EU has played its part as well. European ideas of liberty were pooh-poohed under the Tories, but now their beneficial influence is being felt.
If further proof were needed of the little-Englander unelectability of the British Conservative Party, its response to the Bill of Rights amply provides it. The party’s present, in the form of Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe, its dinosaur past, represented by Lord Tebbit, and their friends in the media have united to attack the new legislation. The law courts will be jammed with “frivolous” cases, they protest. Illegal immigrants and criminals will be rubbing their hands in glee! And, oh, there will be gay sex in the schoolyard, and polygamy, because it’s sanctioned by religions such as Islam, will no longer be a crime! This amazing display reveals just how profoundly the idea of entrenched freedoms upsets the British Right. The Human Rights Act has been law in Scotland for most of this year without destroying civil society, and the Scots must be puzzled by the Conservatives’ alarmism. (Memo to anti-polygamists: even in Islam, there are legal loopholes. Muslim countries such as Pakistan, where polygamy is not tolerated, use them to outlaw the practice. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.)
Defenders of the Human Rights Act have emphasized the importance of creating a “culture of liberty.” Obviously this doesn’t mean that the British don’t value freedom. But—as the Tory uproar suggests—some of them don’t value it enough. A genuine culture of free expression, to give one example, would not tolerate the continued presence on the British statute books of the absurd, anachronistic blasphemy law. This law was tested in the European Court in the Visions of Ecstasy case (1996). In the written evidence I presented at Strasbourg, I argued that “the modern European concept of freedom of expression was developed, by the intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in a struggle, not against the State, but against the Church. Since then, Europe has resisted the idea of Inquisitions, and has agreed that religious orthodoxies must not impose limits on what we think and say.” In the end the Strasbourg judges did not overturn the blasphemy law, preferring to leave such decisions to the EU’s individual member states. Now Britain is in a position to make the decision for herself. Let us hope that the abolition of the offense of blasphemy is one of the new act’s earliest benefits. The likes of Ann Widdecombe and Lord Tebbit will be very upset if it is, which only enhances the attractiveness of the idea.
NOVEMBER 2000: GOING TO ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The climax of this year’s U.S. presidential election briefly conjured up the largely forgotten figure of Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901), the moderate Republican who, between 1889 and 1893, was the twenty-third president of the United States. You know: Benjamin Harrison? Ohio boy, grandson of the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, and described as a kindly man and stirring orator? Benjamin Harrison, who, as president, signed into law America’s first-ever piece of anti-trust legislation, and who presided over the notorious “Billion Dollar Congress,” with whose support he squandered the large budgetary surplus his administration had inherited? Well, no, I didn’t know, either. But one fact about this now-obscure ex-president guarantees him a footnote in American electoral history. In the election of 1888, he polled 95,713 fewer votes than his opponent, Grover Cleveland—5,444,337 against 5,540,050—but still won the presidency, because the distribution of his votes earned him a majority in the electoral college, where he won handsomely, by 233 votes to Cleveland’s 168.
The close-fought Gore-Bush battle has highlighted as never before the unusual way in which American democracy works. One thing we’ve all learned this year is that you don’t need millions of votes to become president of the United States. You need exactly 270, in an electoral college that nowadays numbers 538.
A few days before the election, many political pundits suddenly woke up to the possibility that Al Gore could do a Harrison, get fewer votes than George W. Bush and still be elected president, because the voting intention polls in several battleground states, in the populous industrial North as well as Florida, had started swinging in the direction opposite to the nationwide surveys. As a result, the Gore people took to praising the electoral college effusively, extolling the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who had made such a back-door victory constitutionally acceptable. Now that we’ve all experienced the drama of the tightest election in American history—one in which, surprisingly, it was Bush, not Gore, who lagged behind in the overall count—the Democrats have done a U-turn and are highlighting the injustice of losing an election to an opponent who received fewer votes. Dizzying as this reversal is, the question remains: how democratic is such a system of indirect election?
A variation on this type of two-step voting was the so-called Basic Democracy introduced in 1960 in Pakistan by President Ayub Khan, and now happily defunct. Ayub had come to power as so many generals have in Pakistan, by seizing it from an admittedly unsatisfactory civilian leader. His interest in representative government was therefore not great, and the system he devised was more basic than democratic. It divided up Pakistan’s citizens into “constituencies” of around a thousand adults, each of whom elected a Basic Democrat, who then participated in a referendum that “confirmed” Ayub in power.
In 1965, the same system was used to defeat a strong challenge to the Ayub regime mounted by a combined opposition party led by Fatima Jinnah, sister of the nation’s founder. It was widely believed in Pakistan that the biggest single advantage of Basic Democracy’s electoral college was that its members could be coerced and bribed. Far easier to fix a limited election than to fix one in which all Pakistan’s eligible voters participated fully.
Which is not to suggest that such a thing as a fixed election could ever happen in America, of course; perish the thought. True, the Cubans, Russians, and Chinese are laughing openly at American democracy, calling the USA a banana republic and worse. And when even CNN speaks of an “odor” hanging over the Florida election, and as stories continue to emerge of black voters intimidated by policemen, of polling stations remaining closed so that people were denied the chance to vote at all, and of would-be voters being told that the ballots had run out, those of us with experience of Third World elections can’t help wondering why everyone in America is too fastidious even to mention that all this is happening in a state governed by the brother of the fiasco’s principal beneficiary. But even if there hasn’t been any hanky-panky, the bizarre Florida episode shows why, on the whole, direct elections feel cleaner than indirect ones. The wisdom of the minds that devised the collegiate system doesn’t seem so self-evident anymore. My own country of origin, India, is like the United States a large federation of regionalisms, where people define themselves first as Bengalis, Tamils, Kashmiris, and so on, and only after that as Indians. But India, with far fewer resources than the USA, has managed—albeit imperfectly—to run a constituency-based, direct-election democracy for over half a century. It’s hard to grasp why Americans can’t do the same.
What the Founding Fathers have unquestionably given us, however, is a system filled with the kind of psephological arcana that political commentators adore. The fact that the electoral college contains an even number of votes creates the possibility of a tie. (An odd number of votes was evidently deemed Unwise, for reasons that were no doubt profound and remain incomprehensible.) Lovers of political esoterica will regret that such a 269–269 dead heat is unlikely to occur. If it did, the election would move on to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would have just one vote. If that process were to result in a 25–25 tie, then the Senate would vote. And if they, too, were to end up deadlocked, 50–50, then they would have to elect a
vice president to break the stalemate. Perhaps, after all, the Founding Fathers were wiser than I’ve allowed. In an electorate as ballot-shy as the United States, why not choose who becomes the world’s most powerful leader by letting it all come down to a single, casting vote? It gives the phrase “one man, one vote” a whole new meaning.
DECEMBER 2000: A GRAND COALITION?
We’ve all been put through electoral college by this time, and now most of us would like to “recuse” ourselves from the case or perhaps “vacate” our earlier judgments; we yearn for those innocent days when a butterfly wasn’t a ballot and Chad was a place in Africa. Whoever wins this loses it, we sometimes say. Bush and Cheney will never live down their 300,000-vote defeat in the nationwide count. Gore-Lieberman will always be Sore-Loserman to half the country. But then again, nobody has a memory anymore. Two weeks after one of the combatants is sworn in, all this will fade. So maybe whoever loses it, loses it after all. We give up. We’re confused.
We’ve stopped thinking it’s funny, or even sad. This is still the election that Nader wrecked and Elián slanted and Katherine Harris’s partisanship derailed and the media screwed up, but most of all it’s just interminable and coated in foggy legalese and we almost don’t care anymore. But under the boredom we know there has been damage. It will be a long time before America can preach to the world about electoral transparency. This election has been about as transparent as a Floridian swamp.
America reveres its democracy, its Constitution, its presidency, and the past weeks have done damage to American belief in all three. How then is the strength of the republic to be restored? Bush doesn’t seem interested in reaching out to Gore, and Gore has been too committed to the fight to pay more than lip service to the notion of a reunited nation. The truth is that these United States have rarely been so divided. America, which so often casts itself as the world’s peacemaker, now needs to make peace with itself; and so might benefit from the experience of other divided peoples.
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