Your Vegan Holistic President
Sure an odd, spiritual guy like Dennis Kucinich doesn't have a chance in hell. But it sure is nice to dream
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 13, 2003
©2003 SF Gate
URL:
http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
And then the new 2004 president had the gall, the unutterable nerve, to actually set up an official Department of Peace to promote, you know, nonviolence and human rights. That big jerk.
And then he repealed the snide and vicious USA Patriot Act, and promoted legit environmental causes and sustainability and actually tightened EPA restrictions and strengthened the Clean Air Act, gasp oh my God what the hell is he thinking.
And then it was revealed that, oh dear God what anti-American blasphemy, he eats no meat or dairy, and prefers organic and kosher foods and actually cares about issues of personal holistic health and therefore isn't a smirking well-funded crony of the toxic beef industry or big agribiz, and hence the bloated lobbyists from those groups are no longer swimming in favoritism and payola and what the hell is the world coming to.
And furthermore, he isn't particularly vehemently religious, not in the normal sense anyway, not Christian or strictly Catholic or Baptist or whatever Bush claims to be, Born-Again Failed-CEO Warmonger, I believe.
And in fact he's actually a rather unique amalgam, a loosely observant Roman Catholic who observes kashruth due to the influence of his longtime Jewish girlfriend, and yet who also supports alternative beliefs, has practicing Muslims on his staff, supports spiritual exploration, knows Shirley Maclaine personally, gives his own personal money to alternative spirituality research. What the hell? This cannot be.
And that damn hippie liberal, he actually wants to legalize medical marijuana, and he supports the rights of the poor and the working class, and more protections for the oceans, and universal health care and a reduction in military spending, and actually wants to change the world's opinion of the U.S. as this despised unipolar rogue into a more cooperative powerhouse role-model peacemaker. Oh dear. That does it. We're gonna be invaded by China any day now, for certain.
Let us imagine, just for a moment, just because it's entirely implausible and because it feels so utterly odd, that such a leadership, such an open and distinctive viewpoint, actually ran this nation.
Let us imagine the horror. Imagine the savage blow to the all-American mega-machismo, to the hardcore GOP hawks and the freerepublic.com psychopatriots and the Christian Bible gropers and the stunned CEOs, the insult to the giant angry fist of self-righteousness America now represents were someone like, say, Dennis Kucinich, the humble long-shot progressive Democratic congressman candidate from Ohio -- the one who represents all those viewpoints listed above -- to actually became president.
Is it really all that radical? Is it really all that extreme to try and imagine a truly connected national leadership that promotes international cooperation and spiritual openness and the sacredness of the environment and a genuinely holistic worldview, one who actually attempts to connect with and listen to its populace?
Why does this seem so far off, so utterly impossible? Have we gone so far down the road of BushCo-style isolationism and dread and knives-out bile that we can't even entertain a serious alternative, the notion that we actually could, as a country, stand for something as radical as peace?
Are we so deeply and repressively beaten down with war and terror and fake Orange Alerts and the idea that we absolutely positively must, no matter what, have a cold and corporatized iron-fisted leadership hell-bent on expanding American empire at all costs, that we can't even conceive of a sincere and pacifistic alternative?
Apparently, we are. That far gone. That far removed from what this nation actually stands for, stood for. At least for the moment. The tyranny of fear is in control. We are so absolutely goddamn certain we are facing a brutal and heartless world that wishes us perpetual violent ill that we simply must have an equally heartless and guns-drawn pseudo-fascist leadership to match it.
This is, quite simply, utter bull. We have chosen our own path. We have actively elected to become the strong-arm rogue superpower. We have created our own warmongering circumstance far, far more than it has been imposed on us.
Get this. According to his Web site, Dennis Kucinich's proposed Cabinet-level peace appointee would seek to not merely make nonviolence an organizing principle of society but actually strive to make war archaic, to "endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights ... and develop new structures in nonviolent dispute resolution." Man. What a heretic.
Is Kucinich the ideal candidate? I have no idea. He is merely one of the most interesting, indeed a longshot and probably flawed and it's true that he just recently flip-flopped on abortion rights, and is maybe just a bit overly pro-labor, and who knows what else, and he could be trouble for the Demos in terms of shaking up the unified message the party so desperately needs right now.
But let's just use him as our example. Let's use his unique candidacy as a mirror to reflect how far we have careened down the path of indignation and megalomania and the idea that we, as a nation, are somehow locked into this warmongering, hateful mode, this hostile role as schoolyard bully of the world.
How shockingly naive it seems, how utterly childish to think we could have a president who actually promotes peace and empowers the U.N. and works toward interconnectedness, and in this day and age. Don't you know the world is at our throat? Don't you know it's all eye-for-an-eye and dog-eat-dog and only the strong survive and kill 'em all before they come and eat our innocent babies?
Yeah right. How very sad. No one seems to remember. No one truly recalls the overwhelming sentiment just after 9/11, a stunned and saddened nation rethinking its core values, a deeply historic opportunity for a radical reshaping of America's world position and policy, our intentions, our national agenda.
We could've chosen a Kucinich-style path. We could've easily chosen peace and cooperation and humanity and communication. BushCo chose the exact opposite.
And now, here we are. Globally disrespected, almost universally feared and loathed and resented, our economy hammered, the vicious GOP war machine cranking on all cylinders, openly lying about the justifications for war, huge numbers of misguided citizens truly believing 9/11 is a valid excuse to annihilate Iraq and slaughter thousands, maybe Syria and North Korea and Libya and Lebanon and who knows who else, next.
And Kucinich's Department of Peace? Ha. What a joke. What a sad, far-fetched, disheartening, impossible joke.
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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
I pray every night the dubya will lose, but going of the people i know i don't see that happening. we can only hope he does a repeat of what his father did.
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