October 27, 2004 News & Views » News Feature

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The Homecoming 

A pre-election essay

By
click to enlarge PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/ COFFINS PHOTO: US AIR FORCE
  • Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images/ COFFINS Photo: US Air Force

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Every 40 miles or so, a Wal-Mart sits like a fortress in the same medieval landscape, the Wal-Mart that murdered these once-charming villages, that created five mega-billionaires on the latest list of the super-rich, that controls all the retail business and most of the jobs that remain in wasted Rust-Belt regions like Western New York.

It's here in the empty country that the great Republican gullibility holds sway. People surrender their soldier-children, their votes, their meager taxes without a murmur, then call in to rightwing radio hosts to rage about abortionists and same-sex marriage. Where hope is hard to find, people turn to more accessible emotions, like anger and fear. It takes enemies to give them purpose in the world, and if Osama bin Laden is out of range they're happy to substitute you and me -- the too-tolerant, too-skeptical "secular humanists" for whom, ironically, the post-Enlightenment American democracy was expressly designed.

The Republicans are wondrous manipulators of these lost souls, these disenfranchised Middle Americans. But Kansas isn't our enemy. It's our responsibility, as a few serious politicians understand. Sander Levin, Democratic congressman from Michigan, is an intelligent, compassionate, somewhat sorrowful-looking man who looks like the Hollywood stereotype of the wise old liberal legislator. On his wedding anniversary, he drove out to a Kerry fundraiser in upscale Chevy Chase, Md., to rally the troops, who had been reading discouraging polls.

"Don't start hanging your heads, that's what they count on," he told them. "We have a great opportunity. I'm obsessed by the importance of this election. Believe me -- there are 175 Republican congressmen just like Tom DeLay, and they plan to dismantle this nation as we know it, as it has evolved to this point. Four more years of these people and we're bankrupt, we have no tax base, we have a military draft, we have hopeless wars. Worst of all, all the machinery for helping people will have withered away. Think of a Supreme Court packed with fundamentalist reactionaries..."

Levin shook his head, his voice trailed away. Then he looked up and smiled, a tired smile: "Please, please don't give up."

This is an election that reasonable Americans can't afford to lose, because someday in Iraq that awful game of golf will be played over our children's bones, and the only question left is, "How many bones?" Much as I hate soundbites and slogans, it seems to me that this time, this Tuesday, the choice is precisely as John Kerry has tried to define it: Hope versus fear. I take it as an omen that the anthem my aunt's family chose for her memorial service -- a young man sang it beautifully -- was "Be Not Afraid."

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