Kerry Nominated

August 2, 2004
Writing as a registered Democrat, I'm sorry to say that a worse maunder of platitudes than John Kerry's acceptance speech has not been uttered by another presidential candidate in my lifetime. The emptiness of it was actually thrilling after the opening inanity of the "reporting for duty" line -- you began to wonder with each sentence whether he could top the previous one for vapidity and banality.

"My dad did the things that a boy remembers. He gave me my first model airplane, my first baseball mitt and my first bicycle."

To dissect it further as oratory would only be cruel -- and depressing! -- except to make these two points. First, the narcissism it displayed was impressive: Kerry's lavish thanking of the crowd and his family, as though he had won an acadamy award rather than a daunting nomination in a dark time; the shameless grandiosity of his self-conscious annointment to greatness. Second, perhaps a quibble, that his vocal rhythms eerily resemble Richard Nixon's, for instance the tendency to speak through his applause lines. Mostly, though, I was dogged throughout the speech by the dismaying thought that George W. Bush will wipe up the floor with this guy.

The party that wants to stand for everything and everybody ends up standing for nothing. The internal contradictions of the Democratic party today are so gross that it may not survive beyond this election. It pretends to be liberal, but it's thoroughly corporatist. It trumpets "diversity" but squashes independent thinking (the essence of political correctness). It's anti-war but pro-military.

"And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future -- so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East. "

Given my preoccupations, this is the line that galls me the most, since it indicates so starkly how clueless Kerry is about this country's foremost challenge. The truth is that nothing on earth will allow Americans to continue living the way we have the past fifty years. We're not going to become "energy independent" -- certainly not before the hardships of the global oil peak kick in. We're not going to retrofit the US car fleet and all its accessory services to a fuel other than gasoline -- certainly not hydrogen, if that's what Kerry is thinking. We'll be lucky if the economic meltdown of suburbia doesn't tear this nation apart. In short, Kerry is blowing smoke up America's ass.

The Republican right really needs to be taught a harsh lesson. They've sold the United States to a claque of corporate swine. WalMart. Archer Daniels Midland. Enron. The Republicans have acted like a predatory company using the tactics of hostile takeover to plunder the assets of a valuable aquisition (the United States). The Republicans ought to be judged and punished for it.

Kerry shows no awareness of what this country is up against. The party that produced him has become a kindergarten of whiners, lost in a bawl of childish peeving. It has no recognition of its opponent's real errors and misfeasances, because the Democrats are so intolerant of independent thought that they've allowed the Republicans to do their thinking for them for twenty years.

Want a real opposition platform? Okay, here it is:
-- Do everything possible to prepare this country for a lower energy future.
-- Begin at once to plan a new generation of nuclear generation plants.
-- Begin at once the rehabilitation of the national railroads.
-- End all government subsidies for suburban development.
-- End support for corporate agriculture and shift it to small scale farmers.
-- Assign the US military to close the border with Mexico.
-- Reform the immigration laws to reduce the flow of all newcomers.
-- Prepare for an era of asymmetrical warfare.

Comments

[Matt edens]

-Begin at once to plan a new generation of nuclear generation plants.
-- Assign the US military to close the border with Mexico.
-- Reform the immigration laws to reduce the flow of all newcomers.

Doubt those three will go over well with the party.

[aj]

The platform makes sense aside from what Matt already mentions in his comment. Nuclear looks attractive until you realize how dangerous, in the long term, they are, and it clashes with the idea of expecting asymmetrical warfare -- more nuke plants = more possible targets. Lest we forget, the less publicized nature of the beast, even so-called 'depleted' uranium is extremely toxic, as communities that live near weapons subcontractors found out. Unless you build them deep underground in locations far from anything that might be contaminated (water tables, aquifers, underground rivers etc -- on the Moon, maybe?) there will always be an issue with leakage, transportation of fuel and wastes, possible meltdowns, etc.

Why exactly do you say no to immigration? An immigrant from a country with, ahem, a much better public school system than the States might be just the person to help develop the solution to our energy problem. If you really think limiting immigration is necessary, then we must make conditions more attractive for people at home -- by improving living standards abroad with fair trade and slowing global population growth by encouraging family planning -- exactly the opposite of what the rightwing policies have been.

Can we really fault Kerry for what he said in his speech? Do we know for sure that he doesn't know what's going on? Consider the context -- he's rallying the base (and reaching out to interested swing voters) at a convention. Could any candidate really go before the cornfed American populace and declare that the sky was falling -- even if it was -- and expect to win an election? No-one ever rioted for austerity, as they say.

If you think it is important that the national Democratic Party addresses this in their platform, railing about it on the sidelines isn't going to make it so. Get involved with the League of Conservation Voters or the Sierra Club or the Federation of American Scientists. Does the Congress for the New Urbanism have a PAC? Maybe it should. Heck, volunteer with the Kerry campaign. Talk to Kerry himself, as a journalist. Interview him and ask him these tough questions. Volunteer your services as urban policy advisor, if he doesn't have one already.

[Dennis T Cheung]

That's a great platform... if you want to lose an election and be banished. Will the NASCAR Dads and Soccer Mom's of America ever vote for someone like that?

Nonetheless:

"-- Prepare for an era of asymmetrical warfare"

I think we are on that path already.

[David Marshall]

I don't get the willingnes to embrace nuclear energy, a technology whose widespread implementation demands exactly the same concentration of both capital and physical plant as the oil industry, with the additional fallout of a severe toxic waste disposal problem that's never come close to being solved.

Moreover, the vast and bureaucratic scale of such a centralized system of energy production is completely at odds with the localized agrarian economy otherwise envisioned.

If our major economic activities are to be conducted on a model of local self-subsistence, why would we not adopt small-scale energy production as well?

[aj]

David, exactly. Assuming a vast downscaling of energy consumption (and concurrent increase in energy efficiency requirements across the board) there is no reason why any region's energy needs couldn't be satisfied with a flexible mix of solar(heat/photovoltaic), wind, geothermal, biothermal (bacterial heat from decomposing waste), wave/tidal, and hydro, most of it generated near or at the point of use. This eliminates most of the inefficiencies of traditional electricity production, namely losses due to long transmission distances and electrical resistance. And most of the technology is sufficiently simple that maintenance, fabrication and operation of such systems doesn't require you to be, if you pardon the pun, a nuke-you-lar scientist...

The rest of it will involve a lot of other cultural changes. When the (largely subsidized) price of meat and dairy skyrocket alongside the price of fuel, veganism will be patriotic...

[aj]

Jim, I apologize for haranguing you earlier. There's a very good book called "Fire and Ice" by Environics pollster Michael Adams that does much to explain the widening cultural differences between Canadians and Americans: taken over a 10-year period, his polls show the general value structure of Americans drifting towards the kind of Darwinistic apathy and anomie exemplified by games like Grand Theft Auto, while Canadians move towards a form of 'idealistic autonomy' expressed by a social group he calls the New Aquarians -- visionaries, but techno-savvy and pragmatic. You have long complained that readers have called you pessimistic, but perhaps the truth lies in the fact that we approach the same issues with cultural blinders on. Given the Canadian / European model of activist government, we expect that problems of this sort will be regulated by state agencies and our more-responsively structured federal governments. Americans have come not to expect their votes to translate into anything real in terms of policies or local effects, as there's simply too many layers of entrenched interests to navigate. I'm not saying our system is free of corruption -- it certainly isn't -- but strong, majority governments in a parliamentary system have both incentive to perform (or they lose power) and the mandate to do so. Compare this to the fragmented US system where a bill must jump between the hoops of Congress, Senate, Executive and usually a test case in the Supreme Court, over possibly several years, before effective change is made.

So when we seem more optimistic about the possibilities for change, it's because we live in societies that are empowered to change, while maintaining 'peace, order and good government' for the most part.

[Dave!]

While I don't disagree with you in principle, I disagree with you in practice. The bottom line is that there are not more conservatives in America than liberals. There are not more liberals in America than conservatives. The _vast_ majority of Americans are complacently in the middle. And telling America what it *really* needs to be told (that we're screwed as far as energy goes, unless we start making some tough choices) is a sure fire way to lose an election. Period. Is it right? Hell no! Is it true? Absolutely. Like they say, politics is local. You can tell the awful, hard truth on a local scale, and still be successful. But on a national scale, that simply won't fly. You have to speak in broad, almost undefinable terms, and you have to water down positions to make the palatable to the *majority*. C'est la vie. I'd still rather have a watered down liberal at the helm than a watered down conservative.

[Marty Heyman]

Well, he's not as good as Jimmy Carter ... and not much less boring ... and a bunch better than the incumbent

[Gerard Van der Leun]

Well, Jim, I might say you're a dreamer,
but you're not the only one. In fact, you are, at least here, one of nine.

It will be sad to see Bush simply blow Kerry and the Democratic Party to little oozing gobs of dead brain matter, but after the last four years nobody can say they didn't have it coming.

[scottbp]

I like your platform, most of it makes sense.
Of course nuclear power will not last all that much longer than oil, but it will buy some time. Especially if used in conjunction with all the localised forms of energy production mentioned in the comments above.
Time for research, space research, fusion research, and a more measured change in the lifestyle of the west. Maybe buy enough time to get some of that oil from mars. That is why they are looking for evidence of past water there right?
As for Nuclear power being dangerous... the very nasty leftovers from today will be worth 100 times it's weight in diamonds 30 or 40 years from now once people figure out how to best use it and once the uranium starts to look pretty thin on the ground.
Of course I still imagine food riots are more likely first.

[BluCrystl]

Nuclear fission power, for peacetime purposes, is absolutely, unequivocally, obsolete. Nuclear fusion power, for peacetime purposes, after fifty + years of research, has not even begun to get off the ground with no firm predictions that it ever will.