That’s the night that the lights went out in Georgia
That’s the night that they killed an innocent man.
Well, don’t trust your soul to no backwoods, southern lawyer
‘Cos the judge in the town’s got blood stains on his hands.

— Written by Bobby Russell, recorded by Vicki Lawrence in 1973

I used to think that the US was a deeply religious country; so much so that its theocratic fundamentalism distorted every aspect of its crazed political agenda. Well, that last part is still true. But no one could engage in the kind of rampage of sadistic, destructive behavior in which our nation is engaged without the belief that there is no accounting, no consequence — in short, that there is no hell.

When the state of Georgia murdered Troy Davis on Wednesday, it brought condemnation from around the world. This act of state-sanctioned murder also brought into focus the death grip of moral certainty which now has a stranglehold on the US, even in the face of a world which increasingly sees it as morally bankrupt. But a society as thoroughly racist as the US is just as thoroughly determined, perhaps paradoxically — and perhaps not — to deny, ignore and deflect criticism that would raise any doubt, lest the festering sore of its legacy be provoked and proceed to sepsis.

Like a cornered liar or a thief with a guilty conscience, the righteous executioners must continue to see themselves as upholding justice, democracy, human rights — whatever the good guys do — even when, no, especially when, their crazed and horrific actions bring disastrous consequences for those around them. It is no surprise, then, that Barack Obama thought it inappropriate to intervene in the Davis case while simultaneously trying vigorously to blunt the effort for Palestinian self-determination (could Hugo Chavez still smell the sulphur?). Nor could he or any in the elitosphere be expected to see the irony of his disinterest in Georgia’s killing a black man while he crowed to the UN about “liberating” Libya, his much vaunted and bombastic rhetoric empty except for the contempt it showed for the Libyan people, the black segment of which is now at the mercy of the rapist racists of the NTC while Obama and his Euromercenary allies gladhand each other and twist the arm of any who dare disagree.

This sort of irony just can’t be scripted. Or, as Bart Simpson once famously said, “the ironing is delicous.” But irony is apparently dead, as the banksters, swindlers, liars and oligarchs who bankrolled Obama’s election to the tune of 700 million dollars know all too well. And boy, did they get their money’s worth. Is it even possible to tailor a more perfect stooge for the job of pressing ahead with the Project for a New American Century and all the other tasks of empire with which the US president must be comfortable in order to keep his job? In the words of Zippy the Pinhead, “is dis a system??”

As in Georgia, there will be no remorse, no self-doubt, no awareness of what the rest of the world sees. Full steam ahead. And why should there be? The Peace Prize bestowed by the dynamite-inventing Nobel family (maybe irony died a lot longer ago than I thought) gave Obama carte blanche to pursue unfettered the dreams of empire, peddling old snake oil in new bottles to a gullible public that foolishly gave him the benefit of the doubt. Honey, the Chinese intern hopelessly in love with Doonesbury’s Duke, once went to, of all people, Henry Kissinger for some much needed advice. How, she wondered, could she reconcile her country’s revolutionary ideals with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution? Kissinger demurs: “Mao did what he had to do in the face of the Soviet threat. To counter the same threat, I advised Nixon to invade Cambodia,  resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians! But you don’t see me moping around…” “Easy for you to say, Professor,” Honey retorts. “You have your Peace Prize to fall back on.” The more things change…

And true to form, leaders given an unearned benefit of the doubt are quick and deep to disappoint by any means necessary, throwing one yet another actual body under the doubt bus whose undercarriage is now clogged with the figurative bodies of Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson and so many others. Naturally, it is just this benefit of the doubt that is denied to Troy Davis and so many like him. In fact, while their oppressors kill, imprison, invade, impoverish and lay waste with impunity and moral certainty, the Troy Davises of the world are punished for not expressing enough self-doubt, lest they be tagged with the most racist of all labels – uppity.

More than anything else, Troy was killed for being uppity, for not playing the game. The system’s final victory over the soul is to force it to submit. Orwell’s Room 101 was designed to do just that, to inflict such psychic pain that Winston Smith would cry ‘Do it to Julia!’ and eventually, of course, to love Big Brother. Troy denied them this victory. The day after the Supreme Court finally decided there was absolutely nothing unsettling about the Davis case, the Georgia Board of Pardons granted clemency to a white man who actually killed someone — admittedly shot him and beat him to death with a paint can. But unlike Davis, who stubbornly held to his uppity claim of innocence, the white fella showed remorse, good,  Christian, tear-jerking, self-reforming remorse. Nothing a parole board loves more; we are, after all, aren’t we, as David Duke and Evan Mecham dreamed, a Great White Christian Nation?

Perhaps it is better to have some clarity, to have issues defined in terms so black and white (pun intended — help me out here, people! I’m trying to breathe some life back into this irony thing). A lot of the work is already done for us, as capitalism and empire creak under the enormous weight of their own internal contradictions. The House of Cards is falling, and the guilty are running for the exits, just as they did at the UN in “protest” of Ahmedinejad’s speech. Obama’s presidency is doomed, thank god, and will be little mourned. End It, Don’t Mend it, to paraphrase Senator Yoda aka The Hobbit aka the horrible little man, Joe Lieberman. Maybe we can put aside Progressive Internationalism — what those who claim to be progressives call the imperial killing of Iraqis, Pakistanis, Libyans, and soon, Syrians and Iranians if they have their way — and get back to good old Full Metal Spectrum Jacket Dominance, Syndrome, -itis, or whatever empire’s new label will be. Liberals can still be the useful idiots they are so good at being, but this time on our side instead of in service to empire and full-throttle-us capitalism.

And in the background, we can follow the advice of Troy Davis and the parting words of Joe Hill and Mother Jones: Don’t mourn, organize. Uppity is all we know, and there is no time like the present to push back against the powers who inculcate in us such paralyzing self-doubt while exercising absolutely none as they arrogantly plunder and take everything to which they feel entitled. This is a classic tool of empire, satirized in the old Irish revolutionary standard God Bless England. The kids like it for its catchy nonsense refrain, “Whack fol the diddle o the die do day,” but its true message is in the verses:

When we were savage, fierce and wild/ She came as a mother to her child/Gently raised us from the slime/ Kept our hands from hellish crime/ And she sent us to heaven in her own good time!/  Whack fol the diddle o the die do day.

As the Third World awakens and sheds this slavelike moniker (we could never really figure out what the hell it meant anyway), it sloughs off the equally belittling skins of the undeveloped, underdeveloped, developing, emerging, and becomes the Global South. The world’s people are increasingly aware — much more so than their US counterparts for sure — of who is on their side and who is not. The Europeans shed crocodile tears over Troy Davis and tut-tut their disapproval of a violent, racist America, while their pilots continue to drop bombs on Libya and wherever the imperial agenda next dictates, bringing the New Democracy of One Person, One Bomb to an African, Arab or Muslim country near you! Who knows, in the next installment they may be as prolific as in Libya, where their 30,000 bombs killed 60,000 people, or two people per bomb. See, under capitalism, even democracy expands in each fiscal quarter. Whack fol the diddle o the die do day….

But that’s not what the game is about. It is apparently about Americans trying to act civil with their partners in crime amidst the wreckage they have made of the world, basking in the smooth leather-and-dark-wood motif among the venerable symbols of Democracy in Action. That’s probably why when upstart Congressman Dennis Kucinich vowed to introduce over 50 Articles of Impeachment against the President today, of all days, senior members of his own party took him aside and explained that this just isn’t how things are done. It is a ludicrous spectacle, this desperate reach for decorum once we have drenched the world in napalm, white phosphorous, agent orange and depleted uranium. Makes putting lipstick on a pig seem an exercise in refinement.

I once had a history textbook in high school called The American Pageant. It makes me smile thinking how dead on the publishers were to have chosen such a title. The whole pageant is so starkly drawn, and at the same time so richly layered, that it strains one’s creative capacity to explain it. People look at it from different angles, from inside and out, trying to judge from the light it refracts just what is going on. It is garish, like a Moliere play, and complex, like a well-aged cheese — and just as ripe.

And as Bush slips onto the ash heap of history, the pageant remains. War crimes forgotten, Americans swarm to self-heal like that cool liquid metal suit in Terminator II, rushing headlong toward the next new thing that will make it all better. Europeans’ attempts to grasp it are no less fumbling than Americans’ own attempt to make sense of it, though their prism differs. Talking to each is like changing the lens on a microscope, or on that huge contraption the eye doctor uses to see which magnification is best: better…or worse? Better…or worse? As he cycles through a range of different lenses. It is fascinating how American politics looks to people from inside and out, and always interesting to toggle between the two.

In response to a recent article I wrote about Clinton and Obama and the lack of any meaningful debate, an Italian friend reacted with confusion: “Don’t they both represent the party’s policy? The way I am perceiving it from Italy, is that this is a huge show and as such it is perfectly normal that no actual debate is taking place between the candidates.” Bingo. A domestic observer responded by drawing the analogy with professional wrestling: it looks like a titanic struggle, but it’s all fake. The difference is that the WWF has finally admitted it and moved on.

Better . . . or worse? Many Americans desperately want to believe that their choice is a real one, and that the differences between the candidates are stark enough to care about. In a discussion with a college friend who hotly disputed my somewhat irreverent notion that Clinton and Obama were “twin cheeks on the same fat corporate ass,” I conceded that there may indeed be differences if one wanted to find them. It’s a matter of scale, I said, which is where I came up with the magnification analogy. Better . . . or worse?

The standard line is that, since Bush is a lame duck, his State of the Union, perhaps the least watched pageant in history outside the political elites and c-span junkies, is completely meaningless. But here again, the focus fades in and out depending on your magnification. An Endangered Species called Liberal Democrats (in the US sense, not in the European sense — this might be like Social Democrats or hard core Labourites) is still wrestling with the idea that if they just do x or y, then their fortunes will increase. The rains will come back, the valley will bloom, and they will thunder across the land in the herds they once commanded.

In a sort of Battered Spouse Syndrome, liberals in particular feel that the party that has beaten them into submission will somehow still love them if only this or that and things might turn around if only. That’s why it’s so important to zoom in, to change the lens as it were, and find the right magnification to see what it is they are looking for. The truth in theory is that, in this two-party duopoly, other candidates might vie to broach subjects beyond the accepted discussion, outside the field of vision of the microscope’s lens. Better . . . or worse? But in fact, anyone who pursues crazy ideas, like single payer health care, or cutting the war budget — if in fact anyone dares to do so — these candidates are culled quickly, like noxious weeds, so that the focus can remain in the field of vision.

And so the remaining candidates, and eventually the parties themselves, are imbued with qualities and differences they lack in a different magnification. So newness takes the place of substantive change. And there is some point to it, in a limited sort of way. Spring cleaning always makes the place feel a bit brighter, even if the sherrif is right around the corner with the eviction notice. And the greater assumption is that Americans, tired of the war and the wreckage of the last eight years, will opt for regime change. But here again, zooming out shows that Bush is not quite as lame a duck as one might think.

Obama may be preferable precisely because he is less known, a fresher face, so to speak. There is a wishful thinking, as if it’s all some Broadway production of Guys and Dolls (Marry the man today/and change his ways tomorrow) that electeds will somehow govern from a place other than the one they campaign from. This has arguably happened exactly twice in US history, with relevance to our current predicament: FDR & LBJ. Both were overcome by enormous crises that forced their hand, and LBJ had Kennedys killer(s) to thank besides. It’s nice for someone to line up with historical forces instead of just ripping off their agenda from real radicals, but they tend to operate irrespective of party or ideology. It was Eisenhower who gave the Little Rock Nine the ride to school, for christ’s sake, not to mention giving us Earl Warren. And Tricky Dick signed the biggest child welfare bill in history.

On some level, Americans are aware of how awful their government has been, and are anxious to use even their broken system to correct its course. Of course you can find differences if you want to. It’s really a matter of scale, like looking with the naked eye vs. a low-power microscope. Better…or worse..? Obama can’t and won’t change the equation, but Americans hope he will. Choosing conservative Senator Joe Lieberman as his mentor, not to mention raising funds for him to beat the more liberal Ned Lamont in his own district, his idiotic praise for Reagan, waffling on NAFTA, single payer health care and the war…not the best tea leaves to be reading from. And in a recent letter to the UN ambassador, he fully backed a continuation of American obstructionist efforts to blunt international condemnation of Israel’s Gaza blockade. He’s a bomber, a triangulator and an exceptionalist, just like Hillary — and everyone else, for that matter. The neocons’ and the neoliberals’ agenda dovetails on virtually every level with different labels (Full Spectrum Dominance instead of Progressive Internationalism). The edges will be smoothed out–no more “abstinence only” crap to hinder international aid, for example, but the framework will be intact–corporations writing their own laws, no real change in US aggression in the Middle East, etc.

And domestically, Clinton’s agenda will continue: more black men in jail, growing wealth disparity — on the course it was on well before Bush, absent a huge and unprecedented change. This will come not because Americans elect Obama (or be forestalled if they elect McCain, for that matter) but because the collapse will be so complete that it will necessitate unintended and unwanted change by the elites. Believe me, I’m not hoping for this collapse — we have a lot to lose, personally. But it is the only small comfort as the economy circles the drain: I can’t get a loan? Big fucking deal — neither can anyone else! Bush’s veiled concession to this panic, “at kitchen tables across our country, there is concern about our economic future,” shows how out-of-the-loop he is, like his father before him. True to form, Democrats joined forces with him to craft a stimulus package that ignores the people who will be most affected by the coming storm. And so we come full circle.

The one quality almost no candidate in US politics can shake is also one no foreigners seem to miss, and represents the sharpest distinction in focus between home and abroad. Virtually every candidate for office worships, in one way or another, at the shrine of American Exceptionalism. For those who propose change, the greatest country on earth can certainly show compassion, generosity, blah blah blah. For those who stay the course, well — enough said there: we own the world. Almost no one will slip the trance of Americans’ belief in their own greatness long enough simply to suggest that we might try to be good at the things we have done so poorly for so long: democracy itself, taking care of our people, being good neighbors, or any of the other metrics of a healthy society.

It is a psychological hold which, if not broken, simply cannot yield change. It is impossible to simultaneously believe in ones own greatness while zooming in on ones own flaws, or zooming out to see how those flaws affect the rest of the world. In an earlier piece, I suggested that there is nothing wrong with hope…but false hope is a war crime. As the lights go black on this State of the Union, I still cling to hope that change will come — I believe that — just not in the form we’re expecting. Stay tuned.

An electorate shocked to its senses—-well, okay, not exactly-—by the 2000 debacle is understandably jittery about how and by whom their votes are counted, though in truth most seem to have given it little thought before or since. But the problem is far deeper than which corporate lobbyist-in-training gets the nod to take on her or his counterpart from other industries’ lobbyists-in-training. It is even deeper than the notion of democracy itself, as sweeping and grandiose as that sounds. A nation so caught up in its own ‘destiny,’ its sense of itself so distorted and self-aggrandizing, can hardly look closely at the building blocks of its alleged ‘greatness’ for fear of confronting the Big Lie of American exceptionalism.

True, the votes in New Hampshire and elsewhere should be accurately counted; there is no excuse for not doing so in a nation which touts its role as the greatest democracy on earth. Suffrage is one of the most elemental components of democracy. Forget for a moment-—just for a moment—-whether the results have any meaning or bearing on the lives of the mass of people. The very least an electorate can expect is that its vote reflects their actual actions in the voting booth.

Much has been made of the discrepancies between handcounted paper ballots and machine counts on optical scanners in the New Hampshire voting. This is, of course, crucial, and should be investigated. But logic blunts the charge absent a control: the two sets of data are measuring different phenomena. It is improbable that a candidate’s share of the vote in a certain group of towns would match that in another group. Why would Clinton or Obama have the same exact support in Goffstown that each had in Portsmouth, for example? Still, the widely varying results merit, at the very least, a thorough review.

Of greater concern in this as in every other election is whether there is a discrepancy between raw exit poll data and reported results. One of the greatest and most cynical assaults on US democracy waged by the blowhard lawyers and lackeys of the GOP in 2000 was the charge, which mostly stuck, that exit polls aren’t reliable. In fact, and in the world at large, they are considered to be more reliable than actual results. I should say reported results: there are no actual results, keeping in mind Stalin’s famous caveat about power resting with those who count the votes, not cast them.

The OCSE, the Carter Center and other world groups consider exit polling data to be the only real check on whether a country is running free and fair elections. Despite the perverse and twisted reasoning of the red-faced James Baker et al (remember that image?—still wakes me up in a cold sweat occasionally), the logic is fairly straightforward. Predictive polling and exit polling are completely different tasks, and it is silly-—not to mention cynical and dangerous—-to conflate the two. In the one instance, the task is inherently pure speculation on an action that has yet to be taken-—even the respondent can’t say with complete certainty whether the response is true or not. Exit polling, on the other hand, is sampling the results of an event that just happened. Absent some mass hypnosis or incredibly complex psy-op campaign, skewing the results on a broad scale is nearly impossible.

But of course, the pundits and the politicians and the pollsters know all this, and have for a very long time. Down to the local city councilor, election officials have long dealt with a substandard and wildly inaccurate patchwork of systems based on what the local authority can afford, and who gets what contract for what technology in what district. Punchcard machines jamming and kicking out ballots were so commonplace that up to 10% of cards went uncounted on a regular basis. The dirty little secret is that US elections suck, pure and simple. Many americans were outraged when international monitors offered to observe the 2004 elections, and when Carter bluntly stated that his organization couldn’t participate because voting in the US didn’t rise to its minimum standards: centralized counting authority with uniform standards, etc.

The real crime is that US voters are led to believe—-and gladly do so-—that their system is not only the best in the world but is above reproach. Such asinine and self-delusional fantasies help to shore up a whole host of other crimes, as delusions of grandeur tend to do. Manifest Destiny made it okay to slaughter indigenous people from coast to coast, just as taming a new continent justified the enslavement of Africans. Saving The World for Democracy made the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima into historical footnotes for generations of students. Our moral superiority over the Soviets not only justified, but necessitated, the militarization of global jihad, not to mention the creeping, nearly complete and unprecedented tyranny of the Military Industrial Complex. And so on. Why would voting be any different when cooked up in this same self-righteous stew?

Of course, it doesn’t fool all Americans. In fact, most are so fed up with the system, or so alienated by it, that they steadfastly decline to vote. The façade of democracy has produced a system utterly unresponsive to the people’s needs. How else could it sustain the insatiable appetite for war, the limitless spending on arms and killing machines, and the subsequent strangling of any local government’s ability to meet people’s most basic infrastructure needs? A potential voting friend, neither active nor particularly motivated politically, put it in surprisingly succinct and stark terms: “I hate to sound like a skeptic, but I don’t hold out much hope for any change. By the time they get to Washington, they’re all so beholden to the people who paid for their campaigns that they have to spend their whole time in office returning the favor.”

American bravado about its democracy is especially galling in the face of most of its own history. Democrats’ timidity in the 2000 sham may stem from its guilt over its own complicity in the deliberate suppression of suffrage. American Apartheid, after all, was the exclusive province of the Democratic Party for nearly a hundred years. I’m reminded of a somewhat sick joke my dad used to tell from the days of the poll tax and the literacy test. An elderly Black gentleman in Birmingham decides to try his hand at voting, only to be rigorously tested on his reading skills by the local thug, no doubt a Democrat. When he read everything in due course, frustrated officials pulled out a copy of The Polish Bugle. They snickered among themselves until the old man said he could read that too. Stunned, the Good Old Boys asked carefully what the headline said. “Ain’t no n***** gonna vote this year in Alabama!” was the would-be voter’s retort. Ah, democracy.

Naturally, the struggle for universal suffrage played an important role in trying to hold American feet to the fire, so to speak. The struggle to hold the society accountable for its racism is ongoing. Every expansion of suffrage in human history has marked a milestone toward the promise of increased freedom and human dignity, and each has come in the face of huge opposition from the elites. But the sad and simple fact is that universal suffrage no longer scares those elites—they have mastered the game. And as Burke said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The focus of the struggle is ever-shifting: new battles loom, and we Ewoks must constantly invent new tools with which to fight the Empire. And until Americans realize that we are not special, or different than other people in the world, our government will, beyond our control, the focus of evil in the modern world, to quote another Servant of Empire. Telling the truth is not cynicism, though I’m sure to be accused of it. True cynicism is the forced collective belief that votes have been counted when they haven’t, and that results matter when they don’t.