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.