(DV) Weisser: Dewey Defeats Truman

Current Campaign Comedy
Dewey Defeats Truman
by Mikel Weisser
www.dissidentvoice.org
October 31, 2004

Some said if the Boston Red Sox were to win the World Series that John Kerry would win the election on their coattails. So I waited to see how the series went before writing this, but I can’t wait till after the election to write something to affect your vote in it. Of course, if I haven’t yet convinced you not to vote for Bush, this last little notice probably won’t do it, but here goes.

I could easily talk about the latest outrage: the munitions dump at Al Qaqaa that we ignored in the Iraq invasion where 380 tons of explosives disappeared back in April of 2003 and the fact that the Bush administration tried to keep quiet that their incompetence directly led to the bombs that have now killed over 1100 US soldiers. Oh there are plenty of reasons to resist BushCo.

In these last few months there have been hundreds perhaps thousands of very well reasoned and documented arguments against re-electing Bush. There is of course the massive “One Thousand Reasons” list which is both a book and a website. More recently, and more manageably, Maureen Farrell’s “101 Points to Ponder” at Buzzflash.com offers an overwhelmingly complete and annotated chronological indictment of Bush’s bad behavior. But in the space of 750 words I can’t squeeze in a thousand or even one hundred reasons, so here’s one. You have heard Bush compared to everyone from George Washington to Adolph Hitler. So, for the sake of argument, let’s consider the possibility that George W. is the Devil himself and if you vote to prevent his re-election, that vote could be the one that saves the world.

What do you think? Has the world come to the end of times? It is a decidedly Christian fear, and here in the United States there are a lot of Christians. More than three quarters of Americans call ourselves Christian, a third believe that the bible can be taken literally and a similar third contend that current news events somehow relate to the Christian mythology of the end of the world. A quick check of the Internet shows over one hundred thousand hits linking Bush and Armageddon. One of the better written articles is Grist Magazine’s “The Godly Must Be Crazy” by Glenn Scherer, about the doomsday theology of the Religious Right, and the fact that “231 US legislators and President Bush himself” are backed by people who believe that the world is coming to an end and it’s America job to make it happen.

Since only one person on the planet has the power to self-fulfill Armageddon prophecies, I believe the person who holds that office should be committed to working against such a thing, not working to hasten it. Please understand, I am not condemning Bush because he claims to be a Christian. I am opposed to him because he acts the opposite. I am a Christian myself, which means I try to do unto my neighbor as I want done unto myself and do not preemptively throw a war on him because of what he might do. It means I don’t value mammon more than the many who suffer, so I give to the poor and not the rich. It means I don’t make it my policy to lie, or deny, or mislead to get what I want. And mostly it means I don’t plot the murder of innocent thousands and the destruction of their homeland to get even with one man.

But I guess I’m not like every Christian. Millions of Americans awake each day with a taste for fire and brimstone. After all, for some Christians, the idea of the apocalypse offers strange comfort: all those "evil-doers" in the world, the Saddams, the Bin Ladens, those pesky UN creeps all will be cast into the lake of fire like they've had coming for so damned long. Then the right religious Christians will have their righteous rears whisked away and get to live in paradise forever with 49 virgins or something like that. And while that may all sound cool, I don't believe it is a good enough reason to justify the violence of, say, crashing airplanes into buildings, much less destroying the whole freaking planet. But then personally, unlike some Christians, I am disinclined to follow the voice of destruction, even if it comes from a Burning Bush.

Mikel Weisser teaches social studies and poetry on the West Coast of Arizona. He can be reached at: weisser@citlink.net