Prague Journal

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

We didn’t lose any sleep over the election results, which were not final even in the morning here. But, as we had feared, Florida and Ohio did not embrace Kerry (nor did Colorado) and by 5 p.m. (11 a.m. EST) Kerry called Bush to concede and one of the most expensive and bitterly contested races on record was over. So, another four years of the Bush administration. Too bad. America will survive, but lots of innocents are being slaughtered because of Bush’s war in Iraq. There’s a book What’s the Matter with Kansas that asks why, despite the fact that Bush’s policies have hurt them the most, the struggling ranchers and farmers in the Great Plains have overwhelming supported Bush. Jason Epstein, writing for The New York Times Review of Books (October 7, 2004), attributes the Republican-right shift to the “strategy of culture war to maintain their power as previous tribal and religious orthodoxies have done throughout human history.” Quoting from Epstein’s review, author Thomas Frank claims that the Republicans are exploiting the “democratic tradition of pragmatic, nonideological idealism, denounced as secular humanism” and paints America as “a panorama of madness and delusion…of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys … deliver[ing] up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life [and] transform their region into a “rust-belt,” [and] strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.” As Epstein astutely acknowledges, “Money is the mother’s milk of American politics…political money is raised in exchanged for political favors, often against the public interest.”
Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, the Communist party is gaining ground, as people fear that their pensions and healthcare will be compromised under an increasingly capitalistic, free-market system. "According to former dissident Petr Uhl, voters are no longer so responsive to anti-communist messages. “Many people are more interested in the CP's critique of the anti-social policies of the British Labour Party and German social democrats, which the Czech social democrats are trying to import and support for Bush during the war against Iraq. Many people, including non-Communists, look at the CP, with its programme and its internal functioning and consider it as a more left wing, more social and even more democratic alternative to the Social Democrats...The pensioners who vote Communist are not just motivated by nostalgia for the “grey certainties” of the previous regime, but by the daily humiliation of living on an inadequate pension. The Roma [gypsy] minority, facing 90% unemployment, residential segregation and virulent racism from the majority population, vote Communist not just because “in the old days, everybody had a job and an apartment” but because, quite simply, the CP is the parliamentary party with the strongest record of voting against privatisations and social security cuts, and in favour of spending on health, education and poverty-reduction." http://www.3bh.org.uk/IV/Issues/2004/IV360/IV360%2005.htm In the June 2002 elections, the Communist party received 18.5% of the vote for the Czech Republic's Chamber of Deputies. This made them the third placed party with 41 deputies. In 2004, the communist party won 6 of 24 seats, placing second to the conservative Social Democrats (ODS).
Today was permeated with political discussions – not only among the Americans here. All the Czechs I know are also shaking their heads at the American electorate. As I was walking through the fruit market with Aaron Ritter, a friend of my nephew in San Diego, we ran into some young Americans from Los Angeles, and shared updates as we knew them and commiserated about the foregone eventuality. Aaron is a student at UC-Santa Barbara, studying in Spain this fall. He’s taking every opportunity he can to travel around Europe before he returns to the states in December. He had already taken the standard tours of the center and of the Jewish Quarter, so the two of us walked around town to some of the places he had not yet seen. I took him to the fruit market square, the National Theater, the Paris Hotel and the Municipal House, and also to Tančící dům, the “Dancing House,” (also called “Ginger and Fred”), Frank Gehry's tribute to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_n1202_v201/ai_20757187

posted by JWinn @ 11:21 AM