The View From a Distance
I’m an American, born a few miles from where the Beach Boys first harmonized; familiar with the hills of Arkansas, the cornfields of Western Nebraska (don’t try to eat it–it’s feed corn), the waterways of Maryland and the pageantry of an Oklahoma Sooners football game.
But these days I only get back to the U.S. once or twice a year. Maybe that makes me love the place more. The people are open and generally helpful, the supermarkets are filled with more stuff than I can fathom and the system works.
It really does. There’s room for improvement, sure. And the fact that Americans are currently engaged in a muscular debate about the correct way to align that system is good news.
Here in Hong Kong, they are also having elections. On Sunday hundreds of thousands of people will go to the polls to select representatives to our local legislature. But they won’t be electing a chief executive. They’re not allowed to. China wants to make sure that the limited democracy in Hong Kong doesn’t get out of hand, so they only allow a few hundred Friends of Beijing to choose Hong Kong’s leader. Even then, things sometimes don’t follow the Chinese game plan. This year, the wrong guy wound up winning,
Hey, that’s what happens when you let human beings have a choice.
Americans have been choosing leaders and tinkering with their system for more than 200 years. Although some people like to pretend that the Constitution was handed down from a mountaintop, it’s been amended on a regular basis and our system of government has frequently been overhauled, too. This creates friction, because Americans never agree on exactly the best way to govern their country.
This, I think, is also a good thing. It often seems that the system is broken but it never is. Just needs a tune-up. This year, despite the hollow rhetoric and vicious lies, there are some real issues to be determined. This is healthy. And if the meanness of the campaign seems to have reached an all-time low, remember that we’ve actually gone much lower in the past.
1828 is often described as the nastiest election in the history of our republic. Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory,” was accused of being an adulterer. His opponent, John Quincy Adams, pretended that he was above this unseemly conflict, even as his campaign accused Jackson of drunkenness, treason, murder and cockfighting. Jackson’s supporters accused Adams of being a pimp for the Russian czar and spending public funds on a billiard table for his home.
The Adams family was no stranger to political muckraking. JQ’s dad, John Adams, slugged it out with Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Adams was the incumbent president and Jefferson was his vice-president. That would be a little like Dick Cheney challenging George W. Bush in 2004, although no one would mistake Cheney and Bush for Adams and Jefferson. Interestingly, Jefferson was the leader of the Democratic-Republican party. Soon after he won the election, Jefferson’s vice president shot and killed a political enemy in a duel.
See, modern politics suddenly seems more civilized and genteel. No one has yet to accuse either of the candidates of being a cross-dresser, as Martin Van Buren was. He survived those accusations and went on to become one of the least-rememebered presidents in American history. Also, drunk people will not be allowed to attend the debates between Romney and Obama, and the audience will not be allowed to throw vegetables, both of which were common when Abe Lincoln held his celebrated debates.
Although partisan politics has reached a crescendo, the American public is presented with two distinct concepts of the role and nature of the government if they can sift through the rhetoric and falsehoods–and I think they can.
This is the way it should be. It might not feel healthy (sometimes the feeling is more akin to queasiness) but it’s a sign of a vibrant democracy when the voters can examine, discuss and debate how their republic should be organized and where it’s going. I’ve been around long enough to witness a few of these debates, and I also remember times (late 70’s, early 90’s) when America was written off as a has-been power, only to rebound with innovation and purpose.
It will happen again. That’s how I see things from my viewpoint far away. And yes, I will be voting.
petermaize 