Why I remain uncommitted...

Or, dancing with calaveras on the mesa...

A veranda in Taos where the Tiwa Indians, Hispanos and calaveras have watched with bemused impunity the histrionics of United States electoral politics for many centuries…

I’ve covered four presidential election cycles, beginning with Reagan/Carter.  Politics is in my blood, a pulsing protein in my DNA. For a time my family shared a back fence in Alexandria, Virginia, with Jerry Ford.  Strom Thurmond lived on the corner and Justice Douglas - a heroic figure to me - lived a block further down. You have to love a Supreme Court justice who mows his own grass. That neighborhood was nothing if not political. My dad walked on campus many evenings with Werner VonBraun.

When I was a kid we escaped a coups in LaPaz, Bolivia, by driving over the mountains to Lima where we stayed with friends of my parents, a couple who met after the liberation of Dachau.  They were beautiful people, Jim and Edith.  It was the first time I saw numbers tattooed in flesh.

Dad joined Ivan Illich and other theologs when they launched Liberation Theology in Cuernavaca, Mexico in the 1960s.  Liberation Theology swept through Latin America and brought on the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 70s and 80s.  Jesuits were slaughtered by rightwing death squads after Bishop Romero embraced Liberation Theology in San Salvador.  I had to go and see/cover the aftermath of what my dad had been involved in twenty years before.  As my colleague, Joan Didion, noted in the New York Times Magazine, “terror was the given of the place.”  The crushing apathy I encountered back in the states, when I returned, was a terror of a different kind.  It bristled with the portents of a society unplugged, detached, disassociated from itself and the world, as if everybody went to Disneyland. That’s when I first fully appreciated the deep peril facing democracy in America.  In the perennial contest between principle and capital, principles get shredded to confetti and capital prevails to rule.

In my middle years I grew to detest religion and ethnic identification for the roles they played in that dynamic.  I covered conflicts in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and watched them unfold elsewhere. The death and brutality in every one seemed to be driven by religion and ethnic identity.  The great documentary work by Salgado, the Brazilian photojournalist, reinforced this impression, ten fold. He nearly lost his mind looking through the viewfinder.

These things - religion and ethnic identity - held societies together many centuries ago.  Today, they rip them apart.  Right wing governments are ascendant around the world.  They ride to the top in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel and elsewhere on the antipathy grown and amplified by ethnic and religious divisions.  Two centuries ago, James Madison came around to the view that all religions were poison in a world struggling to preserve the enlightenment era principles of liberalism: tolerance, diversity, plurality.  However, banishing religions in the 18th century was neither feasible nor desirable. He hoped that one day the moment of desires would arrive. An anonymous rabbi put it this way: “It matters not what religion you are a part of so long as you’re ashamed of it.” I agree with him. I agree with Madison.  Any future worth living will be free of religiosity and ethnic identities.  Until all of us identify as members of one human family we are doomed to cue up dehumanizing battles over ethnicity.

When the Democratic convention in Chicago was over in August, the bubble of euphoria lifted up dispirited millions.  I told friends to avoid the intoxication of the froth and check back in three weeks to a month.  Then they would see a clearer picture, the lay of the land, how this election was shaping up in the clubhouse turn.  The horses are now in view and racing to a photo finish. I steadfastly resist surrendering to the notion that our grand experiment in representative democracy has disintegrated into a binary conundrum in a race to a bottom where no one wins.

The primary candidates at the top of my ballot are almost irrelevant to the battle being waged in this country (and in many others).  They are proxies for the real war. White nationalism and the evangelical politics of grievance is the pre-civil war vestige that resides an inch beneath the wrought surface of this troubled society. It is the mirror image of the nationalist movement in Germany, of Zionism in Israel, of nationalism in Russia and elsewhere.  As I’ve written in books and in many publications, Zionism is another label for the tyranny of pernicious human wastes and brutality that followed the rise of Manifest Destiny in the United States the 1840s.  As bad as these modern manifestations are, we seem incapable as a species of emancipating ourselves from the very ideologies that are killing us and making us strangers to each other.

So, I watch the madness in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Taiwan, unfold from a distance knowing that the true hell awaiting mankind is right around the corner.  Climate chaos is going to unleash massive waves of human migration and dislocation around the world.  The turmoil that is already written but as yet unseen resides in the realm of the unimaginable. To put it in context, I noted - for what its worth - in the Seattle Times, “The current plan is to conduct 8 billion funerals over the next 70 years and to turn the devastation wrought in our lifetimes over to 9 billion people who aren’t here yet.”

I see the child weeping for his lost family in the rubble of Gaza, his head rocked back in a searing flash of agony, and I feel the tremors in the shoulders of the child I held in the refugee camp in Soyopango, El Salvador.  And I know, in the face of all other uncertainties and mindless cruelties, that the karmic wheel is coming around. There’s no stopping it, now, and neither of the candidates for the presidency has articulated a vision that promises a reprieve from that terminal vortex, from that event horizon. What they promise - each in his or her own way - is more of the same, the unhinged fascism of Donald Trump, and the closet Zionism of Kamala Harris. A Democratic House will hobble Donald Trump’s fascist madness, and a Republican Senate and hostile Supreme Court will stymie Harris’ loftiest ambitions.

Meanwhile, here on the mesa where the Tiwa and Hispano populations have watched the electoral circus of the United States for centuries, we dance with the calaveras on the mesa to music made by fiddles and guitars, and the beat goes on…