Apocalyptic Democracy

Life goes on, long after the pain of the election is gone

Brian Doherty | November 11, 2004

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Thus, the level of panicked distress from progressives these days is both confusing and unseemly. A smart recent book by Boston University Professor Loren J. Samons, What's Wrong with Democracy: From Athenian Practice to American Worship, sheds some light on why a mere single election result can generate such panic: It touches on sacred recesses of what has become a civic religion, and implies that the spirits you wish to propitiate through the act of electoral participation have abandoned you, taking their blessings to your enemies.

Samons' book takes a delightfully jaundiced look at what our Athenian forefathers, inventors of the most-citizens-can-vote (and can pay themselves off in doing so) polity actually achieved with that system. Mostly, he argues, they created a big mess, waged a lot of useless imperialistic wars, and eventually ruined the entire civilization. As he points out, we should not honor Athens for its early experiments with democracy but for its literary and cultural achievements.

But our modern obsession with democracy makes the voice of the people (as expressed by the 50 to 60 percent who bother to vote) seem the Holy Voice of America. Even though Bush only pulled a 3 percent margin over Kerry, the winner-take-all aspect of our two-party system makes people feel, unjustly, that the values of the winner have swept the nation. But that isn't true.

More importantly, these results have little, ultimately, to do with the warp and woof of life as it is lived by actual Americans, as opposed to those who let their minds be violently colonized by TV news and radio and political blogs and magazines. The fact is, most Americans don't know much about public policy—which is ultimately a rational choice for them, not some sin, because most of them don't care that much about it, and usually couldn't do much to affect it on the individual level even if they did.

Only those who, haunted by the ghosts of Holy Athens, associate civic duty and service to polis with all virtue, should see that as a bad thing. America, after all, is still a great place. We've got, as Chuck Berry (one of the great things about America) pointed out, hamburgers sizzling on open grills night and day, jukebox jumping with records, and pretty much anything else you want, right here in the USA.

For example, consider my own post-election ritual. I went on tour with an absurdist touring cabaret, 25 or so of us in a converted Green Tortoise bus going from San Francisco to Portland and Seattle and back. Once, at a gas station off the 5 somewhere north of San Fran, a small town cop circled us for a while suspiciously while we gassed up, but we were otherwise unhassled. No internal passports, no one asked for our papers. We entered freely into deals with sellers of diesel, lodging, sandwiches, and beer. We met friendly, amusing, and interesting people, hundreds of whom paid $7 to watch us amuse ourselves with a series of lunatic acts playing hard-but-fair with decades of America's indigenous cheap medicine show, sideshow, and musical traditions.

We visited old waterworks in Seattle and museums of Asian culture. We stood on a hill near the Gasworks in Seattle, watching seaplanes land and private sailboats glide and with some inexpensive imported Japanese keyboard technology enjoyed an impromptu singalong of some classic American popular song from the '20s to the '60s while rolling around on grassy hills. (A plaque at the Gasworks informed us, grimly, that even though we can now produce certain coal fuels synthetically, this doesn't mean it's OK for men not to serve in the military. Really.)

We had snowball fights near Mt. Shasta. We bought six-shot espresso drinks and Italian sodas with cream near Grant's Pass, Oregon, just after sunrise. We were, among others, an old Japanese man obsessed with American cowboy song, a young American woman raised by urban artists riffing on '80s dance styles, a former Clinton White House press worker, a German videographer, an expert card trickster from the Midwest, a central figure in a comedic cult religion, a hard-driving punk rock used car salesman turned barkeep, an aging Australian blue heeler, and one cranky libertarian journalist.

We all got along swimmingly along the highways and byways of this great land. Hardly any of us mentioned the election. (I did get an opportunity to do a version of my why I don't vote rap, but in the spirit of friendly bantering camaraderie, not enemy-making ideological conflict) It was sweet, and fun, and gave me many of those brilliant and touching and intense moments that make life seem like a good idea.

Only in America? I don't know, but in America, yes, whoever is president. We are rich, richer than any people in history. (Yes, even most of our poor.) The possibilities of a joyful life are all around us. I say sincerely to people whose political ideologies I find sometimes horrifying: it's a damn shame to let something like the results of an election ruin your chance to enjoy the myriad possibilities of life—real life, not political life—in these United States.