Your Move?

W\hen I was a kid, 19 years old in fact, I was convinced of the message in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 SF book, Logan’s Run, was on the money: “Don’t trust anyone over 21.” Chickenshit screenwriter David Zelag Goodman “adapted” the book to a screenplay and raised the termination age to 30 for the 1976 movie and that is about all there is to say about that subject.

However, at that young, energetic, optimistic, stupid and childish age I imagined the world was a lot easier, more simple place to “fix” than it is. I was a microscopic part of the 1968 McCarthy Children’s Crusade, the student campaigners who imagined logic, decency, and compassion would be enough to stop the Vietnam War. We had no idea how oblivious, callous, and vicious our parents—the self-anointed “Greatest Generation”—were but we would find out. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know about our home country and system of government because the history we had been fed in school was pure propaganda and corporate and white power bullshit. A lot of our understanding of physics, psychology, politics, and history could have been corrected with an understanding of “hysteresis”: “the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force." In politics and culture, hysteresis is often accompanied by violent opposition to changes in the cultural “properties.”

Unlike a few of my friends of the time, I did not go to Chicago for the ‘68 Democratic Convention, so I missed out on the Chicago Police Riots. But I did participate in a rally in Dallas that also went bad when the Dallas cops surrounded the park (Lee Park, ironically), barricading the protesters with cop cars bumper-to-bumper around the park, and swarming the place with batons swinging and gas and mace filling the air. Earlier in the day, we’d been pelted with beer cans and trash as we marched (legally) through downtown Dallas, protesting the war and waving our Eugene McCarthy banners high. Between the violent opposition to anti-violence and the Democratic Party’s betrayal of their own convention rules, resulting in the appointment of Hubert Humphry as their loser candidate, I gave up on what passes for a political system for the next 8 years.

In the 1968 election, I wrote in Eugene McCarthy and someone for VP. In the 1972 election, I wrote in McCarthy, again. In 1976, McCarthy ran as an independent and I voted for him, again. And that was the last time I wrote-in or voted for a candidate who had no chance in hell of winning a major political office. And I have voted in every election in my life since.

Recently, I saw a meme from a Rebecca Solnit quote that said, “A vote is not a valentine, you aren't confessing your love for the candidate. It's a chess move for the world you want to live in.” That, in a concise nutshell highlights the problem with independent candidates in a two-party political system. (You can thank Thomas Jefferson for your lack of voting options.) You can pretend to be participating in the system while not contributing to the problem by tossing your vote at a a no-chance-of-winning-anything candidate or you can play the fuckin’ game. This thought goes nicely with the old “Liberals fall in love, conservatives fall in line” truism that too often explains why the left couldn’t get Jesus appointed as Pope while the right could elect corporate shills like Reagan, the Bush’s, or, worst of all, the psychopathic, narcissistic, and demented Donald Trump to President of the United States. If you want to stare in the face of massive failure, the 2016 election/appointment (by the Electoral College) is the penultimate failure of the politics of avoidance.

If you aren’t a chess player, maybe the complexities of democracy and progress are above your head and in a world that was full of competent adults I might advise you to take your fuckin’ valentines and find a cute little clubhouse in which to play with them and the rest of your pipedreams. However, until the robots take over and apply strict logic to every decision every culture might want to make, you’re going to have to grow the fuck up and see if you can pull yourself away from your phone and Twitter/Facebook/TikToc’/blahblah and learn something about how your system works and doesn’t.

A chess game is the perfect simile for voting in a democracy. Consider this game. Let’s say my opening “gambit” is to move my 5th from the left pawn two spaces forward (called “1.e4”) and you realize that is the move Bobby Fischer called the “best by test” and my conservative approach pisses you off. So, your move is to remove your corresponding pawn from the board (exactly like a no-chance-in-hell 3rd party vote). Works for me. I move my knight from g1 to f3, which really irritates you into throwing a wonderful tantrum and you pull your Queen from the board. Now, I’m putting some money into the game and, being the kid you are you take my bet. A move or two later and we’ve got side bets of a vehicle pink slips and a house title on the line and you’re in checkmate. Sound like the 2016 election? If it doesn’t, you need to read a lot more and by “read” I do NOT mean bullshit from social medial but actual history books.

Remember, just because you don’t contribute to the system doesn’t mean your enemies are going to quit. In fact, they will not only keep regressing the country toward total chaos they will march unimpeded fully-armed and with the nutty belief that they are doing some damn god’s work.