A Letter from the Provinces: On Riddance, as in Good

by Patrick Baker                                                             January 19, 2009

The corks are set to pop here in the provinces as the most unpopular president in the history of American empire is set to go back to doing what he does best: clear brush from the Texas version of the Neverland Ranch. Thankfully, his grotesque series of exit interviews has barely touched us on this side of the proverbial pond, but the smugness with which the Bumbler in Chief prepares to relinquish power cannot be ignored. And so we are pleased to take this last chance, on his very last day in office, to mark the scorecard of the Bush presidency for how it has affected life in the provinces of our great empire.

    I will not make the mistake of trying to generalize about all the countries in the American sphere of influence but instead will limit myself to the outpost I have come to call home: Germany. One advantage to this narrow focus is a greater likelihood of accuracy, as my finger lies closer to the German pulse than to any other. But the real benefit will be the opportunity to relish in the nearly universal hatred felt for Bush in Germany, and thus to participate in a quintessentially German emotional experience: Schadenfreude, the joy taken in the suffering of another. One might feel bad for indulging in such a dubious form of catharsis but for the fact that Bush himself obviously enjoys it, considering his satisfaction with the job he has done setting the world aflame. My only regret is an uncertainty about whether Bush’s sociopath psychology allows him to suffer from the suffering he has caused others. Unlike Clinton, he does not appear to feel anyone’s pain.

    Disintegrating decades of goodwill banked from the Marshall Plan, Bush turned adulation into hatred almost overnight by making Germans feel like the unwilling provincials of an oppressive empire. From Colin Powell’s lying to the U.N. to the unspoken extortion involved in assembling the “coalition of the willing,” Germans have detested the heavy hand of American imperialism and unilateralism. They hate Bush for causing them to waste their tax dollars on military action in which they do not believe, money they otherwise devote fanatically to social programs and education. They hate Bush for sending their sons to war, and for the body bags some have come home in. They hate Bush for the tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Germans hate Bush because he is a symbol for all that is vulgar and predatory in America’s image the world over. Although crisis after crisis toned Bush down towards the end, he has traditionally been a big talker and the kind of listener that only a lonely mute could appreciate. “You’re either with us or with the enemy” is a phrase that lacks the nuance Germans are used to from the politicians they expect to lead, not terrorize, them. Bush’s advisedly few diplomatic visits have turned German cities and even unfortunate strips of the countryside into barbed-wire police zones. Germany belongs politically and culturally to the “Old Europe” that Bush belittled and tried to boss around. Germans hate Bush for Guantanamo, for Abu Ghraib, and for the new policy on torture. Germans hate Bush for the Bush Doctrine.

    Germans hate Bush because they view him as the greatest force of destruction in their world. Europeans of all stripes have become the victims of terrorism at home and abroad, terrorism they believe would not exist in this form if Bush had not pursued a reckless program of war and intimidation in the Middle East beginning on September 12, 2001. America’s actions cause reaction the world over. Furthermore, Bush’s willful denial of the climate crisis, and his unwillingness to let the world’s foremost economic, military, and political power play any role whatsoever in finding a solution to it, are seen as the greatest stumbling block to concerted action to save the planet. American inaction enables inaction the world over. Germans hate Bush for serving corporate interests that make money off war and oil rather than serving the greater cause of worldwide peace and prosperity.

    Germans have been waiting to exhale for about seven years now. When Barack Obama takes over tomorrow, their collective sigh might just have the force to reach Bush’s ear. And if he listens closely, he might hear the foghorn blowing: Good riddance, du Arschloch, and don’t ever come back to the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On Corruption

by Patrick Baker                                                                              December 12, 2008

We in the provinces are gleefully following the story of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. How can one take delight in such an abuse of power? Well, how can one not? Especially if you’re from Detroit, which with thirty years of corrupt mayors from Coleman “Krugerrand” Young to Kwame “Party-at-My-Mansion” Kilpatrick (interrupted by the respectable but powerless Dennis Archer) has long left its residents the lone consolation that only Chicago is more corrupt. Now it appears that the whole state of Illinois is corrupt. There isn’t much to cheer about in Detroit these days, but we – even those of us in voluntary exile – will take what we can get.

    On the other hand, it is a bit disconcerting that Mr. Boogynightsavich (come on, the hair) can incite such shock, disapproval, and outrage, without bringing one person to the streets in protest. Sure, Obama has said he should resign; the Illinois Attorney General is asking the State Supreme Court to strip him of his power; and every self-respecting (read: self-important) pundit has called for him to step down. And yet B-Rod is back at the office, doing business as usual, which means he is probably still trying to find someone to buy a seat in that private club in Washington.

    Yes, the Congress Club, America’s official home of corruption. Where laws are sold to the least scrupulous “lobbyist” in return for campaign “contributions” and hidden perquisites. Where hundreds of billions of dollars are allocated to the great sucking sound on Wall Street, while tens of millions of Americans put up with poisonous food and air, substandard education, crumbling infrastructure, mountains of debt, and nowhere to run, nowhere to go (baby – yes, it does sound like a Bruce Springsteen song). Oh yeah, and club rules allow a convicted felon like Ted Stevens, although ineligible to vote for himself in a Federal election, to vote in its hollow chambers. In light of these observations, perhaps Rowdy Roddy B should appoint himself to the seat. He already seems to know and abide by the club code.

    Meanwhile on Main Street, wherever the [expletive] that was supposed to be, We the People are sitting at home, glued to the tube, unaware that all our self-righteous anger could be dealt with more constructively than with another helping of bagged chips. We might do well to take a lesson from Greece, where in the past week bands of “outraged” youth have decided to start kicking a little in the same place they’ve been taking it for the last five years (from a government so corrupt that even Cheney and Rove could learn something). I’m not saying that Americans need to set fire to banks and cars, but they could at least stop bending over so courteously.

    Of course, there is more at stake than Illinois politics here. And frankly, it doesn’t matter who gets appointed to Obama’s Senate seat. What can that one seat possibly be worth (besides several hundred K) in comparison to eight years of misrule by a sociopath? If Hot Rod should lose his job because “incapable of legitimately exercising his ability as governor” (in the words of the Illinois Attorney General), why wasn’t Bush impeached long ago? Similarly, how could Ted Stevens almost have been re-elected? And why are bamboozling bigots like Jerry Falwell considered holy?

    We Americans have a strange idea of corruption and of inappropriate behavior. We will ruin dedicated public servants like Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer for sexual indiscretions, but we will obsessively romanticize Camelot, for which a more appropriate name might have been the Playboy Mansion. I wonder what Kennedy’s chances would have been if a disgruntled Nixon had sicked a repulsive Ken Starr on him, or if the likes of the indomitable Patrick Fitzgerald considered consensual sexual activity grounds for prosecution. Mr. Blagojevich seems in this sense a most astute criminal. By keeping it in his pants, he has managed to keep the American people less outraged than it should be. And who knows, that might just be his ticket to the Senate of our empire, rather than to exile in its provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On Confidence

by Patrick Baker                                                                November 26, 2008

A lack of confidence in America – in both senses of the phrase – is wreaking chaos at home and in the provinces. First it caused the mortgage bubble to burst, then giant insurance and financial institutions to collapse, and it has now forced the Big Three to their wobbly knees. If only we could restore confidence in American housing, financial, and automobile markets, then we could get out of this hole. Or so we are being told.

    From the perspective on the periphery, however, things look a bit different. That is, they look to be exactly the opposite. It seems not to be a lack of confidence that has caused these problems or contributes to their dreaded permanence, but rather its contrary: overconfidence. Our financial and governmental habits have been characterized by overconfidence in an ever-rising housing market; in the “no-risk” version of the free market, thought up on Wall Street in the mid-nineties; in a stable, low price of oil; in the value of inherently worthless things; in the beneficence of greed; in the relationship of Chevy or Prudential to the solidity of rocks, rather than to their rate of acceleration in freefall; in the ability of corporations to regulate themselves; and in the assumption that there has been a captain at the helm of our Ship of State – in the form of either Congress or the Executive – even a sleepy one, or one who happened to be deaf, dumb, and blind, or even just plain dumb. All these versions of overconfidence have reigned in America at least since the Gingrich Revolution.

    And to the extent that Americans buy into the “confidence-problem” theory, they will once again be guilty of overconfidence, mired in an exaggerated and unfounded faith that this problem can be solved by government, especially the current one; or by money, either real or imaginary (since, not being backed by gold or anything else of durable value, our money is essentially imaginary); or by the same “captains” of industry who got us into this mess. If Edward Smith had survived the Titanic, would we be so eager to give him the next vessel in the shipyard? Thinking in these terms, why would anyone ever listen to Robert Rubin again? About anything.

    We should not think of the economy as some teenage boy who’s got everything going for him except the nerve to ask out the blonde sitting next to him. The economy does not need a pep talk or an encouraging glance to make its move. Nor does it need a blank check. It needs a reality check, which means first and foremost deflating the overconfidence that has allowed it to soar beyond its capacities. The economy as we have known it in the last decade needs to be popped, not propped up. It simply merits no confidence. Should we pretend otherwise only so that the unscrupulous can continue to profit before we really crash?

    So it would seem better to think of the economy rather as an airplane whose pilot is dead and whose cockpit is on fire. If we, the passengers, manage to land this thing, it would be wise not to take off again until the structural problems have been repaired and a competent captain has been found. The only thing worse than not resolving this crisis would be to relieve it through an unwarranted injection of undeserved confidence. Such would be equivalent to dismantling the warning lights that keep flashing on annoyingly as the pilot anxiously fondles the throttle.

    Saying this is all fine and good, but, as always, we passengers are powerless. Fasten your seatbelts, America – our captains have returned from the bar and are about to be cleared for take-off. I just hope they don’t crash in the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On the Promise of Obama’s Leadership

by Patrick Baker                                                                 November 8, 2008

In the provinces, Obama’s election seems to amount to nothing less than the promise of a new world order. Those of us with direct experience of American politics, however, know that Obama’s promise is much less than that. Indeed, such is the mantra even among the President-elect’s own intimates. And we are being told by pundits, politicians, and journalists alike not to expect too much from the man who will inherit Bush’s black hole. America voted for change, and now it is being reminded that change is difficult. Nevertheless, one thing has changed definitively with the election of Barack Obama: the structure of presidential power and the related style of leadership.

    In the recent past, presidents have owed much of their success to big moneyed interests, usually referred to benignly as “lobbies” or “donors”. Obama is different in that his donors – the ones who put him over the top, anyway, and especially after Super Tuesday and again in September – were hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, not big corporations. The upshot is that Obama does not owe concerns like Exxon Mobil or Halliburton anything at all. That doesn’t mean that such interests will no longer be represented. But they will have to fight now, and fight hard. The Cheney Energy Task Force – with all the geopolitical baggage it brought with it – will most certainly not be reassembled by the next president.

    Now, Obama, because of his inexperience, is going to have to rely heavily on advisors, but he will not necessarily be owned by them like Bush was. He will not assemble a team of lackeys, and he is too strong a personality to allow himself to be bossed around by his Secretary of Defense or Vice President. Obama will not be owned by his underlings as Bush was, for the simple reason that his election owes nothing to them. Bush was chosen and then (maybe) elected president as an acknowledged arm of the Republican National Committee. He knew that he was in the Oval Office to rubberstamp the decisions of RNC higher-ups; they got him into power, and he believed that the whole point of the office of the presidency was to execute their will. Bush’s style of leadership followed the chairman-of-the-board model. The chairman represents the will of the board (the cabinet) and the stockholders (the party); for the most part he is a figurehead, while day-to-day operations are decided by the company’s president – in Bush’s case Cheney, and for a time Rumsfeld, now Paulson. Leadership on that model means getting all these forces organized and then getting out of the way to let them do their job.

    Obama, on the other hand – like Bill Clinton in his day – owes nothing of his election to the Democratic National Committee, and so he has a free hand. They need him, not the other way around. Obama also has a very different idea of leadership. As a community organizer, he learned that the chief needs to listen to constituents and advisors, but that ultimately he must be the one to make decisions and set policies. He then entrusts their execution to his officers, who appear to be and think themselves to be – and in a sense become – the real actors. This model of leadership is described countless times in the second section of Dreams from My Father. It is both effective and responsible. It is based on the ombudsmanship concept of governance, which entails sifting through the people’s whims and desires to find and represent the true public interest.

    Obama’s real promise is that he can free Americans from the childish whorishness that has typified governance ever since the Gingrich Revolution. First under a Republican Congress and then with a Republican president, the Grand Old Prostitute listened to people’s most irrational whims, decided which of these tricks it could turn most easily and for the most amount of money for its rich friends and unscrupulous lobbies, and then offered them on a platter. In a sense it represented the public interest, but only if interest is identical to unreflected, base desires. Republicans promised no taxes, no oversight, no services, no government – not worrying that Katrina might hit or that infrastructure would collapse, or that their fantasy wargames would have real-world consequences.

    The ombudsman would never spring for such ideas, because he knows that one of his essential responsibilities is to protect the people from its own shortsightedness, ignorance, and often just its stupidity. Obama’s promise is that he will return the presidency to this model and thus to its basic function: that of actually governing. Such is the promise, at any rate, that his leadership holds for the whole American empire, from the capital to the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On McCain’s Final Days of Desperation

by Patrick Baker                                                                 November 2, 2008

In the provinces we have been bewildered by the McCain campaign’s last desperate attempts to save itself from oblivion. Bewildered, and disquieted. Ever since the selection of Sarah Palin, we have watched with mounting unease as the McCain machine rummages ever deeper in the skeleton closet of America’s electoral past in search of the right whip to drive the electorate to irrational fear of the opponent. Sadly, they seem to believe that only a frenzied, frightened, and hateful populace can hand them victory.

    First there was Bill Ayers. With dazzling sleight of hand, Palin linked Obama through Ayers to contemporary terrorism, thereby suggesting an unspoken connection to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida. This was really nothing new, considering the continuous but untraceable attempts to depict Obama as a Muslim, and the stress, even at official Palin rallies, on Obama’s middle name, Hussein. But this was different; this was proof, right? The willful association with Bill Ayers also had another aim: to conflate Obama, who has no connection to Sixties culture, with the extreme radicalism of that age. As such it was an attempt to fit this election into a worn-out mold, characterizing it as a choice between the respectable upholder of traditional order, and the irresponsible, often violent whims of ignorant youth.

    Then there was socialism. When Bill Ayers’s viewer ratings dropped too low, McCain turned to the antiquated but tested tactic of red-baiting. Out of nowhere he transformed Obama’s keen observation about our progressive tax system – that its aim is indeed to spread the wealth around – into the slogan of a revivified Eugene V. Debs campaign. At the same time McCain aligned himself with a cartoon character known as Joe the Plumber. For the benefit of vapid voters these two have agreed to share the same fantasy universe of straight capitalism, in which Joe, as an unlicensed plumber in arrears, does actually make over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars annually, and where McCain, taking on the guise of yet another cartoon character, Grover Norquist, would never dream of taxing him at all. Anything else would be as un-American as sturdy bridges in the Midwest.

    Now, with less than forty-eight hours until election day, the question is whether McCain will risk it all on a last roll of the tried-and-true dice of irrationalism and hate. Will he race-bait? In one sense he already has. His campaign’s praise of “small-town values” and average “Joes” acts at least in part as an understood blame for what are often called “urban problems” – “urban” of course being the current euphemism among politicians, journalists, educators, and sociologists for “black.” But will things get uglier? In the third week of October, McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, suggested that low numbers on the home stretch might necessitate highlighting Obama’s relationship to his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright – something McCain earlier pledged he would not do. If snippets of Wright’s incendiary sermon do make their way into prime-time attack adds, it will be for one purpose only: to terrify ignorant Americans with the image of an angry black man supposedly inciting his following of thousands to rend their teeth on the “real America.”

    McCain has been an illustrated dictionary’s entry for desperation ever since the South Carolina primary of 2000. That was when he learned that mavericks were tolerated by the RNC only so long as they shot off their mouths, not their guns. His about-face on a host of issues sacred to the back room of the Republican machine – tax cuts for the super- wealthy, the status of evangelical religion, even the acceptability of torture – show where his desperation has driven him, and the lengths to which he will go for power. Will a man who has already sacrificed his honor, indeed his very self, in his bid for the presidency resist the temptation to trample on the vestiges of racial harmony in America? And should he win by using such a tactic, what will happen on the streets of our nation? As Americans get set to decide the fate of the whole world, it feels strangely comforting to watch it from the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On Hate Speech in the Presidential Campaign

by Patrick Baker                                                                 October 11, 2008

The news has reached us in the provinces that hate speech is creeping into the presidential campaign. The press and the pundits are salivating over recent incidents of stump-speech frenzied zealots screaming out “kill him” and “terrorist” when Sarah Palin asks them about Barack Obama; and they are oozing self-righteousness that neither of the Republican candidates has condemned these episodes. While it is nice to see people making an issue out of this, one wonders why it took death threats for hate speech to make prime time.

    I should be fair to the media though. After all, a big deal was made of Obama’s infelicitous observation that hard times make poor people cling to the irrational idols of religion and guns. And everyone was sure to report on the controversy over whether Obama had indeed classified Palin as a new kind of rosette-smeared swine, or had just used a figure of speech unfamiliar to cosmopolitan Americans. Yes, that was responsible journalism, and as enlightened as David Howard’s demise for correctly using the word “niggardly.”

    Then again, an orgy of unrepentant bigotry is coming out of the self-avowed liberal media, and self-righteousness itself seems to be getting in on the action. There is no other way to describe Bill Maher’s characterization of the G.O.P. ticket as “the Maverick and the MILF.” Let’s be clear that a MILF is a lusty, middle-aged mother with whom younger men hope to have a close encounter of the Mrs. Robinson kind. I’ll agree that Palin is ignorant and has no qualifications for any higher office, but that does not mean she is fit only for the set of a pornographic movie. Is our national discourse really this impoverished?

    Apparently so, since much more cynical and embedded forms of hate speech have abounded in the Republican campaign since their convention, and no one seems to have found them worthy of mention. We heard a lot from Minneapolis about “hockey moms,” “Joe Six-Packs,” and “small-town values.” All have a quaint ring to them, but let’s be clear about what they mean. Hockey is the only major sport in the nation which is not yet dominated by non-white athletes. Small towns, as opposed to cities and even the suburbs, have few if any minorities. It was no accident that Palin and her flatterers focused on cultural contexts in which white people need not fear for the supremacy they are on the verge of losing in America, a supremacy whose fate the election of a black man would seem to seal. Hockey and small towns are the country clubs – to revert to traditional Republican imagery for a moment – of white middle America: homogeneous contexts of belonging, unthreatened by otherness, and impervious to the presence of Jamaal-40, Joe Six-Pack’s substance-abusing relative who the whole white family wishes would never visit from his ghetto on the other side of the color line.

    The danger of this Republican rhetoric is its apparent inoffensiveness. Who could find fault with upright small towns, or with devoted mothers taking their children to sports practices, or with a factory worker blowing off the day’s steam with a sextet of Schlitz? The implication, however, is that this is the real America, and that those who do not fit into its frame are not real Americans. While it appears to praise what might be America’s roots, it actually demonizes the contemporary state of the nation: heterogeneous, urban and suburban, economically stratified, complicated, and in need of farsighted leadership. This is the same operation that is at work in the Republicans’ insistence that anyone who wants to change America doesn’t love it, and that anyone who criticizes it cannot be a patriot. It is camouflaged hate speech.

    The more overt and shameful forms of hate speech we have witnessed in the last week are not necessarily worse, although they are more disturbing for the actual – and historical – political violence they evoke. Should it really surprise anyone, though, that Sarah Palin didn’t bat an eye when a member of her audience screamed “kill him”? From my upbringing in Michigan, I recall that it was the hockey moms themselves who yelled just that before their sons were escorted to the penalty box. But what do I know? We don’t have hockey in the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On the Ownership Society

by Patrick Baker                                                                 October 6, 2008

The recent economic meltdown has made us in the provinces familiar with a phrase we had never actually heard before: the ownership society. After years of assuming that George Bush had as little an agenda for the American people as he had an idea about anything else of importance, we were shocked to find out that he indeed did have a vision for the country, a vision in which all Americans owned things, especially homes.

    Here in Europe, where socialism and communism are still valid ideals (although no longer in the discredited Soviet form, of course), many people were wondering if Bush had switched teams. After all, the system in which everyone owns is socialism, not capitalism. So I did some research and found out that the things Americans were supposed to own were stock options, cars, homes, small businesses, and health care. That is, they were supposed to own everything except the means of production. So I guess socialism is out. Someone should actually tell Bush about this, though, seeing as how he has just proposed and seen passed the largest piece of socialist legislation ever in the history of the empire.

    So if the ownership society isn’t socialism, what is it? The kind answer is that it is a society in which ownership of important goods is available to most people. The true answer is that it is a society addicted to debt. The root of the entire economic crisis is not that we tried to get most people to own something, but that we tried to get most people to control the use of something without owning it at all. This used to be called “renting,” but now apparently it goes under the name “buying.” Well, there’s no helping changes in the meaning of plain English words. After all, owning no longer really means “believing” – as in the phrase, “I own he did it” – so why should it still mean “owning,” as in the phrase, “I own it because I paid for it with actual money”? Can’t we just all agree that “owning” now means, “I get to use this good because I have promised a credit institution that I will pay it in the future an amount that I know now I will never actually have”?

    Having come from the land of outrageous financing, lax mortgages, and easy credit, I was astounded to find out that German friends of mine had actually laid out hundreds of thousands of deutschmarks in cash when they bought their house in the late nineties. Elasticity of meaning aside, now that is what I call owning. And come to think of it, I can’t think of any American I know who has ever paid for a large-price item in that way – unless he was trying to evade taxes. And come to think of it, I can’t think of any American I know who pays for anything in cash. It’s all credit, from the last gallon of milk to the next cup of coffee. But let’s be serious. If you have a $300,000 mortgage on your house home, even if you paid $50,000 down (which in itself is unheard of), you don’t own it. The bank owns it, and what you own is debt. And if you sell that house, you are not selling a house. You are selling debt. The whole financial crisis comes down to this: for too long Americans have bought and sold not things, but debt. They have not owned; they have been owned.

    Let’s go back to Main Street’s bailout of Wall Street, or whatever quaint name they’re giving it today. What did the American people buy with their soon-to-be-printed 840 billion dollars? Debt. Whose debt? The debt of the private sector. Maybe this is a new kind of socialism, in which the masses own the debts of the few, rather than seizing control of their capital. See, it’s an ownership society after all. If we think about it a bit, though, it becomes obvious that the American people, rather than doing the owning, are just plain being owned. That’s how it looks, at any rate, from my rented apartment in the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On the Rightful Irrelevance of the Vice Presidency

by Patrick Baker                                                                 September 7, 2008

In the provinces we are following the presidential campaign as intently as you in the mother country, and it was quite easy to get us to take the vice presidential bait. But now that the shock of the selections has worn off, the conventions have mercifully passed, and we have started thinking again, we wonder just how important either Joe Biden or Sarah Palin can be.

    Certainly not as important as Dick Cheney, the only vice president ever to take a more active hand in formulating policy than his boss. And thank God! Let us pass over the short-sightedness, the bellicosity, and the belligerence of his posture, and focus on one thing: its inappropriateness. Whoever the American people elected to lead it in 2000 and 2004, it was a disservice to us all for the President legitimately chosen by the Supreme Court to hand the football off to Refrigerator Cheney on the goal line.

    In the pre-Cheney universe the vice presidency seemed more akin to a major ambassadorial post. Sure, its holder stood first in the line of succession, but he was of decidedly less importance for day-to-day affairs than the big three Cabinet secretaries – State, Treasury, and Defense – and sometimes even than the President’s wife (one thinks of the Wilson, Reagan, and Clinton administrations). The vice president’s central task was to help the president get elected and then get out of the picture. So let us please stop treating our new candidates as if they were going to have a hand in ruling the empire. They won’t.

    With both Biden and Palin seemingly more than content to take a secondary or even tertiary role, we happily anticipate this return to normalcy. What continues to disturb, however, is the amount of attention both the media and the rival camps continue to put on people of so little moment. The last time any VP candidate made such waves was the 1992 campaign, when Dan Quayle couldn’t spell potato and lost his mind to the United Negro College Fund, and when Admiral Stockdale appeared to have a ‘Nam flashback during a televised debate.

    The disturbing parallel: the sick fascination with a mere sidekick’s fitness has been inversely proportional to the content of the campaign. With Bush the First babbling on about points of light and Perot making vague reference to misleading charts, what else was there to talk about? Now, with Obama and McCain substantially agreeing to be vague on everything except whether Iraq is our war, we have to focus on their familiars to tell them apart.

    Of course it matters who is one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, but it matters much less than who is elected there directly. So let Biden and Palin act the part of attack dogs and fearsome fish; let them speak from the heart or from someone else’s talking points; let them pretend that it is possible to put change or country first, as if we could do one without the other after a presidency so corrupt, so irresponsible, and so cynical that even the Grant administration bows its head in awe, yielding its well-won title.

    It is time that Obama and McCain stop beating around Bush and say what they really have in store for the country. With the general election only two months away, they must finally show how they will overcome the legacy of the past seven and a half years, a legacy whose memory is so painful that history itself would rather forget it. This is no time for PR or platitudes, but for clearly formulated plans. That is just the beginning of what they owe to you at home, and to us in the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On the Price of Oil

by Patrick Baker                                                                 August 20, 2008

In the provinces the price of oil is killing us. It costs me eighty euros – that’s one hundred twenty-five dollars of our present monopoly money – to fill my Fiat’s tank. I have even started shifting early and driving well under the speed limit to save gas, thus losing out on one of Germany’s only indulgent pleasures: reckless velocity on the Autobahn.

    I know, the price of oil is killing you, too, at home. It is bringing the American automotive industry to its knees. It is bringing the American driver to lay down precious offerings on the mini-me altar of hybrid technology. And it is has pushed American congressmen to suggest sacrificing their own budget for the sake of looking like they actually care about the citizens. Do they?

    Take the gas tax holiday idea. One wonders just how satisfying sixteen cents less per gallon could be. Gee whiz, we could get a lot of swell stuff with that extra two to five dollars per week! If I were in the mother country to take advantage of this great deal, I think I would splurge on an additional plain, small coffee at one of the few remaining Starbucks on my block. But then a scary thought occurred to me. Since the gas companies already know that Americans are willing to pay that 16 cents per gallon, won’t they just raise the price accordingly during the so-called holiday? Won’t a gas tax holiday just make it easier for oil companies to soak the American consumer? I see fewer lattés in the future.

    The German government has responded to rising heating costs with the advice to put on an extra sweater this winter. Forget re-election. Can you imagine an American politician getting home safely after saying something like that?

    I’ve got a better idea than sweaters, though. How about peace? I know that sounds naive, but I can make it as Machiavellian as apple pie if you’d like. The way I reckon it, the price of oil is not so much what we’re paying at the pump, but what we’re paying in useless wars, loans from China, international standing, and polar ice. The real price of oil is over four thousand Americans and several hundred billion dollars frittered away in Iraq. It is unpayable debt to a country more than happy to own us. It is the inability, despite embarrassing attempts, to take the high ground over Russia on the Georgia conflict. And it is the increasing likelihood of Kevin Costner’s worst movie finding vindication.

    Imagine what would have happened if America had invested just one of the many hundred billion dollars it flushed down Iraq – just say it to yourself real slow: one hundred b-i-l-l-i-o-n – in alternative energy research and development, just like it once put so many resources into the space program, or into designing the atomic bomb. If you think replacing oil with the sun is a pipe dream, how do you think going to the moon sounded in the 1950s? And yet Americans worked and sacrificed, and Neil Armstrong showed us what a divinely felt purpose and gobs of money can do. That is how technological advancements – unlike wars – are won. And once this advancement has been made, no wars will ever need to be fought again in the Middle East-because the region will no longer have any value for us.

    Why is it that Americans and their politicians could be so optimistic when it came to showing up the Ruskies, but now they just roll over and play brain-dead when we need to get out from under the thumb of the oil barons? Whatever the case, one thing is clear: the price of oil should not be calculated in money, but in lives, in peace, and in our future well-being. I wish someone at home were saying these things, but perhaps they can be seen more easily from the provinces.

A Letter from the Provinces: On Barack Obama’s Speech at the Victory Column

by Patrick Baker                                                                 July 27, 2008

The plain fact of the matter is that Europe has floated in the American sphere of influence since the end of World War II, and Germany especially so. There was long a feeling of partnership – well, junior partnership – in promoting the democratic way of life and assuring American interests around the world. Except for the Vietnam War, American interests seemed to be German interests.

    All this changed in the wake of 9/11. On 9/12, American interests were German interests. Germans stood ready to do anything their senior partner asked of them. And they did it. But the commands and the way they were given were both so odious that the trust and the will to obey were broken. Germans no longer look to America as their big brother, their uncle, or their great white father, but they must heed the father all the same.

    For this reason, an event as frivolous as the primary elections received more coverage here than they did in the America of my youth. Germans want to know who the next emperor will be, a desire made all the keener by the simple horror they feel for the current one. And for this reason, over 200,000 Germans went to hear a campaign speech by Barack Obama. Ask yourself when the last time was that any American politician holding any office enjoyed a crowd that big. Has it ever happened? This is important.

    Please do not be fooled into thinking that the crowd was made up of disgruntled American expats, or that most people showed up expecting a concert or some imaginary free lunch (it was after dinner in Germany anyway). And do not think that the speech bombed because most people did not seem to clap at the right time. No, the audience was overwhelmingly German, and it did not clap on time because it is unfamiliar with the obsequious rhythms of mandatory jubilation that attend American political rhetoric. English is also its second language.

    Germans flocked to hear Obama because they are dying for change in imperial policy, and he promises that change. This is the import of his speech.

    And more for us than for them. For even if not elected, he has done America the favor of showing the world that there is hope of escape. Escape from a boot-in-the-face foreign policy that politely goes under the name of “unilateralism.” Escape from a phony war. Escape from helplessness and oblivion, which are the two feelings that dominate the psychology of America’s “allies.” They now have reason to hope that in the future they will not stand helpless as an American president walks all over them. They have reason to hope their own interests will not shrivel up in oblivion.

    There is, of course, no hope of escape from the empire as such. There is only hope for a better existence within it. Will we give it to them?

    Empires come and empires go. The world will likely never know an age without one, and whether this is for good or for ill can probably not be said. What can be said is that some empires are better or worse for others, and that some are better or worse for themselves. This last is worth thinking about, as it rarely gets much attention. Let’s forget about the losers for a minute and concentrate on the winners. Empire was, for example, bad for ancient Athens but good for Rome; good for early-modern Spain but not so hot for France; the best thing that ever happened to England but a total disaster for Italy.

    It is perhaps not a surprising fault that we do not often consider whether our empire is good for our subjects, but it is as shocking as it is unconscionable for us not to ponder whether it is good for us. What Obama’s speech showed is that it could be, or at least that it could be better – for both sides. We hope for the best, especially in the provinces.