Democracies Are Driven By Positive Language Skills

One nice thing about Idaho is that you can commit acts of complete nihilism in the voting booth and it won't mean the end of the world. For example, if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader in November.

That would have meant nothing in the big scheme of things, because if Hillary Clinton were to have run against John McCain in Idaho, Idaho would have voted big time for John McCain. My vote would have made me feel better and might have made Ralph Nader feel better but it wouldn't have made any difference in who got to be president.

It would have been like pushing the button labeled "Kill 500,000 Iraqis" except the button would have been hooked up to a whoopee cushion under Larry Craig's Senate Chair. Or like picking up the phone at 3 a.m. and thinking that you were about to authorize a trillion dollar sale of T-bills to China but finding out that it was just an old lover drunk-dialing you and about twenty other people.

That's what it feels like to be a blue voter in an overwhelmingly red state. You can make dramatic decisions and nobody will get hurt. At least that's what it felt like until Obama got the nomination.

I'm hoping that Obama will lead this country out of the cesspit it fell into in, say, 1963. Hope is a rusty emotion for me because of the assassinations of the 1960s and the war profiteering that has gone on during Vietnam and every war since and the lethal political cynicism of Richard Nixon/Ronald Reagan/Lee Atwater/Dick Cheney/Karl Rove/the Whole Bush Family. I could go on but once you've seen one political cynic you've seen them all and this column has a word limit.

But Barack Obama really does offer hope. It's because of the way he uses the language. Obama uses English the same way George Orwell used English, as a tool to expose possibility rather than obscure it, to promote social justice rather than increase inequality, and to construct a national narrative rather than destroy it.

Language really is a tool for creating a better world and Obama has already used it to brighten up things in this country. If he becomes president there is a chance that the poor people of this country will get educations and jobs, and not because the government will provide them. He will inspire people to change their lives for the better and once human beings have the will to do something, that something gets accomplished.

For forty-five years this country has been mired in moral failure and it's because hope and its attendant call to action have been denied. The people on the bottom of our economic ladder have been told that they deserve to be there because other people deserve to be on top. Privilege has been given political sanction, and by extension, so have poverty and ignorance.

It has been difficult to imagine a country where things turn out better than expected because we've had forty-five years of things turning out worse than expected.

Obama offers us a chance to turn a corner. It won't be simply because an Obama presidency would finally allow us to turn away from the giant energy-sucker of American racial conflict. It's because he's beginning to tell this country's story in a way that allows the rest of us to tell our own stories and for us to give those stories happier endings than they might otherwise have had.

It has nothing to do with Obama's political experience. Political experience is nicely relevant in a dictatorship, less so in a democracy. If you're choosing a dictator you can note that Joe Stalin has had experience getting rid of the kulaks so he will probably do a good job getting rid of the Chechens or Jewish doctors. The Burmese generals who killed the last generation of Buddhist monks will likely kill the next generation with less fuss and muss.

But in a democracy people need to be convinced by reasonable language, by common sense, and by decent behavior. They need to be treated as autonomous human beings who are self-conscious, ethical, and altruistic. By these standards Barack Obama is pretty damn convincing -- even in a red state.