Now, hog farmers are pretty intense folks - I've read their website. But I doubt too many other people voted for their congressional representatives based on their stance on the pork checkoff. And yet, this little battle is exactly what the election was really about, exactly why it was so awful.
The Republican party preaches "American values" in the same way that Disney does - as jingles for a large corporation. Really, the party is devoted to the principle that the wealthy deserve more wealth, and deserve our help in getting it. Their leaders are toadies of big business, whether the NPPC in this case, or the telecom giants, or the CEOs of Enron and Worldcom. In Texas, I can get busted for smoking a joint or having sex with my boyfriend, but if I steal billions of dollars from workers and pensioners, I get off scot free.
The pork checkoff battle is what the parties really stand for: the big guy and the little guy, odious methods of maximizing wealth versus living just a little bit lighter. (I'm not going to defend hog farming as environmentally friendly, but there are better and worse ways to do everything, and if people want their bacon, they're going to get it. At least the CFF people care, and do what they can.) And yet, this message did not get through to the middle-class voters who voted against their interests and for the dream palace of Dick Cheney. They're in charge now - the bad guys. That means more backroom deals with Big Pork, more judges who'll rubber stamp them, no regulations to keep the streams clean from pig shit.
What can you do?
2.
Nothing. You can't do anything. So let me talk about the recent Bob Dylan show.
Don Henley says he wrote "The End of the Innocence" as a sort of looking back on the end of the Reagan years, which, though Henley didn't articulate the idea much, were really a series of lost innocences. For some -- let's call them the naive -- the innocence was lost when the curtain was pulled back and the Reagan Wizard was revealed to be a doddering old fool whose underlings were engaged in covert operations and whose wife was basing government policy on astrology. For others who believed the Reagan mythos, "Morning in America" and all that, the moment came when they gradually woke up in the 1990s to see the 80s for what they were: a period of brash materialism, shallowness masquerading as piety, and embarrassing Greed-is-Good excess. Let's call them the disillusioned. For many, the innocence was never lost at all-they just went right on believing that Reagan was God and greed was his church. And of course for others of us - let's call ourselves the Left - the innocence was lost when America revealed its ugly, racist, reactionary side by electing the Gipper in the first place. We had thought we were moving forward. We were wrong.
In a surreal moment in the concert I saw earlier this week, Bob Dylan performed "The End of the Innocence" (on keyboard, no less). It was hard not to see the timeliness of the song, even though Henley's cheese sounded dissonant coming from the writer of "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." (Now fully into his I'm-a-Showman phase, Dylan also covered Neil Young's "Old Man" and Warren Zevon's elegiac "Mutineer.") There must be someone out there, I hope, whose innocence was lost in the recent election: someone who believed, even after 2000, that elections could not be won through sheer deceit. Not me; I've been long gone. But I hope that someone out there feels just a little more distant from their ideals of democracy than they did on November 4.
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