Obama '08 - Vote For Hope by MC Yogi (and Ursa Minor)

Hey David, thanks for adding your voice!  And i totally agree that Shalk is raising some extremely important issues here, and i always appreciate how he represents the voice of amber in these discussions.  An absolutely essential perspective, even if my thinking has really shifted gears from "transcend and include" to "negate and preserve" in regard to traditional values.

I will probably repeat this a thousand times before the election, because it has become my own political slogan of sorts: include the values, negate the view!

In regards to the question of whether or not America's invasion of Iraq was an imperial move--well, i think it is really hard to argue against that one.  It has imperium written all over it.  Perhaps the question should be: are all imperialistic actions necessarily a bad thing?  Here we might find much more overlap in our thinking--America is most certainly an empire, hopefully more benevolent than not in the long run (all signs point to yes), and will behave in the world accordingly.  But when our role as the world's "last best hope" is abused by an administration (as i believe it was by Bush/Cheney) we must hold our leaders accountable.  And sadly, accountability is not the present administration's strongest suit.

In the end, the invasion of Iraq may have been inevitable.  You are right, fossil fuels continue to be vitally important to the entire population of this world, and we cannot allow such a large source of oil to be controlled by a tyrant.  And i really do wish that the United Nations/international community-at-large had enough testicular prowess to actually do something about it at the time, making our nearly unilateral involvement unnecessary.  But they didn't, and Bush likely did what the administration felt had to be done in order to secure America's place in the coming decades.

But while we may have acted out of necessity, naivete remained our achilles heel.  We invaded without much knowledge of Iraqi culture, of the Sunni-Shi'ite tensions that have existed for centuries, of the civil war that would erupt in the vacuum of Saddam's rule, and fully expecting them to "greet us as liberators."  While Bush's intent may have been in some ways admirable (creating a linchpin of democracy in center of the middle east, which would invariably spread to the rest of the region--because, like, democracy kicks ass and everyone knows it), his execution was horrible.

But you know what?  Who knows--maybe 30 or 40 years in the future, democracy in the Middle East will come to some sort of fruition, and Bush's legacy will be redeemed.  This is entirely possible.  But despite this, as an American citizen, i can't help but to feel short-changed by all this--duped and misled and taken advantage of--as we created an amorphous "War on Terror" (complete with two Patriot Acts, the "illegal" wiretapping of civilians, and a pre-emptive Bush Doctrine) that can potentially identify ANYONE as an enemy combatant.  It's a slippery slope, coated in WD-40 and bacon grease, and i fear that we are beginning to lose our balance.

So, yeah.  Amber values rock.  But amber views tend to do some damage.  While i am very keen to including amber values (as i sincerely believe Obama does, at least much more than most other Democrats) i think it is of vital importance that we allow the pendulum to swing in the other direction, so we can negate the amber views that have so heavily influenced America's decisions in the world.  And here i look to people like Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and even Keith "big-head" Olberman, all of whom understand that, in today's cultural climate, the best way to negate traditional views is with large doses of humor, mockery, and ridicule.  They can be heavy-handed at times, to be sure, but all within the bounds of appropriate discourse, i think. 

This is actually somewhat similar to how we dealt with racism in this country, incidentally--mainstream media did its best to make it EMBARRASING to cling to racist thinking by openly ridiculing it.  This was much more easily done when we only had 13 TV channels to choose from, instead of the plurality of information we have today.  Another example of how green pluralism can reinforce amber ethnocentricity--but that is for another discussion.

Good stuff my man.  Thanks for putting so much thought into all this.

A few drive-bys:

Can't find anything that "flies the amber McCain flag" in the arts world? Well, it may be because ... many of the artists are now dead. You see amber truth has been around awhile. It is some really old shit!

Hahaha you have to understand this statement: "many of the artists are now dead" doesn't exactly make McCain sound any more appealing to a world that is searching for something new! ^_^

My bigger point was that, in today's culture, McCain doesn't seem to be resonating with the artists the same way Obama does.  As an artist myself, i tend to use other artists as a sort of cultural barometer, in terms of relevance and significance.  But this may be an unfair point altogether--i have never seen ANY politician (including all Kennedys combined) create as huge of an influence upon artists as Obama has.

I thought I heard McCain also mention that we need regulation in banking to control this sort of thing.

Yeah, he did say this.  Unfortunately, it was on the heels of his initial reaction to the economic crisis, which was to say that what we actually needed was MORE deregulation--that is, the deregulation we had was not nearly deregulated enough.  We can just look at McCain's record here, before he renamed himself "the Deregulator."  Deregulation is the slogan of free market capitalism; free market capitalism is the philosophy of fiscal conservatives, and fiscal conservatism is the backbone of Republican economic policy.

[What will McCain do] to prevent private capitalists from building and selling electric cars

Well, probably nothing.  He won't do anything to prevent electric cars, or solar technology, or wind farms, or any of that.  But that's not the real question--the question is, what will he do to encourage it?

Until you can show me why that little fucker in Chongqing can do Calculus in a dirt floor schoolhouse, and my senior in high school can't balance his checkbook, I will not spend one more cent on schools. Tell me what is going on here.

Haha this one made me laugh.  I am glad we agree--it's a complete disaster.  And it is eating away at the American soul.  I for one am praying that the technological singularity can extend my lifespan a few centuries or so, because i tremble at the thought of growing old and having to be supported by these younger generation.  Kids today.  Get the fuck off my lawn, you sonsofbitches.

That said, i do really like Obama's idea of making community college available to kids for free, in exchange for community service.  It is a nice balance of internalist and externalist approaches, and presents a fairly novel solution.  I also like how it would be somewhat of a self-selecting process--only people actually interested in getting an education will volunteer for community service, while just about anyone will be willing to accept a free handout from the government to pay for their education.

You got that in writing, bro! One lobster dinner with wine for Corey on the day Roe is overturned!

Again, i laughed out loud at this one.  I don't eat lobster, or shrimp, or shellfish of anykind--filthy bottom-feeders.  I wouldn't eat something that fed off my own doo doo its entire life, so i wouldn't eat any of those either.

I'm sure there's a political metaphor in there somewhere.  Five clams to whoever finds it!

(And i am joking--i don't like these foods, this much is true, but not for these reasons.  I am just an obnoxiously picky eater, as i have been my entire life.  Life is hard when you don't even like cheese.)

I'm glad you are so confident on this issue Shalk--because there are many who aren't.  Some believe that we are two Supreme Court justices away from repealing Roe, which they take to mean that we are two more Republican terms away.  Even Colin Powell agrees that we have gone much to far to the Right in the past eight years, and adding two more conservative justices to the Supreme Court could be disastrous.

I'm going to hold off on the Civil Rights issue, because it is extremely sensitive, ultra-important, and i want to make sure i know exactly what i am talking about.  But i will say this--from the perspective of most minorities in this country, our relationship with civil rights still has a far way to go.  Black people continue to feel as though they are treated by police in ways that are completly different from the white experience.  I know that you are focusing on the LR aspects of civil rights, and perhaps i am looking more toward the LL aspects, but since they are so intimitely woven together we cannot address one without paying attention to the other.

Health care and education are the number one and two disgraces of our country. Energy transition is the number one point of urgency for our world. The big 3. Right there.

I totally agree.  In fact, i agree so much i went ahead and cloned myself, because my single corporeal body was not enough to contain the sheer magnitude of my luminous agreement.  The nice thing is, now i have someone else to write my talk summaries and do the rest of my work while i talk to you guys all day. 

It is downright embarrassing that our health care and our education are in as miserable a state as they currently are.  A malignant mole marring the face of the American Dream.  The energy crisis is to be expected--we are in transitional times, requiring a massive transition of energy and infrastructure, much like when the industrial age first arrived and all the rules of discourse had to be rewritten.  It was inevitable that we would find ourselves where we are today, as it pertains to energy.  But as for health and education, there is simply no excuse.

Of course, we were making enormous progress in getting Saddam to comply with the UN Resolutions.

Well, that was certainly a tough case wasn't it.  On the one hand, Saddam didn't have anything to hide, at least in terms of WMD's and yellowcake plutonium--but he could not openly say so, or his regime could potentially lose its power.  On the other, we had an effete United Nations who was unable to do anything substantial about it, one way or the other.  I like to say that the current U.N. is sort of like the "Articles of Confederation" that preceded the U.S. Constitution, and will hopefully be supplanted with a much more sophisticated international institution that has both the power to actually do something about tyranny in places like Iraq (and Darfur, and Israel, and Palestine, and Georgia, and Tibet, etc....) as well as the wisdom to know how to wield this power.  Right now, the U.N. is an anemic shadow of what it could have been--and who knows, perhaps Bush did enough damage to this international community that something bigger and better shall emerge in it's wake.

"Include the Values, Negate the View!"