How I Learned not to Believe my High School Civics Book.
First apologies for turning one of my comments into a diary, however, this is one thing that I think would be important to us all. It relates to how my conciousness was completely changed in one 30 minute conversation over dinner in Mexico City. I have always been a liberal, but prior to this was certainly a dogmatic American ideologue. The gist of this is that the US has done a remarkable job propagandizing its citizens about the purity of its democracy vis a vis the rest of the world. American democracy is not pure and today is less pure than at any other time in its history. We are in the hands of the oligarchs right now folks and are in danger of losing our republic.
After the Bush selection in 2000, I was working on a project in Mexico City. Many of my Mexican and other international counterparts were very curious about the US election because many were well educated, had attended US universities and done much reading on the US government. They were all very sympathetic to the US. However, they had many questions about how a person who won less votes (Bush) than another (Gore) could have be elected President.
In my less than exquisite Spanish I explained our electoral system, electoral college, the role of the Supreme Court etc. These people, among the elite of Mexican society and other fairly high-powered international consultants, listened to me carefully, but incredulously. They asked questions in both English and Spanish to make sure that it was not my bad Spanish that was causing problems. Once they were sure that it was not that, they just listened. Many were open-mouthed.
Remember that these are the people that in our hubris the US media and government disparaged, against whom the right wing has used racial epithets, whose government the CIA had infiltrated and who were hectored day and night about being a true democracy. In the end there was silence and just two comments/questions:
- If this is true why aren't the American people fighting this?
- We thought the US was a democracy. But you are not. You are worse than Mexico and Argentina. Anyone could take over your country.
I had no good answers.
Both comments have haunted me ever since.