--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Wouldn't it be interesting if Americans chose between a black > Muslim and a white Baptist minister for president?
Indeed it would. Would Americans be intelligent enough to drop the labels and see it as a race between two men? Not likely. Not any more likely than Fairfield Life is to get past labels like "TMer" vs. "anti-TMer" or "evolved" vs. "unevolved" or "enlightened" vs. "unenlightened" or "atheist" vs. "believer in God" or even "lying to others" vs. "lying to oneself." Labels are a way of pretending that complex situations (or people) can be described in...uh...black and white. Americans are *addicted* to labels. They buy products based on the labels, and they buy politicians based on the label. And then they complain when the reality of what they've bought doesn't quite match up with the claims on the label. What I'm waiting for now, as a somewhat dispas- sionate observer (I gave up on America long ago as anything but entertainment), is the *new* labels that their opponents are going to try to affix to these two men, and to the others who are still in the race. I suspect that some of the labels are going to get very ugly indeed. In my rather radical opinion, politics should be label-free, to the extent of being *political party* free. Parties are just another way of trying to label a product to make a complex sit- uation look simple. I'd love to see a democracy that just had a big jumble of candidates in a political race, with "party affiliations" not only not used, but rendered illegal. Each candidate would have to stand on his or her *own* record, establish his or her *own* credibility, make public his or her *own* beliefs and policies. They'd get no "boost" from other candidates or from the party they're supposedly part of. The only drawback I can see to this idea is the one that will prevent it ever happening in real life. Voters would actually have to learn to think.
