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Some of you may already be familiar with
this wonderful website and literary magazine, Orion. My free trial issue was beautiful, and I
subscribed. At Home, click on the Turn the
page button for the current issue. I recommend The Joseph
Strategy, but there is lots of good reading here. I followed the trail to Orion Redux for
past feature articles and immediately selected two by Wendell Berry. Check out their book series, too. Bill McKibben has a few thoughts about the Dean campaign
and the power of the internet to
get people involved and open/change their minds. Concluding paragraphs from Beating Around the Bush:
“What
is most interesting, however, is the effect that it seems to be having on Dean.
The buttoned-down, lukewarm, anti-charismatic governor of Vermont seems to be
turning into something else: someone open to passion. It's possible that it's all calculated -- that he understands
how well his roaring speech at his official campaign kickoff would play with
his new base. It's possible that underneath he is just one more cynical pol who
will tack wherever the polls tell him to tack in the months to come. But it's also possible that he
understands it's
all only a little bit about him -- that
"his" campaign instead might become a campaign for a newer American
politics, one
less about the obvious divisions in our national life than about the obvious
challenges that lie ahead of us. About
global warming, about how you deal with all the baby boomers retiring, about
the lack of
connection that keeps people feeling powerless. He's a vessel
right now for something precious, a quantity of hope and earnestness; should he have the wisdom to understand that the vessel is less
important than what it carries, he just
might emerge as a real force. This happens rarely in our politics -- Bobby
Kennedy was the last time a hack suddenly turned into a force; John McCain came
pretty close before Karl Rove cut him off at the knees. And a force is what we need. It's true that anyone but George Bush in
the White House would be nice -- the mindless vandalism of our nation would
slow down. But it's also true that facing
this century, a century when the planet's temperature could rise five degrees
Fahrenheit, we need something much different. We need nothing less than a
reconfiguration of our economies, our desires, our worldview. It seems at least possible that
Dean will figure out how to turn a campaign -- and maybe even an administration
-- into a two-way conversation with its supporters. If so, he will have done
something truly remarkable, giving
the people the voice they are meant to have in a democracy. The debate about whether any one
candidate can beat George Bush is not worth having -- the only person who can beat George
Bush, not to mention global warming, is not a person at all, but a mood, a
spirit, a swell. We need an eruption of hope, of determination, of
participation, something hot enough to melt our frozen politics. Fate -- in the curious and counterintuitive fashion that
fate often operates -- just might have chosen the unlikely Howard Dean as the
volcano through which that passion could pour. At the very least, everyone can
root for the people power that has broken the surface of our politics, root for
it to go on gathering steam and savvy, and, a year from now or a decade from
now, to transform our political landscape. Has anyone read McKibben’s Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age?
- KWC |
