Max Sawicky wrote,
>I think this is the right protest at the wrong time, and
>timing is everything in politics. It is clearly predicated
>on Gore's margin of defeat, not on any abiding concern
>with democracy.
I agree about the wrong timing but also about the remarkable extent of
activity. With apologies for the byzantine 'dialectic' of the following, I
think it is inevitable that popular protest express itself in inarticulate
and perhaps inappropriate slogans. CounterCoup foregrounds a slogan -- a
leap to making the popular vote total decisive -- that is really the flip
side of the Bush/Baker demand to "get it over with for the sake of the
system". There's also the reckless claim that the Palm Beach fiasco was a
deliberate fraud. Conspiracy theories travel faster than the speed of light.
But there is the fact that the complexity of the situation is hard to grasp
(even among the elite group of intellectuals on this list). Our job (if I
can put it that way) is neither to affirm or deny simplistic reductions but
to situate them in their historical specificity (only partly kidding).
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
