"The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!" A chant that has echoed through four decades, first heard broadcast from in front of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago in 1968, as Walter Cronkite intoned that the Democratic Convention was being held "...in a police state". This was  during the first televised war in history, and the chant was heard again in 1999 coming from the streets of Seattle as people gathered to protest the globalization of the world by the World Trade Organization. It was heard all around the world in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Revolutions are born out of contradictions and coincidence. 

I don't know anyone who really believes in coincidence. Something is definitely in the air. Today I went down to the local Obama office, made a contribution and put the sticker on my car. Tomorrow Robert Kennedy Jr. will be coming to town to canvas voters. John McCain, in choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, and in condoning the incitement of acts of violence against his opponent has drawn a clear line in the culture war, and there's no longer any doubt as to which side of the barricades I'm standing on.

Just before watching the movie "Chicago Ten" in the mail and just as I put I put in on the news that the Sheriff of Chicago has refused to enforce foreclosures came over the wire. A couple of days ago I attended a showing of another remarkable movie, "Battle in Seattle".

Something is in the air. 

When McCain selected Palin I first felt that it was a shrewd move to cover the bases where Obama was weakest. Ms. Palin, it turns out, is little more than a cultural provocateur, playing upon the worst aspects of white racism, fanning the flames of civil war and American exceptionalism without regard for the consequences. We have travelled a long way, from the image of Bobby Seale bound and gagged and chained to a chair in a Chicago courtroom to that of Barack Obama accepting the nomination in front of a crowd of 80,000 people in Denver and the biggest television audience in history. Yet, the party in power is caught in a desperate struggle to hold on and it has chosen to bring out the whole box of fears and racial hatred that has kept it in power, and it has found the perfect spokesperson to drive those fears. Palin has taken the agenda of racial and cultural supremacy, wed to the economic insecurities of a battered middle class, long advanced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove and David Duke, and amped it into a political frenzy that, given the likely outcome of this election, may explode with dire consequences for everyone. What is most telling is that for the most part even the thin religious veneer given to white racism by movements like the Christian Coalition has all but fallen to the side and the hatred and fear stands out as naked as it ever did during the civil rights struggle or the Jim Crow south. 

On the other hand, the forces of real change have, for better or worse collected behind Barack Obama, and have grown into a tide that will not be denied. Although I have considered supporting a third party candidate and only lately have gotten aboard the Obama express, it has become more clear by the day that this election offers two distinct visions of America, and it's clear that the stakes of failure are higher than they have been in my lifetime. This election is not about policy as much as about imagination. Perhaps that is true of all presidential elections, but since it is  imagination that leads us into our chosen future, so be it. 

When the police rioted in Chicago and in Seattle it didn't matter whether you were a demonstrator or whether you were a bar patron along Michigan Avenue or a shopper on Broad Street, you got caught in the gas and maybe you got beaten by clubs and if you were really unlucky they threw you in a police van and hauled you away. The connections between 1968, 1999 and 2008 are broad and numerous. The Democratic Convention of 1968 is the one that everybody was afraid of repeating in Denver this year. The demonstrations in Seattle represented the first public explosion of resistance in this country since the seventies. The apprehension of 2008 was that the events of 1968 and 1999 would repeat themselves in the streets and halls in Denver. Instead, a Democratic Party led by those who had witnessed or participated in those historical events and those who had learned the lessons of the last 40 years managed to pull together and emerge strengthened for the coming contest. 

A storm is coming. An election involving a highly polarized population intersecting with an economic meltdown of enormous proportions while two unpopular and expensive wars are being fought overseas provides a confluence of singularly volatile historical forces. An empire built on jingoistic self-deception is crumbling, and those who identify with it are growing more fearful and angry by the moment while a revolution born of hope faces a nation caught in the consequences of its own contradictions. 

The economy has been revealed as a game built on confidence that is wearing thin, one based on credit, on trust in an enormous pyramid scheme that is reaching the place where all such games unravel. Those who got onboard early on are 'cashing out' while those who tried to snag a ride as the caboose roared by are losing the trust they invested. A new film put out by the Venus Project, called "Zeitgeist Addendum", as a followup to their earlier effort, "Zeitgeist", offers a fascinating deconstruction of the assumptions that support the economic 'money' machine. I link to it with some reluctance, as I have serious problems with the rest of the film's analysis and approach. Still, it offers a wealth of material for discussion and debate. 

After the initial section which sets forth a revealing explanation of where we are and how we got here, the movie wanders into a sort of utopian wilderness that is a combination of ambitious and valid proposals for technological solutions to scarcity and waste, and a rather vaguely drawn vision of a proposed 'resource economy', where wise scientists and machines of loving grace will rule over all. It ends with an attack on religion as a force for control, and proposes that if we ignore the politicians and the priests we will emerge into a New Age of Reason. An enduring problem with Secular Humanists is that they tend to assume that man is not only perfectable, but that he is already 'perfected', and that if he is placed in the right socially engineered environment he will naturally respond in an enlightened manner. The last century is littered with examples of humanist experiments gone horribly wrong.  

Those who spend time blaming religion and politics and other non rational endeavors for the problems that humans create in the world ignore the intricate role played by these endeavors in the long evolution of human consciousness, especially in regards to ethics and morality. The view that we can leave it all behind like a reptile shedding its' skin strikes me as extremely presumptuous. Attacks on religion and politics rarely offer a convincing alternative to the role of faith or the question of how we shall make collective decisions. It seems to me that absolutist visions of the future are bound for failure at best, and serve only to provoke unhelpful and extreme reaction in those who do not agree.  

I can feel that a long winter is approaching fast. Both tensions and hope are high within factions of a divided nation. It feels to me more than at any time since 1968 that we are closer to either civil war and social breakdown or a rebirth of Democracy. However this election plays out, in the midst of an economic Katrina sweeping everything in its' path, we emerge on the other side either renewed or weakened in a profoundly altered social and political landscape. 

Can we weather the storm? We have no choice. However it goes we are in for a struggle. Those who used the last two elections to seize what they saw as total power are being challenged to lay down arms. They won't, not willingly. 

Meanwhile, the call goes out, Power To The People!! The whole world is watching!!

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You can't stop the signal. 

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