9/1/06
Here in our venerable pirate's port of a country we profess a great and ponderous respect for the principle of democracy. It's in our blood like holy wine, or maybe vat-grown rubella antibodies, just one of those sacred touchstones of our collective culture. We expect magic democracy dust to ennoble and uplift everything it gets sprinkled over. More, we perceive cultures without the ostensible trappings of ballot boxes and election ads as seething with an inchoate desire for inky fingers and screaming arguments over which thief is which. It's not just a cute deception promulgated by devious politicos, it's a genuine urmyth.

Unfortunately for this rosy-lensed bedtime tale, the reality of the human world is that all societies are democracies, more or less. It's not so much that people get the kind of government they deserve as that they get the government they unconsciously expect. And as we discovered to our sorrow in Palestine and Iran and Lebanon and Venezuela and any number of other places where they persist in speaking some outlandish gibberish instead of good old USA, sometimes what the people want isn't what we thought it was.

Take that test tube of the democratic process Iraq for instance. Now this is a place, for all its corruption and brutality, that has a fairly long history of democratic government. Many in the country are by no means unfamiliar with checkboxes on paper in curtained booths. It's not their inability to vote that's at issue here, it's the wide and antisocial spread of their deeply-felt political views. Iraq, a country fractured along ethnic and religious lines, is in the process of experiencing direct democratic participation by some of its more extreme citizens, a process in which ballots are bullets and the vote is subtractive rather than additive. Whether this bloody calculus will lead to a more unified country -- or several -- or not remains to be seen. There's no doubt, however, that the People (whoever they are) are making Their Will known.

Just down the dusty Silk Road in Palestine, the locals trooped to the polls and freely and fairly put into power the only effective political party in their country, the one most responsible for initiating public welfare programs, the one most active in rooting out corruption in high places, and coincidentally, the one with the mad-dog Exterminate Israel agenda. Democracy is on the march! Next door in Lebanon, most of the country has the big love for another bunch of mad-dog do-gooders, all but the ones in the south who end up in the crosshairs of IDF cluster bombs when the militia moves Rocket Town into their town. Course, we're talking greatest good for the greatest number here, aren't we? Sometimes you gotta take one for the team, y'know?

Then, right across the river (Jordan) you gots the recipients of all these ill feelings (and rockets), a nation created out of the democratic interaction of any number of nations and ethnic groups over the course of 70 or so years and then imposed quite un-democratically on the region, over the screaming protests of the indigenous population which presumably would deserve some input on the matter beyond what God gave Job. These guys freely and responsibly vote in government after government sworn to improve the image and defend the good name of Eretz Israel by what starts out in theory as self-defense but turns out in practice to be the wholesale (and fruitless) slaughter of hapless civilians, not to mention expressing a surprisingly widespread mad-dog religious landgrabbing desire of their very own.

Obviously, there's democracy and then there's Democracy. The baby-d variety comes with the territory, whether it's the family dinner table or Tienmin Square. It grows in every nook and cranny of the human experience. There's no need to encourage or grow it -- it's a weed that the Wha? Itself couldn't eradicate, very often a virulent invasive that thrives on bullshit and abuse.

The viability of the upper-case version, on the other hand, relies on a lot of very specific and expensive soil amendments like education, tolerance, equality and a propensity towards moderation. Naturally, we Americans see ourselves as the shining beacon of such, as we have so convincingly demonstrated in our last two election cycles and our general level of public dignity of discourse.

The question becomes then, if democracy got us into this mess in the first place, how is more of it going to get us out? And if not it, what?

While I've always been a big proponent of education, in this case I have my doubts. Dubai is full of unemployed young men with earnestly earned and duly awarded PhDs -- in Muslim studies, the only degree course offered. In America, schools have long been reduced to great factories, stamping out uniform employables with the rejects landing in the trash can. Being able to read and write doesn't make a wild hare into a citizen.

To stoop to a demonic reference, Hitler Youth were extremely well educated. Badabump. Crash.

Moral education in the form of organized religion seems to fare no better -- you got your batshit good holy Muslims and your good holy Jews and your good holy Christians, not a finger's width of charity or forgiveness to find amongst the lot of them, all ready to skin each other alive and dance on the bloody corpses in the Names of their high-questionable deities, always assuming they aren't just finger puppets of some supernatural Bad Thing that's really trick with impersonations.

Ultimately, the truth is that big-D dem grows out of small-d only through a combination of time and will. Improvements in the aforementioned education, civility, equality and so on can help, but the chief ingredient is a mob's need to organize overcoming its natural propensity to chew itself to shreds in a frenzy of self-competition. Unless and until people stop being so dang greedy and learn to love each other, all the ballots on earth will only feed the bonfires.