YOU CALL THIS AN ELECTION?

9/11 was also Kristallnacht, sixty-three years before. My parents and I barely escaped by fleeing to Holland. But the nazis were close on our heels. I was the only one who survived. I mention this to challenge the notion that after 9/11/2001, the world was no longer the same.

Toward the end of the war, FDR pondered the postwar future. He said that one of the most important tasks for the country would be to continue the political education of the American people. I didn't happen. The 2004 election, probably the ugliest spectacle after FDR, did nothing to inform, enlighten or even to entertain the American people and the rest of the human race with a television set. Surely it was a failed opportunity to present a genuine Dialectic, staged with intelligence and wit, on behalf of the American people.

Having been dumbed down in the Consumer Society, the American people failed to appreciate Plato's remark that, "...unless Philosophers are Kings or those who want to govern us are imbued with the spirit of Philosophy, we will not see the light of day." We were instead presented with a Madison Avenue advertizing Blitz, itself modelled on Hitler's prescription for the manipulation of the masses (for which he had utmost contempt): Keep the message simple and repeat it ad nauseum. This was the script for the 2004 election.

Most likely, this election was stolen, as was the previous one. Very probably, no amount of bemoaning what happened will change a thing. Still,we ought to consider what it will take to transform the increasingly expensive, tedious campaigns of smears and slander, cheerleading and applause lines, distortions and dubious promises. What about less merry-go-round-the-country, squeezing the flesh? There are, after all, substantial issues concerning our present quandries and future prospects for peace and harmony on this much abused little planet, yes?

The election was a referendum about the war in Iraq. More specifically it dealt with the question of leadership. Of course, Bush was the winner. He didn't say he was smarter. He said he was unswerving, unstoppable, unwavering, unshakable, the True Leedah (in German, the Fuhrer).

The election was also about values and morals in America. I believe that these issues are interrelated. The war in Iraq is not abput "freedom and democracy. It is a religious war (with racial overtones) between the Fundamentalist Muslims and the True Christians. It is about defeating Satan (on both sides). This has been going on for a very long time. The previous incarnation was between the True Christians and the Communists.

I am pessimistic about the realization that we are all children of God and that therefore we must love on another. Better we try to live without God. Darwin, anyone?

What about the moral divided in America? Again it is the struggle between the True Christians and the Secular Humanists, the descendents of the Age of Enlightenment. On a personal level it is hard for me to resist asking: Who are these people ? The people who "came out" to defend the country's moral values? Do I know them? Are some of them nice? Or are they invariable dumb, as Buckminster Fuller believed? Are they folks with whom we can get together to eat barbequed beef, but with whom we cannot talk? Is what separates us an abyss, across which we can only stare at one another, uncomprehendingly?

For me, a 9/11 (1938) survivor, it's deja vue all over again. The Germans (who felt betrayed by the Weimar Republic), also felt assaulted by modernity, diversity and relativism. Their small town mores were under assault, their identity threatened, their faith challenged. They too hated homosexuals, nudity on the stage, disconcerting new art forms, the rootless cosmopolitans, and all those who owned the presses and who financed perverse entertainments, the Savoir-faires and Savoir-vivre of the big cities, the internationalists, the Jews.

Is it not happening still?