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Hi Johannes, and everyone,
And thank you for your reply of course, and participation here; what I've
been thinking about, thanks in part to Samantha Bee's fury on Full Frontal
last week * - what kinds of participation are possible? How does one
engage in the first place? What sort of engagement produces a pat on the
back which is stillborn? She referred (and the details may be wrong here
but the tenor is not) to a mayoral election in Los Angeles - a city which
has had vociferous response, resistance, in the form of actions - art,
yes, probably theater as well, marches with maybe between half a million
and a million participants, all of this. But the crux was the election
itself, in which only 11% of the eligible voters cast their ballots. So
what the hell here? The democratic candidate won by a small margin, but
that was all. And elsewhere, the same pattern repeats itself, no voting,
no getting one's hands dirty touching the lever, taking the time out to
actually make a difference. That pattern apparently has been repeated
across the United States, particularly in local elections, where DIWO - do
it with others - seems to be replaced with LITO - leave it to others. This
is fundamental here. We're addicted to screens, to an imminence; I hear
almost nothing said about the historic low turnouts of voters. So many
people are disaffiliated, waiting perhaps to see what Trump will do? The
rallies here in RI are filled with calls to VOTE; I have no idea how that
will play out. But across the country, people sign online petitions, write
congresspeople, call, but don't go to the ballotbox. And the results are
disconcerting.
Bee brought up the Tea Party and its right-wing agenda - how successful
they've been precisely because they've been motivated to vote. I almost
want to bring Lacan into this, how do we move from the symbolic to the
real, from the signs to the lever, from the indexical to the ikonic? Or do
we think that it's walking that makes a fundamental difference to a
democratic order, pressing Send on a screen poll, rather than casting a
vote?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections
has some details; the national vote was 55%, low. So many people I know
weren't voting for HRC, just dropping out...
So the question might be, in the US, how do we engage? Everyone I know is
waiting for the elections two years from now - but if voters aren't
motivated we'll be stuck with the same mess we're in.
- Alan
* A political weekly television segment on TBS -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Bee
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