It’s election time America.
It’s been a dark 8 years. Lies, illegal wars, torture, military tribunals, wiretapping, extremist judges, neocon yahoos in suits, and the war on intelligence, science, and the Constitution don’t exactly make for happy days for the American Republic. The long winter of reactionary politics, birthed in 1970s anti-civil rights backlash, carried to term with double digit inflation, and delivered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, is breaking to a new spring of progressive change.
It is the end of the conservative era. And now is our moment.
History turns its pages slowly and turns only after the mass struggle of ordinary people compel our “leaders” to ratify the changes that we, the people, have already made up our mind about. True leaders are led by the people.
The Bhatany Report endorses Hope, Change, and the Constitution. I know, that’s like saying I love my mother and apple pie.
For you see, what we’ve forgotten is that nations have souls, just like people. And after hacking away and pissing away at the few fundamental things that make us all American (practicality, common sense, the Constitution), 89% of us think that things are heading the wrong way. And we ARE going the wrong way, and perhaps terminally so.
After 8 years of watching a blue blood-Connecticut Yankee play cowboy president like he was Theodore Roosevelt (without none of that fancy book learnin’), can we really afford to give the keys to White House to a pair that thinks that Iraq borders Pakistan? Can we risk even a 2% chance that hockey mom/moron Sarah Palin will become president? Do we need another Reaganite who wants us to party like its 1986 in the Oval Office? And, finally, should we let those who subscribe to the deregulatory free market fantasies that brought us on the cusp of a new Great Depression into the people’s White House?
No. We will not.
The up-and-comer, Barack Obama, is not my ideal candidate. He’s a little too cautious, a smidge too cool, and a bit too comfortable with the Establishment than I care for. But he has fundamentally changed America and American politics for good and for the better.
Obama’s stint in community organizing has become a nationwide campaign-as-community-organizing experience, re-connecting millions with the community they live in at a grassroots level. My work in the Texas campaign will be will remembered fondly in my mind for the rest of my life. The seeds of organizing that Obama spread must lead to a mass movement if the urgent reforms we need in health care, banking, conservation, and foreign policy America needs are to get through Washington.
The worst that can happen to America is that we get what we want (fame, fortune, and the blissful ignorance of an easy life) at the expense of what we need (family, community, justice, tolerance and unity).
Obama gave us what we needed, not what we wanted. And we need him…. in the White House.
C’mon y’all, let’s turn those pages. Let’s make history.
E pluribus unum.
Excellent background to Muslims in India
28 NovI was considering writing a piece about the history of religion and power in India, but TIME Magazine has finally published an article about India with some actual historical depth. The poor relations between Hindus and Muslims are an interestingly recent (by Indian standards) development that dates to the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 against the East India Tea Company which essentially ruled North India in the name of the Persian-descended Muslim sultan in Delhi.
The British entered India as supplicants and traders to Indian kingdoms in the 1700s. Playing the regional kings and princes against one another, they slowly grew in power becoming the tax-collector and coin engraver to the Emperor in the Red Ford in Delhi. De facto control of the Emperor (king of kings) receded until the point that all he effectively controlled was his palace, harem, and late-night poetry jam sessions by 1857. Urdu and Persian were the languages of the educated, and Urdu ghazals reached their peak under the last Emperor who was a notable Sufi poet himself. With the effective British takeover of India, fundamentalist Protestant missionaries moved in, swearing to save the heathen Muslims and Hindus from damnation. A spark (involving beef and pig tallow in rifle cartridges) lit the gunpowder of a civilization under threat. A rebellion and jihad swept the nation, but it was inevitabally crushed due to the Indian habit of disorganization and in-fighting.
British writer William Dalrymple beautifully writes of the downfall of Emperor Zafar along with his era of Hindu-Muslim co-existence in the Last Emperor bringing together for the first time English and Urdu accounts of the mutiny in one book. The last Mughal died along with the syncretic Indo-Islamic culture he nourished. The British, not trusting Muslim minority after the Muslim sultan rose against them, ravaged the Red Fort, looted all of Delhi, and banished the enfeebled old king to Burma. Hindus were promoted into civil service but not Muslims. Muslim learning and culture were wiped out.
Colonial subjects pick up the habits and vices of their masters, and British mistrust of Muslims spread to their Hindu subjects. And Muslims themselves split between Deobandi fundamentalism and secular modernists, as TIME so insightfully points out.
And South Asia still grapples with that legacy of 1857. One bombing and riot at a time.