If this world were a rational place, according to many Democrats, President Bush's vindication last Tuesday would be shocking on the order of a triple-dose of electric chair. Given the mauling working Americans have taken, the change of gold (surplus) into lead (deficit), tall-tales of Saddam Hussein's nukes and the sheer ineptitude of this administration, Democrats might be forgiven for wondering if the reasons why Bush was re-elected include something more than a strategy of God, gays and tax-cuts by Karl Rove. Maybe Bush was re-elected because we are in grievous denial.
Arguably, the current state of our electoral politics comes down to the way many of us deal with reality. Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach once said you are what you eat (\man is what he eats""). Playwright Bertolt Brecht had a similar take (""grub first, then ethics"").
Those materialistic quotations, however, fail to encompass the way our materialistic nation operates in this time of war. In the homeland of Freedom on the March, you are what you prefer to be eating.
Reality, of course, is sometimes very painful, and so we would desperately prefer it be another way. Right now, reality says that many students here at UW have a weak shot at the American dream, that Bush was asleep at the helm prior to 9/11, that our soldiers are dying and killing in Fallujah for no achievable purpose.
Iraq might well be the prime reason why reality is so painful at the moment. The war is draining our morale and our treasury-hence Abu Ghraib and the big red debt. More important, this war is draining our blood. Well over 1,000 American soldiers have thus far died.
For what? To defend against a loon that posed no threat to Madison, let alone Riyadh? To spread democracy in the Middle East just like the Crusaders once hoped to spread... what? Christianity? Feudalism? Whatever the rationale, the fact remains. One thousand dead and counting. Plus the wounded, who will have to make do without the arms, legs, eyes, bits of brain and assorted other parts left behind in Mesopotamia.
There are few things harder to accept than the painful reality of senseless death. As both individual families and the nation as a whole go through the grieving process, it is hotly denied that there was not a good reason for all this sacrifice.
Democrats and liberal students here at UW may need to understand what the Bush campaign understood so well-namely, that the grieving process is long and includes, in its early stages, denial.
Perhaps that is why a large majority of Bush voters ""prefer"" to believe right up until Election Day that Saddam had a hand in 9/11 and that we did in fact find Iraqi WMDs. This sort of denial might have less to do with God and other matters of faith than plain old grief.
And given all that death in Iraq, who of us would not ""prefer"" that Saddam had ties to 9/11 and WMDs, that he posed a real danger to the United States?
If this nation is indeed grieving and in denial right now, it makes sense that John Kerry lost last week. Quite simply, the election came during the denial phase of the national grieving process. Kerry was offering the electorate a little reality by reminding us, in effect, that we are what we eat and not what we prefer to be eating. Precisely what America did not want to hear.
Bush was waiting with wide arms to embrace those who wanted a temporary escape into the hollow belief that our soldiers are dying for a noble and achievable cause. While enough of us preferred to believe that last Tuesday to carry Bush, the grieving process will grind on and in the end it won't care at all for what we prefer to believe.
