Me = A Conspiracy of Nature

Friend Col writes in the comments,

"Hey, it's Colleen. (didn't wanna go through the hassle of registering so 'scuse the anonymous post, or rather, ill-labeled post). Love ya, kid, but am glad you're setting the torch down on the conspiracy tip. And choosing to focus on election reform is clearly an intelligent middleground issue on which practical results can be registered."



Hi Col! Nice to hear from you! True enough, but I don't think my stance has shifted--I still think they stole it, because that's more logical to me than any of the half-baked, super-soft reasons I've heard for Kerry's sudden hemorrhaging of support. All the pundits' palaver boils down to the old Red vs. Blue paradigm that I think is fundamentally flawed; it's incredibly self-serving to elites on both the left and right for the election to turn on the supposed hatred of evangelicals (one alien, stereotyped group) for gays (another). That doesn't sound like reality to me, it sounds like kabuki--a simple story for people to watch while the real action goes on somewhere else.



But once one hollers "they stole it!" there's no place to go but election reform. It's like saying "maybe we shouldn't have open motorcades" after the President gets his head blown off. It's not the presence of conspiracy that bothers me--it's a constant in human affairs, like eczema or slush--but how disdain is used to prevent us from taking steps against it. The more unacceptable "conspiracy theory" becomes to the guardians of our society, the bigger a role I suspect it plays. Because a rigged game strikes at the very heart of those guardians' fitness to be elite. Why is Tom Wicker STILL insisting in the accuracy of the Warren Report? Is it because he really believes it, or because missing the scoop of the century suggests all sorts of uncomfortable questions about his biases, competence, and that of the New York Times? Maybe he's right, and maybe Bush won fairly, too--but I'd rather err on the side of paranoia and protection.



Politics IS conspiracy--people working together to achieve a result--the only question is how to restrain inappropriate conspiracy. And if you want to restrain it, you have to start by acknowledging that it exists. It's not loony to think that Bush and Co. stole it; if they didn't, it's because they couldn't, not because they didn't try or want to. I am perfectly content for people to think I'm a paranoid fool, in the hopes that my attitude makes it infintesimally more difficult for inappropriate conspiracies to thrive unchallenged. I really do believe in democracy, because my experience is that the average American is smart, not dumb. And reelecting Bush was simply dumb. There's got to be more to the story than what the NYT is willing to admit.