ASYLUM

* Fireworks

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I took a bunch of pictures at the fireworks display last night, and put some of them on Flickr. I've also finished the code that imports (some of) my Flickr photostream into the blog, which means two things: the photos in the banner at the top have changed (and will continue to change automatically from time to time when I upload new photographs), and the gallery page is online, which simply shows all the photos that have ever been a part of the banner.

* Signs and Portents

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I've been viewing this race as politics. Not politics-as-usual — I think more is at stake here — but nonetheless, politics: Is Bush the right man for the job? Should we have invaded Iraq? Is it right to continuously erode civil liberties in favour of security? Clearly, my opinion is a resounding no on all three questions, but what about America? I believed this election was the opportunity for Americans to vote for or against these policies, and others like them.

I am beginning to think I was very, very wrong.

Aside from people's existing brand loyalties, In my mind, the race came down to these two sides:

Factors that would work against Bush

• The Iraq war being a momentous clusterfuck, with many people dying on both sides, hideous abuses coming to light, and no justifications that even faintly stood up to scrutiny

• People being affected by the economy tanking

• People being appalled by the administration's dishonesty, corruption, political machinations, and abuses of countries, people, and ideals.

Factors that would work for Bush

• Apathy, people deciding 'both sides are the same', not voting, etc

• Electoral shenanigans — deception, disenfranchisement, Diebold, etc

• A populace ill-informed about the facts

• A well-oiled Republican talking-points machine trampling the Democrat's poor showing; the far-right-wing painting Kerry as 'left-wing' instead of the 'fractionally-less-right-wing-than-Bush' that he actually is.

• Jingoism, 'national security' fears, sparkly media distractions

• "Folksy" charisma

I recently read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S Thompson. Looking at these lists, in many ways, this seemed to me like a surprisingly-similar rerun of the Nixon re-election campaign. Apart from the charisma, of course, since Nixon actually had anti-charisma.

So, this has happened before — in fact, Nixon won by a shocking landslide, taking every state except, if I remember right, Wisconsin. And then, it worked out alright in the end because the Watergate scandal, which had been slow-burning for some time, finally and thoroughly exploded. When his own legal counsel John Dean screwed him, and both the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigned one after another rather than follow Nixon's orders, the whole thing got too big to contain.

But will we have such an endgame this time round? Now, the President is surrounded by the coterie of the Project for the New American Century. The AG is John Ashcroft, an evangelical Pentacostalist of the speaking-in-tongues persuasion who infamously lost his Senate re-election bid to a dead man, and spoke of the seperation of church and state, "A robed elite have taken the wall of separation built to protect the church, and made it a wall of religious oppression."

Which brings me to the point of this post — there was one after all — this link from the BBC that Tim posted:

Religion — rather than class, ethnic origin or education — has become the key determinant of voting in the 2004 presidential race, according to an exit poll conducted by the Associated Press news agency. And moral issues were more important for voters than Iraq, the war on terrorism, or the economy. — BBC News

Many people, in the US and abroad have asked, "What is it that we're missing?"

With a near-record turnout, it sems like apathy wasn't what won it for W, and though the Democratic party was ineffectual at getting its message across, in my opinion, enough people were putting out the right information that it seemed inexplicable that so many people would vote for Bush. Outside of the US, polls of world citizens showed only a tiny minority supported Bush — so, what is it that we were all missing?

Religion, apparently:

Two-thirds of voters who attend religious services regularly (once a week or more) backed President Bush rather than Senator Kerry — and they make up 40% of the electorate — same BBC report

Salon also has a couple of notes on this:

Bush won among those in swing states who picked moral values by 84-15 and he won among those who picked terrorism by 85-15. Sen. John Kerry won by a wide margin among those who picked the economy.

"The fact that values trumped the economy sends a very strong signal," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who said the moral values issue was in the background of the day-to-day campaign debate over terrorism, Iraq and the economy.

But, what are these 'moral values'? To me, 'moral values' are about taking responsibility for your actions, behaving honestly and fairly, and respecting other people. However it sems the issues being discussed here are primarily gay marriage and abortion, although there seem to be a host of concerns lurking beneath. Fundamentally, we're talking about issues of discrimination, oppression, and patriarchal control.

One thing I haven't figured out yet, is quite what we're dealing with at the top; we know Bush is 'born again' and has plenty of faith — but does he place it in his God or in himself? We gather that the rest of the Project for the New American Century are fans of Leo Strauss, who took a fairly cynical view of religion:

According to [Shadia Drury of the University of Calgary], Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control. At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."

But if these non-believers hope to use religion as a means to control the masses, using Bush's own piety as a smokescreen, they are taking a tiger by the tail. It's early days yet, and already things seem out of control to me, but then, this kind of hatred is so alien to me I don't know how to analyse it. Does this represent religious fervour? Or standard-issue ignorance and xenophobia given the veneer of acceptance? Or the artful redirection by 'moral leaders' of a panoply of fears, insecurity and complaints in a new, more useful (to said leaders) direction?

I don't know. I feel like I need to know; if it does get out of control, or if the leader find they must step up the pressure to maintain control — well, combined, all of this raises the very real spectre of Gilead in America.

It's not just the presidential race; a slew of state-level amendments and appointments push the States further into extreme intolerant-authoritarian territory:

• Jim DeMint — wants to ban single-mothers from being teachers

• Tom Coburn — favours the death penalty for abortionists

• and all these...

The rise of the 'christian right' (I don't consider this an appropriate phrase, since their beliefs do not seem to reflect the words or works of the Jesus depicted in the Bible, but are actually rather Old Testament in their nature, and pretty pick-and-choose about what they take from that, too) is nothing new — Falwell's inaccurately-named 'Moral Majority' was around for Reagan's first election, after all.

But it's generally been considered a somewhat lunatic fringe; it's easy, inside our respective bubbles of either athiesm, agnosticism, or tolerant (ie real) christianity, to dismiss these people as occasional random crazies with their own deep-seated problems, like the guy who stands outside Oxford Circus station with his megaphone, harassing young women for being "Sinners not Winners!".

But it has since mutated into the Christian Coalition and steadily grown in size — and in influence, frequently, quietly siezing minor, often poorly-contested roles in local government and schools, taking the incumbents by surprise with their tight organisational efficiency.

Even though I was aware of this before the election, I hadn't connected this political strategy with any kind of shift in real-world viewpoints: I believed people were voting for policies — policies I disagree with, but which I could understand — rather than religious beliefs.

You have to understand, that here in the UK, religion is largely a fading institution. Wired UK once stated, "The Church of England? That's not a religion, that's a tea party with real-estate," and even its followers might admit it's hardly a fiery hotbed. Attendance is very low, and religious opinons rarely influence public debate. Though many people still believe in God, and recent studies showed 72% still consider themselves Christian, far fewer do than in the USA, and in general, it's been seen as on a steady decline since the Enlightenment. And amongst those who do believe, it tends towards personal beliefs, rather than formal hierarchies. For example, from Scotland (because that's where I found figures from first):

The number of people worshipping regularly at the Church of Scotland has fallen by 22% in the last eight years. And the Catholic Church also reported a steep decline in congregation sizes, with attendance down by 19% in the same period. — BBC News

So it comes as a surprise, perhaps even a shock to find fundamentalism this strong in the USA, and not just in Alabama. Don't get me wrong, I follow the news, but while it's still nowhere near the 'majority' that Falwell so optimistically declared over twenty years ago, at 40%, it's a lot closer than it has been in a long time. Strong enough to swing an election, pass discriminatory laws and stir up hatred.

Well. It's important not to take all this lying down but what to do?

Some want to seceed from the union, which is amusing but never going to happen (if anywhere was going to, Texas would've done it years ago), while a number of others are preparing to leave, and one acquaintance of mine writes that she wants to 'stage an intellectual exodus'.

Now, on a purely personal level, I'd love to import a whole bunch of cool, smart, funny San Franciscans into town... but I'm not sure that fleeing is a great idea.

For a start, there are way more people out there than we can realistically import, and the rest don't deserve to be stranded ("no geek left behind").

But more critically, the last thing we want to do is, by leaving, cede control of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons to what would remain: a whole country of religious fundamentalists who believe in the literal truth of Revelations.

* Darkness Falls

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Chief of staff Andy Card said he was convinced Mr Bush had won with "more votes than any candidate in history". — BBC News

This is bad. This is very bad. Of course, it might just be spin, and we can but hope. But it's not looking good for America. Because fundamentally, this is the American people saying, "Invading foreign countries? Killing tens of thousands of their people? Imprisoning, torturing and killing yet more? All without provocation or any evidence of wrongdoing? YEAH! We LOVE that! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"

Funnily enough, this disturbs us, out here in the rest of the world.

And that's without even getting into what Americans are doing to themselves, how America, once considered a beacon of liberty and hope, is desperately trashing its own freedom in its race to swear fealty to a priviledged few.

Now, we know that's not what all of America wants. But, increasingly, it's looking like it's what the majority of America wants, nonetheless — and not even a carefully-sculpted electoral-college majority:

"We are convinced that President Bush has won re-election with at least 286 electoral college votes. He also had a margin of 3.5m popular votes." [...] Republicans are projected to tighten their grip on the Senate, defeating Democratic leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota and capturing a string of seats across the South. Mr Daschle would be the first party leader to lose a race for re-election in more than 50 years.

This is bad. This is very bad.

* First Post

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Well, I've rebuilt the blog: new look, new software. I'll be importing the old db back in later, at which point this will stop being the first post, but never mind. This is still the first post in the new blog... That said, as I write this, the new version of the site isn't online yet. I'm just writing stuff and putting it into the database, in anticipation of it going up, so I don't forget. When I pull the big red lever, it should all just pop into place.

So. What's been going on? Well, I moved house, and had no net connection for a while, until the monopoly telephone provider got their act together and DSL was installed. Thing was, I got out of the habit of blogging during this offline period and with all the hassles of moving, sorting out furniture, finding my way round London and various other stuff going on, never started again.

So, a mixture of new posts, and filling in the gaps, over the next few days.

In the meantime, some things will be broken: the dates on posts; permalinks; some of the sidebar links; and there's a bunch of stuff missing from the main menu. But it's a start, and it's online.