The Real World

Oh, for crying out loud. Early voting began in Florida and they’re already having some problems at polling stations in South Florida, a traditionally strong Democratic region. The national media needs to start covering this story now. We cannot afford to allow these kinds of problems go unnoticed until Election Day or afterwards. If Governor Bush and his allies are trying to suppress votes, they’re being awfully transparent about it. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Republican operatives tried to relocate 63 polling places that were originally in predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Philadelphia; an effort that failed once the local media exposed it.
I am taking Election Day off. Ron Suskind’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine was enough to push me over the edge. A Bush aide said the following to the author of the article:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
I can’t begin to deconstruct all the Orwellian and Kafkaesque overtones in this statement. An administration that perpetuates such delusions of grandeur within its ranks is a threat to the people it claims to serve. This nonsense about the “reality-based community” is indicative of a president whose own tenuous grip on reality is spreading amongst his advisors like a virus. Both Republicans and Democrats can see that. And I can either sit here and write about it or I can try to do my small part to change our collective reality.
Oh, and by the way…GO SOX! Great win tonight.