RAFTING DOWN AMERICA'S REAL MAINSTREAM

Sam Smith

I helped to start the national Green Party some years back because I was
looking for a political organization in the American mainstream with
which I could feel comfortable. I wanted to get out of the Democratic 
Party because I thought I might become liable under the racketeering
statutes. I didn't want anything to do with parties that went around
invading countries and killing people in the name of freedom.  I
certainly didn't want to find myself called before some war crime
tribunal. And I wanted nothing to do with an economics based on the
cruel notion that what was best for one's campaign contributors was also
best for the country. Or people who treated nature like it was Kleenex.

In short, I wanted a nice conservative American political party. One
that would conserve the environment, the Constitution, individual
liberty, economic and social opportunity,  and all the other values that
our country claimed - if not always followed - during its first two
centuries. Values like independence, fairness, cooperation, and the
protection of those places - including communities, open spaces or
buildings -  that people called home.

Of course, I couldn't even mention to my fellow Greens that I thought of
them as mainstream. Some of them would have been insulted, some would
have gone off to form a another party, and some would have argued with
me long past my bedtime.

But I was right. If you want to find the prototypical American who not
only values those things most often associated with America at its best,
but acts on those values, you need search no further than the Green
Party.

There are others to be sure: libertarians, free thinkers,
devolutionists, unpolitical small farmers, eccentric shopkeepers, 
independent religionists and what Bill Kaufman in Look Homeward America
calls "reactionary radicals and front porch anarchists." On his website
you'll find a tentative list that includes, besides this writer, Ivan
Illich, Wendell Berry, Karl Hess, Bob Dylan, Zora Neal Hurston, Senator
Burton Wheeler, Jane Jacobs, Ken Kesey, Merle Haggard, Kenneth Rexroth,
Hiram Johnson, William Jennings Bryan and Albert Jay Nock.

It is as inexplicable as it is flattering to be in such company unless,
that is, you accept a currently unpopular notion that it is not policy
or ideology that really divides us but our understanding of, and
relationship to, the world, America, and each other.

While I might not agree with all the company that Kaufman would have me
keep, I accept absolutely his argument:

"There are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the
world, and the rest of us. The former is a factitious creation whose
strange gods include HBO, accentless TV anchor people, Dick Cheney,
reruns of Friends, and the National Endowment for Democracy. It is real
enough - cross it and you'll learn more than you want to know about
weapons of mass destruction  - but it has no heart, no soul, no
connection to the thousand and one real Americas that produced Zora
Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy Day and the Mighty
Casey who has struck out.

"I am of the other America, the unseen America, the America undreamt of
by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing
about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball
played without payment or sanction, of uncut maples and unpasteurized
cider.

"So no, I do not feel 'ashamed' of my country, for America. . . is not
George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton but my friends, my neighbors, and yes,
the Grand Canyon, too. Even better, it is the little canyon and the rude
stream and Tom Sawyer's cave and all those places whose names we know,
whose myths we have memorized, and whose existence remains quite beyond
the compass of ABC-TV."

The Green Party is part of that unseen America. The problem is that I
seem to be among the few who know it. The media treats the Green Party
as though it were a bag of nuts, liberals regard it as a strain of avian
flu, and the Greens, to a sad degree, accept the illusion that they are
an oddity rather than prototypical of their country.

The danger in this is that the Green Party will end up in hippie heaven,
an ideological Balinas full of old VW buses, people who think the right
thing and act the right way, but huddled together in a refuge when they
should be leading a revolution. A revolution by mainstream Americans to
recover their land from the thieves, dunces, megalomaniacs and
pathological psychopaths who are destroying it in one of the greatest
acts of political dishonesty, economic banditry and cultural apostasy in
human history.

This is not rhetoric. On issues including the Iraq war, the environment,
health care, campaign financing, genetically modified foods, and
marijuana use, the Greens represent mainstream America better than
either of the two major parties. 

And there are other potential issues and constituencies about which the
Greens have paid far too little attention but with nothing between them
except the will and an appreciation that it's not abstract platforms of
good intentions that matter but the ability to witness one's beliefs at
ground zero every day and in every way. For example, on immigration, a
recent poll finds Latinos blaming the Republicans and distrusting the
Democrats - providing an opening for the Greens they have yet to
discover.  Or consider the women's movement, so absorbed with glass
ceilings that it ignores the hard floors daily faced by their sisters at
Wal-Mart and elsewhere.  Or consider the lack of any movement for young
men with less than a college education, whom conservatives send to fight
their wars or imprison for smoking pot, and whom liberals assign to a
rhetorical  hegemony of dominant males these men will never meet, let
alone emulate. Or consider issues like eminent domain reform and small
business that are just sitting there hungry for a political voice but
shunned by both major parties. The issues are out there. And so are the
voters. If people went to the polls as they did in 1960 there would be
about 25 million more of them.

Finally, there are two great issues the Democrats have deserted: civil
liberties and economic decency. Once hallmarks of liberalism, these
causes have been forgotten by the liberals and trashed by the
Clintonistas. One hardly hears a Democrat mention health care, pensions,
or minimum wages any more because too many of the party's elite have
drifted into a social class buffered against such concerns and the
party's campaign contributors won't let them near such issues anyway.

A Green Party that not only opposed the misadventures of U.S.
imperialism and continued its fight for sane ecological policies and
electoral reform, but also became the loudest voice for single payer
healthcare, populist economic reforms; a sane drug policy; tight control
on eminent domain; devolution of power, better treatment of small
business; and fair immigration laws would pick up a large new
constituency as it became the movement of the silenced majority, which
is to say just about everyone in America currently being screwed by the
Democrats and Republicans.

It wouldn't be easy because the Greens are an anarchistic amalgam of
pragmatists and purists; utopians; spiritualists;  ideological
fundamentalists and strategic agnostics; people with a natural feel for
politics and people who would rather be practicing a religion; the
sanctimonious and the excessively humble; those absorbed in a
pointlessly fractious debate over presidential politics and those deeply
involved at the local level; the gentle and the obnoxious.  In other
words, a typical American assemblage.

But there's a big America out there without any party that gives a damn
about its concerns. Many of these Americans have given up voting. The
Greens could be the party of this America if they learned to lead on
issues that currently don't interest them; to respond to things actually
happening around them as well in their heads and debates; to follow
fellow spirits as well as to lead them; to take pleasure in, and make
friends with, those who can only travel part their way;  and to explain
and celebrate their close connection to the best of mainstream
traditions and values of an America the other parties have betrayed. The
politics are all out there. All that is missing is a party.

PERMANENT LINK
http://prorev.com/rafting.htm

LOOK HOMEWARD AMERICA
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1932236872/progressiverevieA/