Watson is a professor of English at UCLA. He can be reached at
[email protected].
By Robert N. Watson
Behind by over half a million votes nationwide, behind
(according to independent non-partisan estimates) by over 20,000
votes in Florida if the election had been properly run there,
behind (it is increasingly clear) in even the official Florida
count if his unscrupulous handlers hadn’t blocked one for
five weeks, George W. Bush is now proudly claiming the
presidency.
We can’t stop him from taking office. We also can’t
let him pretend he deserves it. Remember, please:
1) The stalling legal tactics and mob intimidation, both
orchestrated by Republican officials, deliberately preventing any
careful count of the Florida ballots ““ a count which is the
traditional, commonsensical and legal norm in close elections
everywhere.
2) Bush obtaining his mythical official edge only because racial
minorities and the poor in Florida were ““ yet again ““
systematically deprived of equal voting rights: through police
intimidation, inaccurate lists of felons and other ineligible
voters that disproportionately excluded black voters, as well as by
the inferior punch-card voting technology in poorer areas that led
to many more spoiled or uncounted votes than the optical machines
provided in affluent Republican areas.
 Illustration by RODERICK ROXAS/Daily Bruin 3) The
conservative Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court suddenly
deciding to override state law as soon as the legal process started
to defend the rights of the Democratic voters. This is the same
court that routinely shrugged off proof that states like Texas and
Florida systematically excluded black voters and executed blacks
but not whites for the same crimes. They enforced the claim of
George Bush ““ all his life, one of the most unequally
overprotected human beings ever to walk the earth ““ that he
needed “equal protection” to prevent the under counted
ballots of poor blacks and Holocaust survivors from being looked
at. If this proves that “the system works,” then we
need to recognize that system for what it is.
4) The intellectual dishonesty, ethical indifference and
spiritual ugliness that allowed Republican spokespeople not only to
exploit all this and lie about it relentlessly, but to do so while
proclaiming their own moral superiority and loudly denouncing
everyone who disagreed with them (including those simply supporting
a thorough careful count) as thieves and sore losers. These were
insults to our intelligence as well as our motives.
By the very act of taking the oath, George W. Bush will commit a
more impeachable offense ““ a high crime against
Constitutional democracy ““ than rascally Bill Clinton ever
did.
For his cabinet as he did at his convention, Bush digs up the
very few African Americans who think exactly like him, props them
up on stage and brags about providing representation and diversity.
Meanwhile, he appoints a secretary of labor who denounces
affirmative action and an attorney general with a lifelong record
of opposition toward African Americans and racial justice.
Bush is already setting up to resume the old practice of giving
huge chunks of government land away to his and Dick Cheney’s
fat-cat oil-and-gas corporation pals, at a loss, and making the
taxpayers pay to build roads into the wilderness so the
corporations can despoil it for their own profit.
In the campaign, Bush said that the booming economy meant we
should give a big tax cut to the wealthy. Now he says that the
slowing economy means we should give a big tax cut to the wealthy.
Like his buddies on court, Bush pretends to have reasons, but
really has only an utterly predictable conclusion: benefit your
rich Republican friends, no matter what the cost to logic and
honesty. Steal from the poor and give to the rich. Are you going to
sit there and let it happen, again, without a peep of protest?
Sure, there will be demonstrations in Washington. But they could
easily do more harm than good. The television public is
understandably tired of big chanting crowds put together by
interest groups (like the one the Bush campaign paid to storm the
counting room in Miami and intimidate the officials there out of
counting the votes that seemed likely to prove Gore won the
election).
Anyway, such large events tend to be taken over ““ with the
active help of the media ““ by zealots and trouble-seekers, by
people with many other agendas, and by agitators planted by the
opposition to make the demonstrators look bad to the public. The
result is likely to be images that increase public sympathy for
Bush, and energies diverted away from meaningful efforts to
re-capture our government over the next four years.
Instead, we have to bear moral witness, in dignified but visible
ways. And we have to promise and prepare to change things for the
better. It would be nice to forget that this election was stolen;
it would also be wrong. We need to say we are mourning ““ not
for a political party, but for a fundamental principle. We need to
say that we have not been fooled-and that we will not reward the
lying and the cheating with forgiveness and forgetting.
So let’s get organized, starting with a gathering of
everybody at UCLA who feels this way ““ not organized by some
candidate or interest-group, no fund-raising or flag-burning, just
thoughtful people willing to try to limit the damage.
Let’s meet on Jan. 20, while George W. Bush takes his oath
to serve the Constitution he’s undermining. Maybe, for
symbolic value, we can each hold a candle, and burn a piece of
paper marked “Ballot” and “Democracy” on
one side and “Truth” and “Equality” on the
other
Let’s make sure that this cynical victory is, in the long
run, a costly one, for those who engineered it and benefited from
it. Before heading home, let’s talk to each other, exchange
phone and e-mail information, and pledge to work vigorously
together to right these wrongs in the years ahead and to turn our
anger and disgust into determination and hope.
I’m willing to organize; I’m willing to listen and
I’m easy to find.
Anybody with me?