Lobsters and Liberals

During my sophomore year in college, I had the honor of hearing former presidential candidate and Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, speak twice. During both speeches, he told the same story of how when he ran for president, Republicans in the South complained that "Massachusetts only exports lobsters and Liberals."

During the 1988 presidential campaign, after which Governor Dukakis lost to Bush 41, my second grade class was given an assignment to make a construction-paper red, white, and blue windsock, affixed with pictures of the candidate we would vote for and an essay explaining why we would vote for him. Since we were only eight, we all followed what our parents said. My epiphany that not everyone had the same opinions about everything came when all windsocks in the class had pictures of a short Greek man--except one. I couldn't understand why a friend of mine would have put the wrong picture on her windsock.

I had another sort of epiphany on Tuesday evening. As I stayed late at work checking pages of documents (to make sure that the copy machine didn't eat one of any hundreds of pages), I had the Windows Media Player tuned to WBUR, Boston University's NPR news station--funny how that tagline came out so easily; must be years of listening and indoctrination. Pat Buchannan was the guest of the evening, talking about his new book criticizing the current Republican party for not being conservative enough. If you put me and Pat Buchannan together in a room, he'd be so far to the Right and I'd be so far to the Left that he'd look like a dot in the distance. Imagine how disturbed I was, then, to find myself agreeing with nearly everything that Buchannan said. If Buchannan is correct that the Right has moved more to the Left since Regan left office, then how in the world do I agree with the guy in the distance but not one closer to me?

For years I've been convinced that my thoughts and those of extreme conservatives had little common ground; now I've had to rethink my entire political philosophy. While I'm certain that I do not agree with everything that Buchannan would say (and probably would agree with very little, in point of fact), his thoughts on the handling of the Iraq war were what hit close to home. Buchannan expressed a very Relativistic point of view, saying that the way to bring Democracy to other countries is not to launch ourselves inside their borders and say, "Look at how good we have it! Be like us!" (like an ad for Gap jeans) but to understand their cultures and figure how they will interpret our actions. When I took Hist A-12 freshman year, Professor Rosen told us how Iraq did not take the United States' threats seriously because they were delivered by a woman. One thing in particular that I cannot remember verbatum but that particularly stuck with me was Buchannan's comment that, "Our country has been around for approximately two hundred years. There's no way that our ideals that have been in progress for two hundred years can annihilate religions and societies that have existed for thousands of years, and it's ridiculous for President Bush and the people who advise him to have thought they could do that."

Another speaker last night discussed why he does not agree with comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. When the U.S. lost (yes, "lost," though I agree with the first female American Congresswoman, Jeannette Pickering Rankin, that "[y] ou can no more win a war than an earthquake") the war in Vietnam, a Communist regime was poised to take over South Vietnam (trying to be very politically correct here). If the U.S. were to pull out of Iraq without peace measures in place and educational help, etc., chaos is poised to take it over. I'm not really sure how I feel about this, but I'm working it out as I type and as I check more pages.

I know that I do believe we need to export more liberals (and lobsters) to Washington in the upcoming November election.

On a lighter note, I returned to my apartment last night to discover that I now have a door--but still no doorknob . . . but at least it's a start!