Let’s have Christ our president, Let’s have him for our king
Cast your vote for the Carpenter that you call the Nazarene.
-Woody Guthrie
So, I’m watching the Daily Show on Comedy Central and there is one of those peculiar moments where the sheer dignity of humanity shines through the utter irreverence of American satire. The current President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, probably by virtue of some blind flier by the booking agent for the Daily Show, was the guest. I’m not sure they even knew what they were getting. Morales was elected President of his country despite the fact that he was not a politician by trade, despite the fact that he doesn’t have a high school diploma, despite the fact that he is, well, “indigenous.” The last category is perhaps the most surprising and damning category for a person from Central or South America, for reasons too deep to go into here the descendents of the Spanish and Portugese colonials have managed to retain almost complete control of the economic and political power in nations south of Texas. The descendants of the Maya, Aztecs and Inca have been marginalized to the point where most of the world doesn’t even know they exist. To avoid any tint of self-righteousness, I should note that North American “indigenous” peoples were treated as badly if not worse, and there are fewer of them left to tell the tale.
But here is Morales, a man elected on a ground swell of popular democratic enthusiasm, who defies all the bugaboos that haunt the modern politician, his campaign was focused on several simple planks, promises made to the people by one of their own. All of his campaign promises, none of which were exactly small potatoes, were accomplished within eight months of his election. This fact inspired Jon Stewart to exclaim, “What are you trying to pull?!” To which Morales, once his translator had told him what was said, simply chuckled quietly. I’m not sure Morales understands the deep frustration that inspired Stewart’s remark, and I’m actually glad if he doesn’t. We live in a land where we expect that politicians will lie to us and we don’t hold it against them. We expect campaign promises to be empty, we accept that our elected officials will quickly bog down and become entrenched in endless bureaucracy, and we get exactly what we deserve.
I found myself wishing that Morales was my President. Honestly I don’t know much about his politics but I admired his simple dignity, his plain vision and what seemed to be an utter lack of duplicity. He had an idea of how to “fix” several of his nation’s most pressing problems. He was elected and promptly proceeded to do what he said he was going to do! Shocking, I know, but imagine the possibilities! If we would hold our politicians accountable to their promises in the same way McDonalds holds it’s employees responsible for certain duties we might actually get somewhere. But we let the “complicated” nature of our problems paralyze us, in short we are afraid to fail and thus we will never overcome the adaptive challenges of our day. Morales, right or wrong, seemed to have very little doubt that what he had done was the right move.
I think I would rather deal with the consequences of poorly conceived action than with the paralysis of bureaucratic indecision. We really don’t know how to live with what we have wrought. It is encouraging to see at least some nations on the globe stop trying to emulate America and becoming what they should be. I lament the fact that once upon a time America was the trail-blazer, boldly carving it’s own destiny and that now we have lost our chutzpah. Sure, mistakes were made, our development was brutal, dirty and tragic in many ways but the most valuable lessons are learned from mistakes. Slavery, the Civil War, segregation, police brutality in Birmingham, all lead to the civil rights movement and a country that is at least philosophically aware of the true value of freedom and the inherent equality of human beings. Nations that have not gone through the struggle do not understand the value of what we have learned and thus nations around the world still trample human rights and enslave millions.
Democracy as a process of trial and error is foundational to who we are but we have turned it into a process of trying to always make the right move and thus doing nothing. If we would simply learn from small failures along the way we might have avoided several of the intractable quagmires of recent history. We have seen the cost of decades of poor foreign policy decisions blow up in our faces and trying to correct all of those mistakes in one fell swoop has not panned out so well. But the way we have it set up now it behooves politicians to try and avoid consequences rather than learning from them. You can’t blame them, they know what they know, and they know our system of bureaucracy, just like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Woody thought that Jesus would make a good President but I guess he got himself assassinated about two thousand years too early. I don’t suppose writing Jesus of Nazareth on the ballot in 2008 would do much good, but I’d at least like the chance to vote for an honest man instead of a politician once in my life, and I don’t really want to move to Bolivia.
Addendum October 2007: Okay so things are not working out so hot for Evo Morales. I saw in the news the other day that his country is experiencing some fairly significant turmoil. Apparently the wealthy classes are none to happy about Morales socializing their natural resources. Who would have figured that wealthy capitalists would be against socialism, hmmm? It also seems that at least some of the poor and working classes think that Evo, who was supposed to be their guy, has sold them out in making some concessions to the upper class in order to prevent full scale revolt. Politics are tough. I wonder whether Jesus would even accept the nomination.
