Declaration from Independents (Red Emma)

RED EMMA

The only thing worse than a Republican is, well, two Republicans.

On those occasions that demand it, I find myself forced to embrace Keats’s theory of negative capability—about the ability to hold in one’s mind two contradictory ideas at the same time, which is easier than holding two Republicans in there I guess. So today I’ll offer that the other only thing worse than any Republicans at all is that weird and increasingly invasive species of political animal called the Independents.

—Yes, the Independence, er, Independents, those confused, silly, self-aggrandizing knuckleheads who can’t decide whether there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans, and who have flattered themselves into imagining that either all or nothing is at stake.

First, my newly-revised list of least favorite kinds of person:

1. People who bring a tray of Vons supermarket sushi or a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to a faculty potluck dinner, the event having been conscientiously organized for weeks around a menu based on contributing, say, Mediterranean-themed food. Their engagement with the event began only as they drove to the party, so they might as easily have brought one of those plastic bags full of dog poop people carry around behind Fido.

2. People who put dog poop in plastic bags, then in the trash, which means bacteria AND plastic in the landfill and the aquifer. A twofer!

3. Trekkies.

4. Libertarians. (This might actually be the same category as above.)

5. Conspiracy theorists, including Truthers and Birthers and New Agers.

6. Men who wear Dockers.

7. Sports fans.

8. Ayn Rand devotees. (See Trekkies, probably wearing Dockers.)

9. Matt Miller, the “moderate” emcee guy in the center on NPR’s weekly radio show, “Left, Right and Center.”

And, of course:

10. People who create long lists of other people they can’t stand.
(I could go on.)

Let’s not confuse Centrists like Matthew in the Middle with Independents. A Centrist is intentionally ridiculous, and has an agenda: maintaining the status quo and his own power position in it. Independents are intentionally unintentional and don’t seem to even know it. Like a dog looking in a mirror, they wonder who that creature looking back at them could be. They have claimed a generic category and turned it into a kind of manifesto, but of nobody and nothing and for not very long.

What about the only Independent in the US Senate? you ask. Instructive case in point: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a hero of mine, a democratic Socialist. Because he does not belong to a political party, he gets the default label of “Independent” in the Senate. Here, of all places, the category actually means something, and he votes like a democratic Socialist because he is one. He uses Independent. It does not use him.

Meanwhile, the Independent voters, also lacking a party, lacking an imagination, imagine that the election is all about them, which sadly, ridiculously it has indeed become, a parade of pandering to know-nothingism, unsolidarity and ahistorical purposelessness all defined by The Spectacle, built on watching commercials, polling, celebrity candidates, and more polling.

The Irrational is a real place, friends, and plenty of people live there, including Independents. They want to play, but can’t make up their minds which token to choose. I speculate that they like the name, the actual word “independence” (sic), which is a dignified-sounding moniker that evokes for these silly individuals – always individuals, by definition never working with anybody but the System – proud ideas about autonomy and righteous purpose and the Fourth of July but is, of course, a construction built on maintaining the two-party stranglehold and elevating the least engaged among us, temporarily, to the pretense of power, temporary and, by definition, unorganizeable. At least the Tea Baggers mean something, however reactionary, nativist, racist or fascist, with the emphasis on mean. Compare their refreshingly vigorous hatred of themselves and others with the Independents, who don’t even know who they voted for because they don’t really vote for anybody except the corporate media. They hate themselves and us so much that they elect a reactionary (see nose, cut off to spite face) just to affirm that the system is watching them. They further their own long-term disenfranchisement by way of enjoying exactly one day, one TV news cycle in the spotlight.

And then, after the election, the Democrats gather round, telling the Indies how important they are, and that now they will be “reached out” to, while the Republicans gloat. The spotlight, which is really a klieg light, disappears with the eleven o’clock news crew and the Independents go back to answering public opinion survey questions about OctoMom, mocha latte and NASCAR. In other words, they, more than any other voter constituency, having put the very least (i.e., nothing) into the process, gain the most, by which I mean the very least: less than they or any of us had before by way of direct electoral democracy.
 

Sorry, I am not done yet. Absent any real involvement, engagement, participation the rest of the year, or any affiliation or commitment, the Independents possess only their big “I” for ego, and are encouraged to use it. Solipsism reigns in a political culture which is really an advertisement posing as a culture, which ignores organized, educated, committed people who can somehow find each other in a room or at a rally or at their union hall, and instead elevates voters who are purely and totally the temporary cast in a campaign season production, an advertising campaign really, a little skit about Harry and Louise, who are of course Independents, or likely Republicans posing as such.

And what must it be like for an Independent to wake up the day after an election and, finding the satisfaction and joy of having been nothing and done only a little more, to have to now go looking around for more opportunities to be nothing? And to be invisible? They wait and they endure, enjoying the delicious pain, counting the days for the next year, two years, four years, just waiting to once again NOT have a position, to not work with others, to not take a stand, to exercise their terrific independence from all the rest of us.

I wonder if Mr. Independent asks himself, “What can I be independent about today?” There is so much to choose from. He can be independent on the Supreme Court’s decision to empower corporations to spend all the money they want in politics. On the wars against the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. On restrictions on women’s reproductive health care.

Being Independent is better than being apathetic. At least unregistered nonvoting Americans don’t actually do anything. Independents actively do nothing. They are mad physicists, having in fact created a whole lot of nothing. They have checked the box indicating citizenship in disappearing ink, in a land where the glass of ink is not either half full or half empty, where it is not both half full and half empty, but where fullness and emptiness are exactly the same thing, and matter more than less. –RE RE ≠ BvT

Pics: Irvine, late this afternoon