 the victory of George W. Bush, a man who has stated that “state law is supreme when it comes to Indians,” ….. She doesn’t think Winona La Duke made her own decision to run? She shouldn’t run either, because she might lose, too? She thinks the Clinton administration has a good record on Indian sovereignty and the environment? I’d love to hear No-Nukes Winona answer that one.
3. “If I were to run for President in the same symbolic way, I hope my friends and colleagues would have the good sense to vote against me, too, ….” I hope so too. You can count on me. But of course, if *you* ran, it’d be purely symbolic and not a practical, political step, right?
2. The Supreme Court issue.. “Gore is the opposite [from Bush on every important judicial issue]. Gore has made clear that his appointments would uphold our hard-won progress in those areas, and he has outlined advances in each one.” This is everybody’s big worry, and I just don’t buy it. Gore voted for Scalia and didn’t prevent Thomas’s confirmation. On the vague possibility that Gore would dare nominate someone decent, and she/he could be confirmed, we’re supposed to dump the possibility of getting a real progressive third party off the ground? If Gore had denounced Janet Reno’s and Clinton’s horrid records on civil liberties, immigration and privacy rights, you might convince me.
1. “The art of behaving ethically is behaving as if everything we do matters. If we want Gore and not Bush in the White House, we have to vote for Gore and not Bush out of respect for the vote and self-respect. ” If everything we do matters, then why do we want a sleazeball like Gorei n the White House? If everything we do matter, then I have to vote for Nader to try to build a third party movement in this country. If not now, when? As for self-respect, it’s a matter of looking at myself in the mirror in the morning. Which I can’t do if I vote for someone owned by the military and the oil companies, while kidding myself that he’s an honest politician.
Steinem goes on to add: “Perhaps there’s a reason why Nader’s rallies seem so white, middle class, and disproportionately male.” Think of it! White, middle-class and male! Then think of Steinem’s NOW feminism —white, middle class and female! Perhaps there’s a reason why feminism is seen by the general public as a largely privileged and irrelevant non-movement — all those years of cozying with the Clintonites. People like Steinem are terrified of not being at the table and in the game. Nader hasn’t played insider politics, but somehow he’s gotten a hell of a lot done. His consumer movement is an actual movement.
Time for a third cup of coffee. Steinem’s “Ten Reasons” were straight-up slime and it was even worse that my own union rep recirculated them to me later in the morning. (Well, he’s sort of my rep, but it’s not like we have a contract or anything.) I wrote back and told him I thought it was a disgusting thing for him to send around. Then another communications professor — supposedly a deep thinker on political theory — sent Steinem around again, this time in answer to McChesney. What would Jurgen Habermas say? But what was coming was even creepier.
“I feel as lifeless as in the lead up to the election of 1968, knowing that the forces of evil are coming at you, but not being able to do anything about it. A long night is coming, apparently, unless we do something about it, instead, Nader continues vicious attacks on Gore.
“The triumph of the reactionaries will be forever blamed, in my mind, on Nader more than the inept Gore.
“If only Nader took the stronger, harder path of attacking Bush, instead of wreaking havoc on Gore, and killing the few scattered alliances trying to protect the environment.
What a nice warm thought, supposedly coming from the John Muir Sierrans, the opposition within the Sierra Club. It’s Gore we want, and Gore we must have, and he’s losing because Ralph Nader is vicious. And here I thought Ralph Nader, running as a Green, was viciously attacking the corporate control of the political system, including both major candidates, and especially on their environmental records.
Dougie goes on to say “Nader has split the left.” (Here I thought he was pulling it together and breathing life into it, but I guess Doug thinks that Clinton-Gore are a “left” of some sort — the left hand of darkness?) The Naderites “have weakened any opposition to the Oil Lobby taking power. This will be a fearsome thing, if it occurs; the terrible abuses in Nigeria and Myanmar may come home, you may see them here. The Oil people have destroyed our electric railroads, and now they have bought up the patents for the new batteries which make electric cars possible. ” All Ralph Nader’s future fault, and he’s being so unfair to that outspoken defender of the people of Nigeria against Sun Oil, Al Gore.
Wow. Some optimistic, clear-thinking people in the John Muir Sierrans, no? I emailed Doug back and asked if his position represented the position of all the JMSers, since his message came via that listserve. If it did, I said, I wanted to know, because I’d want to be off the list. He replied — “You’re off!” What?
I’m not too swift about this email technology. I assumed that since the message came to me *via* the JMS listserve that that meant it came *from* the JMS listserve. Further, I thought that since Dougie Korthof told me I was “off”, that that meant he was somehow monitoring the JMS listserve, and had taken me off it.  “Are you the listserve operator?” I asked.  And what’s your relationship to John Muir Sierrans?” I asked. He refused to answer those questions, but wrote back to tell me that even though there’s diversity of opinion in the Sierra Club, dark fascism is for sure coming to the US, especially if people vote for Nader. Carl Pope told him so, and it is incumbent on all us Sierrans to line up behind Carl’s position. Can’t you just hear the bootheels clicking?
Thus Doug Korthof let me, and perhaps others, think he was representing a JMS position with his posting. He should have told me that I’d simply misunderstood and this was his own private list, even though it was embedded in a JMS email frame. But then he’d have to explain why he got my address from the JM Sierrans. After exchanging a few nasty remarks with him about censorship — what did he mean I was “off the list” for asking a political question?, and he replied to the effect that “if you think this kind of censorship is bad, there’s worse coming after Nader gives the election to Bush” — it finally dawned on me that Doug was using John Muir Sierrans listserve addresses to send around his own anti-Nader scare letters. And then looked back through my mailbox and found that a few days earlier, he’d forwarded a false letter Nader being a direct threat to the lives of the U’wa people of Colombia. The real threats, of course, are Occidental Petroleum, in which Al Gore has a million dollars in stock, and the Clinton Administration’s support for the Colombian military. This disinformation letter, the Rainforest Action Network and the Village Voice say, originated with the Gore campaign and was circulated over the internet by a Sierra Club member. Oh, Dougie, Dougie.
David Orr of the Sierra Club later told me that Korthof “is not on the real JMS listserve.” Orr believes Korthof has created his own version of a JMS list. Smooth, and it looks plausible. So, is Doug a Gore-warrior doing dirty tricks by making a message appear to come from JMS? Or did his own loose brainwaves tell him to scoop up JMS email addresses and freelance some diatribes, preposterous as they are? Or should I take a class in how to decode email headers? Who knows? In any case, Doug’s a nasty little blister.
But he is right — fascism is definitely coming to the US if “greens” so-called can use the electronic stationery of a legitimate organization to try to scare people out of voting for a third party while they still have a legal right to do so, and all the while claiming their reasoning is “green.” Sieg Heil, Doug, and have a nice day.
Bush may well win this election, in large part because Gore has been unable to convince anyone that he’s trustworthy. He’s been trying to out Republican the Republicans and he’s behaved scandalously in refusing to debate Nader. Plus he looks awful — like some inflatable rubber doll with a wooden head. It reminds me of the old Malvina Reynolds song about watching Nixon on TV: “They say it’s his face, but I just can’t believe it. It looks like a mask that you buy at the store……” On the other hand, Bush looks wooden, too, like a shifty-eyed Charlie McCarthy.