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A Note to the Reader
by Mattathias Schwartz
November 2004
On the night of November 2 we sat agape in front of the television, watching the television men preside over the brightly colored maps of an imaginary country. This is right where the president likes us to be. He is not a well-spoken man, and prefers letting the results of his plans speak for themselves to piecing a sentence together. The effects of his first four years have been devastating, and if you've glanced at these pages or any others over the last hundred weeks, you're already well aware. We can only predict, as you likely have, that his next four years will be even worse. We wish we could point you to the scapegoat or silver lining here, but there is neither.
As terrible as his victory is, the result itself says nothing about the state of our country. The wise were not unnumbered by fools on Election Day, but outfoxed by the men who draw the county lines and guard the gates outside the polling booth. The red versus the blue is convenient shorthand for any armchair anthropologist paid to churn out a few thousand words a week, but it is a poor substitute for knowing one's own country. A mythical wall has been erected between the “two Americas,” and its lines are almost arbitrary. Had one in forty Kerry-voting Pennsylvanians changed their minds in the voting booth or one in four Kerry-voting Philadelphians decided to stay home on November 2, the Keystone State would now be part of “Red America,” and we'd be reading headlines about Bush's “electoral landslide.”
So pay no attention to self-appointed surveyors who try to divide the provinces of belief and doubt, the country and the city, the interests of you and your countrymen. What better way to subjugate a nation than to split it along invisible lines? The commentators trying to divine the nation's heart with a box of Crayolas are the same ones who sat hushed and rapt when Colin Powell told us about the weapons of mass destruction, the ones who remembered the infamy of Abu Ghraib for all of a fortnight. Now they have set themselves up as mapmakers, and wish to make every reasonable person believe they inhabit an island of good sense in a rising sea of savagery. They are correct to say a civil war taking place, but its fronts are not so easily drawn. The United States is not a jigsaw of fifty states or a purple scrim of variously shaded counties, but millions of individual consciences. It is within these borders that common sense is doing battle with fear, and we maintain that common sense will ultimately prevail.
Nothing changed on November 2. George Bush is still the president. We are still aligned against him, as we are compelled to by our beliefs in peace among nations, equality among men, the obligation of the government to be honest with the governed. For a time, John Kerry was a vessel for these beliefs, but his defeat does not equal ours. Fifty-six million Americans have had enough of this failed president, and so long as each of us remains bent on seeing his agenda defeated, it is he who should be afraid. We stand ready to do whatever is in our power to erase the awful mark the president intends to leave on history. With time, our rights and alliances will be restored, the wealth of the land will be returned to the people, and the world will no longer have to live in fear of America. Our work will not cease until history forgets this little man who rose too high, and there is plenty of work to be done.
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