"Come home, America" ... Yes, please come home!

The more I got to understand American politics from the inside--I had been following the scene even from India, right from my young days--the more I came to realize how much I longed for decent and plain-speaking politicians who wanted to do the right things even if it didn't benefit them personally in any way.  In a contemporary setting, it was a rare person like Ralph Nader who seemed to fit that profile, though his views weren't always what I would have preferred.

After moving to Oregon, and after reading more about its senators of the past--Hatfield and Morse--it was all the clearer that I was stuck with the self-serving, dishonest politicians who, to quite some extent, were not that different from the dishonest, self-serving politicians back in India.  Perhaps the only difference is that politicians do not switch parties as easily as they do in India, though senators like Specter and Lieberman so casually did in recent times.

Thus, as I read news reports about the final moments of Senator George McGovern's life, I feel a great sense of loss, all over again, in not having been old enough to have lived, in real-time, during his years of senatorial service and his failed attempt to win the presidency of these United States.

Thanks to the uber-libertarian Reason, I read this charming and adoring profile of McGovern, and I especially liked the following sentences there:

“When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.” “[M]ost Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love,” McGovern asserted in one of the great unknown campaign speeches in American history. “It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation. … It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, ‘There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.’

The kind of left and right that no longer exists. That common ground, which is where I find myself without politicians.  The specifics, below, exemplifies the kind of political approaches I prefer:

McGovern’s positions now seem positively temperate: he favored decriminalizing marijuana; he argued against “the intrusion of the federal government” into abortion law, which should be left to the states; and, as he told me, “I could not favor amnesty as long as the war was in progress, but once it was over, I’d grant amnesty both to those who planned the war and those who refused to participate. I think that’s a somewhat conservative position.”
In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, McGovern was groping toward truths that exist far beyond the cattle pens of Left and Right. “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens,” he said two days before the election. “For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.” Charging that Nixon “uncritically clings to bloated bureaucracies, both civilian and military,” McGovern promised to “decentralize our system.” 

In today's lunatic political environment, neither the typical Democrat nor the typical Republican will agree with McGovern's positions.  What a tragic farce we have become!

Until I read that essay, I didn't know that McGovern was from a place called Mitchell in South Dakota.  It was an odd coincidence that yesterday Stephen Colbert had a segment on the same place.  I wonder why Colbert missed mentioning McGovern in his "amaizing" corn story; from what I understand to be George McGovern's personality, he would have surely had a good laugh.

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