Letter From Bahrain

If you play the waiting game to see whether you remain in a country, or move onto another destination, there’s an abundance of free time. Now is the perfect chance to finally read the literary heavyweights like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, perhaps even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August, 1914 – books either assigned in college courses 35 years ago, or deemed chic by some pretentious English Literature majors who once influenced me.

I’ve clocked the first one hundred pages of Tolstoy’s superbly written novel, and I might be close to finish by now if not for the intermittent siestas which overpower me - plus other distractions.

The truth is, I’m still afflicted with the faint twitches of a political junky and so I can’t resist the news on television. In Bahrain, the pickings are slim for an American expatriate. It’s really CNN or nothing – though BBC and Sky News provide some options.

Forty years ago, everyone in the United States gathered around the bonfire of the television to witness the nominating conventions of the two political parties. Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, as reported by the mainstays: Huntley and Brinkley for NBC; Walter Cronkite for CBS; and Howard K. Smith for ABC. It was a civic responsibility to observe history in the making, at least in my household. Afterward, Theodore White produced his The Making of the President chronicle. Despite the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the world still had a veneer of order and hope.

Four years later this changed dramatically, and civic duty had no genuine relevancy any longer. The year began badly with the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam - not unlike the insurgency in Iraq, offering visible proof of America’s inability to impose its will on another foreign country. That spring, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were gunned down. In between, there were student riots and a growing anti-war movement.

The antithesis of democracy in America was never better illustrated in my lifetime than by the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Mayor Richard Daley’s answer to First Amendment Rights was to convulse a crowd by tear gas and beat dissent bloody by police night sticks. This was a time when rock and roll could still earn you a skull-cracking or a jail sentence, before its incendiary potential was extinguished by money, MTV and Marine Corps recruitment ads.

For presidential nominees that year, just two old party hacks – Humphrey and Nixon. And Humphrey proved no match for Nixon’s Machiavellian skills. Of course Theodore White made more good money off his unswerving chronicle in the tradition of Henry Luce’s School of Time Magazine Journalism.

Four years later, the only redeeming feature in another series of leg-lifting dog of conventions was Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Despite Thompson’s enormously wasted gifts in his one-dimensional role as a clownish gonzo journalist, his report of the political process is savage and honest. He is the anti-Theodore White for 1972. Unlike White, nothing was off the record for Thompson. Since he could only go down that road once, Thompson tore the veneer off the charade of the two candidates, Nixon and McGovern, posing as worthy leaders who could unite a deeply divided America. In other words: Help Was On The Way.

Help is always on the way, if you’re a politician trying to persuade an unsophisticated public to give you the only set of keys to the car. I haven’t wasted my time on political conventions in the years that followed.

Except …… last week I awoke early, couldn’t wait to get my hands on Tolstoy, and I was just in time for John Kerry’s acceptance speech – live from Boston. What luck. Kerry has only slightly more charisma than Dick Cheney, a man who seems as cold as a marbled mausoleum. If Kerry is elected, there will be no substantive changes in American governance, but at least he will not appear like that embarrassing language-mangling dink who came by his fortune and his presidency dishonestly.

A glaring flaw in Bush is that his official rebirth in Jesus Christ did not lead him, a former sinner, to compassion but to vindictiveness. A more limited occupant of the Oval Office is hard to recall.

I have no problem admitting my vote for Kerry is strictly motivated as an anti-Bush choice. Kerry has done nothing to distinguish himself during his 20-year senate career. If help is really on the way, as Kerry promised, perhaps he will immediately reimburse taxpayers for the $40 million cost of staging this year’s Democratic Convention.

I’m sure Bush will follow suit, as well – after the pointless Republican Convention in New York City.

The organizers of the Democratic and Republican national conventions have each received checks for $14.5 million from the Federal Election Commission to finance these events. That, combined with an estimated $25 million in security costs, means taxpayers will foot the bill for nearly $40 million for each event.

It is repugnant to know politicians in the millionaire club, like Kerry and Bush, will not get off the welfare wagon.

With the interlude between conventions, now we have the president issuing a massive security response in three major cities, based on pre 9/11 al-Qaeda surveillance information. Fear is the easiest method for the few to control the many. Bush is desperate to cling to power and will do everything possible to deflect the media from John Kerry

Right on cue, CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer continuously intones a Chicken Little style about these serious threats, droning on and on like a big bass drum that has no melody but which trumps every other instrument.

This posturing by Bush and his lackey, Tom Ridge, is just as fraudulent as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, earlier links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, that Iraq is improving, that Iraqis support the "coalition," and that they support their new US-manufactured government.

If pollsters show Kerry pulling ahead of the incumbent days before the presidential election, look for Bush to postpone the event because of more dire al-Qaeda threats to our national security.

Pathological liars carry on lying; it's what they do. Their freak show never leaves town.