Stop the presses: national chauvinism in the Amerikan election

by MC12

Republican presidential candidate John McCain stands by his use of 
the anti-Asian racist slur "gooks" to describe the Vietnamese 
soldiers who held him captive after he attempted to destroy their 
country during the Amerikan war against Vietnam.(1)

Use of the term raised a stir among the press, however, who are 
always looking for a way to make the candidates look different 
from each other to cover up the nearly-absolute sameness that 
pervades the election. Fortunately for McCain, he had a 
previously-scheduled visit to Little Saigon in Westminster, 
California already lined up.

There he got a "hero's welcome" from almost 3,000 mostly 
Vietnamese anti-communists in the pro-Amerikan-dominated immigrant 
community.(2) "I was in prison 18 years," said one Vietnamese man 
who served in the South Vietnamese Special Forces. "I want McCain 
for president."(3) Although a small crowd also turned out to 
protest him, the positive response was predictable. Like the anti-
Castro Cubans of Miami, the anti-communist Vietnamese immigrants 
reliably side with reactionary Amerikans -- in this case even one 
who proudly tars them with a racial slur.

McCain, meanwhile, was taking the anti-discrimination high road, 
accusing George W. Bush of being anti-Catholic because he spoke at 
Bob Jones University, a private Protestant university which 
teaches that Catholics and Mormons aren't real Christians.(4) The 
president of the school has called the Catholic church a Satanic 
cult, which is obviously offensive to Catholics.(5) The fact that 
the university also had (until March) a ban on interracial dating 
was apparently not an issue McCain cared to complain about, 
although some Democrats were making hay out of the whole 
controversy. The flap was loud enough that Bush apologized for not 
criticizing the school's teachings while he was there.

Bush was the latest of the last five leading Republican candidates 
to speak at Bob Jones, which gives them good opportunity to 
broadcast positively among the right-wing of white southern 
Protestants. The university is such a mainstay of the party that 
several of McCain's advisors are themselves affiliated with the 
school.(6)

The loud noise made over these minor disputes merely underscores 
that all the important issues are settled long before the leading 
presidential candidates are selected -- and that the Amerikan 
electoral system has nothing to offer the oppressed in this 
country or the rest of the world. The elections are politically 
important for what they show us about the process and the 
structural impenetrability of the system.

When MIM says we don't vote and organize others not to as well, it 
should be taken not as cynical passivity, but as a call to action 
-- real action. Don't surrender to the completely disempowering, 
dehumanizing process of electoralism in a rigged system. Instead 
turn your energies toward genuine change: the long, hard, but much 
more rewarding work of building a real alternative to Amerikan 
imperialism.

Notes:

1. Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2000.

2. Los Angeles Times, 2 March 2000.

3. San Francisco Chronicle, 2 March 2000.

4. New York Times, 3 March 2000.

5. New York Times, 27 February 2000.

6. New York Times, 28 February 2000.