..,Gary Dretzka
..,Leonard Klady
...David Poland
...Doug Pratt
...Ray Pride
...S.T. VanAirsdale

 

JANUARY 27, 2006

Who Is The Traitor...
Us Or Ralph Nader?

Thank you, Ralph Nader.

An Unreasonable Man takes us into the Ralph Nader story, from birth to last week. And it is, like The Fog of War and Robert McNamara, one of those opportunities to step back, take a breath, and remember the seething power of recent history.

As in Errol Morris' doc, the film has to account for a parade of people who want to string the central figure up these days. And even though it comes late in the film, I will address it first here, because it really speaks to the whole movie... and for me, it very much speaks for the current battle between old and new media.

What is most fascinating about the battle over the two Nader presidential runs is that Nader's initiating proposition is that the two parties have become very much like the big businesses he has spent a lifetime trying to force to play by the rules, and that the response of the parties and of many prominent Democrats has been almost exactly like the response of those corporations. Arrogance. Abusiveness. Misleading Information. Self Delusion.

The filmmakers, who are definitely pro-Ralph, lay it out simply and then with increasing complexity. The first fact is that in what became the key swing state in the 2000 election, Florida, at least half a dozen candidates had enough votes to turn the count. Nader had the most. But any one of the non-2-party candidates could have turned the election. So why all the Nader rage?

Another myth busted by the doc is that Nader promised not to campaign in battleground states and broke that promise, swinging the election. An Ivy League professor, who self-identifies himself as a lifelong Democrat, actually looked at Nader's schedule and found the accusation that Nader targeted Gore in battleground states to be groundless. As both the professor and Nader point out, Nader spend the vast majority of his last campaign months in uncontested states.

But still, Nader has been attacked, harassed, threatened, and endlessly mocked for staying in the 2000 election until the end. Left-wing lunatics (yes, there are tied and suited nutcases on both sides), also well represented in the documentary, argue that Nader was more responsible for Gore's defeat than was Gore's inability to carry his home, Tennessee, or Clinton's home, Arkansas, which would have swung the election for Gore and made Florida irrelevant.

The Democrats' inability to accept that the election was lost, rather than stolen or crushed by Nader's 5 percent ends up explaining a lot about 2004 as well. Nader brings up a discussion with John Kerry about finding three issues that they could share and which Bush could not counter so they could deliver a somehow united front. These were issues with which Kerry agreed. Still, no deal.

The issue of bureaucratic arrogance continues to the presidential debate. Not only was Nader disallowed from debating, but he was thrown off the University property, even though he had a ticket to watch the debate in an adjacent hall on video feed. Who issued that order? The Committee on Presidential Debates... a private organization run by two formers heads of the DNC and RNC. Even though a journalist hosts, the affair is run not by a public interest group, but by the two parties, whose interests are the only ones served.

Of course, acolytes who pretend to be open minded, like Michael Moore and Bill Maher, just play it out the way the Democratic Party has positioned it all. Ralph Nader is a kook. Just the way GM would have had it. Just the way food companies that liked to produce food without ingredients would have it. Just the way auto makers who didn't want to deal with airbags or seatbelts would have it. And on and on and on. Ralph Nader is associated closely with over 200 pieces of important safety legislation.

And now, because of 2000, even the interest groups he founded decades ago are abandoning him.

Who exactly disagrees with his actions... aside from Gore losing? And isn't changing the rules of the game to prioritize the outcome you prefer the stuff of fascists and dicators, not Americans?

This speaks to another beauty about Nader that I admire. He truly believes in the principles of our society. He doesn't think we have achieved the best version of those principles. But his fight is to reach that place. His fight is out of love for those principles. His relentlessness, his tirelessness, his self-denial of a wife and a family... all to fight for something that we, as Americans, were meant to be, at least on paper, for lo these last 230 years.

My sense of the man was shady until yesterday. I looked backward to his achievements, many of them nearly as old as I am. But a man still fighting the fight on principle and not allowing himself to be distracted by opportunity or attack, the machine or the anarchist, comfort or distress.

I am no Ralph Nader. I am not that focused. I am not that strong. But I do admire the vision. I do identify with the endless fight to bring legitimacy to a new medium that competes more than effectively with the old media... and which often slips below old media as well. The fight for standards and the fight to strive to be the best is brutal. And I feel the slings and arrows of those who see the future coming and rage against it.

Thanks to Ralph Nader, I feel emboldened and, actually, proud of being subject to those attacks today. Nader and the filmmakers who really did a great job here (though it really is a TV doc) gave me sustenance for the road all unreasonable men must travel. They have reminded me that the road must be traveled without malice, without pettiness, and without the comforts that always seem to be on the other side of the shiny window.

I thank them for that. And I pray that there is another Ralph Nader out there, just waiting to fight the fight, to love the framework he so believes in that he will give his life to it, to be right, to be wrong, but to be strong in a way so few of us are these days. Our lives have become so easy compared to the past. Easy, in great part, because of Ralph Nader.

January 26, 2006
January 25, 2006
January 23, 2006
January 22, 2006
January 21, 2006
January 20, 2006

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