It’s Election Day in America. A midterm election, which
generally doesn’t generate much interest in the general populace. Here in CT,
the various political organizations are trying to shame voters by sending them “report
cards” on their voting record in the state. It’s rather obnoxious and, if one
were swayed by such things, such mailings would make me more likely to stay at
home. I don’t respond well to Big Brother or Sister telling me what’s what.
Today’s song by Stevie Wonder seems appropriate for the day,
since the cry that usually gets people into the polls is some form of “you
haven’t done nothing.” Which means a vote is often a vote against whoever’s
been in office, doing nothing. The phrase also can apply, though, to deadbeat
non-voters who, in complaining about our politicians and our political system,
can be met with the riposte “you haven’t done nothing”—if you can’t even be
bothered to help vote someone out or in.
Here in CT the big focus is on the gubernatorial race—“perhaps
the closest in the country”—between Dan Malloy, the Democrat in office (and the
first Democrat in that office since 1986), and Tom Foley, who Malloy beat four
years ago by just 0.5 percent. Yeah, it’s a close one.
I think those who will try to vote Malloy out will use some
variation of today’s song’s title as their rallying cry.
When Wonder released the song, on LP in July of 1974 and as
a single that topped the pop and R&B charts in August, President Richard
Nixon was in the midst of resigning from office rather than being ousted by any
margin of votes. In fact, Wonder released the song the day before Nixon
announced he would resign. Great timing! The cry about doing nothing didn’t
seem all that applicable, though. Nixon had ended the war in Vietnam, and he’d
signed some things into law—like the Federal Election Campaign Act which
protected elections from the kind of “corporations are people too” logic and no
limits to campaign finance that are now rampant. We were in a very Republican
country then, and it was certainly fashionable, to anyone vaguely to say
nothing of virulently left, to blame the “do nothing for the underclass”
outlook of the sitting pretty Repubs. Nothing much has changed in that regard.
It’s simply worse, because the end of the Republican mandate—which I guess can
be seen by Malloy getting elected at all—has left the GOP very, very hamstrung,
highstrung and extreme in their efforts to take back the country. Eight years
of W. wasn’t damage enough. Well, damage to regular folks. It was quite a feast
for those who got used to levels of abuse of the system that ol’ Tricky Dicky
could only fantasize about.
Anyway, Wonder’s Fulfillingness’s
First Finale LP, containing today’s song, was released in a midterm year
too. It just happened to be, as fate would have it, the year of the end of
Nixon’s administration. The outcome of today’s races won’t oust Obama but it
could leave him even more shackled to the will of party politics than his
second term has been already. Washington has shown itself unworkable with a
degree of vigor that is remarkable. Remarkable even if you remember the days of
Nixon—a president undergoing a legitimate investigation of his administration’s
practices and facing impeachment proceedings. Even then, dysfunction didn’t
seem to be as rife, or as rank.
What Wonder’s song gets at, wonderfully, is the bitter “we’ve
had it with this shit” feel of the times: We’re
sick and tired of hearing your song / Tellin’ how you’re gonna change right
from wrong / ’Cause if you really want to hear our views / You haven’t done
nothin’
Two things about that: sometimes a politician should follow
the Hippocratic (rather than Hypocritic) Oath: “first, do no harm.” I’d rather
an elected official do nothing than do wrong and harmful things, or things that
only benefit a favored few. I’d rather he or she not undertake to “fix” things
with rather questionable means, or sign away things that can’t be gotten back.
So I don’t know that the cry of this song is what gets me into the voting
booth. It’s more an effort to hold back the harmful rather than reward vision
and leadership. I’m not big on believing in vision and leadership, but then I
was around when “vision and leadership” got its head blown off in Dallas,
Texas. And when vision and leadership has mostly had to court bedfellows you’d
rather see tarred and feathered, well, it leaves a bad taste. So I’m more about
voting as trying—albeit lamely—to keep a finger in the dyke, or is that shut
the barn after the horse is gone?
Anyway, Wonder also—with the help of the Jackson Five (yes,
they were still extant then)—gets a nice little groove going with that “doo,
doo, wop.” This is the Seventies, after all, and doing nothing is kinda the
order of the day. “Much concerned but not involved / With decisions that are
made by you.” That really sums it up well. To be political then was not to put
much faith in the electoral process. I mean, Nixon—NIXON—had a huge landslide
victory in 1972. The Democratic party was a shambles—talk about those who “haven’t
done nothing,” other than lose their grip on the reins of the war they started
and antagonize the party’s entire Southern white electorate with civil rights
policies—and so “politics by other means” was all the rage. But of course that’s
just a recipe for letting power-mad bureaucrats run rampant. Or sleaziod
bankers and investors. Or a revisionist Supreme Court.
Well, so it goes. As Woody Allen used to say, “Yes, I
believe in democracy—and I also think the American system can work too.” It
does, after a fashion. Or did. These days, it seems, the most rabid
reactionaries among us are the ones who are most willing to go into politics. I was
amused (to counter Stevie’s “we’re amazed but not amused / By all the things
you say you’ll do”—though that line should land at Tom Foley’s door, I think)
to read a quotation from, of all people, Barry Goldwater who said, when he
backed Ford against Reagan in 1976, that the people who want Reagan to oust the
sitting president are the people who voted for Goldwater in 1964, and “they are
some of the most vicious people I have ever known.”
We would not care to
wake up to the nightmare / That’s becoming real life / But when mislead who
knows a person’s mind / Can turn as cold as ice.
Wonder sings all this in that
hepped-up voice he uses that really gets your hackles up and makes you pay
attention. The song has a sound—with the clavinet and the horns—that reminds of Superstition, another of my favorites from Wonder. It is a pissed-off song, Seventies style. As, you know, superstition and electoral politics aren't such poles (or polls?) apart. “Doo, doo, wop, stand up
be counted, say doo, doo, wop.” Yeah, let's make a difference, America! But can we ever say that any electorate in the
history of U.S. politics would jump on this bandwagon:
We
want the truth and nothing else.
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