As I write this, it’s October 22 and, yes, I’m still obsessed with the upcoming US election. (I suppose that means my logo will be in blue again.) No, I’m not sorry – how can I not be obsessed given the depths to which the campaign continues to sink? If the US is trying to set an example of democracy in action for the rest of the world to follow, no wonder we get Long Hair tossing bananas at Donald Tsang – well, bananas are probably too good for The Donald: They’re a tasty and nutritious fruit that even my dogs can’t get enough of. If I were in the food-tossing business, wouldn’t stinky tofu be more appropriate for our head-in-the-sand chief executive? But I digress.

Recently, I wrote this on my blog: “What is with Sarah Palin and ‘real America’? What gives her the right to say what is and what isn’t real America?” This was in reference to a speech the Republican Barbie doll made (a recent revelation that the RNC has spent more than US$150,000 to dress her means her clothes cost almost as much as the real Barbie doll’s), in which she read the lines, “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.”

The charge that people who live in big cities (and who, recently, tend to vote for Democrats) are somehow less American than those who live in small towns and are somehow less patriotic is a very dangerous one to make. The idea that the firefighters who died in the World Trade Center or those from the big cities who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow less American because they come from big cities is indefensible – and the idea that a national candidate from a major political party would dare to advance this idea publicly would be a joke if it wasn’t so desperately sick.

Even worse is John McCain’s attempt to smear Obama with the label ‘socialist’, merely because Obama believes that rich people should pay more taxes and poor people should pay less. Obama said something about spreading the wealth around and McCain stopped just short of calling him a Bolshevik. And McCain’s rich backers standing in the shadows smiled at the thought that they’d still enjoy massive tax breaks while the poor people out in the stands, the ones who’d have to pay more under McCain’s proposals, screamed out, “Socialism, booo!!!!!!” as if they’d rather continue to live in a world where tax relief only goes to Donald Trump. McCain himself has embraced the dark side of the force, turning to Karl Rove for advice – Rove being the one who drove McCain out of the 2000 campaign by spreading rumours that the senator’s adopted Bangladeshi child was actually an illegitimate black love child.

The good news is that none of this seems to be working for the Republicans. The more desperate their attempts at childish smears, the bigger the lead Obama gains in the polls. High profile Republicans such as Colin Powell and Christopher Buckley have been vocally throwing their support to Obama. If the polls are correct and Obama does win the election, then perhaps we have given a lesson to the world, one that says, “Sometimes dirty politics don’t work.”
At any rate, one of the comments that someone made on that blog post asked, “What’s real America in your point of view?” That’s a very good question. As I thought about it, my America is a shining ideal, one that America seems capable of living up to less and less as time goes by. I mean, I actually believed the stuff that I was taught in school. I believed that America was a true democracy where everyone stood an equal chance, where the needs and desires of the masses were accommodated every bit as much and even a little bit more than the wealthy few.

Let’s face it, how many other countries have ever put it in writing that the pursuit of happiness is a right and not merely a privilege? None, that I know of. (Okay, back when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, apparently that only applied to white men, but the Bill of Rights eventually took care of that.)

I was raised to believe that patriotism, loving one’s country, meant that people should speak up when they see something they think is wrong, that people should work within the systems provided to change things. But taken a bit further, it can also mean that if the system does not provide a platform for people to have their say and to petition for change, if there is no democracy, no freedom of speech, then one should fight what is perceived as injustice by any means possible. That’s the definition of patriotism that led to the American Revolution – and, I suspect, no one in China would deny the patriotism of Mao Tse-Tung.

Yet somehow that’s been corrupted. Those in power, both in the US and China, and many of those who would attain power for themselves, have redefined ‘loving your country’ to mean someone who sits by silently and places total trust in the decisions of the leaders, whether they were elected to their positions or not. That’s not patriotism. That’s sheep.

I don’t often have cause to think about what it means to be an American. But my mother, of all people, stopped me dead in my tracks recently when I told her that I would consider renouncing my US citizenship if I could obtain a passport from another country. “Don’t be so quick to do that,” she said. “Think about what your family had to go through to get it in the first place.”

My family came to America in two stages – first fleeing the Russian pogroms at the end of the 19th century and then fleeing the Nazis during WWII. What did America mean to them? What did America represent to my aunt, who made her way from Russia to New York City alone at the age of five because the rest of her family had been killed? Why did so many of my family choose America rather than dozens of other places (and some of my family did indeed only go as far as the UK, while others headed to South America and a very small number went to what is now Israel). Sadly, it’s a question that I never thought to ask her while she was alive, but I can make a reasonable guess at the answer.

To them, America of course represented safety, a place where they believed they could live their lives without the constant fear of bigotry and violence hanging over their heads, a place where they could pursue that right of happiness and even prosperity. Most of my family were able to achieve that dream, along with millions of others.

So, that’s my ‘real America’, a land of hope and opportunity for all, the land of “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free”. And I certainly have no intention of letting Karl Rove, Sarah Palin or John McCain take that away from me.