Guest Post: Abandon All Hope by Marc Gold

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”


Let’s flash forward to morning of November 5.

Barack Obama takes the stage of a ballroom in a Chicago hotel. His young supporters cry on each other’s shoulders and wonder where they went wrong. A pile-driven economy, two endless wars, everything was on their side. How could something so certain, so logical slip away?

Upbeat despite the sleepless night, Obama tells the audience and those watching at home, not to give up hope. In his comforting baritone, he speaks of barriers shattered and the millions who voted for the first time. Change isn’t instantaneous, and we’ve taken the first step, a larger step than many imagined, he says. We must never give up the fight, especially not now, not when we came so close.

The liberal blogosphere echoes his calls to stand firm. Editorials encourage people not to let this loss get them down. With McCain in the White House, we must be as engaged as ever, they unanimously proclaim.

Let me preempt all this. If the Democrats lose, give up. It’s over. Cancel your subscription to Salon. Delete Dailykos or The Huffington Post from your bookmarks. It’s time to accept the facts.

You live in a country where the people want their government not only to tell you who you can marry but what you can do with your uterus. A country so firmly behind a bomb first, ask questions never foreign policy, that another impractical and immoral war is, no doubt, inevitable. A country where if you don’t have the cash for medical treatment, you’re left to die—unlike in other great world powers, such as Peru or Sri Lanka.

Already happy to have a government that listens to your phone calls and reads your emails, the people will likely put up little resistance when a warrant to search your body or your house is no longer required.

These are just the political realities of a McCain-Palin victory. Far worse, is how that victory reflects the ultimate triumph of ignorance over knowledge. Forget about the bridge to nowhere. The American electorate will have built a bridge out of the 21st Century, right over Ben Franklin’s house, pass the Renaissance, and directly into the heart of the Dark Ages. As far as I can tell, this was the last time in Western history knowledge was so distrusted, where expertise was so mocked, where faith reigned so totally over reason.

For the past eight years, we've kicked back and watched as Bush stuck his loafer on the truth's skinny throat. A bill which gave companies the right to pollute the air was called The Clean Skies Act and a bill which allowed the timber industry to decimate the remaining fraction of American forests, was called the Healthy Forest Initiative. Operation Iraqi Freedom was anything but that.

But with the election of McCain-Palin, the truth will receive the coup de grâce. We’ll have returned to an age that believes The Garden of Eden should be taught in schools as a likely alternative to The Origin of Species. To a backwards mindset that doesn’t accept global warming or believe in stem cell research. You don’t need to look much further than the continued promotion of abstinence only sex-ed to find the same sort of spit-in-the-face-of-all-evidence-and-logic that once demanded that the sun revolved around the Earth.

Yet in some ways with McCain-Palin, we’ll have entered a new phase in the utter debasement of reason. The man who was the staunchest supporter of an illegal and disastrous war, is chosen to be the most qualified to lead America abroad. An undergraduate degree from the University of Idaho is celebrated for its ordinariness while a law degree from Harvard is ridiculed. Once upon a time, being “elite” was considered a good thing. No longer. Now being mediocre is far more admirable.

This isn’t something you can fight. You can’t educate people who cheer ignorance. You can’t defeat irrationality with reason. Scream as loud as you want, but if someone has their fingers plugging their ears, they’re not listening. This is why it’s time to give up. I understand how counterintuitive this all sounds. Since we were kids, our parents, teachers, and Burgess Meredith have been telling us to never back down.

This is the type of thinking that keeps greyhounds running in eternal circles after a plastic bone.

There’s a time to quit. It’s not healthy to still think you’re going to play shortstop for the Yankees. If you’re 45 and shredding Allman Brothers songs in your parents’ garage, it’s time to forget about your record deal.

Sometimes it’s essential to let silly dreams die so you can move on to practical things. The election of McCain-Palin obviously wouldn’t equal the death of goodness. There’ll always be plenty of ways to help others on an individual level. But please, don’t waste any more time trying to convince someone in rural Ohio why it’d be better to raise taxes on rich people and lower them on poor people. Or why killing moderate Muslim civilians by the thousands might backfire one day. Forget it. You’ve passed through the gates of the Inferno. It’s no use pretending that you’ve gone someplace cool that has universal healthcare. You don’t live in Scandinavia. Accept it and stop thinking about a country that has stopped thinking about anything at all.