It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Of course, Americans should vote as they see fit. But it is instructive to note how citizens of other nations around the world would vote if they had the choice. Of thirty-three nations surveyed recently, in only one nation did a majority of citizens say they wished for Bush to be re-elected, and in only two other nations were there more citizens who said they wanted Bush to be re-elected than citizens who said they wanted Kerry to be elected. In thirty countries, more citizens wanted Kerry to be elected president, and the margin of Kerry's favor was, on average, a staggering 26%.

Now, it could be the the previous result came from only surveying treacherous nations of evildoers. So let's look at the United States' traditional allies. Even among the United States' traditional allies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom), citizens from nation to nation uniformly supported Kerry by margins of 20% to 67%. We can succumb to xenophobia and dismiss this wave of judgment as coming from useless outsiders, or we can listen to what they're trying to tell us.

Let's try to be most favorable to Bush and move from those nations whose old alliances with America Bush has undermined to a consideration of Bush's "New Europe," the small Eastern European nations with whom Bush has tried to forge new alliances. Surveys were taken in three such nations: Poland, Sweden and the Czech Republic. In only one, Poland, was Bush preferred over Kerry -- and only by a 5% margin. In the other two nations, Kerry was preferred by margins of 24% (in the Czech Republic) and 48% (in Sweden). Bush has globally lost the hearts and minds of even the few nations he's reached out towards.

(Source: Program on International Policy Attitudes September 8, 2004)

Posted by James Cook at 1:54 PM. # (permalink)




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