How The Dinosaurs Became Extinct.
A happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, enjoy the turkey and the family rows, and to my compatriots, sod it, it’s Thursday, it’s nearly the weekend and it’s geology and comedy night on BBC2 so screw the vile weather. Let’s plan something nice for dinner and have a night in in front of the telly. Comfort food and enjoyable tv pablum, that’s the ticket on these dismal November days.
Also happy post-election day and well done to the Dutch, who elected 25 Socialist Party candidates to the Tweede Kamer yesterday. What was really encouraging was to see so many people my sons’ ages out campaigning and at SP rallies. I guess the Second Life strategy must’ve worked after all – or maybe it was the consistently anti-war and anti-capitalist stance and the bottom-up, good old-fashioned street campaigning to as many individual voters as possible in person that it did it. The SP over the past couple of years has been a model of how to build a party from the ground : they’ve also used technology as a tool to enhance campaign effectiveness, not as a substitute for actual people. Great branding too.
25 seats means they’ll have a lot more clout in NL’s negotiation based system than they did. (For a more detailed view of the results and their implications, see Wisse Words.) There’s been a move on both left and right away from the mushy managerial middle towards parties that actually have a coherent agenda. This has also led to the Party For Animals gaining a seat, which no doubt will be jumped on as evidence of loony leftism: but if you think about it more than a second or two, it makes perfect sense that the the welfare of non-human animal residents of the country should be taken into account on issues like agricultural policy.
There was also reported to have been a massive swing by Dutch moslem voters away from the middle and to the SP, thanks to its vocal opposition to the rampant Islamophobe-baiting and racist pandering practiced by the other parties, most notably by that hatchet-faced harpy Rita Verdonk and the ridiculous-haired spiv Geert Wilder and his crew of provincial prodnoses.
So why the dinsoaur cartoon? One, I liked it and two, it gves me a convenient peg to hang this post on – because there’s a feeling around that we’re on the cusp of significant worldwide change and that the right-wing political dinosaurs of the past generation are slowly becoming extinct or irrelevant as globalisation reveals the true complexities of the future we face.
(Except for Henry Kissinger, obviously, who’s Undead.)
Let’s hope that this Dutch leftward shift is another symptom, like the elections of leftists in Spain, Chile and Italy and the standoff in Mexico just to give a few examples, that the global political balance is shifting away from pure profit to people and planet, in spite of or maybe even thanks to the failed policies of the neocons in Washington.
That we can even begin to hope that it may be so is something we can all be thankful for whatever our nationality.
Read more: Dinosaurs, US Politics, Thanksgiving, Dutch elections, Video, YouTube
