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Dennis Kucinich
By Gore Vidal
11/28/07 "The
Nation" -- --- For the past two years I've been
crisscrossing the United States speaking to crowds of people
about our history and politics. At the same time, would-be
Presidents of the greatest nation in the country, as
silver-tongued Spiro Agnew used to say, have been crowding the
trail, while TV journalists sadly shake their heads at how
savage the politicos have become in their language. But then, it
is the task of TV journalists to foment quarrels where often
none properly exist.
As I pass through the stage door of one auditorium after
another, I now hear the ominous name of Darth Vader, as edgy
audiences shudder at the horrible direction our political
discourse has taken. Ever eager as I am to shed light, I
sometimes drop the name of the least publicized applicant to the
creaky throne of the West: Dennis Kucinich. It takes a moment
for the name to sink in. Then genuine applause begins. He is
very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain, and
I work him into the text. A member of the House of
Representatives for five terms since 1997, although many of his
legislative measures have been too useful and original for our
brain-dead media to comprehend. I note his well-wrought articles
proposing the impeachment of Vice President Cheney, testing the
patriotic nerves of his fellow Democrats, but then the fact of
his useful existence often causes distress to those who
genuinely hate that democracy he is so eager to extend. "Don't
waste your vote," they whine in unison--as if our votes are not
quadrennially wasted on those marvelous occasions when they are
actually counted and recorded.
Meanwhile, Kucinich is now at least visible in lineups of the
Democratic candidates; he tends to be the most eloquent of the
lot. So who is he? Something of a political prodigy: at 31 he
was elected mayor of Cleveland. Once he had been installed, in
1978, the city's lordly banks wanted the new mayor to sell off
the city's municipally owned electric system, Muny Light, to a
private competitor in which (Oh, America!) the banks had a
financial interest. When Mayor Kucinich refused to sell, the
money lords took their revenge, as they are wont to do: they
refused to roll over the city's debt, pushing the city into
default. The ensuing crisis revealed the banks' criminal
involvement with the private utility of their choice, CEI,
which, had it acquired Muny Light, would have become a monopoly,
as five of the six lordly banks had almost 1.8 million shares of
CEI stock: this is Enronesque before the fact.
Mayor Kucinich was not re-elected, but his profile was clearly
etched on the consciousness of his city; and in due course he
returned to the Cleveland City Council before being elected to
the Ohio State Senate and then the US Congress. Kucinich has
also written a description of his Dickensian youth, growing up
in Cleveland. He has firsthand knowledge of urban poverty in the
world's richest nation. Born in 1946 into a Croatian Catholic
family, by the time he was 17 he and his family had lived in
twenty-one different places, much of which he describes in
Dreiserian detail in a just-published memoir.
Kucinich is opposed to the death penalty as well as the USA
Patriot Act. In 1998 and 2004 he was a US delegate to the United
Nations convention on climate change. At home he has been active
in Rust Belt affairs, working to preserve the ninety-year-old
Cleveland steel industry, a task of the sort that will confront
the next President should he or she have sufficient interest in
these details.
I asked a dedicated liberal his impression of Kucinich; he
wondered if Kucinich was too slight to lead a nation of truly
fat folk. I pointed out that he has the same physical stature as
James Madison, as well as a Madisonian commitment to our 1789
Constitution; he is also farsighted, as demonstrated by his
resolute opposition to Bush's cries for ever more funding for
the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More to the point, in
October 2002 he opposed the notion of a war then being debated.
For those of us at home and in harm's way from disease, he
co-wrote HR 676, a bill that would insure all of us within
Medicare, just as if we were citizens of a truly civilized
nation.
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