Getting it right

By Fayza Hassan
My daughter, who has been living in Florida for several years, is always prompt to point out the reasons why I should admire her choice. The American way of life is something she really believes in and, Florida being the cream of the American states, she affirms, I must agree with her that she is living at the door of paradise.
Normally I am not inclined to diverge, but since the election debacle I have not been able to resist teasing her about her place in the sun. Did she manage to handle the butterfly ballot? I asked her. "I did not have to," she said. "In my county we used colouring pencils." I thought this quite wise, in view of the apparent intellectual capacities of the voters, and asked why the other counties had not adopted the practice. "We are in a democracy," she explained, as if speaking to someone severely challenged. "Everyone does their own thing." I mumbled something about colour-blindness as a reason for that method not being used more extensively, and she must have guessed that I was doing my best to stifle my mirth, but chose not to take the argument any further.
Seriously, however, I am thinking more and more these days about a conversation I had with a friend at the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "Mark my words," he had said; "America is on the decline. It is only propped up by the stupidity of the rest of the civilised nations, which cannot see the writing on the wall." I had told him at the time that America could survive anything. It had emerged unscathed, time and again, from its most monumental blunders: Vietnam, the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombing of Iraq, Desert Storm Syndrome, its shameless support of Israeli aggression, a president in office suffering from Alzheimer, Watergate, O J Simpson... surely a little hanky-panky in the Oval Office was not going to break the camel's back?
My friend persisted that it was not so much the political faux pas as the way the media seemed to relish the shortcomings of the country, exposing them down to the most shameful details. "It is like the lepers of long ago baring their wounds, only Americans do it with smugness. They call it democracy, but I think it is a variety of dangerously decadent exhibitionism, heralding their downfall," he had commented, adding that when a country looks on its faults as fondly as America, seeming to delight in its own ineptness, there was something terribly wrong going on.
This summer my daughter was as happy as ever: she had a good job and the children were doing well at school. My granddaughter was going out on her first dates and my grandson had made it onto the basketball team. They were well fed and clothed, with no worries other than their next trip to the mall: what could they possibly buy this time? When my daughter said for the tenth time that she was living in the most beautiful country in the world, I approved, if only for the joy I experienced in seeing her so content. I said nothing of the involvement of the US in the Middle East; nor did I mention TWA and EgyptAir, or John Kennedy's private plane, suddenly and inexplicably falling out of the sky and the rumours that had surrounded the three accidents. America, I told myself for her sake, has the world's most sophisticated arsenal, manned by competent engineers and technicians; missiles don't just go astray... even if they did bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake.
For the past month, I have been watching the presidential elections on television with an attention akin to obsession. I spent many a sleepless night observing the Florida vote and many questions sprang to my mind. Isn't it strange that, with all the technological expertise at their fingertips, the voting system has not been computerised? Why can't they construct simple voting devices that function properly? Can't anyone design a simple ballot there? Are average Americans unable to follow simple instructions? What exactly is going on? Are we witnessing democracy at work or rather a helpless and clumsy giant paralysed by its inability to count mechanically or manually up to six million? Should the rest of the world contribute to the system by sending thousands of abacuses to Florida? Are we witnessing the dissimulation of something far more sinister?
Whenever I turned the television on, I was sure that within ten seconds I would be assured by a sanctimonious spokesperson that "we have to get it right: every vote must count." Americans don't really seem to know why they chose one president over the other. The contenders were so eager to reach the coveted Taj Mahal that they shed every previous pretense at fulfilling a mission. And as usual, their personal ambitions were aired in full, courtesy of their television stations. Typically, as the winner was finally announced, the rest of the world remained under the uncanny impression that it was being treated to yet another American farce. My sister called: "It's over," she said. "Didn't Bush's father run around Washington in a gas mask during the Gulf War?" I remembered that he had indeed. God bless America.
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