A regular reader (hi, Michael!) left a comment on my last entry which (half-jokingly) brought up an issue that I’ve been tossing around myself since November 2: as an expatriate (geographically, anyway), why do I even care who gets elected in the United States?

After I found out that Bush won, I tried to get over being distraught by telling myself that it shouldn’t matter to me because, hell, I don’t even live in America, so if the (slight) majority of Americans want Bush, then they’re more than welcome to him. I tried to convince myself to fully embrace my position as a tax-paying member of British society, to give myself up to a mental allegiance with "Old Europe", and to let the Americans who live in America get on with their own lives under their rightfully elected leader.

But it’s not that easy, is it? It doesn’t work that way, because what the president of the United States does affects the entire world. Bush cut funding for the UN Population Fund, so disadvantaged women around the world aren’t getting the level of reproductive health care and education they so desperately need to help them survive childbirth and prevent the spread of AIDS. Bush decided that it wasn’t really worth trying to cut CO2 emissions in accordance with the Kyoto protocol, so other huge polluters around the world decided that they didn’t need to bother cutting their emissions either (Russia, thankfully, has finally come around). Bush withdrew from the International Criminal Court treaty (thus aligning the US with countries like China and Iraq), drastically undermining global efforts to bring international criminals to justice. Et-bloody-cetera.

But really, the situation in America alone is enough to make me furious, even though I don’t live there. So many people without affordable health care (and if I was living in America, I would be one of those people, because freelancers more often than not just can’t afford to have health insurance there - thank God for the NHS), so many people without jobs, so many languishing public schools, so much of the wilderness being stripped away and drilled into for damn oil - and I haven’t even mentioned the likelihood that Roe vs. Wade will go down in the next four years as part of the creeping "moral crusade" that the Bush administration is intent on carrying out in America - and that the (slight) majority of Americans are all too eager to sign up to.

And, to be honest, it is precisely this endless talk about "moral values" that I find so difficult to take. If all the post-election polls and interviews and analyses are right, then 51% of Americans voted for Bush not because they think he’s doing a great job domestically (because they admit that things are worse in America now than they were four years ago) or internationally (because even Republicans are realizing that almost 1,300 Americans have died in an open-ended war in Iraq that has not in any way affected al-Quaeda or brought Osama bin Laden closer to justice - which was the whole idea, right? Right? Right?). No, 51% of Americans voted for Bush because he doesn’t think gays should have the right to marry, or that women should have the right to make their own reproductive health choices. It’s as simple and devastating as that. These are the core "moral values" that Bush represents, and it doesn’t matter if things are bad now and getting worse, because Bush is a God-fearing man, and that’s really what’s important in the "heartland".

And there are two realizations here that I find completely heart-wrenching: first, the realization that Americans feel it’s more important for the government to prevent two people who love each other from entering into a permanent legal and spiritual union with one another than it is for the government to care for the sick, help the disadvantaged, protect the environment and improve the standing of the United States on a global scale; and second, the realization that the truths that I hold to be self-evident and the "moral values" by which I try to lead my life are so apparently at odds with those of the majority of Americans. I know it’s not a huge majority, and I know that there are many, many Americans who feel exactly like I do in the wake of this election - sad, frightened and in shock. But there are even more Americans right now who are clapping and cheering, and as people suffer and die in the United States and around the rest of the world as a direct or indirect result of George W. Bush, I find that absolutely heartbreaking.

Further reading…