John Kerry, Creator and Destroyer

By Crispin Sartwell

Just a quick review. Kerry voted for the war in Iraq, declaring foursquare that Saddam's weapons programs and connections to al-Qaeda made him a threat to the free world. Then he voted against funding the operation, saying (according to the New Yorker) that this would help position him as a peace candidate in competition with Howard Dean. Then he asserted that knowing what he knows now, he would have voted the same way, and promised to stay the course. Then he said that George Bush is unfit to lead our nation, because he misled us into what Kerry asserts is the right war at the right time.

John Kerry's bold move to endorse a series of flat contradictions on matters of life and death - indeed to endorse them with all the truth and love and passion and commitment of a great soul - opens up entirely new and wondrous vistas in political discourse. It's perhaps the greatest expression to date of the literally unimaginable political daring for which John Kerry has been so noted.

First of all, let's explore the upside. And what an upside it is. It is actually not possible to disagree with Kerry, because if you disagree with him, it follows that you agree with him. Indeed, this makes polling obsolete, as Kerry has exactly 100% support, not empirically but as a matter of strict conceptual entailment.

Second, consider the following well-established logical fact. Any assertion - any assertion at all - follows from a contradiction. That is, if your premise is 'p and not-p,' where 'p' stands for some claim, any claim 'q' follows.

This means that Kerry can now fall into silence, having endorsed once and for all every single possible claim that can be formulated in any language. We will miss the stiff stentorian tones, as well as such brilliant phrase-making as "the future belongs not to fear, but to freedom." But we will press on, for the spirit of America is one of eternal optimism.

At any rate, Kerry is certainly the first presidential candidate to assert that giant purple flying pigs inhabit the planet Jupiter, that the government of the United States must immediately be dissolved, that terrorism is fun, or that 2 +2 = cheesecake. Such claims make him the boldest, most visionary leader that our country has ever produced.

However, it would be irresponsible not to point out some of the risks of Kerry's logico-political strategy.

Though it's true that everyone agrees with him, it's equally true that everyone disagrees with him. His polling numbers are at once 100% and 0. Indeed, were he to win the election, he would go down to a crushing defeat.

Kerry, as both a Republican and Democrat, both a liberal and a conservative, and - what the heck - as a fascist and a communist - presents our great nation with one of the starkest choices in our history. The choice between Kerry and Kerry and Kerry and Kerry and so on to infinity is so complex, so bewildering that it may actually repress voter turnout, throwing the election in the end to Kerry.

Were Kerry to be elected, Kerry himself would certainly regard it as a disaster, rejecting as he does every position Kerry has taken on the issues.

Kerry has become an image of the dialectical flow of history itself, in which all possible antitheses are realized within the onslaught of time. But Kerry himself is the synthesis, the zone in which the contradiction is embraced with total intensity, the avatar simultaneously of truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, exaltation and degradation.

John Kerry has transcended the mundane human realm, been etherealized into the embodiment of the processes by which the cosmos emerges and is undone. John Kerry is the creator and destroyer of worlds.

And that's why, come November 2^nd, I'll be voting for John Kerry and against him.

Crispin Sartwell has a Ph.D. in philosophy.