John Perry Barlow on the election

Supporting Kerry Anyway….

I’m aloft somewhere between Rome and Cincinnati, jetting back towards my crazed, stupefied, dangerous country after three days in Berlin. I dread coming home. You know things have taken a paradoxical turn when Germany feels safe, sane, and free by comparison with the United States of America. But that’s how it looks to me. That’s how it looks to the Germans too. The idea that we might actually re-elect George Bush is unfathomable – indeed, inexcusable – to them.

As one of them put it to me, “We can forgive you for electing him once. As we ought to know, any electorate can make a tragic mistake. But if you elect him twice, we will start fearing you Americans as much as we currently fear your government.”

For the last month or so, the election seemed reminiscent to me of ads for the film “Alien vs. Predator, ” the tag line of which goes, “Whoever wins, we lose.” (Further, it has seemed right to me that one of these characters is an alien and the other a predator.)