Democracy just doesn't look very epic
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Wednesday 12 August 2009 01:31

Voting, for example. On some rainy day you head for
some school in the hood and put a cross somewhere
on a piece of paper and put that in a box which
resembles the box you separate your trash in.
Voting is an important thing to do, but everything
about it makes it look unimportant. It's stripped
down to the bare minimum, with the number of the
voting office in black on white on your piece of
paper and the same on some sign outside a school,
the sterile efficient and neutral environment of
the voting process intertwined with the flashback
inducing desertedness of a school when the kids
have gone. It's the anti-climax of democracy.
Buying a postage stamp from a vending machine
appears more exciting. And that's the active part
of democracy.

The passive part can be equally deceptive. Mostly
because I'm saying the Piratenpartei are a bunch of
idiots, I wanted to check if the FDP isn't, because
otherwise it wouldn't make much sense to dis the
Piratenpartei if all parties are idiots. So last
afternoon I went to Lurup, for the Bürgergespräch
with Katja Suding and Burkhardt Müller-Sönksen, MdB
no less. Optimistique-moi glanced Google maps and
decided one hour would be enough to get to the
about 6 kilometer far target by bike. But once you
get on the wrong way to Schenefeld there is no
shortcut in the direction of Lurup. So a bit lost
in the ghetto suddenly 18:00 was approaching fast
and Böverstland isn't exactly on some crossroads
that you'd randomly run into. Circling the area
didn't yield much so then I just followed my sense
of direction through the courtyard of some brown
bricks, over a playground and there we were. Katja
Suding on the parking lot of the Stadtteilhaus, and
not even fashionably late.

Those Hauses are something I can't get used to. I
know the Barmbek Bürgerhaus from Balista meetings,
and I don't know the background of it, but they've
got some seventies communist look and feel to them.
The location and situation within the neighborhood,
the intellectual aspirations, café like atmosphere,
like the مدرسة of post-war Germanies. The focal
point of pre-revolutionary tension, the place where
things are happening, where the AK-47's are stored
in a dusty cellar and will be handed out when the
time is right. Apparently from an era where
architects were concerned with those things and
provided the means to society to form itself.
Meeting there with a dozen of FDP people could be
considered surreal, or the other way round.

But like with the voting thing which seems bizarre
in isolation, it all adds up in the big picture.
It's a step in the convergence to BundeskanzlerIn.
This isn't an epic monarchy where future rulers
behave like future rulers because they are
predestined to be rulers, this is democracy where
people without mythical powers can just be at the
right time at the right place to make a difference.
There's no magic, there's no gap, there's just
people.

And they're not idiots. Au contraire.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2009/08/12/democracy-just-doesnt-look-very-epic/