It is 17 days until November 4th, which—one way or the other—is a day that promises to be epically historic. I predict that we will see record-high voter turn-out, that’s for certain. And I won’t say anything more than that. I can only hope for certain outcomes, but we all know where hoping has gotten me this year.

While his critics levy charges of ephemerality, vagueness, and abstraction, Barack Obama has certainly tapped a vein with his message of change and hope. As dark as the near future seems these days, with the likelihood that this recession will be the deepest and longest in recent memory, and with apocalyptic pronouncements of “being worse than the Great Depression,” it seems inevitable that the people must abandon the sinking ship that is the status quo. Al Gore may have hurt himself by distancing himself too much from Bill Clinton in 2000, but there is no doubt that John McCain has harmed his campaign by failing to distance himself enough from George W Bush. His desperate retort against Obama—”I am not George Bush!”—was too little, too late, particularly when the most concrete aspects of his policies that I managed to glean were that he was simply going to “cut taxes” and “cut government spending,” the continual empty mantra of the Republican Party. I say empty because this current administration has done little of either over the past eight years, (at least, certainly, little for the middle class or for the poor.)

But change is inevitable. Obviously, we hope that it will be change for the better, but I’ve also learned to expect the worst. The drumbeats are already pounding, as people go looking for a scapegoat to blame for the dire straits we’re in. Certainly, the people actually responsible for our predicament have not stepped up to the plate and accepted responsibility—the ruling class, the CEOs, the speculators, the charlatans, the white-collared thieves. Certain populist malefactors have been decrying ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act. Those are the code words. The dog whistles. And the angry mob is raising their torches and pitchforks. It is all too apparent that they are planning to blame this all on minorities, on people-of-color, on the poor, on the powerless.

But Obama is not just an empty suit. He clearly possesses a mind like a steel trap. He has utilized the successful techniques of grass-root organizers and activists to run a campaign unlike anything ever seen before. Maybe Howard Dean and Joe Trippi had run a prototype version of such a campaign. But the necessary tools weren’t yet in place. And the traditional media shot them out of the sky.

But Obama’s ground teams have been creeping across the country and infiltrating the very soil exactly like roots. Yes, we can. This is not a new motto. For the last century, workers seeking fairness have chanted this very thing, in English, in Spanish.

In the end, he will not save us. We can only save ourselves. What he is doing is reminding us of this very fact. America is The People, and The People are powerful. We seem to have forgotten that, stupefied by the mind-numbing modern equivalents of bread and circuses that distract us from the calumny of the ruling classes who have led us off a cliff.

Which leads me to the thing that was on my mind when I started this post. This false dichotomy between reform and revolution. I’m still hoping that maybe we can use the System itself to fix itself, without violence, without bloodshed. Looking back at American history makes me apprehensive, though. I certainly think of the Civil War. I also think about the Civil Rights Movement. I think of the Free Speech Movement and the protests against our ill-fated imperialist adventure in Vietnam. And then I think of the smoke and the flames as a city burned around me when I was just a teen-ager, a city fractured by race and socioeconomic status. Rodney King, Reginald Denny. Florence and Normandie. Pico and Alvarado. The black and brown faces of the people looting the Fedco on La Cienega. The Koreans on the rooftops, shooting at people in the streets. The National Guard went to protect Beverly Hills, but there was no one there in K-Town, in South Central. Even cops were fleeing. Those last particular details remain sharply embedded in my brain.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around what may be the worst-case scenarios might be like.

And even if Barack Obama is peacefully inaugurated on January 20th, 2009, that’s only going to the beginning of this national struggle. The next few years are going to be dark. Can we keep the flame of our nation lit without torching ourselves?

Even a dilettante interested in American History knows that laissez-faire capitalism is a myth. There has never been a time in American history where there were no protections to trade. Whenever ever financial institutions that were too big to fail failed, the government always stepped in to bail them out. The Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods pact that Nixon finally killed, the $700 billion dollar bailout just recently approved by Congress. There has always been manipulation of the so-called free markets. Ostensibly, it has always been done for the good of the American People. While deluded free-marketers may believe that the Invisible Hand should reign unchallenged, sane people still understand that the reason government exists is to protect the liberty of the people first and foremost, market forces be damned.

Social Security and Medicare, the bugaboos of conservatives, have not transformed our government into a communist totalitarian regime. If the FDIC didn’t exist, I guarantee people would’ve been jumping out of windows a couple of weeks ago, banking branches would’ve been torn apart by panicked account holders, and chaos would be reigning in the streets. I think we as a nation are slowly learning that “liberal” and “socialist” may not be as bad as we thought.

Certainly the 1990’s have taught us that communist totalitarian regimes don’t really work, well, except perhaps in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, I guess. But I think what we’re learning in this century is that a poorly regulated capitalist democracy isn’t very democratic. It becomes a kleptocracy, which is really no freer than totalitarianism. Instinctively, I think we as a nation know this. Even John McCain has changed his tack and is touting “responsible regulation.”

So maybe not all the ideas of the Marxists are bankrupt. Not all the ideas of Adam Smith are sacrosanct. It is left for us to sensibly winnow the wheat from the chaff. It will not be surprising if what we need is a hybrid of ideas, a strategy that is crafted from a myriad of ideas from the past, tweaked for the present time. How post-modern is that?

But the specter of violent revolution lingers. The words of JFK are kind of spooky. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” There will be those who cling hard to the past, who resist change even to the detriment of their own interests. I’m hoping that they really are a scattered few. Dead-enders. Relics of eras long gone.

All of this is prelude to my fractured thoughts as I watched the musical “Wicked” at the Pantages yesterday. It is, indeed, a fable for our modern times. As an unnamed aide to George W Bush so triumphantly put it in 2004, “…what we call the reality-based community… believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This theme is the heart of this Stephen Schwarz musical based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist fairy tale set in the world of Oz (and even the original story is suspected of harboring political allegory.) Maguire re-imagines the cardboard cut-out villain—the Wicked Witch of the West—as more of a Che Guevara-type revolutionary, fraught with the very same moral ambiguity that clouds Guevara’s image. Someone filled with passion and anger, who wasn’t hesitant about being ruthless and using violence to achieve their goals. The victorious writers of history have decided for the sake of propaganda and simplicity to ignore their complexities and to tag them with the monochrome label “Evil,” but victors often forget that the vanquished have real, still unaddressed grievances against people who intentionally sought to deliberately harm them and the people around them, even if in an impersonal manner.

While the musical necessarily adds some saccharine to the subject matter, toning down on the moral ambiguity, and even giving it a happy ending, from what I understand, the book is a lot less apologist. Did this person commit acts of irredeemable evil? Does this necessarily invalidate the acts of good? Certainly mass murder and assassination would never fit in the “Good” category, but we seem to be selective about which perpetrators we’re willing to pardon and who we’re willing to condemn. Terrorist or freedom fighter, right?

I harbor no illusion that future revolutionaries will not be subjected to the same vagaries of history writing. If you’re on the winning team, you get to be a hero. If you’re not, you’re nothing more than a fanatical terrorist deluded by a dead-end philosophy/lifestyle/religion, filled with nothing but evil, burning in hell. Such is life.

But what I wonder is, is it possible to maintain your morality and ethics when you’re interested in radical change? Probably only if you’re willing to be a martyr. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. I think of Mohandas Gandhi. They certainly never achieved the goals that their more radicalized, more bloody-minded compatriots hoped for, but I wonder, is that really a bad thing?

I am beginning to truly believe that circumstance cannot excuse acts of evil. But circumstance can sometimes inspire surprising acts of goodness. Can you really do much more than to walk this world hopeful, even if you must still be wary?