Watching Bush deliver his Roman speech in-the-round at the convention, my first thought was that W was taking some of Colin Powell’s Ambien. Bush has hit that white light that you can now get in the double-oughts, with an amazing mix of endorphin+dopamine cocktail vitamins, unbelievable White House food, Condi’s suckling love, and the warmth from Cheney’s hands.
Whatever drug it was (maybe only Baptist fervor or pre-speech sex with wraiths summoned from hell), the monkey-faced wind sock quietly glowed with pleasure. He seemed drained, post-coital, and as he twisted his mouth into that smug smile, as he always does after every teleprompter paragraph, I really thought he might drool a little.
The only other thing I saw was Kerry’s hurried speech, the whole thing. When he “reported for duty,” I confess I felt proud. It was like: let’s get ready to rumble. I know I was supposed to cringe, but I’m Uncle Sam, dammit, and I felt proud in a way I could not control, like this guy was going to come and save us from the nasty little boy king from the Twilight Zone who was wishing everybody into the cornfield. Plus, Kerry is allowed to say “reporting for duty.” In the context of this election; in the context of whatever war this is, he was. Plus it was in fact real. He served his country when he didn’t have to and proved he has huge balls.
But by speech’s end, I felt like Dukakis in the tank. I felt like Muskie in the snow on the sidewalk. Kerry wasn’t coming out and telling us Bush was robbing us. He wasn’t saying the war was wrong. And my feeling of pride had ground to a pathetic halt. Which is too bad, because the Bush administraiton could easily come crashing down if somebody (OK, it has to be John Kerry) takes even the slightest step off the set and shows the guy wires and how everything’s propped up. I want to hear him talking about “Where are we going with all this anyway?” — _any_ kind of philosophical approach or honest approach and it’s a real election. The only way for Kerry to win is to own who he is and go meta. He has to expose the elite world he is so much a part of let the chips fall where they do. But he ain’t gonna do that.
Uncle Sam’s view of conspiracies is that while there indeed may be no ruling conspiracy, there are surely alliances of interests and profilage little “conspiracies.” The overwhelming historical movement of the last 30 years has been the consolidation of business entities and of business power, and the concomitant development of increasingly kick-ass political strategies aimed at one single coherent goal: to shift more wealth into the pockets of large corporations and the very wealthy individuals that run them.
The Reagan election was the spearhead of the first great victory of this process on the political side (again, not a conspiracy, but rather an aggregate of allied groups all working more or less separately toward a more or less shared goal). And nobody loved Reagan more than small-time Texas farmers, factory workers in Cleveland, out-of-work insurance salesmen in Missouri, folks who had gotten so played that they perceived Reagan as the enemy of the very cabal whose chief servant and figurehead was in fact Reagan himself. The farmer knew he was being screwed, and the pseudo-cabal had convinced him that it was Jimmy Carter who was doing the screwing.
The key to Reagan’s victory is working for Bush again today. The farmer guy seeks comfort, he wants Daddy, he wants an end to his thinking, an answer, like the bible and Robert Ludlum give. He can’t handle some messy story about lots of different people acting out of greed and self-interest, and every now grasping at an idea. He finds comfort in knowing that there is a hand on the tiller, even if it is the Devil, or space aliens, or the Jews.
Sure, there’s no cabal. But if you take cabal in a virtual sense, a Hegelian-cabal, then who is the real wild-card, the interloper? It’s Clinton. Hell, he maybe would never have gotten elected without the other wild-card, Ross Perot. And what proves that there is a virtual “cabal,” that is some superorganic principle that defends the status quo of power, once the smart hick got into power, the people would have elected him to 3 terms at least, if it were legal. And his heir-apparent would be president right now if not for Jeb Bush’s police.
But the question now is, was this the last gasp? Was this the last moment of democracy? Because the Texas farmer had the wrong guy but the right idea, power does control the field, but sometimes, ever so rarely, there are anomalies that slip in the back door. I’m not saying that Clinton was great president, or a hero, or anything else, but only that he was an anomaly, a shard of something human in the machine. And he might be the last we will see in a long time.
There aren’t many Americans I would say remind me of Hitler. TR and Wilson had certain elements, and maybe Bush has everybody beat. But I recognize that in a sense, when I see Bush as Hitler it’s out of hopefulness, because Hitler has an end to it. But maybe he’s not Hitler; maybe he’s Caesar. The end to that is a lot nastier, and lasts a whole lot longer. What we are seeing is the creation of what may well be a permanent and unstoppable alliance between two groups who have almost nothing in common–corporate America, who are mostly perverts and drug abusers, and socially conservative America, who are mostly poor. As unholy as it seems, the alliance really makes perfect sense. The rich don’t give a fuck about abortion rights or creationism or gay rights. They can get all the abortions, or actually correct education, or gay sex that they want through their own exclusive sources. And the social conservatives are too busy rolling around on the floor of their churches speaking in tongues to care about the erosion of their civil rights and the ruination of the national budget to pay for tax cuts for the rich. But together, they can win elections.
Why Kerry/Gore/Dukakis are so lame I can’t account for. But why Bush and Reagan win is because they are actors, and nothing more. It was genius on the part of the corporate pseudo-cabal to realize that the people will always go for an actor with really good writers and directors behind him. I don’t think the opposition will ever be able to do that though. Kerry and every Dem loser before has been criticized for not having a “coherent message.” But because there is no Cabal on either side, a coherent message is hard to come by. The Repubs have an advantage, however, because the policy that the pseudo-cabal of the rich drives toward is simply whatever gives more money to the rich. This allows them to be “coherent” without having to actually conspire. They have really good accountants, and so there is always a simple bottom line for every “clean skies” or “healthy forests” initiative. But there is nothing comparable on the opposition side, nothing that translates into a figure.
Good acting, writing, and directing can do anything. Bush, the figurehead of the most deceptive administration in recent history or probably ever, is perceived as “sincere.” Kerry, with a silver star, has his war record compared unfavorably with a draft-dodging deserter.
But what was I thinking? Bush is not Hitler or Caesar. He’s the anti-Christ. He seems like the savior, but he’s the doomer. He seems warm and nice, but he’s full of worms. He’s a nasty little bully and he knows it and he’s fine with it and what’s the capper: we’re fine with it. Or are we? We shall see. Assuming we are, fine. Let it go down. Speaking of which, here’s something worth watching: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/graphics/packageart/bush/tsg_bush.avi.
To summarize:
1) They have mastered the big lie, and the little guy who is getting screwed most by it is supporting it the most.
2) Reagan seen as the interloper, when really it was Clinton (side issue), but mainly
3) An unholy alliance between big business and small-town America (which again is like #1, but this is a political mandate).
