- It has been said that people pretty much get the government
they deserve. There is more than a little justice in the observation.
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- Pat Buchanan, long my choice as symbol for all that is
wrong with America, has given a last-minute endorsement to George Bush's
re-election. One is tempted to class his words, qualified as they are,
with the grovelings of John McCain at Bush rallies.
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- After spending a couple of years successfully peddling
columns attacking Bush for repeating the bloody stupidity of Vietnam, Pat
has come to the conclusion that Bush isn't so bad after all. He says that
while Bush is wrong on the war, he is right on just about everything else.
-
- I suppose Pat's list of things that are right with Bush
includes Jehovah's receiving a seat on the National Security Council, some
of the Patriot Act's finer points on human rights, sending individuals
secretly to places like Syria or Egypt to be tortured, insulting and alienating
friends and allies, squandering a hundred billion dollars without managing
so much as a patch-up of Iraq's smashed infrastructure, and laughing off
world environmental threats far more deadly than anything dreamed of by
terrorists.
-
- Pat perfectly represents America's noisy, pointless "culture
of complaint," something which mimics the effects of a bad gene pool,
endowing America with ridiculous trash like Crossfire or Rush Limbaugh
or whole networks like CNN or, indeed, the grotesque practices of its national
elections.
-
- Recall Emerson's advice, "A foolish consistency
is the hobgoblin of little minds." Certainly, no one can accuse Pat
of consistency, foolish or otherwise. When war served his career, his rise
to White House speechwriter, war was a very good thing. He defended it,
or should I say he defended others being sent to it, fists flailing and
lips flapping. Later, as failed presidential candidate for the re-born
Know Nothing Party, being against another war provided some limited scope
for still being listened to by some of the party he had opportunistically
turned against.
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- Pat, not being an evangelical in religion, is very much
one in politics. Much like Bush, but with far more showmanship, he always
displays an evangelist's sputteringly obnoxious and insistent tone of certainty
about what he is selling: if you don't listen to me, you're doomed to a
horrible fate. The evangelical tone is common in America's politics and
contributes to the massive sound and fury of its political campaigns. The
same dead certainty and implicit threat are, after all, the underlying
message of so much of the television advertising in which Americans are
immersed day and night: use our product or risk the torments of social
hell.
-
- Pat is typical of so much of America in his efforts to
claw his way to the top, embracing a bizarre distortion of William James's
philosophy of pragmatism. Whatever works for our own momentary self-interest,
we do, a practice which makes the moral relativism falsely-ascribed to
liberals look deep by comparison. Likely, the near-absence of genuine morals
now common in the commercial and political life of America is partly responsible
for the resurgence of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism offers certainty where
there is none and the sense of always being able to start fresh. The Puritan
brand also is long associated with notions of those chosen and those not
chosen, a satisfying private reflection for those who are less successful
in clawing for the top.
-
- How many Americans reflect on the stupid, needless death
and destruction inflicted on Iraqis (families hiding in smashed apartments
without clean water, electricity, or jobs) while driving their air-conditioned
SUVs, listening to the stereo, on the way to a sale at the Crate and Barrel?
Were they concerned with such things, the bloody, destructive invasion
could not have happened, but, then, neither could there have been ten years
of organized murder in Vietnam.
-
- Returning to Pat's pick for president, my first thoughts
on the Bush "bulge" controversy (see the wonderfully informative
site, http://homepage.mac.com/c.shaw/BushBulges/PhotoAlbum15.html ) went
to Shakespeare's hump-backed embodiment of evil, Richard III, but Shakespeare's
character is fascinating, and of course the historical Richard, so far
as we know, was a genuinely heroic figure. Bush is simply a dull man with
a shrill voice. The next comparison that came to mind was a marionette,
only an updated version with radio controls and servomotors instead of
strings and hinges.
-
- Whatever the best analogy, the fact that the American
president wears a radio device of some kind during important meetings and
national debates has been sufficiently established for people of a critical
turn of mind. The revelation seems almost an over-the-top parody of what
we already knew of Bush's capacities, an absurd editorial cartoon about
an inadequate man walking through responsibilities he doesn't understand,
leaving in his wake terrible damage to decent government and peace. Where
do the voices in his ear piece come from? Lynne Cheney? The Boston Strangler?
Franklin Graham? Jesus? The Wizard of Oz? All of the above?
-
- America, you elected this plodding creature, and it appears
you are about to do so again. Never mind the narrow focus on stolen votes
in Florida, nasty stuff that it is. Stolen votes are an enduring part of
the great chaotic noise you call national elections. Stolen votes in Texas
got Lyndon Johnson's political career going, and stolen votes in Texas
and Illinois put Kennedy into office. We usually do not hear much about
stolen votes in America because the two parties are satisfied with the
calculation that the damage inflicted is roughly equal.
-
- Are stolen votes more contemptible than the absolutely
corrupt practices of powerful politicians like Tom DeLay? Are stolen votes
more contemptible than an election campaign in which the genuine issues
of the day, matters of life and death, do not receive a sensible airing?
Since those same great issues are ignored by most Americans between national
elections, just when are they considered? The truth is that there is no
national debate in America on almost anything of genuine importance. The
most narrow self-interest continues relentlessly under all the superficial
noise and cheap tricks that pass for politics, and, so long as that remains
the case, America will continue to kill and maim and overthrow whenever
it serves the needs of clawing for more and the heat of evangelical fervor.
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- Only empty slogans are heard, a billion dollars worth
of slogans on television, a billion dollars obtained from the people who
actually do run the country.
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