Now that the presidential campaigns are in full cry, following the painful pageantry of the conventions, the formerly scattered (resigned, fired, or banished) neocon braintrust of the Bush administration has reanimated into McCain’s advisory cabal, those, that is, who were not formerly (or are currently) corporate lobbyists – they form the foundation of his campaign. The Bushites forté is meme building. They write speeches that offer a potpourri of prevarication – Palin’s convention speech was written by Matthew Scully, an experienced speechwriter who served two stints in the White House, most recently for President George W. Bush – and barbarous memes that leech on to the listeners’ sub-conscience like spiked retroviruses, the modus operandi of the right-wing talk-radio hate peddlers. They spew out lies and hatred and see what sticks, what demented spirit will take up the hate meme and act upon it. Like Bill Moyers said on a recent edition of his PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal, "You cannot un-ring a bell."
Try and you'll find yourself an "enemy of the people." One Republican official told journalists in St. Paul, "We will get with you if you keep messing with us." And as John McCain and Sarah Palin barnstormed the nation this week, crowds that came out to see them booed members of the press.
(Incidentally, this episode of BMJ is one that scrutinizes the frightening and fatal effects of the hate speech shouted by right-wing fanatics like Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan, Jim Quinn, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al, and should be required viewing for all Americans.)
With her script written, Sarah Palin took her place beside the white knight as his kemo sabe and began ringing the bell of lies that took the press and the blogs a couple of weeks to damper. And while the vicissitudes of a gullible electorate have shifted somewhat, the Bushian clappers will not stop the bell’s ringing - and what should have been an abject disqualifier, the selection will continue to threaten our political reality into the wee hours of November 5th.
Although there exists an actual governor Sarah Palin (as far as we know), the Republican candidate for vice president whom we see in political advertisements, whom we saw and heard at the Republican Convention, who gives speeches at political rallies and who recently granted an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, is a fictional character, an illusion, an imaginary construct fabricated by marketing engineers, political consultants, lobbyists, and febrile former Bush administration speech writers and strategists.
John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel, The Manchurian Candidate, is a Cold War political thriller steeped in paranoia that takes place after the Korean War and involves American war heroes who have been brainwashed and "programmed" to commit political assassinations back in the United States. In the book, as in the first film adaptation, there is malicious, incestuous, and plotting mother who is pulling all the strings, and a stepfather who is a McCarthy-like senator. In Condon’s pulp spy novel (Louis Menand called Condon "Mickey Spillane with an MFA") there are scenes that take place in Wainwright, Alaska and plot lines such as the character of the senator who has lied about a war injury to his foot, when in actuality he was bitten in the foot by an Eskimo woman whose igloo he visited when he was searching for sex.
In 2004, Jonathon Demme remade The Manchurian Candidate with some plot twists: the brainwashed war heroes are from the Gulf War, and the central antagonist, the son of the manipulating mother and right-wing stepfather, becomes a vice presidential candidate, while his running mate is the target of another brainwashed assassin.
In the thoroughly-imagined, Sarah Palin version, she is chosen (by sinister political/government operatives) to be the Republican vice presidential candidate precisely because she is essentially unknown, from an unknowable place, with a homespun-Americana biography and a family that would seem as endemic to Georgia or Mississippi as they are to Alaska, i.e., archetypal worker-bee Republicans. A plot to have her elderly boss, President McCain – easily elected in a rigged election – suffer an apparent heart attack in his first month of office puts her in place as the Stepford President of the United States of America. Of course, this is all fiction, political paranoia, off-the-deep-end conspiracy theory - madness.
The full throttle of the diametrically opposed presidential campaigns are barreling toward each other like freight trains on the same track, the proverbial switchman asleep at the switch. The stakes are absolutely existential. The spoils for the neocons could be American global hegemony, ownership of the world’s energy supplies, Executive Branch usurpation of the United States of America’s (and thus, the world’s) entire system of finance, perpetual wars - against the Muslim world, the Occidental world, the Russians, all non-Christians – and a corporate ruling class of unimaginable wealth, ruling over a mass population of indentured servitude. The less paranoid version has the Constitutional United States of America remain free, united, and intact, as the Founding Fathers intended.
Those right-wing talk show screamers spit out their puerile version of patriotism (and rail against all the vile liberals who they say have none of it) and deny reality with every syllable. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were justified, enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture (and if they are, who gives a shit?), extraordinary rendition is a myth, the Surge won the war, and on and on.
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." (George Orwell, from a subsection called Indifference to Reality within his essay entitled, Notes On Nationalism
In our postmodern lives, tethered by our web of light-speed communication devices and sandblasted by incessant media, we rarely find the space in time to imagine interior worlds. The machinery that we used to recognize as turning the world has become invisible and, in its invisibility, more sinister. The labyrinths are infinite and balanced on the head of a pin. We decide which emails to glance at, which to delete, and which few we will actually read. We discard most of the information flowing at us, through, and around us to avoid going insane. In desperation , we grasp at those books, articles, programs, songs, whatever, that seem to confirm some long-forgotten ideal or value that is buried so deep as to be virtually inaccessible. Even as we take our stands in this presidential election, intellectual evaluations and moral dialectics are nowhere to be found; we react viscerally to the sound bytes of the day. Our hatred for our political opponents is palpable.
While the details may very well be in the gray areas, Americans have experienced brutal, soul-scarring affronts to their collective humanity these past eight years. The eighty-plus percent of the electorate that polls as unhappy with the direction the country is going, has gone, feels the irrevocable shame of what moral depravity the Bush administration has committed in their name, and what lies have been perpetrated over and over to quash any reasonable objections through fear and coercion. However, the reaction against this assault on our collective consciousness is not intellectual or reasoned; it is visceral and divides us almost in half, propelled by intrinsic fear, prejudice, ideological slogans, and gut-level instincts. Metaphorically, as well as politically, the fevered pitch of the rhetoric allows only for choices that are emotionally black or white.
And once again, I have that sinking feeling. The sinking feeling, the abject hopelessness that I, and over the half of the electorate, felt when the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election. The sinking feeling after 9/11 when something improbably named the Patriot Act was foisted upon us, and we were told to lobby congress to pass this immediately, don’t even read it, pass it or we’ll all die. The sinking feeling when, in the weeks leading up to getting congress to sign away their war powers to Bush, in the Administration’s full-on charge to war with Iraq, Rumsfeld was on every single Sunday talk show (followed by Rice and Cheney) that this needed to pass now, or else we would all die. And now, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is on every single Sunday morning talk show, selling the need for congress to immediately sign on to a clean, i.e. no regulations, no strings attached, no oversight, bill (read this flim-flam Executive Branch power grab here and pay particular attention to [the ironically named] Section 8, Review) without debate or hesitation (sound familiar?), or we’re all going to die (like starving church mice).
The modus operandi is strikingly familiar: present "facts" of impending doom, catastrophic collapse - when was the last time you heard of a "terror alert"? (hint: 2004)- and phony "intelligence" to a closed-door congressional committee. Then announce "bold, government action" (Bush said, "I decided to act, and act boldly"), i.e. bailout (rip-off), and watch the stocks soar like it's Christmas morning on Wall Street. As Naomi Klein said recently, imagine waking up to find that all of your credit card debt, your mortgage, all of your bills and medical debt had been erased (and that someone was going to pay you 20-40 percent of the original value of all those decades of junk in your basement).
During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly. (emphasis mine) - Naomi Klein, from Free Market Ideology is Far From Finished (9/19/08)
In other words, the right-wing wet dream of burying forever the entitlement programs of FDR and Johnson, i.e., Social Security and Medicare, will be realized, environmental restrictions on companies will be dissipated as too costly, money for infrastructure projects will be non-existent, and so on down this ideological worm hole. After all, the final days are upon us, and only the chosen few shall enjoy the spoils until the sky opens up. The Final Act of the Bush Administration is now underway – making way for the Sarah and Todd Palin theocratic presidency.
Since the unparalleled tragedy of 9/11, the neocon-driven Bush administration has been dismantling facts, revising history, indulging in prevarication and obfuscation, and using Eric Arthur Blair’s dystopian novel as an operational handbook. The extant miasma of the American condition, inflicted upon us and perpetrated globally by the Bush Administration is predicated upon one thing: the co-opting of the 9/11 attacks. The profound, immeasurable, and incomprehensible pain of these attacks obliterated our sense of reality, and the ensuing emotional, political, intellectual, and nationalistic reactions were conflicted by proximity to the trauma.
The American President, George W. Bush, had just come back from a month long vacation, the longest since Nixon was President, his poll approval numbers were in negative territory, his proposals to privatize social security and his foreign policy of anathema toward international treaties, called "exceptionalism" (the concept that the U.S.A. is the world’s only superpower and is thusly exempt of any necessity to comply with any treaties between the rest of the world’s countries) were both receiving vociferous criticism. The embarrassing incident of the U.S. aircraft that collided with a Chinese fighter and was forced down into the People’s Republic of China in April was slowly fading. Then, instantly, like a Phoenix, Bush arose from his stupor, stood upon the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center, now called Ground Zero, and declared prophetically, "Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not have the distance of history, but our responsibility to history is clear, to answer these attacks, and rid the world of evil." In our national state of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, the hyperbole and implicit machinations of the words "rid the world of evil" did not resonate within our perspicacity. Bush’s and McCain’s usurpation of our national tragedy has been used since without compunction.
The pain of that day is still so graphic and unequivocal that words such as "Nine/Eleven", "Osama", "Al Qaeda", "World Trade Center", and "War on Terror" are psychological inducements toward fear, anger, and confusion, and these words are used precisely for this reason by Bush and now McCain. Progressives, Liberals, the Democrats, and the American people need to realize that these attacks happened while these people, i.e. the Bush Administration and the Republicans, were at the helm. While this should have been a point of shame and culpability for them, it has been used as a rallying cry and excuse for every abomination that they inflicted upon our foreign policies, our civil liberties, our national security, and our international reputation. Our own failure is that we did not reclaim the tragedies of 9/11 as a point of origin for discussions pointing a finger at the Bush Administration. Instead, for the neocons and Republicans, especially the hyper-belligerent John McCain, it was the carte blanche that they were hoping for to run rampant over the status quo of humanity.
From the cynically named Patriot Act(s) and terms like Extraordinary Rendition, to the calculated obfuscations applied to hide the illegal methodologies used to circumvent the fourth, first, fifth, sixth, and ninth amendments, among others, of the Constitution (in fact, this article by David Cole says that all of our Constitutional freedoms have been jeopardized "but the right to bear arms and the guarantee against the quartering of soldiers"), the Republican supplicants, with the help of many capitulating Democrats, have ineluctably changed not only our ability to decipher propaganda from fact, but have also weakened our tendency and ability to be outraged – they have made us impotent and ignorant. On August 29, 2008 John McCain committed the most cynical act of political recklessness since, well perhaps since the incipient Republicans’ chant for more offshore oil drilling, the planet be damned. (Which, as of this afternoon, once again worked.)