Regardez travailler les bâtisseurs de ruines
Ils sont riches patients ordonnés noirs et bêtes
Mais ils font de leur mieux pour être seuls sur terre
Ils sont au bord de l’homme et le comblent d’ordures
Ils plient au ras du sol des palais sans cervelle.
Look at them toiling the builders of ruin
They are orderly, patient, rich, dark and stupid
But they do their best to be alone on earth
On the edge of humanity they fill it with garbage
They ply to the ground their mansions without mind.
- Paul Eluard
As the old feminist rule goes, there are only two good reasons to sleep with somebody the first time: the good one and the bad one; and there’s only one good reason to sleep with them again: the bad one turns out to be pretty damn good. I thought I was supporting Obama for the only reasonable reason, which was that he seemed to be the least bad of a not-too-bad lot after the rest dropped out. But when I saw him go onstage in Oregon last week, and when his two dark-skinned kids came out with him I almost cried. If you’ve lived through SNCC and Martin Luther King and then you live to see that – well you’re entitled to your temporary loss of consciousness.
Hope: it never struck me as a sufficient reason to support Obama, but it was a necessary reason, and Obama’s been remarkably successful at blending the necessary with the sufficient. And it’s not Obama that Clinton and Fox are out to destroy, it’s the hope that sustains his candidacy. Of course that’s been Murdoch’s Modus Operandi all along: treat your readers and viewers like children because children are pliable and can be taught cynicism and hate far more easily than us older folks, who’ve lived enough to know better and in some cases to find our spine.
Teaching despair: it’s what Clinton does, it’s what Rupert and all of his tough-ass Hemingway-sucking staff do. Oh, and here’s a third example:
Roberto Ferrario looks like a character out of Grand Theft Auto IV, and I don’t mean the loose straps on his dress. He claims to represent Rifondazione Comunista, the now-moribund offshoot of the Italian Communist Party, and he once was living off the Paris section of the French Communist Party until they threw him out, and I don’t know who’s paying for Bellaciao.org now but I do know nothing goes on there without Ferrario’s say-so: the site has all the spontaneity of the Great Joyful Rally to Increase Soviet Tractor Production.
Thanks to Roberto, at last we know why Hillary will have to drop out of the race: because she SPILLED THE BEANS about Obama being assassinated! If she’d only kept her trap shut she’d have been vice-president, and then....! But now, the evil powers-that-be will have to chose a new vice-president to step in, and it’s going to be their tool, John Edwards, and we know this because Edwards had already been chosen to be vice-president so he’d become president after Kerry had been elected and then shot, which I guess means the evil-powers-that-be didn’t trust Bush or Cheney, which gives you a pretty good sense of how evil the evil-powers-that-be might be. Our conspiracy freak forgot to mention that James A. Johnson, who is organizing the selection process for Obama’s future successor, was also Walter Mondale’s campaign manager – no wonder Geraldine Ferraro is pissed, she was scheduled to be the first woman president.
Drivel? Of course, but like the drivel in Murdoch’s press it serves a very good purpose:
DEMORALIZE!
A long, long time – like, a year ago, maybe - you’d hear the kids saying stuff like: "No point voting for Obama, dude, they’ll make sure he never gets to be president." In the short run the kids may be right. But then the kids are always right in the short run and they’re always wrong in the long run and that's why being a grownup is a lot more fun than watching Fox News.
Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language.