After I was making some calls for Obama this afternoon (trying to set an example, folks), it hit me. Maybe it's not an original thought, but it explains a lot of downright bizarre behavior we've been seeing lately. I'm talking about the official Republican role model, Eddie Haskell.
For those on whom youth is currently being wasted, Eddie Haskell was not Alice Cooper, nor was he killed Vietnam, nor did he become a porn star. He was a character on the sitcom Leave it to Beaver, which is so old they were all in black and white.
Eddie was a friend of Beaver's older brother Wally. He was forever taunting Beaver. He was a coward and a bully, or, more accurately, a sniper. He only ran down "the little squirt" behind the backs of the Beav's parents. He twisted the knife by sucking up to the parents. Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver weren't fooled. Would that the American people were a little more like them.
You see where I'm going with this. Does the sniper have a plan for getting out of Iraq? How about the housing crisis? The economy? Education? They seem to want people to volunteer for everything, but then they run down community organizers. What do they want?
Atrios nailed it last week: It's all about pissing off liberals.
That really doesn’t sound like much of a goal or a plan. But why exactly would you run down those thousand-points-of-light losers? Why would you, in fact, even want to introduce yourself to the country in the way that Sarah Palin did, unless it really is her goal to elicit nightmares?
If you had the opportunity to insert my persona into the collective unconscious as Palin has, you would probably want to make a better impression.
Why so much furor over lipstick traces unless you wanted to make your opponent so angry that he would make a misstep? (Which looks like it was working for a good part of sweet-Jesus-has-it-only-been-about-a-week?)
Eddie, of course, wanted to reduce Beaver to tears in controlled, regulated situations: at home, in front of his family, or at school, in front of his friends. To lose control is to lose face. And as Bill Maher (speaking of smirks!) pointed out, Obama has less margin for error than most candidates. He's black, and he dare not appear too angry, or angry the wrong way. On the other hand, we want to see some emotion. Obama seems to be getting it right.
Ignoring Palin as the distraction she is seems like a plan. But she's part of a bigger game. Putting a racial-stereotype caricature of Obama on a waffle box, taking loud lumbering steps to suppress the vote in Wisconsin, putting a two-minute timeout on Diebold voting machines and telling us it's too late to fix it, posing as a feminist while advocating The Handmaid's Tale as social blueprint, telling us to stop making fun of McCain's technological illiteracy because dammit he was a POW ... all these things serve certain purposes. Vote suppression, for example, is certainly a good in and of itself if your party rolls that way.
But so much of it is sniping, and the main reason is to see if they can't get our candidate, his staff, our organizations and volunteers, and people like you and me, livid with rage. And the more seriously you take politics, the more committed you are to leaving a better world behind for your children, the angrier it's naturally going to make you. Rudy's mocking What? about community organizers says all that needs to be said about what today's Repub leaders think about people who are so foolish as to actually care.
Yes, these and others are tales calculated to drive you mad. I could fill a trilogy with examples, including of course the Original Smirker himself.
Which brings me back to my lede paragraph. Don't let it get to you. Do something instead. Action is the best cure for fear and depression. Good grief, one of the people on my contact list this morning was somebody I know from our Unitarian church. There really are a lot of us out there.
The smirk, the snark, the aren't-I-naughty is what so much of it is all about. I could be wrong, but I don't think this election is going to be quite as close as the polls or pundits say.
There is a way to wipe that smile off their faces. Maybe we'll see how Eddie likes it when the joke's on him.
(Updated 9/15 just to fix a typo)