Reading through, listening to, and watching Willard Mitt Romney and his coterie of plutocrats, would-be aristocrats, neo-conservative chickenhawks, and just plain-old fools run their apparently never-ending campaign for office, I am continually struck by the just plain incomprehensibility of almost everything they say.
It's not that I disagree with what they say, it's not that I find what they say offensive, or stupid, or ahistorical, or wrong, or what-have-you...
It's that most of the time, I cannot even decode the information that their statements are intended to convey. It's hard to criticize, disagree with, or argue about what turns out to be unadulterated gibberish about 85% of the time. That other 15%? Well, that's where the offensive, stupid, ahistorical, and wrong part comes in...
I never quite got what they were doing, and certainly don't understand why it's working... until I remembered this:
The Chewbacca Defense
And suddenly it all starts to come clear. Word Salad, Gibberish, apparently insane mumblings, inane and startlingly incomprehensible babble - on stage, on tv, on tape, at dinners, on the campaign trail...
It comes down to this: Content and quality have absolutely no bearing on the presentation of a GOP candidate - words, sentences, speeches are simply the white noise behind and above which the dog-whistles, nudges and winks, and tips-o-the-hat to whatever sullen, vicious, poisonous bit of nastiness, bigotry, or hatred the GOP candidate wants to tap into this week and refer back to next week.
Mumble, jumble garble FOODSTAMPS chewbacca watermelon ELITIST snarble barble grumble fumble QUOTA QUEEN... Syria IRAN ocean GENOCIDE MILITARY snarble barble STRONG chewbacca KILL...
It's the absolute apotheosis of what the Jungians call appealing to archetypes and what Wilhelm Reich correctly pegged in his amazing book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (PDF) wherein he writes:
Because National Socialism is an elementary movement, it cannot be countered with arguments....Speeches in National Socialist meetings were indeed characterized by very clever manipulations of the emotions of the mass individuals and by strict avoidance of objective argumentation.
Emphasis my own.
That cognitive dissonance many of you experience when you hear that Syria is Iran's pathway to the sea, or that it really is important that we have fewer battleships than in 1916, or that Mitt actually proposed the bailout that Obama then co-opted... well, it's real... but it's not meant for your ears.
It's meant for the folks that need the emotional, authoritarian, papa-figure with the soothing voice and the ever-present threat of daddy-knows-best punishment followed by Papa-really-loves-you-when-he-hits-you. It's meant for the psychologically twisted, terrified little (usually boy) child, who hates and loves daddy, and loves, desires, and despises mommy, and hates everything different except when its potentially fuckable, when it might win you the office pool, and if it might make you look cool.
It really does come down to that. It's almost impossible to combat by rational means, and it's deeply ingrained in our society.
Obama's mockery and chiding, somewhat gentle teasing is just about the best way to go, but even that's not assured.
Chewbacca mumble bumble grumble ROMNESIA!!