The Bush campaign is nothing short of a miracle. There's simply no logical or historical reason that Bush should be polling above 40%. That he still has a chance of re-election is a result of many things -- an easily-manipulated press corps, a ruthlessly sophisticated BC04 messaging center, one-party rule, an opposition that has (at times) struggled to find its voice -- but all of these factors shrink in comparison to The Spell.
The Spell is what The Daily Show parodied so acutely with their "Official" Republican Convention Bush Biography Video (
"George W. Bush -- Don't Listen To The Facts...Listen To The Words"). The Daily Show parody was/is so devastating because it pinpoints the tools of the spell, and those tools are simply words, and nothing more. Certain words, repeated over and over on cyberspace and cable television, woven into our national conversation until they become their own justification and take on their own unique meaning. "Weapons Of Mass Destruction." "The War On Terror." "Strength And Stability." "Freedom Is On The March." "Spreading Liberty." "Giving Comfort To Our Enemies." They are powerful and terrifying words, both an ominous whisper and a seductive lullaby designed to keep us all fast asleep.
I've devoted a ton of my gray matter to The Spell lately, because it fascinates me to no end (when it's not frustrating me to no end). It makes discussion with many Bush supporters impossible for me, because so many continually lapse back into the words we've all been taught. The Spell is like cognitive dissonance on an eight-ball of coke, and facts simply aren't heard when The Spell takes over.
The closer we get to the election, the greater the force of The Spell becomes, or at least the greater the attempts to whip it up. The rhetoric from the Bush campaign is more like a hurricane every day, and would be silly if it wasn't so dangerous. The worse the news becomes, the more powerful and appealing The Spell is, and those who have been under it can do nothing but stick their fingers in their ears and shout as loudly as they can, terrified that The Spell will be broken.
Here is the truly disturbing part of this phenomenon -- George W. Bush, the chief architect and conjurer of The Spell, has fallen under its power himself. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the first debate. John Kerry stood at his podium and bit by bit, and presented a completely different picture than that drawn by The Spell. As John Kerry methodically and surgically articulated the clear-cut realities, George W. Bush simply couldn't compute them. He kept going back to the magic words, over and over. He was frustrated; nothing made sense to him. His was a world in which The Spell was the truth, and John Kerry was cruelly ripping his world to pieces.
I believe that for much of America The Spell was broken that night as well. For some it was a one-night-only affair, a cold shower between bouts of deep slumber. But many -- and hopefully enough -- woke up to find themselves dramatically reassessing the world they thought made sense to them. Living within The Spell is a natural and understandable reaction to the lurches of our tempestuous age; breaking The Spell can be as terrifying as living outside The Matrix.
One thing gives me faith in our country's future -- The Spell is a tactic of desperation from a dying and bankrupt regime. It may work this time, but the fact that the Republican Party is basing its entire electoral strategy around it (instead of, say, ideas to move the country forward) tells me that the GOP is about to come crashing down and that the impending progressive movement cannot be held back forever -- not even with all the message discipline and News Corps and magic words and terror alerts and poll watchers in the world. Maybe not in 2004, but soon. And when it does (as I hope it does next Tuesday), the real work will begin. After The Spell is broken, I believe we will look back upon this election as a dizzying frenzy in which very few of us were thinking clearly. We'll be deeply ashamed of this chapter in our history. We'll wonder how we were ever persuaded to invade Iraq. We'll wonder how our dominant Party could attempt to radically bludgeon our healthy middle class into a permanent underclass ruled by a permanent aristocracy, and how our media collectively became the public relations VP's for the world's largest corporations.
But we'll wake up. The Spell, by it's nature, can't last forever. And a Kerry Presidency will be its first mortal blow.
