May
28
I think I’m going to be ill
May 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
One day we are going to realize that there is an entire portion of the political spectrum that is, not to put too fine a gloss on it, completely and utterly batshit insane.
Exhibit A of what will be a long litany of such exhibits will be this – thing - written by Charles Pierce.
I’m not really sure what this is. It’s almost like reading Hunter S. Thompson – but if Thompson had done even more drugs and was a little more unhinged.
I’m not really sure where to begin, because this – thing – is so nutty that it’s really hard to concentrate on one specific topic. There’s the usual Messiah-nification (I totally just made that up) of Barack Obama, but it’s worse than the usual crap that we’re treated to. Pierce doesn’t necessarily contend that Obama is in fact the Messiah, but he desperately needs him to be one, which is much scarier, if you ask me.
Freedom,” the water tower reads.
There was a time when the cynic would have read into this the hand of what the powdered-wig set in Philadelphia called “Divine Providence.” It would have been more than a landmark. It would have meant something else entirely. But politics has lost its imagination and it is dead to metaphor, and the cynic sees the water tower that says “Freedom,” and it’s only a measure of how utterly lost he is.
Convince me, he says to himself.
Convince me that I’m wrong. Convince me that there’s enough left that’s worth saving. Convince me that there are enough people left who care enough to save it.
Convince me. Convince me. Convince me.
And the cynic turns away from the center of town and back out onto the cold, narrow road that leads out of Freedom.
Umm, righteyo.
The point is that he needs to be convinced in the coming of Obamamessiah, because, well, do you really need to guess why Mr. Pierce is so jaded?
More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is — or, as a right, ought to be — about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country’s name. The war powers of the Congress had been deeded wholesale to the executive long before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and a passel of think-tank cowboys found within them the right of a fecklessly incompetent president to make war unilaterally on anyone, anywhere, forever. The war in Iraq is the powerful bastard child of the Iran-Contra scandal, which went unpunished.
The ownership of the people over their politics — and, therefore, over their government — had been placed in quitclaim long before the towers fell, and the president told the people to be just afraid enough to let him take them to war and just afraid enough to reelect him, but not to be so afraid that they stayed out of the malls.
It had been happening, bit by bit, over nearly forty years. Ronald Reagan sold the idea that “government” was something alien. The notion of a political commonwealth fell into a desuetude so profound that even Bill Clinton said, “The era of Big Government is over” and was cheered across the political spectrum, so that when an American city drowned and the president didn’t care enough to leave a birthday party, and the disgraced former luxury-horse executive who’d been placed in charge of disaster relief behaved pretty much the way a disgraced former luxury-horse executive could be expected to behave in that situation, it could not have come as any kind of surprise to anyone honest enough to have watched the country steadily abandon self-government over the previous four decades. The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable. The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country.
Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost.
Most of the damage was in plain sight in 2004, when Barack Obama became a political star by giving a speech in which he told America what a great country it was, and what great people were in it, and then the country went out and reelected George W. Bush anyway. Then came even further revelations — of warrantless spying, of a Justice Department turned into little more than a political chop shop, of torture and black prisons, of the length and breadth and sheer audacity of the lies that led to a seemingly endless war. The Democrats even took over the Congress in 2006. And nothing, it seemed, changed. Nobody was held responsible. White House aides simply ignored congressional subpoenas. Documents vanished. E-mails were accidentally deleted. The sound of the shredders working in a hundred different offices in the executive branch of the government must today sound like the starting line at Daytona five seconds before they drop the flag.
Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost.
Wow. Charles Pierce has left the building and has been replaced by the spirit of Winston Smith.
Folks, I know a lot of you have disagreements with George Bush over the direction of this country. There are policy disagreements to be had. We’re all a little jaded and have our qualms about the policy direction of the United States.
But for the love of humanity, can we take a little bit of a breather and perhaps tone down the rhetoric? Perhaps the reason Mr. Pierce is so cynical in the first place is that he has a completely overblown view of what this country looks like. While he paints the picture of black ops, torture chambers in every prison, and sinister think tank maestros twirling their moustaches as they lead us to endless war, the reality is a little bit less stark.
Let’s rewind: “The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country’s name. ” Does this even remotely resemble reality as we know it? No. This is the insuferable rantings of a know-nothing lunatic so desperately starved for attention that he has to create a picture of America far removed from what it actually looks like. I am convinced that people like this author actually crave disaster out of a wish to be part of some horrible tragedy. Their lives are so vapid and empty that they evoke all sorts of horrors about our Nation, and they envision themselves as countering some hideous regime and REBELLING! Charles Pierce can one day go down in the history books – a real life Winston Smith fighting against a tyrannical regime that has sapped Americans of all their rights.
The problem with this ridiculous caricature is that by so grossly exaggerating the supposed harm done by George Bush, it makes it more difficult to take seriously legitimate claims of abuse. America is not a torture state, but the administration has been a little too coy on this issue for my tastes. There isn’t some neocon cabal hiding in the shadows and pulling the strings, but this administration has acted too secretly at times. Cronyism has hurt George Bush’s effectiveness. These are real problems, but they don’t come even close to rising to the seriousness of Pierce’s charges. Charles Pierce, and so many others on the lunatic left have become, in essence, the modern day McCarthys. In flailing about after every imagined monster, they miss the few ones that happen to actually exist.
The rest is just sanctimonious drivel. Mr. Pierce is really too good for America, and so is Barack Obama. But then again, Obama can make him believe again in all that is good in the world. He just needs to be convinced. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying.
Obama takes the stage and the hall explodes, the way all the halls have exploded in this, the last really good week he will have. All the rest of the upcoming weeks and months will be about becoming aware that the country he imagines is not the America that is, and that it hasn’t been for a very long time. And the cynic realizes at last that he is more naive than anyone else here, particularly more than the slim, smooth candidate himself, stalking the stage in his edgeless way and looking out over the crowd at something in his private distance. The cynic believes in an old, abandoned country that’s no less illusory than the redeemed one Obama is promising to this crowd. Isn’t that something? the cynic thinks. Maybe that’s enough, that single revelation, just a flicker of the lost imagination. For the last time, in the roar of the crowd, it comes back to him again. Convince me America is not an illusion. Convince me that it never was. Convince me that you’re not a pious mirage. Convince me that we’re not. Now that you brought it up, convince me.
Convince me.
Convince me.
Convince me.
Gag me.
The ultimate tragedy in all this is that he needs a presidential candidate to feel some kind of hope. What does it say about people like Pierce who pin all their hopes and dreams about a Nation on a president or presidential candidate? Some of us have other outlets – you know, we crazy conservatives cling to our guns and religion.
And you know what? Maybe you need something to cling to other than your government.