The Government
You Deserve
By John Chuckman
24 October , 2004
Countercurrents.org
It
has been said that people pretty much get the government they deserve.
There is more than a little justice in the observation.
Pat Buchanan, long
my choice as symbol for all that is wrong with America, has given a
last-minute endorsement to George Bush's re-election. One is tempted
to class his words, qualified as they are, with the grovelings of John
McCain at Bush rallies.
After spending a
couple of years successfully peddling columns attacking Bush for repeating
the bloody stupidity of Vietnam, Pat has come to the conclusion that
Bush isn't so bad after all. He says that while Bush is wrong on the
war, he is right on just about everything else.
I suppose Pat's
list of things that are right with Bush includes Jehovah's receiving
a seat on the National Security Council, some of the Patriot Act's finer
points on human rights, sending individuals secretly to places like
Syria or Egypt to be tortured, insulting and alienating friends and
allies, squandering a hundred billion dollars without managing so much
as a patch-up of Iraq's smashed infrastructure, and laughing off world
environmental threats far more deadly than anything dreamed of by terrorists.
Pat perfectly represents America's noisy, pointless "culture of
complaint," something which mimics the effects of a bad gene pool,
endowing America with ridiculous trash like Crossfire or Rush Limbaugh
or whole networks like CNN or, indeed, the grotesque practices of its
national elections.
Recall Emerson's
advice, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Certainly, no one can accuse Pat of consistency, foolish or otherwise.
When war served his career, his rise to White House speechwriter, war
was a very good thing. He defended it, or should I say he defended others
being sent to it, fists flailing and lips flapping. Later, as failed
presidential candidate for the re-born Know Nothing Party, being against
another war provided some limited scope for still being listened to
by some of the party he had opportunistically turned against.
Pat, not being an
evangelical in religion, is very much one in politics. Much like Bush,
but with far more showmanship, he always displays an evangelist's sputteringly
obnoxious and insistent tone of certainty about what he is selling:
if you don't listen to me, you're doomed to a horrible fate. The evangelical
tone is common in America's politics and contributes to the massive
sound and fury of its political campaigns. The same dead certainty and
implicit threat are, after all, the underlying message of so much of
the television advertising in which Americans are immersed day and night:
use our product or risk the torments of social hell.
Pat is typical of
so much of America in his efforts to claw his way to the top, embracing
a bizarre distortion of William James's philosophy of pragmatism. Whatever
works for our own momentary self-interest, we do, a practice which makes
the moral relativism falsely-ascribed to liberals look deep by comparison.
Likely, the near-absence of genuine morals now common in the commercial
and political life of America is partly responsible for the resurgence
of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism offers certainty where there is none
and the sense of always being able to start fresh. The Puritan brand
also is long associated with notions of those chosen and those not chosen,
a satisfying private reflection for those who are less successful in
clawing for the top.
How many Americans
reflect on the stupid, needless death and destruction inflicted on Iraqis
(families hiding in smashed apartments without clean water, electricity,
or jobs) while driving their air-conditioned SUVs, listening to the
stereo, on the way to a sale at the Crate and Barrel? Were they concerned
with such things, the bloody, destructive invasion could not have happened,
but, then, neither could there have been ten years of organized murder
in Vietnam.
Returning to Pat's
pick for president, my first thoughts on the Bush "bulge"
controversy (see the wonderfully informative site, http://homepage.mac.com/c.shaw/BushBulges/PhotoAlbum15.html
) went to Shakespeare's hump-backed embodiment of evil, Richard III,
but Shakespeare's character is fascinating, and of course the historical
Richard, so far as we know, was a genuinely heroic figure. Bush is simply
a dull man with a shrill voice. The next comparison that came to mind
was a marionette, only an updated version with radio controls and servomotors
instead of strings and hinges.
Whatever the best
analogy, the fact that the American president wears a radio device of
some kind during important meetings and national debates has been sufficiently
established for people of a critical turn of mind. The revelation seems
almost an over-the-top parody of what we already knew of Bush's capacities,
an absurd editorial cartoon about an inadequate man walking through
responsibilities he doesn't understand, leaving in his wake terrible
damage to decent government and peace. Where do the voices in his ear
piece come from? Lynne Cheney? The Boston Strangler? Franklin Graham?
Jesus? The Wizard of Oz? All of the above?
America, you elected
this plodding creature, and it appears you are about to do so again.
Never mind the narrow focus on stolen votes in Florida, nasty stuff
that it is. Stolen votes are an enduring part of the great chaotic noise
you call national elections. Stolen votes in Texas got Lyndon Johnson's
political career going, and stolen votes in Texas and Illinois put Kennedy
into office. We usually do not hear much about stolen votes in America
because the two parties are satisfied with the calculation that the
damage inflicted is roughly equal.
Are stolen votes
more contemptible than the absolutely corrupt practices of powerful
politicians like Tom DeLay? Are stolen votes more contemptible than
an election campaign in which the genuine issues of the day, matters
of life and death, do not receive a sensible airing? Since those same
great issues are ignored by most Americans between national elections,
just when are they considered? The truth is that there is no national
debate in America on almost anything of genuine importance. The most
narrow self-interest continues relentlessly under all the superficial
noise and cheap tricks that pass for politics, and, so long as that
remains the case, America will continue to kill and maim and overthrow
whenever it serves the needs of clawing for more and the heat of evangelical
fervor.
Only empty slogans
are heard, a billion dollars worth of slogans on television, a billion
dollars obtained from the people who actually do run the country.