Forgotten But Not Gone

He gives orders
which no one hears
King’s hat fits over their ears…
–Eno

I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah…
–Elton John

You’re enjoying your day
Everything’s going your way
Then along comes Debbie Downer
–The Debbie Downer Theme

January 20 is a long way off. A certain overly proud man still stalks the halls in the White House, self-conscious under the august gazes of those imposing portraits on the wall (oh to know the content of the imaginary dialogues), ruefully retracing his dizzying rise and humiliating fall. We’ve all been there, when trying to fathom failure or heartbreak: obsessively revisiting events in one’s mind over and over again, searching for some gap, some logical inconsistency that will reveal reality anew, altered and made compliant, or at least bearable. Altogether an unhealthy process when done in isolation.

The Family’s hired narrative help in the media have been reassuring, or threatening, us that he cares not a whit for how we appraise him, confident in history’s judgement. Well, no sober perspective regarding popular opinion was on display when we were treated to a glib, cinema-age version of a Roman triumph, vulgarized to the point of sacrilege, stripped of solemnity and verging on camp. When I recall him prancing about for the cameras on a warship, decked out in battle gear with strategically placed sock, I shudder, plotting on the graph in my mind the egomaniacal crash that should follow such–let’s call it irrational exuberance.
So let’s hope that those still in power, whether nursing wounds or hangovers this morning, recuperate quickly and heed the admonition that nothing is so dangerous as a humiliated lame-duck president preparing to hand over power to the opposition. Perhaps there was at least one timely Debbie Downer at Obama HQ last night. At this point I’d like to say something optimistic. Which would no doubt prompt Debbie to offer, “has anyone seen Dick Cheney lately?”

John McCain’s Base Base

Perhaps you‘ve seen it, the near-precise moment when John McCain lost control of his campaign. The scene is a now familiar one, the bogus “town-hall meeting.” He’s passing the microphone around like a decrepit Donahue, standing before a woman who starts by saying she “can’t trust” Obama; McCain is nodding along, intimately engaged for the moment in manipulating the neurotic angst that is the dwindling lifeblood of his campaign. About the time she says her fear is due to what she’s been reading, a look of worry creases his trademark frown of condescending concern; he’s contemplating preemptively snatching the microphone back from her, when she lays it on him: Obama is “an Arab”. She’s managed to confuse her slander (assuming there isn‘t an “Obama is an Arab” email careening about the internet), but it matters not.

Taking back the microphone, still in the affectedly somber tones we usually hear dulling the senator’s continual call to panic (before the more immediate economic panic swamped it along with his campaign) he informs his disappointed supporter that while he‘s spent the last several months denouncing as irresponsible peace-mongering Barack Obama‘s marginal departure from a foreign policy of serial occupations determined by the requirements of AIPAC and the defense industry, no, the man is in fact human, and all that entails. The crowd lets fly with various notes of despair, all but booing their candidate.

It was about as close to sympathetic as our too-proud would-be president has come in a long time, but it’s the anonymous woman, now a momentary punchline, who deserves our compassion (in taking a break from writing this I find her being parodied on television as “Crazy McCain Campaign Lady”). Her only sins are a lack of sophistication and an abiding faith in a political party. In taking advantage of this that party has terrorized her with the serial bogeys of Iraqi WMD, Iranian nuclear weapons, treasonous Democrats and now an Islamic Manchurian Candidate, with only resolute John McCain and his platoon of lobbyists and ideologues standing athwart these allied furies, united solely but unalterably in their Hatred of America and Her Freedoms.

If you’re a severe enough white liberal, witnessing the exchange you probably experienced that familiar rush of ethno-masochistic ecstasy at the welcome sight of white Republican “bigotry”, producing an odd combination of gloating and dismay (think of the old joke about the conflicted lover: “Don’t! Stop! Don‘t…stop! Don‘t stop! Don’t Stop!”). Whatever internal psychic tension is produced in the breasts of our liberal brethren by this fetish, this conspicuous self-abnegation, is probably one of the great unexamined social effects of our time.

Indeed, soon after, on the subject of the increasingly hysterical mood of Republican rallies, Chris Matthews sounded as dismayed as the McCain crowd as he all but demanded that Pat Buchanan personally reign in the cranks. One wonders how Mr. Matthews, having participated in the fear mongering preceding the Iraq War of which this woman‘s neurosis is the continuing effect, plans on enforcing his edict. Judging by the volume of his indignation he’s going to defend his offended sensibilities by deluging us all with spittle. Watching the man snap one more tether to reality, assuming it can’t be long before someone relieves him of his microphone, I console myself that the affair is not without its entertainments and compensations.

If you’re just paleo enough to find the preceding mostly inoffensive, and you saw the video above, you probably cringed. You may be tempted to sue the liberals for peace, if they‘ll only protect you from the barbarian hordes that have sacked and taken over the Republican Party. GOP, we hardly knew ye.

If you’re a supporter of John McCain you’re not reading this, but lapsing into carbon monoxide induced unconsciousness in a sealed garage, sitting in an idling Cadillac Escalade with a “Drill Here, Drill Now” bumper-sticker. I confess I’m finding it difficult to feel sorry for you. Nonetheless: don’t do it; you’ve got your whole life ahead of you; things are never as bad as they seem; this is not the answer. And so forth and so on.

The town hall format is proving disastrous for McCain, who has been deluded into thinking close quarters suit him–probably by the many reporters who’ve flung their skirts overhead at the first wink of we-think-alike-don’t-we-won’t-you-accompany-me-on-my-way-to-the-White House complicity. The candidate, his disdain for common folk barely concealed beneath his deliberately sedate (or sedated) style, cuts an unappealing and alien figure among the living and breathing. One imagines there are none on his staff willing to brave the volcanic vanity of their boss by suggesting, however gently, that he‘d be better served parking his doddering personage behind a podium.

But McCain willingly crawled into the coffin his own supporters are now nailing shut, when he declared the Jeremiah Wright controversy off limits. In so doing he left the issue to his more rabid supporters, and a deliberately oblivious media. Despite his independent pose, John McCain strictly observes the rules of engagement as set by his former “base” in the press. That base deserted him almost immediately, ironically as a requirement of the same politically correct rules of engagement that McCain dutifully observed by forfeiting the Wright controversy. This Maverick never goes below the hard deck, and would probably report someone who did to the Commanding Officer (before heading off to the officer‘s club to brag about how he told the Old Man off).

Thus, even as he stokes fear of Islamists, Iranians, Russians, the Chinese, terrorist cells, suitcase bombs, and Barack Obama’s suspect commitment to the defense of America, he cannot bring himself to exploit what should be his opponent’s biggest weakness, his political mentoring by the buffoonish crypto-segregationist Jeremiah Wright. Why Wright is off limits has never really been explained. In a more open and honest media environment, the Wright controversy would have played out by now. Of course, McCain was likely conceding a battle he rightly figured he could only lose. This all delineates for us some of the extent of Barack Obama’s considerable advantage as the potential First Black President.

Few remain to lament the lost McCain administration. One is tempted to welcome any route by which this dangerous man is shunted off to retirement. But, despite our culture of personality and ambition, the citizenry’s appreciation of reality is always far more important than the candidates who spend much of their time seeking to obscure it.

Understanding Jeremiah Wright, and the need of his flock of upwardly mobile black professionals–of which Barack Obama has fashioned himself into a prime psychological exemplar–to identify themselves as oppressed despite the obvious blessings of their citizenship in America and their participation in Western, “white” culture (indeed, perhaps because of this) is a fascinating and exigent question. But it is forever obscured beneath a rigorously limited discourse that says, in effect, that no claim against white America can be baseless–legitimacy is conferred in the making of the charge.

In the years ahead, as unprecedented demographic shifts occur, perhaps simultaneous with the painful economic contraction attendant upon the decline of American power, the preservation of the Republic will largely depend on whether or not we can reconcile a diverse population to the inequality that results from equal opportunity. This may be a longshot; indeed the respectable consensus holds that inequality in wealth and influence is necessarily a result of unequal opportunity. Another more severe consensus is forming as well, as the first becomes less and less tenable, as the idealism of the sixties resolves increasingly in bitter disillusion: that equality in wealth and influence apportioned by demography is the goal itself, and that equality of opportunity is either a delusion or the very instrument of oppression.

Despite the promise of cross-racial unity, Barack Obama’s career, his very identity, depends upon casting in relief and exploiting the most problematic division in American politics. You have to hand it to him; he spends his formative political years mastering the narrative of guilty America’s permanent racial division, and then he offers himself as its solution. Whether he truly believes in either is suspect. An Obama presidency will be welcome opportunity to give the lie to the demagogues of various degrees who see in the resentment toward white America (and perhaps soon other market dominant minorities) an inexhaustible vein of political power and patronage.

None of this is to paint Barack Obama as a extremist. He too is a highly conventional politician and thinker. Even if he’s the closet radical his detractors make him out to be, there is little significant change he, or any president, can effect. The process of candidates surrendering certain ideals as the price of admission to higher office isn’t without its benefits. As Obama’s demonstrated himself of superior temperament to his rival (no great boast, yes) I say, bring him on, delusions and all. Barack Obama has promised to unite us, largely by rephrasing conservative critiques of liberal excess and returning them to his opponents as high-sounding but meaningless sops disguising the unoriginality of his boilerplate. His presidency will be a welcome opportunity to call his bluff. Perhaps we can finally have that “conversation” about race the liberals are always talking about–that is to say they’ll finally allow their counterparts to get a word in edgewise.

The elite consensus is that black nationalist radicalism, as evinced by Jeremiah Wright, is a harmless indulgence to be humored only when it can‘t be ignored. Media and political elites do not take the Wrights of the world seriously, and with some good reason. These demagogues typically content themselves with shake downs and patronage. They are prone to internecine squabbling and a Big Man mentality that can only be discomforting to the studiously tolerant–that is to say deliberately ignorant–observer. Liberals can’t say outright that Jeremiah Wright and his ilk are ultimately irrelevant jokes; this upsets a certain carefully calculated pose that always assigns a premium to both the intellectual achievements of blacks and charges of white racism.

McCain left the radicalism of Barack Obama’s political coming of age to the nut cases behind the “Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen” emails. Now he’s lost his audience. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. But the result of an ambitious but untested melancholic backing into the presidency by stepping effortlessly into America’s great romance of racial atonement at a moment of profound national doubt, well, that should have happened to another country.

Election 2008: Bile vs. Guile

Regarding George Will’s welcome broadside on the Straight-Jacket Express that Leon Hadar brought up over at the AmCon blog, even when Will’s right, he’s wrong:

It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

Some of us believe McCain is clearly unsuited for the presidency and no more due to “moralism”, boiling or tepid, than to “bottomless” certitude, unless we’re referring to a morality that places John McCain’s advancement above all else and the ensuing certainty that anyone and anything getting in its way are fair game. It’s ambition unrestrained by a modest or measured temperament, and the subsequent lack of morality, preachy or otherwise, that McCain displays, despite the fatuous theme of “service”.

I’m reminded of Will misreading the minor controversy regarding Jim Webb’s snub of President Bush at a White House reception for newly elected congressman. You’ll remember Webb tried to avoid shaking hands with the president, only to be confronted and asked, “how’s your boy?” Will, perhaps due to his own basic decency, was quaintly clueless as to what had actually happened:

…disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, [President Bush] asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.

Will mistook the hostility of the president’s disingenuous question, which was nothing more than an attempt to force an intransigent Webb to submit to the protocol of their power arrangement–to knuckle under–sharpening his attack with the indecency of bringing the man’s son (who, it shouldn’t be lost on us, was carrying a rifle and facing peril under the command of President Bush) into it. It was about as civil and caring as a mafia boss asking a recalcitrant union leader “how’s the family?”

We should be able to discount personality, seeing as it’s not only subjective but subject to the artistic mythologizing so nauseatingly on display in the current campaign. We’d all like to think our mature and advanced democracy guards against the vanity and jealousies of petty men–with the outsized power of the executive branch, make that one petty man–but the Bush administration is depressing evidence that personality and temperament are as operative as ever. And this year we choose between aged choleric and youthful melancholic. I don’t know what is more depressing, the dismal choice or the fact that the latter is clearly superior. If irreconcilable misanthropes had slogans mine would be: Refuse to Choose.

The Falling Sky’s the Limit

It’s remarkable how shameless our political leaders are regarding their state of hysteria (of course it wouldn’t be hysteria if it wasn’t without shame and decorum) and not a little disconcerting, suggesting (but by no means proving) that their collective panic is warranted. Last Thursday’s convocation of politicians eager to impress upon the public how terrified they were (and by inference how oblivious they, tasked with overseeing the financial system, had been previously) was downright surreal. The sight of political leaders so disoriented they could barely prevaricate and dissemble inspires a mixture of revulsion and pathos, like seeing a turtle out of its shell. Less remarkable and more familiar is their lack of contrition regarding their decades of collusion that precipitated the crisis. First the combination of comedy and corruption that are the presidential tickets, the spectacle of the two mystified candidates scrambling to present competing facsimiles of leaderly competence, mimicking outrage while drawing on advisers complicit up to their elbows in the debacle, and now this, confirms it: the American political system has entered its late decadent phase.

The habitually ironic language Senator Schumer used to describe the reaction to Ben Bernanke’s fire and brimstone sermon can speak for the bewilderment of the nation as a whole: “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.” Sort of like a moment. Perhaps when it all hits the fan in earnest we can at least reclaim spoken language from its flaccid state. I do hope when I’m tied to a stake by some feral, post-apocalyptic tribe I don’t turn to see a fellow victim lamenting that it’s all kind of like something, really.

Some of the language used brings to mind another incidence of grandstanding hysterics, that precipitating the Iraq war. This crisis is real, of course, and the content of this tragedy less fictional, but the form is the same: a sudden threat is identified, extraordinary actions and powers are deemed necessary post haste. Drastic measures will be accomplished through the mixture of cowardice and corruption that is sometimes called bipartisanship; they will likely be difficult to unwind, if not permanent. Questioning the consensus is all but forbidden. Now, as then, the details are too grim for the tender public: Senators Dodd, Schumer, et al, would not disclose them Friday. Back then it was classified information that couldn’t be freely circulated; I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you. Now it’s I could tell you but it’d probably kill you.

You’ll recall the “crisis” precipitating the war also featured administration appointees briefing Congressional leaders and leaving no dry seat in the room. It makes me wonder what sort of prop Paulson might have used, a la Powell brandishing his vial of mock anthrax at the UN. Perhaps a toilet brush, to terrify them with the prospect of poverty and its indignities. As with the war, consequences for the powerful and responsible few will be deferred indefinitely, but will be immediate for the nation’s integrity, prestige and pocketbook. The war may have not been necessary (though this question, and its moral implications, have been flushed down a memory hole capped with the illusion of “success”–as if we’ve gone through it all to deliver Iraq and its oil wealth to an Iranian-allied Shi’ite government) but even so it can be seen as a consequence of an extravagant society overly dependent on oil–just as the collapse of our financial system is a consequence of our dependence on borrowed money.

But however dislocated our leaders are from their constituents, it’s still on us, the citizenry. The consequences of being a debtor nation have been well known, and one doesn’t have to understand the complexities of credit default swaps or tranches to understand he can’t borrow his way to wealth unless he plans on dying deep in debt. Our short-sightedness as a nation is the aggregate of our desperate decadence as individuals; no one seems to care anymore what will become of the world they leave behind (even as they flail away against mortality in the gym and in the plastic surgeon’s office, as if they’re going to live forever, and forever young). I’m sure someone has already used the metaphor, but as a nation we are a gambler on a losing streak, doubling down.

And out here in the provinces it all still seems so remote; nothing appears to have changed. Football was played on Sunday. The electronic menagerie of celebrity eavesdropping, reality television, the glib and soulless sitcoms; it all looks exactly the same. People are going about their business, carefree. Funny, I don’t feel insolvent. But I am getting a sinking feeling: who, after all, is going to pay for this all? I’m not talking about taxpayers, either, but our foreign would-be benefactors. Foreign money is already looking for other places to go and the economy, coming down from the false stimulation of the last tax rebate scheme, can be expected to produce lower tax receipts; two sides of a vice. Meanwhile, the bill grows; foreign investment firms with offices and the attendant exposure in the US are clamoring for inclusion in the bottomless bailout plan. Another busy-work stimulus scheme with which incumbents hope to arm themselves for the coming electoral carnage is in the works.

There is one possible consolation: an attack upon Iran is probably off the table in the oval office. Of course, with certain messianic factions that don’t concern themselves primarily with the health and viability of the US economy and the order that depends on it, and the fact that Israel and Iran themselves might not care that our schedule doesn’t permit another war at the moment, having their own ideas and requirements, makes me feel a little like one of those trembling pols I started out here making fun of.

Preparing and Pining for the Apocalypse

Looking for silver linings (figuratively speaking, though literally speaking silver and gold are good redoubts at the moment) and not finding any. The fascinating (and by fascinating I mean inducing the same kind of dread one gets when his doctor prefaces his diagnosis by enthusing on recent advances in treatment options) thing about the current economic crisis is its many aspects; I’ve spent the last hour trying to retrieve something I read yesterday about how Asian investors started migrating out of US securities a couple of months ahead of the present difficulties–but retracing my steps through the informational thicket I find it has grown unrecognizable and unmanageable, like some nightmare jungle growing by the second, vines coiling about my ankles and unwinding down from above. I had set out in search of the headwaters of our economic torrent, only to get lost and disoriented in the bush.

Seriously; gold, silver and maybe oil, which in my worst-case scenario stays around a hundred dollars a barrel due to demand abroad despite the US lapsing into recession/depression, leaving us with negative growth and rising commodity inflation. I fear this more than the “global depression” which is the consensus worst-case, the US coming apart while everybody else continues to grow, learning how to thrive without us. Of course I have no idea where all that prudently saved Asian money will go, either, once our financial system implodes.

Someone compared this all to an economic Vesuvius, bringing to mind an image of unsuspecting modern Americans captured forever in three dimensional snapshots, like those unfortunate Pompeians cast forever in ash as they cowered beneath the pyroclastic onslaught. As we remain mostly oblivious to our impending fate, many of us will be caught in various ignoble postures, sitting in traffic or in cubicles, laying in tanning beds, getting tattoos, en flagrante delicto solus before the computer screen, pouring potato chip crumbs directly from the bag into my maw watching financial chat on (er, um, financial, uh, excuse me I seem to have lost my train of thought…oh yeah–sorry, I was transfixed briefly by the graceful, cascading arc of Becky Quick’s golden mane) television.

As for me, I’m going to spend the weekend with a tall stack of DVDs of the post-civilizational dystopia genre, re-reading all my catalogued and annotated back-issues of Modern Survivalist magazine, looking for tips the television personalities (uh, television, um, the uh, what was I saying? oh yeah, sorry, I was helpless in the vortex of those limpid, almond eyes for moment) cannot provide; in the meantime I’ll be outfitting my Honda with a swiveling gun turret and a Kevlar reinforced twenty gallon auxiliary fuel tank.
Okay, maybe my long-cherished fantasy of marauding through the post-apocalyptic hellscape at the head of a band of cutthroat brigands isn’t going to come about at long last. But I do think that things are going to change for us all, just a bit; and it needn’t be all bad, in the long run at least, should it mean retiring finally our ironic empire of consumption and conquest.