I would like to tell anyone reading this that I am six foot two in height, an accomplished pianist, a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist. I work out at the gym four nights a week and do volunteer work at local nursing homes and children’s hospitals on the other nights. I would like to tell you these things but what’s the point? They are not true. They are lies and, after all, just saying something does not make it so. Right?
How about if I present it well and say it over and over, does that help? How about if I say it with unerring conviction and a personable charm? Am I six foot two yet?
Unfortunately, no. So now the question must be asked, why do, according to polls, roughly half of voting age Americans think that President Bush is doing a good job and deserving of a second term? The President just took a substantial bounce in the polls from a convention that was beautifully produced, filled with passionate, charismatic figures (with the exception of Cheney and Zell Miller, one frightening, the other sadly comical). Held in a city largely opposed to their party, where thousands of people took to the street every day in protest of their policies and of them, the Republican convention was confident, aggressive and predicated almost entirely on enormous lies. The economy is getting stronger. We are creating new jobs at a satisfactory rate. We liberated a grateful Iraq. The war and the 1,000 murdered young Americans was absolutely necessary. The administration values education for the underprivileged. The Bush tax cuts, which depleted our economic surplus and sent us back to the same deficit we had in 1991, benefited most Americans. We are safer today than we were before 9/11. And, best of all, the President who has logged, far and away, the most vacation days in Chief Executive history has been working tirelessly to make all of this happen. After I watched Bush finish his acceptance speech among video fireworks and the blessing of the faithful, I began flipping channels and hit local channel 11 at the exact moment that, on an old Seinfeld, George was giving advise to Jerry on how to pass a lie detector test even though he was going to lie. George leaned forward with the expression of a sage and said, “Remember, it’s not a lie if you really believe it.”
The American people who support President Bush, that is, the ones who do not choose their President on the sole criteria of organized Christianity or their love of guns, do so because of a mass delusion. The belief in an America that no longer exists. The one with “aw shucks” cowboy leaders. Plain-talking straight shooters with an affection for Mom, Pop and Little Billy. White hats in a black hat world. When Secretary Of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld sold this war to his room of hand-picked, embedded journalists and thus to the American people, all of his lies about the slam dunk of WMDs, military operations lasting just a few weeks and being welcomed by the Iraqi people with “flowers and candy” were all peppered with liberal (no pun intended) doses of “Goodness Gracious, No…” and “Oh, My…”. Take a good look at the guy. Does anybody think Donald Rumsfeld really talks that way when he’s making plans that include the deaths of thousands? But it worked. Mr. And Mrs. USA looked at him on TV and said, “He’s a nice man”. He could be sitting on the public bench with Floyd The Barber and Goober. When President Bush put Osama on a Dead Or Alive Wanted Poster even though the prospect of apprehending a son in one of Saudi-Arabia’s most prominent and economically active families was not even an option (much better to go after a connectionless street thug like Saddam) a good part of this country ate it up.
My question is:
After President Bush and his administration failed to find Bin Laden, failed to find any of the nightmarish objects that he, himself, named Weapons Of Mass Destruction in Iraq after we blew the place to smithereens, alienating most of the world in the process, spurring the creation of countless more terrorists than we had before we started, and then, most incomprehensible of all, botched the war itself so badly that we seem to be losing control of most of Iraq’s major cities to a new enemy, the “Insurgents”, who have vowed to fight us forever… After all that… Why is this most blatantly arrogant and incompetent President on his way to a second term?
Good, old-fashioned Retro-America.
In a new book of socio-economic theory with a decidedly urban slant, The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, the infamous red and blue states are renamed Retro and Metro for obvious reasons. The authors differentiate, “Retro America’s commonalities are religiosity; social conservatism; an economic base of extraction industries, agriculture, nondurable goods manufacturing, military installations; and a commitment to the Republican Party. These are ‘God, Family, and Flag’ folks politically dominated by rural, conservative, white, Fundamentalist Christian populations. Retro America is not the land of co-habiting, unmarried, hetero, or same-sex couples, or of the young seeking cultural excitement in the large Metro cities. The Republicans have carved out Retro America as their base and are using the dangers of terrorism and permanent war to try to create a new national unity and a new national party.
On the Metro side of the cultural divide are religious moderates and seculars, Democrats, and moderate Republicans who are committed to excellence in education and science, who want the arts to flourish; who are accepting of differences in ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation; and who want a clear division between church and state. These moderates are in favor of women’s, gay, and workers’ rights. Their congressional representatives support affirmative action, public education, childcare, and other services needed by working parents, as well as progressive taxation. They oppose tax cuts for the wealthy that undercut progressive taxation, and they oppose subsidies and tax shelters favoring industry, especially the oil and extraction industries.”
Yeah, well I said it was slanted, didn’t I? But just because it’s biased doesn’t mean it’s not statistically correct. Just like as John Kerry said ostensibly to Bush in his acceptance speech, being resolute is not the same as being right.
It is our deep desire for a black and white world that drives so many people to figures like Bush and, even more successfully, Ronald Reagan. Watching Reagan’s canonization this summer was a paradoxical situation for someone like me. It was beautiful. Moving. I mean Nancy Reagan’s face at her husband’s coffin… But the thing is… I remember Ronald Reagan and he was a horrible President. Charismatic? Yes. Resolute? No doubt. As a college student, I watched him practically give birth to the Retro America we know today. They loved their cowboy on horseback (how could you not?). They loved him even as he pioneered tax cuts for the wealthiest under the premise that the wise thing to do is not burden these insanely rich people with taxes so that, eventually, their wealth would “trickle-down” to us. No really. It sounded great when he said it. Social Darwinism, the application of “Survival of the Fittest” to the everyday American became a cornerstone for the decade. If you are wealthy, it is because you are superior and, if you are poor, it is due to your inherent flaws. Up until then, from FDR, through Kennedy, Johnson and, yes, Richard Nixon, the goal of this country was to provide opportunities. To know that everyone had a chance and to make it so that, at the very least, no one would be deprived of the basic necessities of life so that they could realize their goals. This could only be done with diligent supervision from the Federal branch. It was never a complete success but that was the goal. The new Republican conservatism ushered in under Reagan’s down-home charm was something far more cold-blooded and sinister. Locally, it classified ketchup as a vegetable on public school lunch menus and globally, it marked the beginning of our misbegotten chess game for oil in the Middle east, strategically backing one crazy dictator against another in the hope that our crazy dictator would do what we say. That went well.
Arms For Hostages, Iran/Contra, The Afghan War, Osama, Saddam, an impossible deficit, greed is good, the enemy of our enemy is our friend… it all started with that smiling, waving guy who stood so tall in his pin stripe suit: the Gipper. And you know what folks, I was there and the economy of the Big 80’s was not so great. The first half of the decade was plagued by a post-Vietnam recession which was only ended when Reagan decided to print more money. We had three or four good years until it all collapsed and we were left with a deficit that had grown several times more during Ronnie’s tenure than the previous two hundred years combined! I can remember the cover of New York’s Village Voice in 1989 as he prepared to leave office. It showed the Gipper grinning and waving from atop his white steed as if ready to ride off into the sunset. Beneath the photo against a black background in bold white letters it said, “So long, Suckers!” In fact, his most cherished belief that government should stand aside because business knows what’s best for business set the path for CEO’s making five hundred times the salary of their middle management and, eventually, the downfall of the same middle class that adored him.
If the Reagan Revolution wreaked such havoc, why do so many people consider him one of the greats? The answer I heard over and over, from the funeral to the Republican convention, was, “He made us feel good again.” In other words, “He lied really well! He made us feel like it was 1956 again and everyone shared the same simple, wholesome American Dream.” The only reason to point all of this out so insensitively close to the man’s death is because people are still under it’s spell and it’s affecting this election. If the same people who decided that God doesn’t want stem cell research so, possibly, your parent or grandparent wouldn’t have to suffer the same slowly debilitating fate as Reagan endured for so long are giving their delegates “Win One For The Gipper” signs to hold up at Madison Square Garden, a little deconstruction is in order.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, I don’t think Reagan really understood the dark forces he was unleashing with his Hollywood honed, telegenic appeal. I believe he was, in his own way, an optimistic, idealistic fellow who believed in both freedom and capitalism. I think he would have been appalled by something as Stalinesque as the Patriot Act, the unscrupulous way this Administration has treated American citizens since 9/11 and most assuredly, I don’t think he would have held his Vice-President’s son in very high regard at all.