After weeks of listening to multimillionaires like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi argue about how many bread crusts the rest of us should be allowed to keep to dip in our gruel, I’ve come to the conclusion that it almost doesn’t matter what the content of a particular fountain of political oratory is because the public has turned off large sections of their brains in self defense and the tiny piece they are using regularly isn’t geared for anything more complicated than Snooki’s new diet or which whippet-thin starlet is getting a tattoo on her butt. There has been a pile of data produced in the last year or so to illustrate this sad fact and now, with 1 in 3 persons still not sure that Obama is a Christian, 38% unable to pass a standard citizenship test and 70% incapable of explaining what the Cold War was or why we were involved in it, it becomes clear why our political discourse in the country has devolved into two varieties of clowns shouting, honking and hitting each other in the head with big, rubber hammers.
Witness the incredible cacophony of blather coming out of Washington since the hyped-up deal was struck to raise the debt ceiling and the subsequent down grade of US debt by Standard & Poors, (a result you could see coming from a mile away). Democrats and republicans have been tossing grenades across the aisle ever since, each accusation louder and more ludicrous than the last. The dems are hammering away with their “eat the rich” accusations, accusing the republicans of behavior more in line with Louis the 16th and his gal-pal, Marie Antoinette. Republicans fire back with a veritable chorus of voices that it was Obama’s fault – a particularly heinous accusation given that he basically handed them the keys and said, Fuck it” at the end.
John “Sure I wear pink ties even though they look ridiculous” Boner – in a typical burst of garbled hyperbole – accused the democrats of being "unwilling to make the tough choices required to put Americans on solid ground”, a phrase so meaningless and out of touch with reality that he had to have been into the pharmaceuticals again. Naturally he refrained from mentioning S&P calling for increased tax revenues. For their part, democrats conveniently omit S&P calling for entitlement reform as well. But it was the republican presidential candidates who ramped up the convoluted logic meter to eleven as they fell over themselves trying to pin the blame on Obama in a comical series of partisan blasts. Pawlenty, a man still searching for someone to tell him running is a good idea, called him inept. Bachman – senior economist of Christian counseling quack-a-torium, Bachman & Associates, where her husband and their staff are feverishly praying for some kind of Freudian hypno-therapy to un-gay gays, says Obama is “destroying the foundations of the US economy” in a spectacularly over the top rant.
When you think about it, it is like one of those cheesy dream sequences in a bad sci-fi movie, where evil voices are all talking at once in a perverted version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat on acid. There is so much bullshit flying around from both candidates and various commentators, experts and senior correspondents, it’s a miracle we can keep track of what day it is. Lies, obfuscation, delusion, hallucinations, petty partisan recriminations – it’s all reported all day, every day. When you have a nation of voters with the attention span of four-year olds it should be no surprise that they prove susceptible to believing whoever lies the loudest and is most often reported doing so, even if it’s in a story about liars. Any publicity is good publicity, as the saying goes, so when the cameras are rolling and they are always rolling - there is no longer anyone filtering candidates’ speeches for accuracy.
To complicate the effort needed to sort through the incessant hail of bombast, hysteria and general lunacy, all of the republican candidates have spent the summer cloaking themselves in look-at-me-pray hair-shirts of religiosity, lending a certain perverse authenticity to their otherwise questionable ideas of governance in general. Leading that particular crusade – and smearing on religiosity like sun tan lotion - is almost-candidate, Rick “god’s going to get back to me about it” Perry, who yesterday, in a spectacularly inappropriate perversion of a Burning Man tribal gathering, spent 7 hours praying and cavorting with various bible obsessed and, in some cases, demented “ministers” in a Texas football stadium, all of whom share common cause in opposing abortion rights, gay rights, and the freedom of religion laid out in the First Amendment for anyone but christians and who believe in every fiber of their being that hellfire and damnation surely await most of the rest of the country, especially the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, otherwise known as the East and West coasts. As Rick himself put it, “we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us” and he is happy to be the one to remind us; at least those of us turning out for republican caucuses in Iowa and South Carolina.
But relying on religion in the noxious and treacherous political climate we inhabit now in this country is like clinging to a floating piece of wreckage after the Titanic went down; it provides a temporary feeling of relief and well being but it’s going to turn out to be pretty disappointing as a long term strategy. Eventually someone is going to have to turn up in a boat or your ass is going down. And if it was me driving the boat, potential voters who think that we spend 25% of our federal budget on foreign aid and cling to other assorted absurd beliefs could just keep hanging on to that floating deck chair. I’m not picking you up; I can’t stand the racket.
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