Nation of Feebs

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

12:16 on the west coast of America and the grim bells of doom have begun to toll. High atop the old State House in Boston sits a filthy black raven with the head of Dick Cheney, quothing “Nevermore . . .”

Anything less than a clear plurality for John Kerry, I felt as Election Day drew near, would be a horrible badge of shame for America. Even a victory in a close contest would not send the message to our former friends and allies: “Sorry. We fucked up, and barely voted in a vicious gang of thugs, fixers, fascists and goons, drastically destabilized a world largely at peace and put a sock-puppet moron in the White House. We’re very, very sorry. Here’s the proof: a decisive rejection of all these swine stand for.”

And now, as the dust begins to settle, it becomes increasingly clear that short of a Hail Mary-style flurry of legal maneuvering by the Kerry campaign, the wheels are coming off the Democratic Party and they are likely to stay off for a good long time. George W. Bush lied, blithered and babbled his way bug-eyed through three straight debates in which John Kerry whipped him like a red-headed stepchild; Bush rarely through the campaign scored above 50% in job approval ratings. Yet now, as the final votes tally up, he has a clear margin of victory in the popular vote and looks to have a slender but stable enough lead in the yet-undecided states to lock the electoral votes.

It’s natural at times like these to look for answers. And there can only be one: that we are a nation of idiots. Certainly that will be the view of the rest of the world: twice we elect a bumbling clown to lead the world’s mightiest nation down a trail of blood and bones. What other reason can there be? What right-thinking person could in good conscience cast a vote for this witless, uneducated monkey and his filthy animal of a puppetmaster, Dick Cheney? What person with a modicum of intelligence could watch George Bush struggle to put together a cogent sentence on any issue and say, “that’s the man I want to represent my country?” Leaving aside for the moment questions of ideology, is there no sense of shame in voting for the dumbest president in US history, a president loathed more viciously at home and abroad than perhaps any other in history?

Bush was the “more likeable” candidate, they say. “He’s a reg’lar guy, lahk me,” opined Larry Spim of Arkansas. “Kinda guy I could have a beer with.” Well, fuck you, Larry. I don’t want to have a beer with my president. I don’t need to feel that I could shoot a rack of pool with him. I don’t want my president to be a “reg’lar guy.” I don’t need to feel like I’d like him as a buddy. I want him to be an extraordinary person, intelligent, a statesman, who looks to the future with a clear eye and leads the nation forward. Everything, in short, that Bush & Cheney are not.

Could it be that people vote for Bush because he’s an idiot, not despite it? Because it makes them feel OK to be morons who don’t need to think issues through, or be informed? “He’s a jackass, just lahk me.” The only other plausible scenario is that people are simply so deep in denial over his evident stupidity and incompetence and the venal, fascist drive of the ideologues behind the throne that they can’t believe it’s true.

Better watch it, Charlie. Watch what you read, watch what you say. Watch what you post on blogs like this – call the president a moron and the SS might come knocking (it happened to someone just last week.) Watch that guy who just joined your “Knitting Circle for Peace” group because there’s a good chance he’s an undercover cop. Better make sure you trust the guy at the bookstore to resist the seizure of all your book purchasing records. The slope has never been more slippery and we’re all heading downhill, and at the base of the hill is a fetid pile of sticky, tarry black eagle-dung.

Back when 9/11 happened I emailed some friends a piece by John Barlow which warned us that 9/11 was our Reichstag Fire, that our government, run as it was by a gang of degenerates who’d been waiting for just such an event to rationalize a sweeping clampdown on 30 years of social progress, would move swiftly, in the name of our safety and ratcheting up Fear, to force through radical and unconstitutional limitations on our freedom. My friends took umbrage. A couple of friends, married to women who'd spent their young lives during the cold war behind the Iron Curtain, were enraged that I would suggest that we were in grave danger of becoming a fascist state, or a police state.

Have a look around. And take a look not just at the Nazis (to whom I am not comparing Bush & Co.) but at any totalitarian governement. In every circumstance, the forerunner to its ascension has been a concentration of power in the executive branch of government, justified by some imminent threat, from within or without, of sufficient horror to stirke fear in the hearts of the populace. Mix in a failing economy, unemployment, and a soaring national debt and ratchet up the sense of desperation amongst the populace and – well, hell, they’ll go along with anything that sounds like it will just take the Fear away.

They’ll even vote for an idiot.

“Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own god-damned business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.” – William S. Burroughs, “Thanksgiving Prayer”