\n| \n They have activated the transponder in our
\n head again. They are messing with our brain. We know this because during
\n the past two nights, we have been watching the Republican National Convention
\n on television, and their twisted version of reality is starting to sound
\n reasonable and righteous.<\/p>\n Watching in rapt solitude with Norma Yvonne
\n sleeping sweetly at our side, it all began to make sense. We have
\n been swept away into a safe and happy place where America is strong
\n and respected,
\n and our President is a wise and judicious leader, strong, brilliant
\n and a paragon of moral virtue, where opportunity exists for all, the
\n economy is in a strong recovery mode, and our revamped educational system
\n is leaving no child behind.<\/p>\n We could be very happy living in this vision of America,
\n if
\n only it was true. But
\n politics has never been a truth-based game, and this Republican team
\n is proving
\n brilliant
\n at
\n weaving a heartwarming and self-affirming fantasy which has taken the
\n country by storm, offering it a cozy, safe place to feel good about itself
\n again.<\/p>\n You’ve got to hand it to these guys, they are playing the
\n media and the masses like Isaac Stern on a Stradivarius. They know
\n exactly which buttons to push to pull that precious 47 or 48% of the
\n votes (thanks, again, to that rascal Ralph Nader) under the Big Tent,
\n and win four more years, despite the fact that most of the rest of the
\n country is drowning in debt and running wild in the streets.<\/p>\n It is positively Orwellian the way they have used the lens
\n of the government and the media to distort the image they project, turning
\n it almost upside down. A rush to war becomes a drive to peace. Apparent
\n peace becomes secret war. Billions to the rich become the only way to
\n help the poor. Spending more than you are making becomes fiscal prudence.
\n Imposing religious and moral values on others becomes protecting personal
\n freedom. Personal freedom becomes the freedom to be poor.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the show they are putting on in New York is
\n masterful. Watching it, it is obvious that the Republicans are the party
\n of compassionate progressives, supporting immigrants, women and minorities,
\n championing diversity and scientific progress. These guys are obviously
\n trustworthy. We are so used to welcoming media superstars like Arnold
\n Schwarznegger and
\n Rudi
\n Guliani
\n into our
\n living rooms that we feel comfortable with them in a way we never could
\n with "real" politicians.<\/p>\n We guess the point is that modern Americans are conditioned,
\n like no group of human beings in the history of the species, to the will
\n full
\n suspension of disbelief. A lifetime spent in darkened movie theaters and
\n glued to the tube have taught us that the idea that a horse can talk,
\n or that all human beings were being kept alive in some sort of suspended
\n animation like giant Everready batteries to feed the energy needs of
\n a race of machines, seems eminently reasonable, at least for the duration
\n of the show, or movie, or series. <\/p>\n Reagan pioneered the art of politics as Hollywood Production,
\n but since then the process has accelerated to the point that today the
\n theatrical responsibilities of being President are so time consuming
\n that they mostly leave the actual running of the country to less important
\n figures, like the Vice President. The picture painted by the current
\n regime is an obvious and outrageous fantasy to those left out of its
\n warm embrace, but is no problem to sustain for the happy campers who
\n have jumped aboard the bandwagon.<\/p>\n And the show is endlessly, shamelessly entertaining. Exhibit
\n "A" – the Bush twins. Could they have been any more charmingly vacuous
\n than they were last night? Their parents think Sex in the City is something
\n adults do but NEVER talk about? Please! They even went so far as to allude
\n to their own and their father’s irresponsibility in youth, as though
\n that were a selling point! What balls!<\/p>\n All the while, half of the viewers were undressing them
\n with their eyes, assuming equal numbers of queers and lesbians. America
\n has always had a sick sexual fascination with twins, and Barb and Jenna
\n are certainly nubile and comely enough to fulfill it. Their disingenuous
\n Bimbohood (they weren’t;t allowed to say anything serous) brought to
\n mind the lascivious
\n ads for
\n Coors Beer which list archetypal American fantasies, and always ends
\n with, "…and TWINS!"<\/p>\n Not coincidentally, the Republican candidate for the US
\n Senate seat in Colorado this year is – Pete Coors! Who can doubt that
\n the Coors beer "Twins" campaign was a brilliant three-year set-up for
\n the
\n unveiling
\n of the Bush MTV generation secret weapon.<\/p>\n Personally, the Dowbrigade would pay serious money to see
\n the Bush twins take on the Kerry sisters, say in the wading pool on the
\n Capitol Lawn, filled and flowing with light Arabian crude. No holds barred,
\n winner-takes-all,
\n America votes for the winners over the Internet. It would probably
\n be as productive, and certainly more entertaining and revealing, than
\n the campaign we have to look forward to for the next 60 days.<\/p>\n The Republicans are definitely going after the younger
\n generation, and the swing voters, and even whatever "soft" or stoned
\n Democrats they can snare with their movie star and minstrel show. They
\n figure their core constituency is NEVER going to vote for Kerry, even
\n if the President were to spend the time until the election washing oil
\n off whales with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, so they might as well trot
\n out the most spectacular and simpatico speakers they got, despite their
\n ideological
\n divergences from the party platform.<\/p>\n Plus, both their speech writers and speech coaches are
\n doing a much better job than the Democrats, whose speeches (with the
\n exception of Al Sharpton’s)
\n sounded like they had been squeezed from the same soggy oratorical
\n sponge. The
\n Republicans are speaking slowly and clearly, and pausing in the right
\n places and for the optimal amount of time, unlike the Democrats who
\n rushed through their overly-long speeches as though afraid of getting
\n cut off by a commercial if they went over their limit.<\/p>\n Yesterday on the radio we heard Bush say, "Freedom is
\n not America’s gift to the world, rather it is God’s gift to all Men
\n and Women". Damn, if that doesn’t sound Presidential. With
\n a better script and better actors, the Republicans are putting on a
\n much better show, especially for the TV audience in the heartland,
\n than the dopey and depressing Democrats.<\/p>\n Perhaps
\n their most masterful stroke was getting the Democrats to bet the
\n farm on a comparison of records during the Vietnam war.
\n This strategy was doomed from the start for a variety of reasons: the
\n Swift Boat controversy has muddied the waters sufficiently so that it
\n no longer matters WHO is telling the truth, Kerry and the Dems are
\n seen
\n as fixated in the past while the Bushies are looking towards the future,
\n and the President was able to stay spotless by declaring that personally
\n he
\n believed Kerry and respects him for his service.<\/p>\n There is mounting evidence that this entire brouhaha was
\n a cleverly laid trap by the Republicans, knowing that the one attack
\n Kerry would not be able to rise above would be an attack on his personal
\n honor and war-time record. David Fuller writes in Fullermoney.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n At the beginning of the year, Thomas Lifson, who was at Harvard Business
\n School with George W Bush, made an interesting observation about
\n the President. He notes that young George "was a very avid and skillful
\n poker player" when he was a Business Administration student and
\n that "one of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage
\n your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern
\n of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W Bush’s political career".<\/p>\n Indeed one does. In the months following Mr Lifson’s observation, the
\n President sat back, as John Kerry’s consultants, the Iowa caucus voters,
\n the Democratic
\n Party at large, and the media convinced themselves that the one card that
\n trumps Bush’s leadership in the war on terror was Kerry’s four months in
\n Vietnam, and bet everything on it. They have just lost that hand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So we are starting to entertain fantasies of turning Republican,
\n making influential connections, and joining the ruling class. We
\n can only hope that before we fall irretrievably under the spell of these
\n masterful
\n media
\n magicians
\n and
\n vote for a Republican
\n for the first time in our long electoral career, we will have the sense
\n to pull the plug on the set or somehow disable the damn transponder
\n they have planted in our brain. For we know after a lifetime of research
\n that even the most engaging and persistent hallucinations eventually
\n fade, and one comes crashing back to cold, hard reality. George Bush
\n may be
\n a Master Poker player, but we are far from sure we want him playing our
\n hand when
\n all of OUR chips are on the table. He is, and always has been, playing
\n with House money.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They have activated the transponder in our head again. They are messing with our brain. We know this because during the past two nights, we have been watching the Republican National Convention on television, and their twisted version of reality … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |