Someone, maybe it was Cruz or Bush or Rubio, but it could have been anyone, spoke of violence “in our communities” as the bigger issue than gun rights. It struck me how obviously “communities” is a metaphor for “ghettoes.” Reminded me of that dick Rudy Giuliani mocking Obama for being a “community organizer” at the 2008 Republican Convention. He was really saying “ghetto organizer.” He was really saying “N-word organizer.” Ha! Can you imagine that? A lowly N-word organizer. Now he thinks he’s gonna be president!

Now I’m remembering Giuliani’s objection to the pissed-on Jesus art exhibit way back when. Someone should have pissed on Rudy’s face. That’d be art.

Maybe now the Republican Party will fragment: Its more reasonable members can become Libertarians and the rest can form some odious faction akin to France's nationalist party or Germany's NDP. Is it not time to explode the two-party system anyway? Let's have a handful of vital ones while some fade like dead stars and some burst into being like the Big Bang. Let's elect Greens and independents and parties previously unimagined.

He's Black!

The gnawing fear I have in my gut right now, about the election, is this: At the penultimate moment, National Guard soldiers will be called in to block the polls. They'll be arrayed in well-practiced formations around the perimeters, legs spread slightly, M-16s at the ready across their chests. Commanders will engage tactfully with the puzzled citizenry who'd hoped to exercise their franchise. They'll wave their arms: "No, no, no. Go home everyone. Go home peacefully, please."

"Why? What's going on?"

"No voting today, folks. Go home. Go peacefully."

"What do you mean, no voting?"

"There's no voting. John McCain has won. Go home."

"What do you mean he won?"

"There can be no election, people. There is no voting today. There is no voting for Barack Obama."

"No voting for Barack Obama?"

"He's BLACK. HE'S BLACK, FOLKS. The election is over. There is no voting. There is no voting for a black man. Go home."

Government officials and the Republican high and mighty will be on all the networks, asserting minute variations of the same message: "There can be no election today; one of the candidates is black. How dare anyone think that our nation might actually have gone through with this? Anyone who thought they could vote for Barack Obama is a fool. Of course they can't. He's BLACK. You didn't expect us to actually put our nation in that sort of peril, did you? You'll be glad we intervened. It's over now. Everyone remain calm."

There will be a flurry of outrage, but by the end of the afternoon we'll all grow tired, hungry. Docile. We'll cook dinner and eat it in front of reality TV, placing salty forkfuls in our mouths, masticating unhappily. We might cry a tear or two of shame. Really, what were we thinking? How naive, how stupid. To think we might have, today, voted a black man to the presidency of the United States! Of course they stopped us. Of course. What did we expect?

OK, that's my fear. If it doesn't happen, I think Obama's got a pretty good chance.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

The All-American Witch Hunt

The increasing venom of crowds at McCain-Palin rallies indicates that a certain segment of the population has taken the innuendo and slanderous accusations of unscrupulous Republican campaign strategists completely literally. In other words, they believe that Obama is a Muslim terrorist. They imagine that through some strange and cruel chain of events, the evil "other" represented by 9/11 hijackers and by Osama bin Laden is now incarnate in the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Many of these people already hold some form or other of Biblical apocalypse fantasy alive in their imaginations, so it is not hard for them to believe that God is testing, or Satan is tempting, the good people of our country in this election as some necessary step in a process that also includes the breakdown of our civilization (i.e., economy), a war with heathens in the Middle East, the End of Days (global warming?) and the Rapture. Considering this point of view, it's not terribly difficult to understand why some people consider Obama's identity as the Antichrist to be a matter of fact beyond any question whatsoever. So it's even sort of poignant when, for example, a woman tells McCain how terrified she is of Obama because he "is an Arab." She really believes Obama is an Arab and is terrified that the United States will be ruled by an Arab terrorist. It's easy for us - the "reality-based community" - to dismiss a lot of the Republican lies and smears about Obama as laughable and obviously untrue. Of course, that's what they are. But the mistake we're making is to trust that while some are laughing and others are keeping a straight face, everyone is in on the joke. That even if McCain supporters want to believe them or pretend that they're true, they must know they're lies. The chilling fact is that many people believe them wholeheartedly, sincerely. They are terrified to the core of their souls that Barack Obama, an Islamist terrorist, will be elected president. "Kill him!" "Off with his head!" they scream. This election is an all-American witch hunt. That's what we're up against.

The news that W. is sending Special Ops to Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government can mean only one thing: This is the October surprise. Mark my words: There will be an announcement in mid- to late October that Osama bin Laden has been captured. It will be a moment of pure vindication for Bush, allowing him to strut and preen and prattle on a bit about how history will view this moment, how our sacrifice has been great but our cause just, etc., etc. There will be the implication, as there was in the capture of Sadam Hussein, that one man - our man, our president - has humiliated another man for the sake of the clan. And the corollary of course is that only tough talking, Republican men do that. Sure enough, McCain will glide into office. He'll have a stroke in early 2012, making Sarah Palin president and ushering in a dark decade of warmongering, religio-fascism and economic mayhem that future historians will marvel at the way an avid mortician scrutinizes a bludgeoned corpse, but that's beside the point for now.

These hideous, corrupt, power-mad and murderous cocksuckers have waited seven years to the day to play this card. They could have picked up bin Laden any damn time. But why waste a trump? It's akin to the 3/11 Madrid bombing. Hit them when it hurts. Hit us when it hurts.

If you're inclined to, pray that this doesn't occur, as it surely can't be God's plan.

One reason to worry if you're an Obama supporter is that in spite of the substance of Republican philosophy, very much in evidence in McCain's history and platform - the predilection for war, the reluctance to govern for the common good, the reflexive fear-mongering and "values" pandering - Republicans are now trying to co-opt the Democrats' message. You hear a lot about "change" and "cleaning up Washington" from the McCain campaign. You've got to sort of admire the nerve. They're skimming the cream from the top of Obama's cup and dumping it into the cold bottom of theirs, with apparent impunity. Every grand and beautiful thing that Obama says - no problem, they'll just say it, too. I like to imagine that one of Karl Rove's lackeys, now working for McCain, had this revelation after weeks of "Curse you, Barack Obama! You're so good!" fist shaking. Eureka. Never mind that bringing change to Washington means changing eight years of grotesque mismanagement by George W. Bush and the (until very recently) Republican Congress. Like so many Machiavellian tactics, this one has an infantile simplicity at the heart of it; it's like children pathetically parroting each other's insults. "Say anything and the people will believe it" cynicism has evolved, or devolved, to "if the people believe what the others are saying, say that." Again, a saving grace is that it reeks of desperation upon the slightest examination. All we really need from undecideds this November is for them to think twice.

I was a bit surprised that Paul Krugman defended Obama for going after McCain's inability to remember how many houses he owns. It seems to me that if you don't want the Republicans to castigate you as an intellectual elitist (which Obama is), don't castigate your opponent for being a wealth elitist (which McCain most certainly is). A better point to make - and I'm not sure how to make it in this twisted political landscape - is that it's far better to be an intellectual elitist than a wealth elitist. If you went to Harvard Law, you're an elitist; if you can't remember how many houses you own, you are one too. But which kind is more likely to have the know-how, poise and breadth of diplomatic and other skills necessary to lead the country?

This notion that intellectuals are to be distrusted, this creepy idea that Nixon internalized and that Karl Rove and George W. Bush externalized and perfected, seems to haunt us still - even after its disgraceful consequences in our recent past. It's far more damaging than your run-of-the-mill campaign canard; in fact, it's fascist. It's Bolshevik. And Islamist, too. Totalitarian regimes, and the philosophies that gird them, have long repressed, demonized, ridiculed and even slaughtered the intellectual class. Why? Because intellectuals are the types of people who have the brains and insight to stop evil people, such as Republicans and terrorists, from doing whatever the fuck they want. It's always been easy for regimes to repress the intellectual class, because "regular" people - be they blue-collar Americans, the Russian proletariat or the Iraqi poor - are exceedingly susceptible to class resentment. This is a very easy button for propagandists to push, and once that's taken care of, it's not hard to make the problem "go away" - intellectuals tend not to be militaristic; they don't put up much of a fight. In Spain during the Inquisition, or Russia under Stalin, this meant you could round them up and kill them. In the United States today, you have to dispatch them more subtly - by insinuating that they're "soft on national security." No matter the method, it's the same crime.

Politics is now just a derivatives game. It's not about the moral character of the candidates, nor about their "vision," nor their experience or know-how, and least of all about the tedious "issues." The game is played at deep layers of derivation now: It's not even about the "spin" that a campaign can try to put on news events, polls or the assertions of its opponent (although this is an essential tactic). Nor is it even about the media's coverage of said spin. It's about the media's coverage of the media's coverage of the media's response to the public's response to the media's coverage of the spin.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over whether modern American politics and policy have become "poll-driven." This is not the real worry. (In fact, we'd be a lot better off if the last eight years of executive policy had been determined in accord with public sentiment rather than in spite of it.) The trouble is, the media are poll-driven. They are engaged in a breathless dance with the public, as represented by lucrative demographic sectors, in which they cloyingly proffer "news" that might be most appetizing for the public to consume, whereupon the public more or less eats it up, the media poll the public to evaluate the success of the transaction (ever heard of ratings?), and try even harder next time to please. In other words, the media are doing the work of politicians.

The American people might be stupid, but they're no fools. They'll let someone butter their bread any old day. The media give the public what they want - entertainment, the illusion of authority, the illusion of knowledge, bells and whistles and (ironically) Britney Spears. Barack Obama's umpteen-point health care plan doesn't do that. It might buy you chemo when you're sick, but it won't try to tell you what there is to live for. All consumers aspire, strive and fantasize, and the media's business is to leverage that.

What's most worrisome is that Republicans are experts at this deeply cynical, immoral game. They don't give a fuck whether anything is "true" or not. This was not an aberration of the Bush campaign (no big surprise, as Bush's staff is now on board with McCain). It's ingrained in the cutthroat Republican culture now. They can't fight this campaign on the issues. They fucked us with Iraq, they fucked us on the environment, they've humiliated our country in the eyes of the world, they've dismissed the victims of disaster, they've tortured innumerable innocents, they've encouraged insane and profligate fiscal policies and economic practices, they've installed ass-kissing cronies at every level of government, they can't get their story straight on gays. So now we have: Obama voted against troop funding. Obama wouldn't visit the troops. Obama's playing the race card. Don't you think he's too thin?

It's encouraging that at least historically, McCain has not been completely down with this type of nonsense. (This may be the real reason the Republican "base" is so worried about him.) The pressure might get to be too much; he might have some cataclysmic and very public emotional breakdown over the evil that his minions are doing in his name. But I wouldn't count on it - the sight of the ultimate trophy seems to have rendered him docile and compliant. For that reason, too, Obama might have an advantage: Who's the fucking man in this duel right now? Not McCain. Still, we should worry.

I don't know how Republicans rationalize all this - or if they do. Maybe they see it all as an extension of individualism and free markets - get all you can ruthlessly, give the people what they want, the rest will sort itself out. The real trouble is, it works.

The bigger the lie, as somebody once said.