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The Gong Show of the American Political System
by
Phil Rockstroh
Of Karl Rove, Nixon's Gray Ghost, Pinball Proto-Fascism,
Muscle Car Imperialism,
and the Gong Show of the American Political System
An unpopular war drags on, gas prices rise and rise, as a cloud of scandal
gathers over Washington D.C. At times, it seems as though the 1970's never
ended: it's just Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's Quaalude-laced, faux populist
snake oil caused us to sleep through the 80's and 90's -- and now we're
awakening, hungover, groggy, queasy, still in the midst of that ugly and odious
era. At least -- that's the encrypted message I've been able to decipher, using
my Super-Secret, Decoder Mood Ring, special limited,
Karl Rove edition. George W. Bush and Karl Rove are as much products of the
1970's as were Naugahyde pit group sofas and outbreaks of the Herpes Simplex
Retrovirus at Plato's Retreat. Historically, the world will regard The Bush
Administration as the Dacron Polyester of American presidencies: its legacy will
carry all the beauty, style, and enduring appeal of a powder blue Leisure Suit.
George Bush, himself, will be remembered as the Pet Rock of the American
plutocratic class.
Accordingly, if there is any presiding spirit possessing the current zeitgeist,
it is the gray ghost of Dick Nixon. During the Watergate Era, Karl Rove
apprehended a fact the rest of us pushed out of our minds, due to its troubling
implications: Nixon wasn't brought down because Americans were troubled by
having a sick, corrupt bastard as their president -- we simply found it
embarrassing to have the White House curtains pulled open, thus allowing the the
world to witness Nixon pacing the floors, draped in a dingy bathrobe, muttering
expletives at the yellowing, West Wing wallpaper.
Moreover, Rove perceived that Nixon's paranoia, rage, envy, and resentment
merely mirrored those of the American middle class. Nixon knew from the depths
of his black spleen to the tips of his twitching nerve endings the dark side of
the American character and how the pathologies therein could be exploited for
political gain. In 1972, Rove watched and learned as Nixon was reelected in a
landslide victory. NIxon showed Rove that the American middle and laboring
classes feared and hated those spoiled brat, college campus radicals and uppity
blacks that they saw every night on the evening news more passionately than they
loved their own freedom.
Nixon realized the concept of freedom was (and remains) too vague for many of
us. Where exactly can freedom be located? But, in contrast, just go down to any
shopping mall and you'll find envy; just visit any suburban subdivision and
you'll find fear; and just set yourself down on any stool at any neighborhood
bar and you'll find hatred and resentment.
Nixon's legacy looms large before us, because we Americans have refused to face
a few sad and creepy facts regarding why we were (and remain) possessed of the
need to tell ourselves Watergate and Vietnam were mere aberrations and that
Nixon's resignation from office in August of 1974 purged the demons from our
nation's soul and cleansed us all. Even after Nixon was exiled to San Clemente
and we took up the mantra, "That was that ... Let's move on ... Our long
national nightmare is over", we Americans remained uneasy, desperately clinging
to the sustaining self-deception of our being mere bystanders when the crimes
were committed -- and, as a consequence, we made ourselves willing marks for
political flimflammers (as within a few years time, Ronald Reagan would
exemplify) who peddle the politics of the comfort zone and all its attendant
lies exalting the inviolable grace of our collective obliviousness. Otherwise,
we would be forced to face our complicity in Nixon's crimes; otherwise, a
million Vietnamese corpses would have risen accusingly in our dreams -- as tens
of thousands of Iraqi dead would haunt our sleep tonight.
Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney -- these ruthless men are all Nixon's progeny. They all
got away scott free. In fact, they prospered in the cynical post-Watergate era
and they continue to perpetrate their crimes right up to the present time.
Moreover, it is we, the American public, who bear responsibly: we conjured these
psychopaths with our ceaseless incantations of denial.
Fascism comes to a nation when a group of fanatical outsiders forge alliances,
based on political and economic expediancy, with a corrupt ruling elite -- as
all the while -- a fearful, distracted, denial-ridden public surrenders their
liberty (then, inevitably, their souls) for the illusion of security and a few
material goods. I first began to take note of the acceptance of proto-fascistic
tendencies, in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s -- even in those of
us who were too young to have cast a vote for Nixon. I noticed my fellow
peak-years-of-the-Baby-Boom teenagers were not the progeny of The Woodstock
Nation, as the beleaguered authoritarian types of the era had feared -- instead
we were the floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic. As a
rule, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or
political rebellion -- rather they were utilized as apolitical agents of
anesthetization ... Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions,
and our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM
radio revolution (that was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock) -- our
seeming rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad,
reefer-reeking surface, a pervasive anomie ... the metastasizing of an insidious
indifference -- to a large measure a radical renunciation of anything more
challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our
comfort zones. It was a revelry in adolescent, pop culture narcissism,
punctuated by incessant self-medication, that was mistaken for the excesses of
freedom ... In short, just the sort of numbed-out, muck-headed Sturm und Drang
one should expect from young minds -- bereft of life experience, brainwashed by
an existence inundated by commercial manipulation, and incompetently educated by
the state -- that were larded with Quaaludes and the like, for Christ's sake!
We were primed for proto-fascism by our habitual consumerism and willful
ignorance. As the years trundled on, our customized vans would become Mini Vans
that would morph into SUVs and Humvees. It was all about comfort, the illusion
of control, and insularity, even then. All about, our right to the pursuit of
numbness. We were fledgling Weimar Republicans, clad in faded, frayed
bell-bottom jeans. Beneath the pot reek, clinging to polyester fabric ... the
Muscle Car rumble ... Quaalude spittle ... the tribally-administered
prototypical serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors that were the
precursor of the pharmaceutical fascism to come -- we baby boomers were scions
of the Cold War Military/Industrial/Consumer empire's Than a topic dynamo. Even
then, our corporately usurped Eros had transmuted into an indifference to little
else but our ceaseless attempts to sate our hollow appetites and our perpetual
need for distractions from the tedium and emptiness engendered by our existence
within an economically exploitive, class-stratified system, where one's personal
worth is measured in mammon and identity defined by consumption.
Our sense of entitlement would not have become so grotesque, if our lives had
not been so diminished by the internalization of our bloated empire. Up to the
present day, our Nixonian self-absorption, pettiness, and spite are collectively
magnified into the self-serving economic machinations and genocidal military
designs of our elitist overlords ... The accouterments of imperial power have
grown so large and menacing, in direct proportion to the degree our individual
visions have been rendered so small and corrupt.
This is criteria by which the United States was transformed from a republic,
conceived to be governed by way of democratic discourse, into a shabby-ass,
centerlines archipelago of shopping malls, devoid of a public square, dominated
by a defining narrative of marketing platitudes and the collective, sound-bite
psychosis of corporatist canticles. It all has gotten away from us, because an
internalized mcmansion has supplanted the towering glory of our internal Sequoia
trees; hence, our roots can no longer reach deep down in the dark loam of our
evolutionary legacy; our branches no longer lift towards the sky of possibility.
We are devoid of nourishment and hope, because the internalized empire has clear
cut it all, reducing sequoia forests to toothpicks in order to pick the bits of
charred flesh of those slaughtered in its imperial wars from its teeth.
Furthermore, we shield ourselves from our complicity in the carnage by choosing
to remain fixated by our small concerns and mind-numbing distractions,
rationalizing the corruption of the corporate and political classes is in no way
a reflection of our own self-serving proclivities; we march through our
commodified, daily lives -- Storm Troopers of our venal, corporatized agendas
(all maintained by bunker buster bomb imperialism and planet-looting ecocide);
our thoughts as banal as Eichmann's as he calculated the weight capacity of
death-camp-bound boxcars as, all the while, foreign blood is spilled in our name
and the natural world that sustains us dies.
Yet, more than likely, the readers of this essay are as mortified, heartsick,
and enraged by the actions of the US Government and the corporate overlords who
own and operate it as is this writer -- nevertheless, we carry the empire within
us as deeply as we carry the imprints of our parents' faces. It is too immense
for us not to; it is too pervasive and invasive for us to avoid; it weaned us
and socialized us -- and even when we rebel against it, our actions are
generally restricted within limits set by it. Otherwise, the consequences would
be too crushing for most of us to endure: financial ruin, destitution,
homelessness, prison. There are reasons the neoliberal oligarchs endeavor to
widen the class distinctions in the United States and abroad: The harsher the
economic consequences are for the laboring classes to risk defiance the more
obedient we will grow, particularly when we are incessantly plied with the
synergy of corporate salesmanship and state propaganda -- and everyday we must
negotiate our way through a collective mindscape as hyper-commercialized,
zoning-bereft, and nature-denuded as the endless clip joints of corporate
capitalism spanning the length of the land.
Yes, the empire is as noisy, distracting, and meaningless as a vintage 1970s
pinball machine ... as smart and self-aware as a baby boomer, suburban pothead
teenager, who, as the years have passed, has transformed into a self-absorbed
Starbuck's Latte-slurping, SSRI-popping consumer zombie, afflicted by a mindless
appetite begot by a inner desolation that threatens to devour the resources of
the entire planet in the manner he devoured the food from his mother's pantry
when he had a bad case of the reefer munches in the 1970s.
Though the ensuing decades, we've continued to deceive ourselves into believing
the corruption and embarrassments of the 1970's -- from the crimes of Watergate
to the inanities of The Gong Show (the reality TV of the times) -- had nothing
to do with us. As a consequence, it comes down to this: we didn't learn a damn
thing during 70's; therefore, we've condemned ourselves to relive it.
Yes, it is high time to strike the gong for Karl Rove and his pathetic, dancing,
feces-flinging pet monkey act that is presently stinking up the stage of The
Gong Show of the American political system. But next, we should turn off the TV,
walk to the closest mirror, look ourselves in the eye, and repeat the risible
(as well as demonstrably false) phrase, "I am not a crook," -- and then, at long
last, face the Richard Milhouse Nixon within, and thereby come to grips with the
reason we Americans are, at present, as popular and respected worldwide as
Richard Nixon was in the Summer of 1974.
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