Images of my candidate keep me up at night: The droning, turgid voice. He’s begun to do this old man thing with his tongue, kind of foppishly licking his muscle-less lips every few seconds or so. I got so worried I called my good friend Paul Bunyan. This is what he told me:

How lame is Kerry really? There are 2 sides to this. The real question is what Kerry would actually do if elected, but first we have to deal with Kerry as a candidate, and the question of how much of a Gore/Dukakis passive temporizing Asperger’s syndrome dweeb he is. The indications so far are not good. It is very confusing to me that he can make the same mistakes as Gore just 4 years later. I guess it’s an instinct to lie about little things that is ingrained and uncontrollable. A few months ago he was skiing and reporters saw him fall on the slopes (a secret service guy had blundered into his path). When a nytimes reporter asked him about it, he snapped “I don’t fall down.” According to the reporter, he then “used an expletive to describe the agent who ‘knocked me over.'”The reporter crafted a brutally contemptuous profile of Kerry around this quote, a real assassination job. Here’s how it begins:

“John Kerry was in the air, approaching the Continental Divide, and the candidate often ridiculed as straddling both sides of political divides was wrestling with the big matter at hand.

Should he ski, or snowboard? Or maybe both? He gave no clue where he stood. But that was Wednesday night.

A longtime adviser recently suggested that there were two John Kerrys: “indoor John and outdoor John” — one who agonizes over decisions, and another who acts boldly on them.

It was outdoor John, decidedly so, who emerged from an armored S.U.V. at the foot of Bald Mountain here on Thursday morning, outfitted in blue ski gear and swigging from a bottle of vitamin-fortified water. From the rear of the vehicle he pulled a weathered old snowboard, and for most of the day proceeded to zigzag down what locals affectionately call Mount Baldy.” (nytimes 3-19-04)

The guy is being mocked for having a car, for drinking water, and for being able to both snowboard and ski, and the entire piece is like that, going on to mix in a few mentions of his supposedly embarassing flip-flops on policy along with the gratuitous ridicule. The question is how much of this is Kerry’s fault, or to put it another way–is there anybody as good or better than he (president-wise) who would fare any better (candidate-wise)? If he really did profanely insult the bodyguard, then he really is autistic and it’s going to catch up with him this summer in some hideous way, but the incident is uncorroborated and comes from a reporter who clearly holds a venomous hatred for him, so I’m suspending belief on that. But it doesn’t really matter what exactly happened because, either way, Kerry has somehow managed to make one of the key campaign reporters loathe him on a visceral level. Inspiring the hatred of reporters is exactly what Gore did, while Bush seduced them like Phineas the cool boarding school jock (A Separate Peace reference). Most reporters hated Bush’s ideas, but it was easy for them to forget about that because he never talked–or probably even thought–about anything of substance. He was just was fun, while Gore was a bore and a scold. Clinton was (almost) as much of a hairsplitting, risk-averse, fence-straddler as Gore and Kerry, but he dazzled the press corps, and got away with it. Now of course Bush has the press corps trained like dogs. There was a question today in his minute and a half “press conference” after his testimony before the 9/11 commission that went in effect like this: “Mr. President, some of your critics–and I know they are desperate and insane–have suggested that you have insisted on giving your testimony in concert with Mr. Cheney in order to–forgive me Mr. President–in order to “get your stories straight,” and also because, as these obviously crazy people might say, you are incapable of answering the commission’s questions without his assisstance. Please forgive me for I only ask this question to give you an opportunity to put an end to this treasonous madness.” (find a transcript and I think you will find my paraphrase captures the basic character of the question.) Bush’s answer was something to see–he never even remotely adressed the question (by the way, how can somebody who only speaks in scripted talking points spend so much time fumbling for words?). There was no follow-up (to see a follow-up question from the press, try the BBC or, in this country, travel backward in time). But Jesus Christ, couldn’t Kerry grab some press by saying something or other? People like us have been saying this a lot lately. And it’s pretty much inexplicable because there’s so much to say. Four years ago we were complaining in the same way about Gore, but it was kind of abstraction–say something, anything, please. But right now the stuff to talk about is sitting right there staring everybody in the world in the face, a mountain of lies, failure, and corruption. Bush lied about the WMD (and that’s why I, Kerry, voted for the war authorization). He is lying about being focussed on terrorism prior to 9-11-01, and in fact ramped down Clinton’s anti-terror protocols. He was on vacation while Osama’s people planned the attacks, and ignored all warnings in August ’01. He threw out all the people trying to plan for post-war Iraq, and what is happening there now is a direct consequence of his ideological blindness and incompetence. He lied about a thousand small things from the Baghdad thanksgiving turkey, to the “mission accomplished” backdrop, to the fake Christmas poem. Plus the Halliburton and Enron scandals, the Hitlerian madness of Guantanomo bay and the Yee debacle, theft from the 9/11 fund, rolling over on Pakistan and N. Korean nukes, and getting played by the Saudis. Sorry for reiterating this stuff, so I won’t mention the environmental policy giveaways to the enregy companies and Total Information Awareness. How can Kerry give a speech, anywhere at any time that doesn’t include the phrase Total Information Awareness? I mean they gave this stuff to him.Okay, whatever, let’s say he gets elected, which stilll could happen despite his best efforts because the sock monkey president is not Reagan, he really is an uncomfortable and idiotic figure.Well, I think people get their hopes too high. Was Adlai Stevenson or Eugene McCarthy or McGovern or Ralph Nader ever president? What do you want from a president? What are you angry about that Clinton signed while dealing with republican majorities?All I want is a president who is not an insane person. Is that too much to ask? I really don’t care that much about politics–except when Hitler tries to come to power, which is what is happening now. There is nothing cynical about “anybody but Bush.” This isn’t some kind of sell-out or lack of principle. We want to just get back to normal, where an arrested person has right to council and to state his case–unlike that poor bastard Padilla–and America doesn’t start “preemptive” wars.I don’t care if Kerry is FDR or LBJ or WJC or something lesser. He won’t be able to do anything anyway, given that at least the house will be against him. We just need a president who is not thinking about some confused vision of the 1000-year Reich combined with the Rapture so that we can go back to doing whatever it is we do.

“Nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens”–GW Bush

And that is why I am having a hard time watching John Kerry.

The hand gestures. Jeez, that alone.

The turns of phrase. How many times can you hear: “and I tell you this…and I say this…”?

Then there’s all this recent questionable stuff:

The SUV claim

The $1,000 haircut

The medals stuff

The botoxy looks-like-hell un-American wife. I don’t know what drugs she’s been doing most of her life, but she has lived pretty hard. She ain’t no Laura Bush.

But the real critique is that he won’t say:

George Bush represents a cabal of powerful moneyed interests that had long-planned to invade Iraq. Whether or not he knew more than he’s telling us, or should have known more than he did, about 9-11, he used it to pursue a policy that was already in place, and that he had not been honest with the American people about. And, due to his and his team’s arrogance, he failed to appreciate how crucial an international coalition was to success. Or worse, he was so greedy about making sure all the spoils that came from controlling the region would benefit his friends that he, accidentally or on purpose, failed to acknowledge what was required to be successful. The threat represented by 9-11 is not something the US can militarize our way out of. Terrorism comes from the hearts and minds of people who feel sufficiently mistreated that they see it as the only option. When 9-11 happened, we had the world on our side. Indeed, the US never had the sympathies and support of the world as we did after that incident. And yet, in only 2 and a half years, we have sufficiently alienated the world to the point that we have never been so hated, or so unsafe from terrorism. I don’t know if George Bush is evil, or an idiot, but he is bad for America, and we have got to elect somebody else President in 7 months. I will…

Anyways, that’s kind of what Dean was saying, what Kucinich and Brown and Sharpton of course said, what Lieberman, Gore, Gephardt and Edwards would never say, and what would need to be said to win. But it will never be said, and therefore we will not win.

~ Axil

My good buddy Paul Bunyan wrote me today. Here’s what he said:

The president has entirely ceded his presidency to his campaign manager and PR people. Bush may be the first president in history who governs without personally holding any ideal whatsoever other than the desire to be elected a second time. Unfortunately, the brand identity that this guy’s advisors have chosen for him is as the Avatar of Christian Vengeance. Somewhere pretty early in the planning of the ad campaign, somebody figured out that a product of this type would have an immense advantage over its competitors so long as both were positioned in a context of global war. They worked it out and it was as pretty as can be. As long as war continues, and American soldiers are at risk, the moo-cow people will feel a vague, primal disturbance, and will huddle around their leader. The effect is stronger if the soldiers are winning, but it is still pretty strong even if they are losing, and with Vietnam it took more than 8 years before people got tired of being patriotic for something that was almost as stupid as the Iraq war. But Karl Rove had also learned a lesson from the first gulf war. Bush’s dad had gone to war in the Middle East almost 2 years before the election, and he made the mistake (the political mistake, as we know in retrospect) of prosecuting his war with almost perfect success. He did this by leaving the war-planning up to the military, who put together what was probably the most perfectly realized execution of a “combined arms” military plan in the history of the world, and utterly destroyed or demoralized their opponent in a matter of days. The Nazis (who invented this style of warfare, which they called “blitzkrieg,” would have been proud). Like younger George, older George enjoyed 80% approval ratings for many months. But unlike younger George, older George was no longer at war when election season rolled around.You know, Bush’s war begins to make sense if you look at it that way. The dismissal of Jay Garner for Paul Bremer. The exclusion of the military intelligence study-group who wrote the briefing on post-war Iraq (I have the details on this somewhere. The head of it has talked to the press. Their paper, which predicted pretty much every nasty thing that has happened in Iraq that has come as a “surprise,” was excluded from CPA briefings and the personnel were all rejected for Iraq duty, despite their special knowledge). The refusal to guard cultural treasures, to police the cities, to talk to the people. The attack on Fallujah. I couldn’t figure it out–are they evil or stupid?The answer is they’re evil, but in this special way. It’s not, as I imagined (I couldn’t think of anything else) that they are trying to bring the world to destruction to hasten the coming of Jesus. It’s something much more simple, believable and clearly motivated. And there is no need for any sort of widespread conspiracy. They (Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) want to get reelected, and so they want the war to drag on for a while–they can’t afford to succeed. And so they have decided to do everything in a manner opposite to whatever their military people advise. If the generals say we need more troops, we bring in less. If they say we need another week of mobilization before starting the war, we go in a week early and our supply lines are shot to hell. If they have a program for winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace, we make sure that is not implemented. But politically, it works. There is no downside, short-term. It’s a win-win. It really seems insurmountable, thus the panic at the village voice. But here’s the possible hope. Everything that took 8 years in the 1960s takes 1 year now. The people are more brainwashed than ever, but they are also more malleable than ever–It’s not a brainwashing that runs deep. And they have also never encountered this level of incompetence and lies, and some of it will leak through.

# # #

I indeed I agreed with Paul. For to be so low as to be below the requirement to expose this is very low indeed. It’s a frightening concept to contemplate how deeply one must need to draw on the powers of banality to consistently squish oneself so as to remain always below this requirement. Even the slightest slip of the tongue towards reality or honesty would raise the profile of the challenger to visibility, and sheer visibility, any visibility, would shatter the falsity of the Antichrist (President). But Kerry cannot do it, or, rather, the demon driving the earth towards its seemingly certain destruction is so firmly in charge that the slippery droolings constantly emanating from his mouth – the only man in a position to replace the devil – grease his already forlorn carcass with the musky elusiveness of all the losers that have led up to him. It’s a kind of willful lying, a disease of the democrats, a need for daddy that is so sad, so sick in its lack of conviction and understanding of pride, so the same in Mondale and Muskie and Dukakis and Hart and Gore, that we are due for being treated to its burnt butterscotch sweetness one more time. I want to believe, but I can’t make stone soup again.

So people (yeah, mostly the media but now people too) are saying Howard Dean melted down. Maybe so. Here’s what it sounded like: http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2004/01/20/20040120_060803_dean.mp3.

But how bad is that? Anyways, it got twisted into headlines like: DISASTER FOR DEAN IN IOWA – NY Post, or: Dean Goes Nuts – Drudge Report. I agree that this is bad. But is it Muskie crying in the snow about his wife? Hart with a blonde in a mini-skirt on his lap? Dukakis in a tank? No way!

What I think (or wish) is that he had the balls to spin it the other way, and say: “You know, we need somebody willing to be a real human being…” and do a whole hoe down, shindig, battle cry thing with it. Co-opt the “I’m mad as hell…” contengent. But given that this year only a military man can win, I’m afraid this Angry Clinton doesn’t stand a chance. Re his gutterance and the crowd he delivered it to, he said: “I thought they deserved everything I could give them.” That’s lame. And the next day, a newly quieted-down Dean said:”Those of you who came here intending to be lifted to your feet by a lot of red-meat rhetoric will be a little disappointed,” he told supporters. That’s really lame. It’s playing to the negative.

He’s so similar to George Bush in this weird way of being nasty. He lots of times says to the press: “I’m not going to play that game” He chastises the press the same way George does. He don’t get it. We want LOVE! We want that nice, warm, kindly Reagan/Clinton thing. Especially now that we’re back to being scared. That’s what can beat George. But mainly, this is the time to be super cool, for the blue flame cool-medium. I hope he can do it.

But what can Howard Dean do to recover from this debacle? What I would do is a Checkers-like big media play, while everybody’s still paying attention. I think it’s his last chance. I would buy a half-hour of national TV time and give a speech about what the heck happened. What speech, you ask?

This one:”My fellow Americans. I’m Howard Dean, and I’ve chosen this unique way to come before you because America is in deep trouble, and now I’m in deep trouble. I decided to just stop, and deal with this issue right now, take back control of the situation, and reframe the debate about what’s really at stake.There are so many special interests taking over this country, we’re losing our country. The idea that a real person, a Doctor no less, could run for President against all the giant corporations and big money and special interests and corrupt lobbyists that run our society and our government, and get as far as I have, is really unbelievable. In a way, I don’t believe it. If you’re watching me right now, it’s because you believe, like I do, that we’re about to go off the rails here.

The terror isn’t terrorism, it’s the way we’re dealing with it that’s terrifying. We’re bullying the world, and at home we’re bullied by smaller and smaller concentrations of ever-more powerful interests that don’t have our interests at heart. What we need is a real human being with a brain and a heart and the strength and the will to get out there and speak the truth. Without tons of handlers, without a marketing committee that decides what dog food the people will eat– the classic American individual, willing to take on the system. But let me tell you, because now I’m learning it, there’s a lot of risks when you freestyle. We were the front runner, but now it’s a new ballgame.

We have to regroup, rethink, and redeploy. Let me then, after these very first election results for the 2004 Presidency, explain why I fell 12 points in 6 days and came in third in Iowa. There are a lot of powerful and entrenched interests in this country, and they come from the left as well as the right. I, however, come from me. And we haven’t had a president that’s just been a person since, well, probably Harry Truman. I speak not just for the common man, I speak for everyman and everywoman. To turn a phrase, I am the silent majority, and I made it on individuals realizing they are in that majority and want it to take back this country.

I really don’t have any powerful lobbyists backing me. I have a lot of little people like me who see themselves in me and want me to make it. Maybe you thought you were one of them. I’d like to convince you you still are. Now, let’s face it. The fact that I call it as I see it, and the fact that I want to take this country back, _is_ a little scary to people. But they can’t say: Gee, this guy is scary because he speaks the truth in an unabashed way, doesn’t have any powerful interests to serve, and would really clean house if he got in office. Now, they can say: this guy is scary because he’s …oooh!….angry! Well, let’s just address this head on. Yes, of course I’m angry.

I’m angry that we waste so many of our precious resources, that we squander our wealth on the military and bloated pork-barrel business deals and corrupt politicians. I’m angry that we haven’t lived up to the America that I know we can be. That we are being hoodwinked and led down the garden path to a totally non-sustainable vision of the USA. I am so angry that our children our dying, that we’re destroying our environment, that our poor are getting poorer, that people don’t seem to care, that the media doesn’t seem to be helping, that people are losing control of their lives.

But hey, people, don’t forget: I decided _not_ to get mad. I decided to get even. I decided to do something about it. I decided to actually run for President of the United States. Me! Just a guy. Right here before you. Running for President. How ironic that the Bushies as well as some of my fellow Democrats are calling me angry, as if I would do some bone headed thing like let my anger get the best of me by, um…let’s see…, invading Iraq? Now that’s the unthinking act of an angry man. I may express myself using words that are emphatic, yes.

But I know the difference between raising my voice and raising the terror alert to orange as a way to scare the American people. So I make no apologies for my anger, for my emphatic style, for jumping up and down or acting like a football coach or what have you. This isn’t France or Germany or England. This is America. And America is not exactly an all upper crust polite society. We cheer here! We accept all kinds here. Especially just plain folks who ride in pickup trucks, go to Football Games, and yell and cheer. Heck, we invented cheerleading in this country. I’m proud of it. I may do it again. I like getting fired up. I like caring. I am me.

It’s amazing I’ve gotten as far as I have by being me. And my value proposition to the American people is this: if you elect me, you will have, for the first time in 50 years, with all due respect to every president during that time, a real guy running the country. Like I said: Just some guy. If you’ll take me back into your hearts, I’ll be the first Doctor to run the country. That’s right: I chose to be a doctor, because I love people. I want to heal people. And now I want to heal this country.

We all know it: America is going insane, and it’s time for there to be a doctor in the house. America, I’m a doctor, and I’m here to help you get better. I am tapping in to, as I said earlier, what I think is the great silent majority of Americans who are neither this nor that, but just plain folks that have had it up to here with lies and bureaucracy and being manipulated and being put on hold for longer and longer as corporations rack up higher and higher profits. I will be a president that is not a part of that system.

I love these other guys I’m running against, but they are all tangled up in it. With me, what you see is what you get. So no wonder they’re all trying to stop me. Honestly, they are all taking shots at me, from all sides. And well they should. Cuz if I win, if you put me in office, I will blow their minds. I will show that when you cut out the fat, when you clear out the deadwood, when you fire the criminals, when all you care about is getting things done for the American people, without paying off some contemptable group of greedheads that bankrolled you in the first place, we can work about half as hard and still get the same results.

We don’t have to work like mad. We don’t have to be killing ourselves. It’s not healthy. We can have a vacation. We can have a life. We can have our families back. We can have our safety back. We can have America back. It just takes a little honesty emanating from the top. And that, my friends, is just about all I’ve got to offer. Thank You, God Bless You, and God Bless America.”

On the 9th of January, Presidential Candidate Clark declared that if he were President 9/11 would never have happened and if he wins this election, another 9/11 will not happen. He guaranteed it.

Here’s one of the stories: http://www.detnews.com/2004/politics/0401/11/politics-31662.htm.

It was really something, and when I shared the general’s claims with my good friend Paul Bunyan, he became incensed at the irresponsibility of the quote. I wrote him and asked: What do you think?

Starting directly below is what he wrote back to me, and then me to him, on down to our conclusions about what taking a position such as this might mean. So unlike normal email threads, this one is stacked so you can read it top to bottom.

——————————————————————————–

From: Paul Bunyan

Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 2:17 PM

To: Uncle Sam

Subject: Re: FW: pull over buddy

I am so sad, so angry, so disappointed…so really, really alarmed… by the stupidity of these guys who want to pretend to run this country. It’s weird that almost everyone seems to agree that the way to win an election to speak completely irresponsibly.

Not only is guaranteeing security either total bullshit or a promise of a police state (and even then still bullshit), but it’s also just a really bad thing to say, a bad thread to launch, a bad meme to propogate. ANd not only that, it’s more of this kind of shit that all the Dems are doing that may or may help them win a few primary votes, but which completely distorts and trashes the political discourse of the party as a whole, and hurts everbody’s chances in the general elec.

–Paul Bunyan

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Yeah the clark thing is so weird. I have a buddy who is working for him. Clark is COOL in the “cool media” — you have to be this way — sort of way. He’s a Modern TV Guy. A CNN guy. And from my media studies, those are the folks who can win. The question for me is the degree to which he’s a person of conviction, of caring, of his own mind. He’s a little too cute alright, and maybe up against George that would stand out more.However.I love the quote. Insofar as words are what they are, which is a simulacrum of what is truly possible, I like what he said. They can’t hurt us. I’ve been wanting somebody to say this for a long time. In the language of what passes for American politics, it’s fucking awesome. He’s just saying no. Do you kind of see my angle?~ Uncle Sam

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At 07:54 PM 1/9/2004, Paul Bunyan wrote:

Not any. 1) You can’t ever say this can’t happen. 2) To say 9/11 was Bush’s fault is to criticize him for the wrong things. Even if Bush did the thing (which is not true), or even passively allowed it for political reasons (still not true but at least possible), it’s the wrong thing to criticize him for. What clark is essentially saying is I would have been more facist than he. WHich is the wrong way to go.

The democratic thing is as you said, is about, we make happen more money, more sex, more happiness. The victory path is not to say, yeah I could beat those evildoers better. Its to say, we didn’t have these evildoers at all when we were president. let’s get back to living good life and stop focusing on all this negative shit. I think every time we go to orange alert or some fucking embarassing ridiculous shit like that and nothing happens, 500,00 votes shift over to the dem side. Only thing is, one more terrorist attack on U.S. soil under any conditions and 5 million votes shift over the other way.

Clark can say it doesn’t matter, he can say we will conquer it by other means, he can say it’s bushes fault even, but he can’t say I can prevent such things. It’s just not true and it’s a false hope and phony and riding for a fall. A football team can guarantee a victory, but no one can guarantee “security” which does not exist.

–Paul Bunyan

——————————————————————————–

From: Paul Bunyan

Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004

9:54 PM

To: Uncle Sam

Subject: RE: FW: pull over buddy/incompetence fear and love

Uncle Sam wrote: I may be in the minority, but I can’t discount that Bush & Co. ignored certain information for political reasons. You really don’t believe that? To whatever extent that means he “did” it I will leave for minds more philosophical than mind to determine. Paul Bunyan replied: Nope. I stick to my dogma. Incompetence explains nearly everything. Fear and love fight it out for what’s left. I think the level at which they passively have responsibility exists, but at a few removes.

It’s like, should we take the Hart/Rudman study seriously?–and then the answer is no, and there’s a semi-unconscious check mark in a mental box that says, kick this out cause it’s a win-win, either there is no threat or if there is, it’s good for us. But I don’t think there was any specific ignoring of intelligence specific to the WTC, for example. And then of course there’s the fact that what Hart/Rudman expected (I’m guessing) was 200 dead in a first domestic incident, not 3000.

Even though some people did see the idea of the jet plane attack, still it would have been 3 figures dead, and not 4, even at the WTC if not for the structural collapse, and I don’t think anybody took it that far. So if that’s the kind of collusion you mean, then o.k.“I could have stopped it. If I am president it won’t happen.” Of course it’s not criticizing him for the right things. It’s an absurd thing, for sure, for Clark to say.

But we aren’t arguing about the comments’ trueness, or how well it reflects on the candidate. All that has nothing to do with the fact that I love the quote as one of the greatest American quotes I have ever heard. Let me say this about that. I think in these times we got to get our love where we find it. If you give me Tyson I’ll give you Clark. “I could have stopped it. If I am president it won’t happen.” It’s so crazy, so wonderfully crazy, so fucking smart about distilling what kind of discourse would count for distinguishing itself from the drumbeat we’re getting inundated with. It is also something I love, which is swinging for the fences. It’s the first thing that shows me this guy wants to win. I like that. And it’s obviously what the politicos sitting in the meeting must have been saying to one another.

Here, I’ll give it a whirl: “Well, dammit, the only thing that’s going to beat Bush is if we have him say: ‘If I am president I will protect you. I won’t use fear as a tool. I know what I’m doing. I’ll fix it. I know how to listen to intelligence. I honestly think if I was in charge I would have figured it out better than these idiots did. I would have stopped it. So vote for me, and if I win, I promise we won’t be living in that environment where we’re terrified all the time. We’re better than that.’”And then they just hit upon it. Fuck it, he’s just gotta go out there and say it. It’s either going to sink him or it will elevate him, but it will show that we simply won’t have it. It’s so amazingly American. Just say no.

No, we’re not living in Bush’s world.O.K., you had to really hammer away at me, but I can see now the beauty of Clark’s statement. Especially because the second part of it is actually True. The fact is that things will happen–heck, even Timothy McVeigh happened, and so did ted bundy even and all that. The subtext of all, all, all is the NY Nuke, and it either will or won’t happen. But the team doesn’t need to know the details, they need the Tao (what Clark calls the “right way”), and the Tao relevant to this issue is the mode of living in which we will be o.k. if it doesn’t happen, and, more importantly, will even be o.k. if it does happen. And this is possible, as painful as it is even to think about, which is why the team doesn’t need to know about it.

But Bush is giving us a fragile world in which the blow will finish us, he’s giving us a world of preemptive war and religious hatred, whereas there is another world which Clark expresses just about right: “there is nothing that can hurt us if we stay united and move together and have a vision for moving to the future the right way.”Bush is using the insane fear of terror to increase his hold on power. duh. That is the sick reality of the day. You must see that. I think, dammit, I know, every time we go on agent orange alert 500K votes go to the _republican side_. My point is/was this. I agree, of course, the very idea even of creating terror-alerts and then implementing them certainly creates republicans and has been already described by some weird combination of Orwell and Huxley.

But what I was talking about is that these guys, both in Iraq and domestically are paying somewhat slightly for their dogmatism, in the slight corrective of nature that is the tiny and possibly insignificant edge that truth has, by not getting the facts right, even though they’ve got the propaganda game iced. They are crying wolf, cause they really don;t know anything, cause their intellingece sucks, and are just rolling the dice by calling these alert conditions. The last time they rang the alarm before this one–I think it was the 2002 aniversary of 9/11–nothing at all happened, and a NYTimes piece many months later said that sources inside that process said that they had been totally played by a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. No I am not assuming that people know that, but I am assuming that people noticed that the alarm rang for no fucking reason, and that it was rung again lat month in the same way.

Yes, Bush’s guys are smart, and they learned form the last time and realized that this time they had to create fake events, like the cordoning of a number of flights, and yes, I know this probably worked to some degree, i.e. that most people are not aware that all of the security shit that happened was total bullshit, but I still think that even pure TV-watchers can tally it up: 2 Orange ALerts, no atacks and no arrests related to those alerts. If the sock-monkey declared his romper-room Condition Orange and then, subsequently, anything, terrorist-wise, actually happened, or if there were even any significant news-story (even of jessica lynch like fabricatedness) of some prevention of anything, then yes, I agree, many republicans would be created.

But my point was that they have blown it so far. Which I have to say is puzzling, and very encouraging in what it says about how deep the resources of Evil are. The whole thing about terroism is that it is the ultimate of the practical, and Bush and Sharon are simultaneously its “enemies” and its indispensible allies. Anything that Bush does to stay in power, and any perception of there being a need for a man like him to combat terror, are things that any self-respecting “Al-Qaeda” would want to support with everything it’s got. The fact that Macy’s wasn’t blown up (not even a little bit) on christmas leads me to believe simply that they could not do it, because reenforcing Bush’s claim that the Orange COndition actually meant anything would do everything they want to do.

Again I see it as incompetence on both sides. Bush rolled the dice. Call the alert, and lose a little if nothing happens, gain a whole lot if it does. It’s like going for it on fourth down on the opponent’s 30. But still, he didn’t get the first down, and I insist that this erodes his credibility. And again, my point was that this is an incremental erosion–one single terror attack of large magnitude on our soil before the election and all this is washed away. One negative point for calling an alert and having nothing terroristic happen. 100 positive points for having anything happen at any time before the election, no matter what the alert status, and it wipes away all the incremental shit.

Yes, there’s a backlash, but let’s first assent to raw brute force reality. Most people are just plain folks and this shit sounds scary! Certainly the whole Hitlerian terror alert and homeland defense thing works. I’m only talking about the little chinks in its armor.So on the level of meaning where anybody would know that making a claim like that is asinine, I say to those people that cancels out with the sheer audacity of the statement, and how deeply it represents congealed denial, wish fulfillment and the American dream. So you can’t ding it for being wrong. He gets a get out of jail free card on being factually wrong or stating the impossible because he fucking said it, said the thing everybody, deep in their bones, was longing to hear (that’s why you’re reacting to it so strongly the other way).

Yeah. And he gets it because any moron knows that’s impossible, so then, what’s he really saying? You have to get past your purist upsetness that someone would say such a thing. Because it’s clear that it’s unenforceable. But again, that’s depending on how you look at it. Either way though, that’s done with. What’s left is the sense that there’s a guy willing to say he’s going to change reality. Reagan kind of did it with the hostages, and to such a dramatic extent that that apparent reality vanished the day he took office.

And of course the amazing thing is the historical fact that he negotiated with the Iranians prior to the election–who had been going to release the hostages in the fall–promising them stuff (arms I think) to wait until he was in. You know this stuff already right? But the thing remains that he was a guy who made it work as you say. It was like the malaise was over. Most of America needs a strong, kind, warm looking president that will make it all OK. And you can’t hate people for wanting that. And you can’t hate it when somebody tries to give it to ‘em. Of course that’s not what we ultimately want. We want real consciousness.

But I promise you that the hope (and hope, I claim, is the remainder of that equation) represented, though in a very twisted way, in that home run swing, is inextricably between our present state of collective unconsciousness and denial and true consciousness: actually being aware and strong enough to live in the real world. I know. ANd I know you can’t tell the team “well these guys might kill us all along with your wives and babies, but still we might win…” But my point is, it freaks me out. It still seems like you promise them that the other team won’t even get a first down and you are riding for a fall..cause they are going to get that first down and then what do you say?–Paul Bunyan- Uncle Sam

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At 02:38 PM 1/9/2004, you wrote:

Uncle Sam wrote today to his buddy Paul Bunyan:I think we’re agreeing that the overkill of pushing the alarm has a backlash effect. All I’m saying is that’s in the context of the initial effect of creating the alarm reality to begin with. So 5 million people switched to being very afraid, i.e., Republicans, and sure, OK, sum total of both of the Crying Wolfs, I’ll give you 500,000. Except I think my 5 million is low.OK, on to your last and final question. Everybody knows the best way to make something happen is to visualize it.

Or to stop something is to visualize it not happening. So his quote is crucial to at least the chance that collectively we could have some impact on what it might be possible for terrorists to do. More than that, it’s deeply populistic. It’s even to the point of countenancing a militia, the idea that the government is the people, that we can be a society that works together to protect itself. So the 1st half of the answer is that what’s established if he wins is something of that reality. Then the 2nd half, and what happens if and when a bad thing happens is that the spirit of how we rally is different, because no one will be mad at him for letting us down. All that will be left is the residual goodheartedness. We’re a team is the way it’s gotta be. No matter what.

– Uncle Sam