If
Santorum’s downfall was his inability to back up his positions with solid plans
of action, I knew that I could no longer go about my days with the grime of
spin and bull oozing from my mouth. He
(meaning Santorum) is a disingenuous fool and I can’t wait to have a huge
shindig for when he’s finally dropped out of the race.
He only had a chance in Iowa because it’s a bunch of Bible thumping
Evangelical morons out there who climax at the mention of keeping “The Big Man
Upstairs” in government. He knew that, but refused to let it show. Dishonesty will be the death of this Godforsaken
Empire if it hasn’t already.
After
dinner,
we retired to the Hotel in Salem to watch the debate. What I saw wasn’t a debate though. What I watched was a vicious dogfight on
American ideals that even Michael Vick wouldn’t have been able to orchestrate. Aside from one of the announcers having a
comically deep voice , all of the
candidates let their conservative colors fly.
I have no problem with conservatives, however,
I’m not a particular fan of the mainstream Republican take on conservativism
and I’m not afraid to show it. Even Ron
Paul stood there mindlessly humping a dilapidated cardboard cutout of Ronald
Reagan, he was just more discrete in his desires; but not in the message. Everywhere you looked the words dancing off
the lips of the candidates were the same as the next one and they hit the
audience with such explosive intensity that it felt like bombs detonating in
the Tora Bora morning:
“LIVE
WITHIN OUR MEANS!”
BOOM!
“REAGAN
CONSERVATIVE”
“SMALLER GOVERNMENT”
BABANG!
“FAITH”
“FAMILY!”
“TRADITIONAL
VALUES”
KRAKOW!
“CONSTITUTION!”
POW!
“FREEDOM!”
BANG BANG BANG! My head was reeling back and
forth trying to make some semblance of sense from the idiocy I was
watching. No one had any plans of
action! With all the bullets people were dodging, it was like watching a Looney Toons cartoon of a Western shootout. It was a moving Picasso
caricature of true political reason. I
couldn’t believe my eyes! I almost turned it off out of pure disgust. As I lay there ill with depression over the
state of modern American politics, I felt a pang in my gut that ironically told
me everything would be okay. The world
of politics is a sick one, folks: wicked to the bone and cynical to the core. I felt comfort in my own disgust because I then remembered that the next day we’d be
seeing the ring leader of the mad circus.
His chiseled jawbone and perfectly parted slick hair gleamed in the
stage lighting. He looked like a
president I could hate. If he got
elected I’d easily stay employed writing columns about his screw ups. My morbid, selfish desires for my own career
came over me and I was immediately invigorated no matter how wrong it might
have been.
Zero Hour, 9 AM. The words sting me as I type this out because it’s drawing closer. Eh, screw it, I’ve never had much use for sleep anyway, life’s too exciting for sleep! Think of everything you waste when you don’t dig it all and let it overtake you. People don’t get wrapped up in anything anymore, or at least they don’t allow themselves to get wrapped up in the right things. The Almighty THEY say that my generation is skeptical and hardworking, which may be true but I refuse to agree. I finally figured out why I will never agree with the Almighty THEY (a.k.a. whoever sits upon that gilded throne in some corporate high rise in Midtown or Hollywood) on Sunday after seeing that badly animated manikin Mitt Romney and Ye Ole Crazy Grandpaw Paul.
The bus was tired that morning. I got up at 5:47 AM to work out, shower, and
explore the local scene. I got an
amazing breakfast at Sammy J’s on the main stretch in Salem and was alive as hell. I switched on “Moanin’” by the
Great Mingus and jumped around the bus.
I couldn’t understand why people were tired and then it hit me like
pepper spray at an Occupy rally: they weren't tired, they were sad.
Let’s face it, folks. Times are shittier than they’ve been in a
while, plain and simple. We’ve yet to find our way out of
the bloody ruins of the Twin Towers and I don’t think we ever will. Fear still governs us with an Iron Gavel no
matter whose hands hold it; the economy’s been down the shitter since the dawn
of time, we’ve gotten stupider and proud of it, there’s endless war, we’re prey
to every source of authority that’s out there and we feel weak underneath it
all. We’re waiting for a knight in shining armor to carry away this ravaged damsel in distress of a country. Yet we feel and perhaps KNOW deep down that we’re
not gonna get that brave knight because we thought people like Barack Obama would be one.
Nope, we know we’re gonna end up with some sorry loser playing
Russian Roulette with a Luger pistol he fashioned out of our broken
economy and need for distractions.
Between the media who keeps an I.V. ready with a boredom killing serum
on tap, a government who gives more of a damn about our Tweets and Facebook
statuses than our actual societal problems, and corporations and banks that
play jump rope with our bank accounts, it’s a wonder to me that we don’t have a
nationwide repeat of Jonestown. After
watching the pitiful performance of each candidate, regardless of what the news
networks say, my classmates and professors were broken down. There’s only so much disappointment we can
take before the weight of it all gives us worse scoliosis than Quasi Modo.
In lieu of all this, we kept our spirits up
a little bit by keeping our minds off politics or only cracking the occasional
political joke. The best remedy for
political sickness is a shot of something strong and a huge whopping dose of
anything else you can get your hands on. We opted for movies,
which became a philosophical analysis of films which eventually led back to
politics. We were dogs chasing our own tails
and tragically always catching them. I
didn’t mind though. Unlike my pals and
colleagues I believe that we can all find a nice rock to sleep under in dangerous amounts of cynicism, as long as it doesn’t morph into
pessimism. My friends felt cheated by
Obama (I got over that feeling 6 months into his sad excuse of a presidency) so
they were looking to Republicans to find someone to root for. Today was their shot because we were seeing
the two main frontrunners.
First up was the head hancho himself: Mitt
Romney. Similarly to Santorum’s rally, I
went to the press section. When asked
for credentials, I told them I forgot my badge but I was definitely with the
Huffington Post online, writing for a new section on youth perspective and the election. Like good lemmings they followed my trap to
the water and fell in with dazzling Olympian swan dives TEN OUT OF TEN! I was excited to see Romney because I knew
just as well as everyone else in that amphitheatre and the rest country he
would win New Hampshire and probably get the nomination by a huge margin
(scoring 40% in New Hampshire on Tuesday).
Unlike Santorum whose security consisted of a fat guy with a big silver
cross and mutton chops that seemed to reach his ankles, Romney had legit
security. Guards lined the wings
backstage, down in the pit, and up in the balcony, watching me as I bounced around getting
down every little bit I could. My
partner in crime, Pat Tierney wrote down everything he could muster about
Romney’s speech and what he wrote said it all quite plainly: THIS GUY’S A TOOL.
This Ken Doll crotch of a candidate showed no
gravitas at all. His political huevos
rancheros were a no show and to me that means he’s a no go. Granted, this is the same guy who said John
Adams wrote the Constitution, so I suppose I was expecting wayyyyyyy too much
from him. Romney walked onto the
stage and the crowd blew up! There were
at least 350 people in and around the theatre but it didn’t feel that way. The thing with Romney is he’s definitely
electable. He came in with jeans on and
the sleeves of a grid patterned button down rolled up because 110% "working
man". His voice rang out clear with his
scripted, memorized sound bites blazing through the amplifiers; the crowd loved
it. I wanted to throw myself off the
balcony when I heard him talk about the love he had or veterans. He had no plan at all for the country, he had
no plot or set of actions to save us from our dire situation; but goddamn the
guy sounded electable. The crazy thing about
it is he didn’t need to say
anything that involved policy. This was
no maniacal tyrant I was watching, hell bent on turning America into a
theocracy. This wasn’t Rick Santorum! This wasn’t Ronald Reagan!; NO NO NO partner, this was the sickly cancer boy in Thank You For Smoking who companies and non-profits use as a pawn
to win over the audience, and the dumbasses out in the seats and aisles of this
theatre were eating it all up like hobos at a goddamn dumpster pig roast. It was nauseating, shocking, appalling,
depressing and more than anything fascinating. I didn’t know what to think! I
saw a bunch of semi-educated, grown adults buying into a message with no teeth
and Romney made no bones about it. From
his creepy Stepford wife, to the eight thousand family members he
brought with him on stage, and his now infamous quoting of “America The
Beautiful” (of which I was one of the guinea pigs for his sick, patriotic
experiment on its effectiveness), this wishy-washy elitist looked like and in fact IS the biggest whore in politics
since Bill Clinton; parading himself around like a prime rib plaything for the right wing oligarchy holding the Republican Party hostage by its own
freewill. I’d feel bad for him if he
wasn’t so weak and if he didn’t know/understand what he was doing. But the twisted thing about it is he DOES
know exactly what he’s doing and he revels in it.
It’s because of his willingness to bend over for any right wing cause
that he can win people over with his talks of the long dead American Dream and
Ronald Reagan’s haunting ghost. He looks
like a president, talks like a president, walks the walk, and that’s what got
him 40% in New Hampshire, but he thinks too much like a crony. It’s because of this willingness that he’s
the perfect presidential nominee, but the holder of a failed presidency if the
Electoral College ever voted him into office.
So after a good laugh about the whole
situation (I couldn’t bear to feel down anymore, all the bull in the
political world has gotta make you laugh to keep you from blowing your brains
out with a .50 calibur, gold plated Desert Eeagle), we headed off to some
little pochuck town in central New Hampshire that kind of reminded me of where
I grew up. There are two reasons why it
reminded me of good old Rock Tavern, New York: there were 8 cows for every
person and Tea Baggers coming out of their secret farmhouse lairs in droves. We were en route to see the Fringe King
elect, ladies and gentlemen… RON PAUL!
I was pumped as hell to see Ron Paul. If there was any one of the Republican
candidates I could have seen myself supporting, it was Ron Paul. He had that independent swag and spoke his
own truth, a man after my own heart. He
spoke about freedom, cutting overseas spending, gutting corporate loopholes,
the Constitution, and the “preservation of Liberty”.
I got right up front with my Flip Cam to get
every moment I could as a souvenir to my own "Libertarian" heart. I also did this
“I’m-a-hardcore-journalist-in-the-making-ladies” act to impress the girl from the
day before and any other girl there or who I was texting because I was in that
kind of a mood. Sometimes you just wanna
impress ladies (or men if that’s your poison), not even to pursue them, just to
dig that attention and anyone who says they don’t is a goddamn liar who should
be dragged to the stockades by their boot heels like Salem witches. As I was putting on this embarrassing but
personally entertaining performance, Ron Paul came out from the door and I saw
something I had never seen before. I
never got to see Barack Obama at a rally back in ’08 but I gather this was the
closest thing you could get. Ron Paul
struck a chord with the audience with only one toe poking through the door; Mitt
Romeny couldn’t strike that chord if he ran naked through the halls of the
Capitol Building with his hair on fire.
The audience erupted like Mt. St. Helen 30 years ago and the lava flowed
quick through the scene like mad.
“If there is any candidate in this race who
might talk policy when the major news networks aren’t all there, Dylan” I said
to myself “it’d be Ron Paul.” My lips
were pursed and exhilarated beads of sweat brimmed from my brow and evaporated
when they touched the electric fire in the air. Everyday this guy gets people pumped about most of the
right stuff, or at least some of the stuff that’s right in my opinion. Today however, was not one of those days.
Mr. Paul began with what seemed to be a
Beethoven-esque ode to civil liberties and a textualist interpretation of the
Constitution, but it stopped there. The excitement in my heart took a sudden dive
and veered off to the ground so quick it was as if a Mafia Capo drove his rabid ice pick
clear through my chest. I never stood a
chance and my mind was just standing there alone; stripped, ass naked to the wind crying in
the corner somewhere back in Salem. This
bright star at the front of the room quickly became a wormhole where happiness
and freedom go to die! His speech and
conversation with the audience ceased being a glimmer of hope in a dark tunnel
and became the darkest tunnel of them all.
This old geezer of a hack stood in front of 200 drooling people telling
us that we had all these problems and he had solutions, but what were
they? Shit, he didn’t know! He said he’d bring the troops home and close
down the bases we have all around the world, but how would he do so? That shit doesn’t just POOF! Happen out of
thin air! I need some policy Ronny Boy!
BRING IT ON! How would we make back the
revenue lost from dropping the corporate tax?
All style, no substance, and the audience shamelessly swallowed it down with haste, ease, and haapiness.
The whole affair showed me that Ron Paul was
not at all a beacon of independence compared to the other candidates; he was
the same as the rest of them. He was
almost as bad as Romney and it hurt deep down to watch it before my very eyes. I understand that you play to the base in
primary season, but Ron Paul was supposed to be above political games and norms. This playing to the base bull has to stop
for the sake of my own intelligence and the intelligence of every other American out
there. If we were to quit it maybe we could salvage a sense of dignity/honesty in our political system, but that seems to be a long lost cause. Plus, his insistence that he is a
Romney competitor as opposed to an Obama competitor exhibits his lack of
political balls. Ron Paul sold his soul
to the primary season and with stupefying audacity that made my head spin
around a sheer 360 degrees. I noticed
this on two issues: Israel and drugs.
When asked by a group of anti-Zionist Hassidic Jews what his policy with
Israel would be, he made a huge cop out.
I could tell it pained him to make such a cop out, it was written all
over his face in black Sharpie marker, but he did it anyway. Unlike Romney who proudly wears his
prostitution on his sleeve, Paul did it because he knew he had to. He knew that even though these doting people
would eat up anything he said, the party leadership was watching him with a
vengeful eye already so he had to up his Republican credentials. However, he also kept in mind that the
audience would never accept someone saying they disagreed with Israel’s
policies on expansion (policies that I find abhorrent and disgusting, and I say
that especially as a Jew). Because he
couldn’t let his train lose steam by chancing an unpopular position and
slipping up in front of the RNC (they’d be watching somewhere, some way), he
let go of his principles for a split second and allowed himself to be spanked
by authority and public opinion. The second
issue he lost me on personally was drugs.
He didn’t say anything about drugs.
The media will tell you that he’s won young people with his
near-pacifist views on war, his libertarian views on economics, his grandfatherly
image and his overall message of freedom above anything else. The media was also duped into wasting a week
reporting on a kid playing hide and go seek in a weather balloon. Ron Paul won over the youth with his views on weed. Plain. And. Simple... Weed. Nothing else. Just weed. Anyone
who says otherwise is either lying through their teeth or hopelessly moronic. Ron Paul knew however, that
even if he was in the Live Free or Die state, talking about drug legalization
in front of a group of old conservatives and fringe veterans was political
suicide and the race for second place might be contentious between he,
Huntsman, and Gingrich (even though it wasn't at all), so he didn’t talk about it. I’m not a baseball umpire and I don’t believe
cats have nine lives. I’ll give you a
second chance if I’m desperate, but I’m not. Ron Paul is just as much a liar as the rest, folks. If
you’re supposed to be the candidate who will fight tooth and nail for your own
personal cause, don’t beat around the bush in your answers and not talk about another
one because it’s the make or break position.
In other words: don’t treat me like an asshole, you asshole. Man up, stoke the flames, grow a pair, shake
rattle and roll baby and don’t let up until the fat lady belts out a little Ave
Maria,
With a heavy heart, I left that meeting
feeling colder than ever. These were the
two top candidates and both proved to be nothing more than $10 street corner ladies of the night to the public and their party. They bent over and took it (and none too
admirably might I add) for the sake of primary season and nothing could make
one feel more hopeless than drowning in a pool of politician lies and media
fodder.
THIS POST ALSO APPEARED ON "FRM THE G MAN": http://fromthegman.blogspot.com/
THIS POST ALSO APPEARED ON "FRM THE G MAN": http://fromthegman.blogspot.com/
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