I wondered if the left had the same problem. Did liberal commentators say, at the top of their lungs, things that didn’t need saying to people who, it goes without saying, didn’t need to hear them said? Were there liberals who felt as if they were dogs hearing a human command: “Eat food dropped on the floor!” “Jump up on house guests!” “Bark like a fool at squirrels!”
NPR seemed more whiney than hectoring, except at fund-raising time. There was supposed to be a lot of liberal braying on network television. (Network television still existed in 2003.) I watched ABC, CBS, and NBC and looked for things that debased freedom, ridiculed responsibility, and denigrated man and God but that was all of ABC, CBS, and NBC. How did one tell liberalism from the Levitra ads?
Liberals seemed to do their best shouting in print. Michael Moore had published a book not long before, Stupid White Men, titled in a spirit of resonant persuasiveness unmatched since Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants by Martin Luther (that original antinomian).
Now Moore had another book out, Dude, Where’s My Country? Employing the stylistic niceties of the hog call, Moore spent ten chapters stridently convincing the stridently convinced. Moore had, however, included an additional chapter on how to argue with conservatives. As if. Approached by someone like Michael Moore, a conservative would drop a quarter into Michael’s Starbucks cup and hurriedly walk away. Even assuming Moore had been able to capture the attention of a conservative, I doubted the argument would have gone well. Under the subtitle “Tell them what you like about conservatives,” Moore suggested the following: “Tell them how dependable conservatives are. When you need something fixed, you call your redneck brother-in-law, don’t you?”
Also on the fairly well selling list at the time was Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. I didn’t need to open it. But, having done so, I found these chapters: “Ann Coulter: Nutcase,” “You Know Who I Don’t Like? Ann Coulter,” and “Bill O’Reilly: Lying Splotchy Bully.” I supposed these were the sorts of things that liberals shouted at other liberals at two in the morning after the third spliff in the vegan restaurant.
In fairness, however, maybe liberal shouting has been more effective than the kind of shouting my friends and I do. After all, since 2003, Michael Moore has won an Academy Award and a Palm d’Gore—or some such prize—at Cannes. And Al Franken has become a Democratic senator despite, as his stand-up comedian career proved, not being funny enough for it.
Really, I could judge only for my own side. And, while I listened to the ear-splitting racket of the right, my frustration in concurrence built, mounting from an exasperation of like-mindedness to a fury of accord. As a result it’s been seven years since I’ve listened to a damn thing a conservative has said. Going by the snippets of yelping from Sarah Palin that I’ve involuntarily audited I haven’t missed much.
If we’re going to shout, let us give people something to shout about. America likes a whoop and holler. There’s a little rebel yell in the most confirmed of Yankees. Let us howl in defiance. Let us cut loose with a battle roar. Let us give full throat to a cri de coeur. “You’ll have to kill us first!” “Fuck you!” “Marry me!”
4
The Next Big Stink
For the moment, the killjoys55 are in charge—the mopes, the fusstails, the glumpots. Their wet blanket has been thrown over the White House and Congress. They’re worrying up a storm. (Good thing George W. Bush is no longer in charge of the weather the way he was during Hurricane Katrina.)
To sum up America’s political situation, we made a mistake. In 2008 we were experiencing a polar ice cap and financial meltdown causing sea levels to rise and sending cold water flooding into Wall Street where the rapidly acidifying ocean was corroding our 401(k)s and releasing mortgage-backed securities full of hot air into the atmosphere until our every breath was full of CO2 especially when we exhaled, which should be banned when children are present lest their uninsured health care be harmed by secondhand greenhouse gases that endanger plant and animal species (Republicans were declared extinct on January 20, 2009) leading to a shortage of green, leafy vegetables vital to the fight against America’s growing epidemics of obese hunger and housing foreclosures on the homeless. Hence the return of the killjoys.
You remember the killjoys. They’re all over liberal Democratic politics like smug on Barney Frank. They initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can’t buy a car that hasn’t been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside. (Click it or Ticket!) And they wrote the infant car seat regulations that require devices so complex, with such arcane rules for use, that each car seat now comes from the manufacturer with its own engineer and each infant comes from the maternity ward with its own lawyer.
Nor is the kid exempt from legislative backseat driving just because she (the pronoun that all publishers with Second Class mailing permits are federally mandated to use in alternate sentences) has emerged from the car. Children must now wear safety helmets to bike, ski, roller-blade, and play hopscotch and wear an additional helmet—in case they collide with hard porcelain and injure their tailbones—on their butts when they go to the toilet. The only time children are allowed to remove their safety helmets is when they catch a parent smoking cigarettes. (Mr. President, you stand warned.) In that case they can doff their protective headgear to better reveal facial expressions of shock, horror, shame, and disappointment. Children learn these facial expressions in the thousand hours of compulsory anti-tobacco education that America’s public schools have made time for by eliminating reading and math.
The only way I can sneak a smoke nowadays is to borrow a buddy’s hunting cabin in the Maine backwoods, lock myself in the bathroom, and stand in the shower stall with the curtain pulled tight and the water running. You’d think this would extinguish my cigar. However, thanks to low-flow shower heads required by federal law to conserve a precious resource that I thought we were about to have too much of due to the melting of polar ice, I can smoke in the shower with the faucets on full blast and stay bone dry. (Flushing the butt down the water-conserving john is another matter.)
Sucking the fun out of life has always been an important component of politics. The inventors of modern politics, the Puritans of Cromwell’s parliamentary ilk, are rightly a byword for buzz kill and gloomocracy. The Puritans banned all theatrical performances because of the dangers of... they’d think of something... actors playing Mercutio and Tybalt having a sword fight in Romeo and Juliet without wearing safety helmets.
Creating alarms about salt content in restaurant food or energy sustainability in Yellowstone National Park expands the purview of government almost as well as war, without all the patriarchal, exclusionist, sexist heroism and hurtful, insensitive patriotic language. Gas prices frighteningly high? Declare a moral equivalent of Hiroshima. Arteries clogged? Pass a law requiring the chicken nugget fry basket to be dunked in boiling mint tea.
Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician. This is what draws people—and Democrats—into politics. All a politician needs is the upper-story window of public attention and the chamber pot of rhetoric. How else to explain that politicians get elected?
Being a poke-nose, a nanny-pants, and a wowser satisfies the need of the political class to feel self-important and powerful. Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the West Wing feel like the admiral of the Mongolian navy.
Not that pecksniff buttinskiism is a strictly partisan matter. Long-lipped howler Republican drys teamed up with spigot-bigot Democrat William Jennings Bryan to enact Prohibition. The Republican Party is home to bluenoses big enough to expand Mount Rushmore with a bust of Andrew Volstead. Republicans stick their snouts into other people’s medicinal marijuana prescriptions and underpants (but not gun cabinets). And, when it comes to scolding foreigners and horning i
n on the governance of lesser breeds without the law, Republicans are a regular pain in the atlas.
Meanwhile Democrats do have their pleasures—drinking bong water at Emily’s List fund-raisers and so forth. But it is the Democrats who’ve best learned to make political honey out of minding other people’s beeswax. Not satisfied with mere bossy irritation of the public, Democrats have created whole branches of government—the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Welfare, the Department of Education, the Department of Tofu and Sprouts. Democrats have opened barrels of (USDA inspected!) pork sufficient to feed all of their high-binding and wire-pulling friends, relatives, and cronies, with table scraps left over for their public sector labor unions. Democratic wisenheimers have managed to get themselves elected Big Chief Itch-and-Rub of every worry and to be appointed Pharaoh of Fret for every concern. They are the party of Eliot Spitzer. And we the citizenry are Eliot Spitzer’s wife.
How are the Democrats going to demean and humiliate us next? What issue will the Democrats fasten upon as a threat to the commonwealth and a hazard to the planet? What busybody ordinance and ass-and-elbows regulation will be put upon the books for our own good?
It would be valuable to know the answer. It’s important to find out what kind of private enjoyment or human felicity the Democrats are going to pass a law against. We could lobby to defeat it. (Although our best lobbyists are in jail.) We could battle it on principle. (Although our principles, if we ever had any, are on the wane. Witness the paltry vote against the confirmation of Timothy “I forgot taxes were the law” Geithner.) Or we could plan strategies to resist the oppression. (Dig hole behind garage. Buy enormous freezer. Bury the red meat.)
There are several ways to make a prediction about what the Democrats will outlaw. We might calculate the greatest statistical danger to Americans. That would be death. Statistically speaking there is a 1:1 rate of occurrence. But it’s hard to build a constituency of dead people, even though they do vote in Cook County. Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, one of the living dead. But whether this gives the White House a pro- or anti-death tilt remains to be seen.
Another way to foretell proscription is to look at the most common or frequently occurring danger to Americans. What causes the most crime, violence, unemployment, divorce, disease, and mental illness? But that brings us back to Andrew Volstead, who was a Republican. Democrats will have to be satisfied with operating on the margins of this issue, providing additional enforcement efforts to curtail Managing a Hedge Fund While Impaired, etc. Also Democratic Party loyalist trial lawyers can be given legal opportunities, allowing more restaurant and bar patrons to sue for being “overserved.” Some friends of mine and I are bringing a class-action suit against P. J. Clarke’s in New York where we met our first wives.
In fact, we’d be wrong to use any of the above methods to foresee what our government will attempt to constrain or forbid. A better way to approach the problem is to ask, “What would annoy the most people most often?” That is the true test of government intervention in life. The Secular Grail of the killjoy is a program or policy that combines the intrusion of the census, the depredations of income tax, the duress of school busing to achieve racial balance, the expense of Social Security, the nuisance of Medicare paperwork, the inconvenience of automotive smog testing, the pettiness of a congressional investigation, and the fine print on the label of flame-resistant children’s pajamas.
My guess is that the next great government crusade will be against soap. The president will appoint a Blue Ribbon commission, which will determine that soap releases polluting grime into the ecosystem, leads to aquifer depletion, and contains fatty acids that laboratory studies have shown to be acidic and not fat-free. Soap encourages behaviors that lead to teenage pregnancy as well as adult sexuality with multiple partners, driving America’s divorce rate higher, causing more children to live under the poverty line in single-parent households. Soap is a factor in many cases of child abuse, according to small boys in bathtubs. Soap bubbles may contain methane, especially if rising to the surface of bathwater containing small boys. Soap marketing sends the wrong message about the ivory trade and also about Irish spring, which is being altered by climate change. Soap degrades the flame-resistant properties of children’s pajamas. And soap makes whales foam when they spout.
Socialism—you can smell it coming.
5
The Fix Is In
We can’t change people. We may not even be able to change things. But we can change the way people think about things. Oscar Wilde, in his essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891), wrote, “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.” The same can be said about politics.
Wilde’s hope for the attitude that people would eventually have toward war seems to have somewhat come true. Once us vulgarians had been convinced that H-bombs would wipe out the entire vulgus, we members of that general public were less enthusiastic about war. It hasn’t completely lost its fascination, as makers of video games and my six-year-old, Buster, can tell you. But we haven’t had any really, really big wars for sixty-five years. Knock wood.
And we haven’t had any really, really big politicians since Reagan and Thatcher. Maybe popular taste is changing. Maybe the loud, clashing stripes that politicians wear—reds and blues and pinks and greens with wide streaks of yellow—are beginning to look passé. Maybe the political garb, with its ugly plaid of conflicting interests, its lurid paisley patterns of corruption, and its baggy double-knit of lies, is going out of fashion. And a size XXXL government doesn’t fit us anymore. We hope.
We can send politicians to the thrift shop and politics to Weight Watchers. But we have to be realistic about the new look that will emerge from this electoral closet cleaning.
I’m sick of politics. We’re all sick of politics. We live in a democracy, rule by the people. Fifty percent of people are below average intelligence. This explains everything about politics.
Not that we’d want to live in a country ruled only by the best and the brightest. That has been tried repeatedly, beginning with Dion, the fourth century BC “liberator of Syracuse,” who attempted to establish Plato’s Republic (and Plato) in Sicily. The outcome was murder and military despotism. Subsequent experiments have produced—pace Lenin—worse results. Even under the ideal systems and circumstances we have in the United States, being ruled by the best and the brightest would be like being married to Nancy Pelosi.
Therefore we keep democracy, despite our knowledge that democracy can go wrong the way it has in Russia, the Gaza Strip, and Venezuela, not to mention the U.S. House of Representatives.
Politics can’t save us. Politics is the idea that society’s ills can be cured politically. This is a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. Your bottle of cabernet sauvignon is rolled in bread crumbs and dunked in the deep-fat fryer. Hence our big, fat political ass.
Consider how we use the word politics. Are “office politics” ever a good thing? When someone “plays politics” to get a promotion, does he or she deserve it? When we call a coworker “a real politician,” is that a compliment?
Political science, if there were anything even remotely scientific about it, would be searching for a cure.
Still, we’re stuck with our politics. The alternative is arbitrary law. We choose to be equal before the law instead. If we’re equal before the law, we’re equally entitled—to heck with your IQ being higher than mine—to try to shape the law. Are we equal to the task? Of course not. The democratic political process is like the process of our children going through adolescence. There’s not much we can do to improve it and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We cannot, however, just declare ourselves to be apolitical any more than we can declare ourselves to be “aparental.” Here are the car keys, son. Dad’s stash is in the nightstand drawer. Why don’t
you take my ATM card while you’re at it? See you when you’re thirty.
“Kill Fuck Marry” is a way to look at politics, but it’s also the way politics looks at us. Politics is forever deciding that we shall be murdered, seduced, and entangled in legalities. The only answer to politics is to reduce its power to do these things. Political power can be used to do good and so on and so forth, but there is no excuse for allowing that political power to be concentrated, not even in the most harmless-seeming form—in the form of your beloved infant, innocent as a newborn babe, “trailing clouds of glory/Do we come from God” and all that. Give him unlimited power while he’s having a tantrum and he’ll destroy the nursery. And the world. No creature could be more blameless and biddable than my Brittany spaniel bird dog, Millie, nor is she a political incumbent or a registered member of any political party. But endow Millie with infinite might and main? It if flies, it dies. She would bring down an Airbus A380 and come back at a trot to drop it at my feet.
Lord Acton’s dictum on power is well illustrated in John Keegan’s A History of Warfare.56 Genghis Khan, that political mastermind, again provides us with an example—as he did with the American automobile industry. Genghis is supposed to have asked his warriors what was the most pleasant thing in life. On being told it was falconry he replied, “You are mistaken. Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his wives weeping and wailing, ride his horse, and use the bodies of his daughters as bedclothes.” The first Tuesday in November, circa 1200 AD.
Reform movements can’t save us. The fallacy of all government reform was explained by Milton Friedman, “It assumes, somehow, that government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men.”57
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