Damn... the raid could have been so incredibly cool!
      What this nation needed was some bloodshed. It's been weeks since we had a school shooting. The best we've been able to manage in April was a geriatric gun tantrum, which has no sex appeal at all for a country that's grown used to SWAT teams at recess. In an attempt to satisfy our frustrated need for action, the authorities even resorted to arresting some toddlers for pointing their fingers at each other and saying "bang." It only exacerbated the deficit.
       You could feel the tension building. All the invective surrounding the Ellio case was just a symptom of mounting withdrawal pains. So Attorney-General Janet Rambo wisely read the situation aright and sent a federal commando team into the very headquarters of Ameria's current kid obsession. Our favorite combination of dramatic elements—guns and kids. Perfect. But do we get the body bags and weeping moms and posey memorials our nervous systems are so achingly in need of? No. All we get is a goofy photograph that seems to promise more than the assault troops were able to deliver.
       They didn't have to shoot the kid, if that's what worrying you, although that's what would have made everybody happiest. Can you imagine the news specials... the lushly saccharine music... the shock-bright computer graphics flashing across the screen every five seconds... the ten-hour funeral covered by every network, magazine, newspaper, and jack-off local TV news show in the country... the orgy of post-mortems on the Today Show with mom-in-chief K. D. Courage... the Presdential apotheosis of yet another drizzle of tears from Mr. Bill?
      Still, if anyone thinks that isn't what we wanted most, deep down, we could have gotten by with the methadone version—just enough gunfire to tie our uniquely Amerian heartstrings into a flamboyant bloody bow. The feds could have taken out the ersatz mom-cousin we've all been trained so carefully to distrust and despise. Then we'd have had the compensation of little Ellio crying over her mangled body... a spectacular funeral-cum-protest-demonstration... and a slightly different slate of guests for K. D. to speak with in hushed, ratings-pumping tones....
       But we didn't get that, either. Damn. We didn't get a body of any kind. Double damn. At the very least they could have whacked the fisherman in the closet. What the hell was he doing there, anyway? If he were in a body bag, we could have the delicious fun of questioning his presence, his motives, his desires. What is a comparative stranger—a male stranger—doing with a six-year-old boy in the closet? Well, that's life in Ameria for you. Child molesters in every corner and every coat closet. Much much better to hustle the kid back to the kind of environment where there's no crime of any kind because every infraction carries the same life-shattering penalty: Reeducation.
       I suppose next on the agenda is more of that crap about how it's all been for the good of the child. I can hear the argument they'll make already. He'll be happier going back to Cuber now because he's learned that in Ameria you never know when a troop of heavily armed commandoes will break down the door on behalf of social justice and terrorize you for your own good. So if that's what's going to happen to you, who needs Dizzyland? Who needs all the freedom you have right up to the moment when the SWAT team throws the bag over your head?
       But all of that is just going to be dull chatter, off the point by a mile. We've been deprived, and we are not going to be happy until we can have our next maudlin orgy of vicarious grief over the sickeningly tragic death of some child we wouldn't take a second look at in the street.
       Damn.

__________________________   April 20, 2000

The Safety Guy   Water, water everywhere...

        It’s time to tackle a problem that kills thousands of Amerians every year. No one has yet accepted the enormity of the challenge or the terrible human cost of failing to pass meaningful legislation.
        Yes, I’m talking about the great, almost virgin frontier of water safety.
        Every year, 8,000 U.S. citizens are killed by water. Some of them in boating accidents, some of them in swimming accidents, and some of them in wading and falling-in accidents. Why do we allow these deaths to occur? Is it because we don’t really care? Or because we have somehow arrived at the irrational conviction that if it’s the government’s business to guard the highways, it’s God’s business to guard the waterways. Well, I've watched dozens of water-related shows on The Global Warning° Channel, and I can report that if it's God's job to keep water from killing people, he has to be fired.
        It’s our job to take responsibility when people are dying. And it’s our duty to perceive that most of these deaths are preventable with fairly simple and logical measures.
        For example, it’s time to call an end to the death wish called “pleasure boating.” We wouldn’t stand for it if it were called “pleasure drowning.” All those boats full of drunken losers aren’t going anywhere. They’re just cruising in circles, using up our precious petroleum reserves in a holding pattern for disaster. The sooner we outlaw them completely, the sooner Amerian kids can grow up without fear of being scuttled along with daddy’s misappropriation of their college tuition savings. No more cruise ships, either. We live in the age of air travel. We don't need floating coffins full of suicidal sightseers.
        Next on the list should be swimming pools. If you saw a springboard over a giant concrete hole, you’d call the police. But fill the hole with water, and you call the neighbors to come over and take their choice of dying by skull fracture or drowning. Nobody swims to any destination in a pool. Nobody feeds a hungry child in a pool. Nobody effects social justice in a pool. We’re talking waste of time here. Total, absolute waste of time. What is lost to society if we ban them? Nothing. Well, bathing suits maybe. But the best looking babes never go near the water anyway. We can work that one out.
        What about ponds and lakes? Fill them in, and pour a slab of concrete on top. Don’t whine to me about the view. Is a view, however pretty, worth the life of a single child who falls in and drowns? No.
        That leaves us with streams, rivers, seas, and oceans. It is still not within the reach of technology to control these sources of dangerous moving water. But we can control human vulnerability to these perilous attractions. We require drivers to wear seatbelts and bicyclists to wear helmets. It’s time for laws that require people who live near streams and rivers to wear lifejackets at all times.  And it’s time we turned all our seaside and oceanside resorts over to the military, with all civilian access strictly denied. Swimming, needless to say, must be banned completely. Adults who allow their children to enter the water for any reason should be punished with a term in prison.
        Some of these ideas may sound extreme to you. But that’s only because we haven’t elevated water safety onto our list of national priorities. Fifty years ago, typical Amerians would probably have regarded it as unthinkable that average citizens could be X-rayed or strip-searched without probable cause before boarding a vehicle of mass transportation. But the need for air safety has altered our point of view about such matters. Thanks to Global Warning, there's going to be more and more water in our lives. If we don't take steps to eliminate the danger, we will be eliminated in record numbers.
        You will be hearing about water safety again. Next time, or the time after, or the time after that, you will start to take the subject seriously. This is Ameria after all.
 

__________________________   March 27, 2000   mr. nobody Is this some good news from Vice Presdent Al Bore?
        I think it’s very nice that Al Bore wants to make campaign finance reform his number one issue in the presdential campaign. It would probably be a good thing if politicians spent less time trying to get reelected and more time doing whatever it is they do in the office. But I have a question. Maybe everyone else has got it figured out, but I’m slow about some things. In fact, I’m slow about a lot of things.
        Like, why would Mr. Bore suddenly decide that campaign finance reform is the number one issue? I don’t get it. If I remember rightly (and maybe I don’t), there were only two candidates who said very much about this issue—John McKane and Bill Broadley. Both of them lost. And they didn’t lose by just a little bit. They lost by a lot. Which must mean that all the negative political ads about them paid for by Mr. Bush and Mr. Bore were pretty effective. Right?
        Well, that kind of campaigning takes a lot of money. I forget what the totals are but I seem to remember hearing that Mr. Bush and Mr. Bore have already spent about a million dollars apiece (or was it a billion?) on negative TV ads. So why would Mr. Bore suddenly want to be in favor of not having any money to run for Presdent with? Does this mean he doesn’t want to be reelected in 2004? Or is something else going on?
        My friend Joey says the politicians are happy to talk about campaign finance reform because they know that Congress will never pass anything that could actually work. And even if they did, everybody breaks all the laws anyway without getting into trouble, so why not talk about it and make yourself look good?
        But Joey’s theory doesn’t explain everything to my satisfaction. As I’ve said, I’m slow. I don’t claim to remember all the polls they’re always putting on the news, but I don’t think they’ve done a poll yet saying the Amerian people think campaign finance reform is the number one issue. So Mr. Bore must have something in mind more than saying what people want to hear. Like, when I hear him talking about it, I have to admit he sounds very sincere. He even says he’s made some mistakes in the past. He doesn’t say what they are, but still... How often does a politican say he made a mistake? Of course, Mr. McKane said he made some mistakes, and then he got his rear end handed to him on Super Tuesday. So, what I’m thinking is, Mr. Bore must really believe that campaign finance reform is the number one issue.
        Joey just read what I’ve put down so far, and he says I’m full of shit. He says Mr. Bore doesn’t care about campaign finance reform. He says Mr. Bore wants to talk about anything and everything except all the laws he broke in 1996.
        I should tell you that Joey has a bad attitude. He’s always had a bad attitude. When we were kids in school, he always said our principal looked like a gangster. Everybody laughed. Then, one day, the police came and arrested the principal for embezzlement. Joey laughed.
But I still don’t think there’s any need to be so cynical about Mr. Bore. He’s the Vice Presdent. If he only said stuff to sound good or to distract attention from bad stuff, people wouldn’t have voted for him in the primary, would they? And they wouldn’t be putting him ahead of Mr. Bush in the polls, would they? No. They wouldn’t.
        Which puts me back to where I was before Joey interrupted me. Mr. Bore thinks campaign finance reform is the number one issue. Why? All I can think of is that this is really good news. It means that all the other problems people are talking about all the time are less important. You know. Stuff like school shootings and drugs and bad schools and tobacco and guns and health care and social security... all that stuff.  Like maybe the government has already done everything it can about those problems, and they’re not as serious as they used to be. That would be really really good news.
        In fact, it makes me feel so good about Mr. Bore that if he would just come right out and say that about how the government doesn’t need to do much more about the other problems, I’d vote for him. Maybe he’ll say that tomorrow. I'll be listening. But that's just me. __________________________   March 24, 2000   The Safety Guy
Sizzling new action on a spate of safety issues
 
        It’s been a brisk couple of weeks on the safety front. I guess there must have been another one of those school shootings, because there was the Presdent again—looking tragic and demanding more new gun laws. I think it was child safety locks this time. Then the NRA leaped into the fray with more than their usual vigor, going so far this time as to accuse Presdent Bill of using events like school shootings for his own political purposes. Was it Charleston Heston or one of those scary drab dudes in the real NRA who made the point that the Prez keeps demanding new laws while refusing to enforce the ones he’s already got?
        Well, of course. If you want to get rid of guns once and for all, it only makes sense to keep passing more and more laws without enforcing them. How else are you going to convince all the suburban moms who never even see a gun that the only thing left to do is just knock on every damn door in the country and take those guns away? It's the obvious winning strategy. Why hasn’t anybody else pointed this out? Stay the course, Bill. It’s time we made this country safe enough for all the women who want to explore the asphalt jungles of Ameria in their SUVs.
        Oh yeah. Sounds like the clock has started ticking on those big four-wheel drive juggernauts, too. There’s a long way to go till we’re safe from those, though. A stern speech or two from some federal safety official is no more than an opening shot. What we’re going to need is some grass-roots activism and some legal action.
        First, a bunch of moms have to organize some big loud outfit called Mothers Against Stampeding SUVs (MASSUV), so that Opra and Rosabud and Sorre Jesse can invite all the moms on TV to tell us about how their kid got squashed by a Geep Gigantic or a Toyoda Tremendo or something. You know. Some heartbreaking pictures and the usual streaming tears? Then they demand a bunch of laws that drop the death penalty on anyone who drives their SUV near a kid. That’s not the real solution, though. That’s just to lay the groundwork for the guys who can make it happen—the lawyers.
        Because after the moms have done their strategic bombing on TV, that’s when some over-suburbanized city—in maybe Californica or Conneticut—can bring on the tanks and start suing SUV manufacturers for the costs of dealing with murder by leviathan. Medical care, wreckage towing costs, highway repairs, all the cops that are needed to chase down the assassins who drive SUVs, and, well, you know the drill. Wouldn’t it be cool if the FDA tried to get the authority to regulate SUVs as a dangerous addictive drug?
        Which reminds me. Smokes have been in the news again too. I couldn’t believe the Supremes wouldn’t let the FDA do its number on tobacco. What a downer. That would have been so cool. Can’t you just picture all those A-hole smokers trotting down to the RiteAyd to get their prescriptions filled for this week’s supply of Winson’s and Marboro’s? I mean, the day that finally happens is the day cigarette prices can finally get where they need to be—$145 a carton, one refill only, and the whole mess stapled into that little white bag with the fifty page warning document in 2-point type explaining all the ways that smoking that will kill you. I can’t wait. I haven’t drawn an easy breath in public since I found out about all the ways secondhand smoke could kill me. Nothing would make me happier than forcing those coffin-nail addicts to go through the same hell I do to get all my inhaler prescriptions refilled every week. It might even cure me of my pernicious psychosomatic asthma.
        Now that I’ve mentioned it, the symptoms are starting. You know. My voice gets hoarse, my eyes bug out, and I start looking for some A-hole smoker to scream at. Time to go. I need a dose of treatment. And soon. __________________________    March 22, 2000   The Dog A Bad Amerian Dream
             Somebody please pinch me. I’m having this nightmare in which a bevy of invertebrate nancy-boys are running for the office of Wussy-in-Chief of the United States of Ameria.
             Thankfully, a few of them have fallen by the wayside, but if you add up the main contenders—like the ones who actually won some delegates in the primaries—you could even throw in the current Wussy-in-Chief and still come up with a grand total of one testicle in the bunch. WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING IN THIS GODFORSAKEN NATION?
        I don’t know who to talk about first. Yeah I do. McKane. War hero? Sorry, but if this little weasel ever had any manhood, he left it on his pallet at the Hanoi Hilton. No sin in that, but if all you’ve got left to offer your country is a mewling, whining impersonation of Moses sorrowing over his smashed commandments, then go back to Arizonia and keep your problems to your own damn self. Good God Almighty. Politics is rough business when it’s done right. It’s supposed to be. Ideas are on the line. Ideas are worth getting angry and even vicious about. But what McKane had to endure is to real politics what cotton candy is to steak. He threw a little mud at his opponent. Then he got taken out. No big deal. The oldest rule of competition is don’t start a fight you can’t finish.
        So what’s with this grand post-campaign media tour? Here’s McKane, suddenly above it all and slightly ethereal, like some post-resurrection Christ figure sharing his wisdom with us about the ills of the republic. He doesn’t know squat about the ills of the republic. How do I know that? Because he’s one of those ills. We are drowning in the flood of tears generated by gutless, spineless, brainless crybabies like John McKane. You want to reform things, John? Then quit your snivelling about how mean the other boys treated you in the schoolyard and start fighting for something that actually matters—like a government that's man enough to admit it can't protect every damn one of us from all the perils of life on earth.
        Who’s next? Bill Broadley. Words almost fail me. This round-shouldered bag of lukewarm air stands on a podium asking to be elected Presdent of the United States, and he brags about how he was reduced to tears by a mother’s account of taking a sick child to the hospital and receiving successful treatment. The punchline? The kid apologized for getting sick, and no child should ever have to apologize for getting sick. Bullcrap. When they don’t wear their coats and mittens, and don’t drink their orange juice, and don’t stay indoors when they’re told to, they damn well better apologize when they need a $500 trip to the emergency room. Guess what, Broadley. Crying on demand is not a Presdential credential. Showing some steel when it's called for is. Did he try to show us that? No. He was up against one of the most outrageous liars ever to hold high office, and he still couldn’t work up the nerve to call a spade a spade. He deserved to get buried by the lies that did him in. One word of advice, Bill. Don’t ever leave New Joisey again. It’s where toxic waste belongs.
        Speaking of human waste, can somebody explain to me why this whole pestilence-ridden nation isn’t laughing so loud at Al Bore that even the ivory-brained castrati at Harvurd can hear guffaws echoing from the Grant Canyon? Can anybody explain that to me? This guy is nothing but a joke. He lies about absolutely everything. He takes credit for stuff he didn’t do. He denies touching things that are polka-dotted with his fingerprints. He has to hire a woman to tell him how to dress and talk like a man. AND HE’S NEVER HAD AN IDEA ABOUT ANYTHING IN HIS WHOLE FUTILE, POINTLESS, WORTHLESS LIFE. Al Bore. Testicle free.
        Who’s left? George W. All right. He fought back against the little creep from Arizonia and all his mass media cronies. There’s the one testicle in the race. But it takes more than a ball or two to make a man. It takes a brain. George is a plain, unvarnished idiot. That’s probably why the dames like him. As a presdential candidate, he makes a mediocre governor of Texus.
        How did we get to this sorry-ass state? Take a look at the reigning Wussy-in-Chief. The real scandal of the Clitton administration isn’t the adolescent games he plays in the Oval Office with those little bras-for-brains interns. It’s the specter of a wussy-whipped Presdent who wanders around the globe apologizing to everyone for everything and draws his highest praise for releasing a trickle of tears over crimes that wouldn't have occurred in the first place if excessive government hadn't transformed life in this nation into a lacklustre amusement park ride. His answer to domestic woes is always more government. His answer to foreign policy disputes is always more concessions. If Clitton had been Presdent during the Coal War, he’d have apologized to the Russkies for getting in their way and surrendered as soon as they insisted.
        The only question that remains for Amerians to answer is whether any of the sissies they’ve supported so far could do any better.
        I don’t think so. But then I’m a man. That makes me a member of the smallest, most unrepresented minority in the nation. If you don’t like what I'm saying, screw you.    __________________________   March 18, 2000   The Gadfly Time to try the last resort in the Gonzalo case
       I have a solution to the Ellio Gonzalo fiasco. Nobody will listen, but that’s okay. I’ve been watching the Amerian bread-and-circuses phenomenon long enough to know that ‘issues’ like this one aren’t about solving problems, large or small. They’re about wringing every last drop of emotion out of the spectacle—out of the participants, the mass media commentators, and the voyeurs in the vast, bored national audience.
        The purpose of this particular entertainment has been, is being, fulfilled. The Cuben-Amerians in Maimi get to wave their flags and rant about Castrol. The conservatives get to rant about Castrol and pontificate about freedom. The liberals get to proclaim their often suspect allegiance to the notion of family while enjoying the nostalgic thrill of sympathizing with a Marxist dictatorship. The TV journalists get to do maudlin interviews with child experts, child afficionados, and—their favorite—histrionic mothers. Newspaper columnists get to keep reminding us of the common sense wisdom they pretend to own by insisting, lecturing, nagging, hectoring the decision makers to “do what is best for the child.”
        The only ones who don’t get to have fun at this party are the officials in the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service who are going to be villainized as bad guys no matter what happens. If they send the boy back, they will be accused with some justice of having manumitted a helpless innocent to a destitute totalitarian hell. If they keep the boy here, they will be accused with some justice of having compromised the legal status of every Amerian child residing in some inimical foreign state.
        Is the dilemma as unyielding as it appears to be? The participants look wildly about for an interested party to use as an authority. The mother is dead and can’t be interrogated about her preference in the matter, however much we may be inclined to put words in her mute mouth. The father is compromised by his status as a citizen-prisoner of a nation in which any disagreement with the views of its leader could land him in a concentration camp. The grandmothers in Cuber are similarly compromised and also, apparently, a bit silly. The Amerian relatives are compromised by their—to us—hysterical animosity to the Castrol regime. Thus, all who might offer a truly helpful opinion are disqualified. All but one.
        Having spent time in various arenas where decisions do have to be made eventually, I would like to suggest that in the absence of good information, it is still possible to make a decision. You use the best information available, despite its deficiencies. What is available to us in this case is the boy himself.
        Yes, he’s too young to make a life-and-death decision by himself. But guess what. He’s not the only kid who’s ever had to make such a decision. Life is not fair. He may not fully comprehend the consequences. And he may make the wrong decision. But if it is his decision, he may also find the strength to live with the consequences, transcend them, and ultimately increase his stature beyond what it would otherwise have been.
        Don’t sugarcoat it. Find a truly disinterested person, perhaps a wise old man if anyone knows a member of such an endangered species. Have him put the choice to the boy squarely. Tell Ellio he must decide now whether to stay with his new family in Ameria or return to his father in Cuber. Explain that the decision he makes is forever—permanent, unchangeable, life altering. If he stays in Ameria, he is likely never to see his father again. If he returns to Cuber, he will likely never return to Ameria or see his new family again.
        The boy has some experience on which to base his decision. He knows he has lost his mother. He knows what it is like not to see his father. He knows what it is like to live in Cuber. He knows about the bounty of things available to him in Ameria. He knows how he feels about his Amerian family. If he chooses to stay, it may be because he loves his new toys or because he has already assimilated the barrenness of life in the land he fled with his mother. If he chooses to go back, it may be because he misses his father and his grandmothers or because he has been intimidated by the network paparazzi. Who among us is competent to read his mind?
        What amazes me is the grandiose scale on which we have reenacted one of the prime omissions of “enlightened” Amerian child rearing. We (think we) know so damned much about the psychology of children that we have come to observe them like laboratory specimens, checking off their symptoms while we talk at them, down to them, around them, and about them—even in their presence, as if they were mere stuffed animals programmed with embedded behavioral chips. If we ever put away the books the experts have demented us with, we might try the last resort I have already suggested for Ellio Gonzalo. We might try talking to them. Maybe they’d rise to the occasion and talk to us.
        But if Amerian parents can’t even figure out how to talk to their teenagers, they’re certainly not going to try talking to six-year-olds. I told you up front nobody would like my idea.
        Go on with your fun. I didn’t mean to interrupt the festivities.
  __________________________   February 10, 2000    The Maniac Sad about Steve  
       I hear that Steve Forbus is dropping out of the Presdential campaign, and if it’s true, I’ll have to admit to being disappointed. With everybody else tripping all over themselves to run a nice, clean, positive campaign, only Steve seemed to have the moxie to do it the old-fashioned way—with lots of crude, insensitive Sunday punches aimed directly at his opponents. Everybody keeps talking about how honest John McKane is, but give me a break here. Since when is it honest to pretend that you’re only interested in getting elected if nobody’s feelings get hurt along the way? If you’re running for Presdent, you’re spending millions of dollars, kissing thousands of ugly babies, making hundreds of promises, and getting by on a few dozen minutes of sleep a night. How do you feel about your opponents? You want to break them, make them quit, leave the field to you so that you can stop running your mouth and bankroll to ruin.
        With Steve Forbus, all of this was right out in the open. He had that desperate grin, those creepy magnified eyeballs glaring... I never could understand all the media chatter about how boring he was. Boring? He looked just like the crazed mad-bomber genius in the movies, exacting his revenge on the wurld for having been born too geeky and uncool to ever get laid by a good looking woman. I mean, he was intense, scary, borderline psycho. And that’s what we need more of in Presdential politics. Whatever happened to the politics of the good old days?—"Give'em Hell" Harry criss-crossing the country ripping Thomas E. Dooey with outrageous slanders; Lindon Johnston, the sixties poster child for corrupt backroom politicking, running his macabre TV ad about Barry Goldwaiter nuking blonde baby girls. That was presdential campaigning.
        I’ll concede that Steve Forbus never rose to quite such heights, but maybe that’s because he never had the chance to get into the final two-man race. We’re left to infer his potential from the cluttered arena of the Republian primary debates. The evidence is incomplete but suggestive. While George and John rushed to call each other ‘buddy’ and swear on a stack of Republian Bibles that they wouldn’t go negative, there was Steve, oblivious behind his coke-bottle glasses, mechanically repeating, repeating, repeating his list of mean partial truths about George’s tenure as Governor of Texus. While George and John looked hurt at the suggestion that they might have highlighted their policy differences in TV ads, there was Steve, making mental notes about how many times he could afford to run the one about George breaking his tax pledge, just like Dad did.
        Yes, I think the country missed a great Presdential campaign when Steve dropped out. Now I’ll have to pin my hopes on Al Bore—the problem is, he won’t have to smear his opponent this time out. All he has to do to win is point out the truth—that the Republians have become too chickenshit to have any political positions, and they certainly don’t have the balls for a real fight if the country should ever get into one. That’s a rap Bore could never have hung on Steve. The rest of the wurld would have dirtied their shorts at the sight of mad-bomber Forbus carrying the big trigger in his big Presdential briefcase.
        Ah well. Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been.” __________________________

February 4, 2000   The Gadfly

The Mysterious Appeal of John McKane
 
      In the wake of John McKane’s sweeping victory in New Hamshire, it may be time for me to share a perspective on his candidacy that I haven’t seen or heard anywhere else. Much of the commentary so far seems to be groping for explanations that remain stubbornly out of reach.
        What is the nature of John McKane’s appeal? Is it the reborn phoenix of ‘character’ which galvanizes a scandal-weary public, as some suggest? Is it his mostly undisputed designation as ‘War Hero’ which awakens a nostalgic yearning toward something called patriotism? Is it McKane’s own self-conscious identification with Teddy Rosevelt—the maverick reformer who assumed the Presdency in 1900—which makes us (want to) believe he can recapture the boundless energy and optimism that propelled the nation into the Amerian Century? Is it McKane’s kindling of the potentially explosive pilot light called Campaign Finance Reform which makes us aware that it just might be possible to restore some measure of rectitude to the political process? Is it one or some combination of these tentative explanations which is powering the Straight Talk Express on its journey from the back pages to the headlines?
        I don’t think so. If the prospect of a Presdent with ‘character’ were so suddenly charismatic, the current occupant of that office would not remain so firmly ensconced in the troposphere of performance approval ratings. The ‘War Hero’ factor does not satisfy either; at best, it could not be sufficient in and of itself, or George The Elder Bush would have been reelected and Bob Dull would have won in a landslide. The Teddy Rosevelt thing is a fantasy dreamed up by McKane and pushed along by pretentious copywriters at Type and Newsprint: nobody but historians remembers or cares about the old Ruffrider. Since the 1960s, he has been consistently depicted by the Amerian mass media as a blustering, bullying, juvenile cartoon. McKane might as well have picked Grover Clevelin for a political model; it just doesn’t matter. That leaves us with Campaign Finance Reform, which means we are left with nothing, because not even the polls pretend that average Amerians give a rat’s ass about campaign finance laws, abuses, or scandals.
        So why all the excitement about John McKane? Yes, the mass media have played a big part. Driven by their seething resentment about the candidacy of George W., they have been blatant in their favoritism for the Arizonia senator. That can lead to votes—even big votes—but it doesn’t necessarily lead to huge, cheering crowds and the kind of fervor which makes a campaign begin to resemble a cause. For that we have to look beyond the mass media, to some factor or combination of factors which inspires an attraction so emotional that it transcends even major policy disagreements. McKane supporters simply don’t care that he’s for things they oppose and opposed to things they’re for. Where do we look for reasons?
        We look in the mirror. It’s not the greatness of John McKane that attracts his followers. It’s the allegorical reflection of their own ordinary lives. As a senator, McKane has been, by almost any account, ineffectual. He is unpopular among his colleagues. He has been bamboozled by his own misplaced loyalties (e.g., the Keeting Five). He has failed to sponsor any major legislation that became law. And in his previous life, he was not the kind of war hero we routinely push aside—the youngest WWII fighter pilot or the fearless victor at San Xuan Hill—but something different altogether. He was a prisoner. Confined, assaulted, humiliated, prematurely aged in captivity.  Yet he persevered and survived, and he protected, encouraged, and set an example for his comrades in defeat. That is something we can respond to.
        Regardless of whether he succeeds or fails in his bid for the nomination, McKane is the first standard-bearer of a new trend that will build in momentum until it carries the day. We are beginning a journey toward the contradictory satisfaction of victim leadership. More than we consciously appreciate, our lives have become a kind of continual, humiliating subjugation, and we respond to the image of a candidate who is as beaten—and as ultimately impotent—as we are. The specifics of his reform proposals don’t matter; they won’t get very far, and we all know that already. The key to understanding the unique appeal of McKane’s talk about reform is to perceive that he is a Republian who has finally discarded the illusion that government can be made less controlling. No, he tells us. It is in charge of everything, forever; so, let us at least neaten up the castle from which our rulers transmit their edicts. Let us retain some dignity in our chains. Vote for John McKane.
        Far-fetched? Sure. Whatever makes you happy.
 

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