Delete "Elite," Tout de Suite

[Another weekend rant. But be of good cheer: it'll be my last. Also, I wrote it a while ago, so it's a little out of date. I'm emptying my drawers. As it were.]


Here is an opinion column that pretty much says what I've been thinking ever since Hillary Clinton's and John McCain's dismissal of the universal condemnation by economists of their gas tax holiday proposal. "Elitists," they called them. Them there 'lekshuals. Well, I've been thinking about it since she (unexpectedly), the wife of a president and daughter of the Seven Sisters, and McCain (expectedly), the son of admirals and duacentamillionaire by marriage, began trying to paint Barack Obama as an elitist. Naturally, the talking heads have taken up the cry. Just as it's assumed without scrutiny that John McCain is a wizard at foreign policy, pols promote the Obama/elitist meme as neogospel. The writer of the opinion piece said it well enough, but here's how I'd have put it:

FER GAWDS SAKE, PEOPLE!!! THE WORLD IS COMING APART AT THE SEAMS. WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF OIL, WE'RE MELTING, AND BEFORE WE'RE SWAMPED IN SEAWATER WE'LL MOST LIKELY DROWN IN DEBT. WAKE THE FUCK UP!! WE'VE TRIED IT WITH DUMB PEOPLE. ISN'T IT ABOUT TIME WE GAVE ANOTHER SHOT AT HAVING A SMART PERSON AS PRESIDENT??? NOW, WHEN OUR LIVES DEPEND ON IT??? SHOULDN'T IT BE A GOOD THING TO HAVE LEADERS WHO ARE WELL-EDUCATED AND CAPABLE OF A COMPLEX THOUGHT??? DON'T THE TIMES DEMAND AN A-STUDENT, FERCHRISSAKES? ISN'T THINKING BEYOND BUMPER-STICKER PHRASES EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED? WOULDN'T YOU LIKE OUR PRESIDENT TO BE THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM, THE ELITE OF THE ELITE? ONE WHO LISTENS TO OTHER REALLY SMART PEOPLE, WHO ARE EXPERTS!!!??? WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM??? ARE YOU REALLY GONNA BUY THE CRAP THOSE IDIOTS ARE TRYING TO SELL YOU??? #%$$#@@%&?&RS!!!

Or something.

We seem to have come to a pass wherein people not only don't care about intelligence in our politicians but have elevated stupidity to some sort of golden ideal. C-student? Heck, we can do better than that! How about bottom of the class at a military academy? Voters, in numbers large enough to flip an election -- so it appears -- care more about "relating" to a candidate (whatever the heck that means!) than about what he or she says about the really difficult problems we face. Thus, the two-carbon-fragment test: who'd you rather have a beer shot with. I think it's a sort of a mind-melt, mentally checking out of the debate: it's just too damn hard to think about the important stuff, and too scary. Let's talk wives, flags, fist-bumps. Enter the stupid. Cling to it, one might say.

There's a paradox: we saw it in the reaction to Barack Obama's "bittergate." The very people whom Republicans want to characterize as insulted by Obama's remarks are those that they (Republican strategists) assume want the simplest answers in all spheres: the Bible is the inerrant and literal word of God. George Bush never made a mistake. Gay marriage is more important than energy policy. In decrying Obama's poorly phrased but easily contextualized words, they count on the very thing they pretend to dismiss. You gotta be pretty elitist to think like that! N'est-ce pas?

The Truth Will Set Us... Upon Ourselves

[Another weekend political rant. Stay away. It's all downhill from here.]


How many people would agree that the Republicans have been brilliant at getting the average person to vote against his or her own interests? (Hint: I would.) Knowing that their actual agenda of giveaways to the wealthy wouldn't fly on its own, they've managed to get people to think that this country will live or die over gay marriage and gun laws. So along comes a politician who points this out, and it becomes 24-hour news, drowning out the fact that the president admits, finally, that he authorized torture; wiping off the public consciousness the deficits, the war, the health care problems. Barack Obama said something that takes more than two seconds to explain, and the media and his opposing politicians go crazy.

I'm not sure about John McCain, but I do think Hillary Clinton is smart enough to understand what he said. The talking heads on radio and TV? Part stupidity and part cynicism. But Hillary knows, and plows ahead anyway. And what was it that Senator Obama actually said?

Government has failed to deliver to the average person, he said. It makes people frustrated and angry. By exploiting those feelings, politicians manage to get people to look away from their leaders' failings or their plutocratic agenda and to vote for them anyway, by sleight of hand. When people feel bad about their situation, they tend to look for issues to make them feel better. Immigrations, guns, gays. Is this untrue?

Okay, I admit he said it awkwardly. He's admitted it, too. But his words were "elitist" or "out of touch" only to those who willfully or stupidly misconstrued them. In the case of Hillary and her supporters, it's willful. Nor did he make stuff up out of whole cloth, like, say, bullets in Bosnia. He made a sophisticated point about how people think and how the political system exploits it. If anything shows how much change is needed, it's his words and the bullshit-filled reactions to them.

The spectacle of CNN and its ilk making 24 hour shrieking punditry out if it, finding it more important than all the problems facing us, is dispiriting beyond my ability to tell it. Between the cynicism of our politicians and the mendacity of our media, the American political system has become incapable of self-correction. We have, ultimately, no one to blame but ourselves. We elect the idiots, we watch the networks. Comes a person who actually thinks it's possible to change how we do our national business, and he's set upon by those for whom the status quo is their life-blood, while the people who have most to gain or lose are too complacent, or too burnt out, or too disappointed to make the effort to push back. They buy the crap because they've stopped believing there's anything else. More's the pity. The audacity of hope meets the beat-down of burnout.