February 01, 2006
State of Disunion
Everything about this administration reads like a Jim Thompson novel. There’s one theme Thompson kept coming back to. It’s practically identical in both The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Take your pick. Either way what you have is an up close and personal portrayal of a trusted authority figure (the county sheriff) who systematically betrays the faith of everyone around him in himself and his office. The tension in these gothic noir novels, like our own sinking political situation here in the good ol’ US of A, is the disbelief and the sheer unwillingness, even faced with clear evidence, of the townsfolk to consider the possibility the sheriff is anywhere near as evil as he truly is. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. And, that’s not all. Thompson’s novels are written from the psycho’s point of view. The reader can follow every corrupt twist and turn in this man’s thinking. Dubya could easily be the Sheriff in these books. Every decision leads to a greater disaster. To cover up one brutal crime, another more vicious is planned to hide the previous one. The size of the canard, or the lie doesn’t matter. The trick is to keep the townsfolk paralyzed with incredulity, indecision and fear. On the one hand the people’s suspicions grow greater until the terrible truth of the situation dwarfs their worst nightmares: the sheriff who they have all embraced like a brother is nothing but the worst kind of snake. While, on the other hand, the sheriff’s plots thicken and take on ever more monstrous and wicked proportions: he believes he is above the law, beyond the grasp of the fools he lords over. Whatever nonsense he feeds them, why they’ll just eat it up. Heck, they don’t have a choice do they? On a scale of one to ten, the shit Dubya shoveled up for the State of the Union was nothing, zero. Only the most insulated maniac Bushevic would think for a second that anyone would believe that they had any real interest in alternative energy. No, that rant was much more about adding to the beleaguered American electorate insult to injury. We must now realize that the present administration not only openly considers us dupes, but, worse still, we are now also thought by them to be nothing but low down “addicts”. And, why not say whatever bullshit comes into your head when you know no one’s going to call you on it? There are few mainstream media sources for alternative viewpoints to the administration's. Public radio is square in the cross hairs of conservatives, and the effects of right wing gag tactics have made their presence clearly felt on the likes of the Newshour. One of the most clear cut examples was on the day the Air Marshals shot and killed a sick bipolar passenger, Rigoberto Alpizar. That evening, the Newshour which is famous for their even handed (to a fault) news coverage, uncharacteristically only gave the law and order side of the story. The security analyst, Charles Slepian, gave the shoot first ask questions later position without any dissenting rational opinion expressed in a situation that clearly called for closer scrutiny. The proof that everyone knows the game the Bushevik’s are playing came in a post State of the Union pole. While a large number of folks responded positively to the empty substanceless sugar candy speech, over sixty percent of them didn’t believe one bit of it would ever really get done. It’s not at this point a question of the Neocons fooling anyone. Their tenure has been, bar none, the most cruel, predatory and greedy in the history of our country. The question is why the American people continue to vote against their own interests.