Why Republican Party Election Stagecraft Keeps Becoming American Statecraft
Andrew Sullivan's column, "McCain's Integrity," pasted in below from the Atlantic Monthly web site, is the most incisive piece I have yet read on the moral catastrophe that is John McCain. You owe it to yourself to read it and pass it along to at least 10 friends.
But, face it, appeals to reason in Matrix America, where every issue is framed as an episode in a continuing TV mini-series called "Election" scripted by Republicans that mixes "Little House on the Prairie" with "Desperate Housewives," are useless. Why? Because elections are events packaged for a viewership not a citizenry. This viewership is now wired to retinal reasoning and image-based thinking. Such capitulation and enslavement is bringing on a post McLuhanesque apocalypse. So while Gil Scott Heron was right, "the Revolution will not be televised," he failed to realized that the Counter-Revolution will. The Republican Satanists have staged a coup d'etat that involves takeover of the collective cerebral cortex of America and the building of an image pipeline (which William Burroughs long ago predicted) to supply the daily supply of amniotic verisimilitude which sustains enough media-addicted Americans to get McCain elected. Lie in front of a heaven-sized American flag and no one will recognize the lie. This is a feat of human and cultural engineering which makes building the pyramids look easy.
Think for a moment of a National Geographic image of some dusty, ramshackle South American or African village where the people sit on crates (or lawnchairs brought inside) watching the one modern convenience they can afford or are allowed to have: a color TV. This virtual enrichment in the midst of real abject poverty is the icon for the despoiled global village which America has helped to create. The Democrats have allowed every election since 1980 to be a mini-series telecast on that TV set. Meanwhile the Republicans have learned to adapt their numbness and dumbness strategy to new auxiliary media such as computers that the shack owners are buying with their pitiful wages. Remember: communication has become the cheapest commodity in the world; everyone is a have when it comes to information. This is no accident. For media is the source of what I think of as a state-subsidized global perceptual currency (scrip/script). That is why everyone in the global village now aspires to citizenry in the Matrix. Nothing beats the comfort of virtual reality. Of course, this is not heaven on earth; it is hell on earth. But as long as Democrats fail to understand the potentially diabolic, inherently demonic nature of media, especially in a corporate state, their appeals to reason (i.e., the 18th century rational mind that shaped the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) cannot reach the media co-opted mind that is (mis)guided by retinal reasoning.
REAL CAMPAIGN REFORM INVOLVES MEDIA REFORM STARTING WITH OVERTURNING THE DISASTROUS SUPREME COURT CLASSIFICATION OF ADVERTISING AS PROTECTED FIRST AMENDMENT SPEECH. THIS HAS GIVEN THE REPUBLICANS AN IRREVOCABLE LICENSE TO LIE WHICH THEY DO WITH GLEEFULLY CYNICAL ABANDON.
So McCain, constantly caught in his own memory breakdowns and enfeebled reasoning, cannot be rationally critiqued by the American viewership that suffers from the same erosion of memory and critical thinking. Every time I see this doddering, desperate, pre-dementia politician, I think of Christ's great question: "What does it profit a man to gain the world if he lose his soul?" As a Sufi, I know by now that the greatest "ambition" of a true human being is indissoluble unity with God (read: Lifekind) and the Bodhisattva instinct of universal compassion that it instills and, when needed, arouses. It is obvious from McCain's statements and actions regarding war that he is not, except in the narrow and profoundly hypocritical defense-of-embryo sense, pro-life. Obama and McCain give a clear choice: the welfare (in its highest sense) state versus the warfare state. Pro-life, as the Republicans preach and practice it, is simply an assurance of future soldiers for their Empire Games.
Pray without ceasing in houses lit by bulbs not TV screens. I'm not saying go without media. I'm just saying pray as hard before viewing any TV program as you would when facing any possibly lethal situation. And if you know that the Republicans will enrage, anger or even annoy you, don't sacrifice your precious peace of mind to their lunacy. You, like me, already know who you will vote for: Barack Obama. And you know he is the right man. So don't waste your time in sputtering fury over Palin and McCain; work on behalf of the last man standing between true national security based on compassion and vision versus our ongoing national tragedy as the people continue their jog toward oblivion.
McCain's Integrity
10 Sep 2008 01:40 pm
Andrew Sullivan. ATLANTIC MONTHLY, September 10, 2008:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.
And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.
And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.
Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
But, face it, appeals to reason in Matrix America, where every issue is framed as an episode in a continuing TV mini-series called "Election" scripted by Republicans that mixes "Little House on the Prairie" with "Desperate Housewives," are useless. Why? Because elections are events packaged for a viewership not a citizenry. This viewership is now wired to retinal reasoning and image-based thinking. Such capitulation and enslavement is bringing on a post McLuhanesque apocalypse. So while Gil Scott Heron was right, "the Revolution will not be televised," he failed to realized that the Counter-Revolution will. The Republican Satanists have staged a coup d'etat that involves takeover of the collective cerebral cortex of America and the building of an image pipeline (which William Burroughs long ago predicted) to supply the daily supply of amniotic verisimilitude which sustains enough media-addicted Americans to get McCain elected. Lie in front of a heaven-sized American flag and no one will recognize the lie. This is a feat of human and cultural engineering which makes building the pyramids look easy.
Think for a moment of a National Geographic image of some dusty, ramshackle South American or African village where the people sit on crates (or lawnchairs brought inside) watching the one modern convenience they can afford or are allowed to have: a color TV. This virtual enrichment in the midst of real abject poverty is the icon for the despoiled global village which America has helped to create. The Democrats have allowed every election since 1980 to be a mini-series telecast on that TV set. Meanwhile the Republicans have learned to adapt their numbness and dumbness strategy to new auxiliary media such as computers that the shack owners are buying with their pitiful wages. Remember: communication has become the cheapest commodity in the world; everyone is a have when it comes to information. This is no accident. For media is the source of what I think of as a state-subsidized global perceptual currency (scrip/script). That is why everyone in the global village now aspires to citizenry in the Matrix. Nothing beats the comfort of virtual reality. Of course, this is not heaven on earth; it is hell on earth. But as long as Democrats fail to understand the potentially diabolic, inherently demonic nature of media, especially in a corporate state, their appeals to reason (i.e., the 18th century rational mind that shaped the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) cannot reach the media co-opted mind that is (mis)guided by retinal reasoning.
REAL CAMPAIGN REFORM INVOLVES MEDIA REFORM STARTING WITH OVERTURNING THE DISASTROUS SUPREME COURT CLASSIFICATION OF ADVERTISING AS PROTECTED FIRST AMENDMENT SPEECH. THIS HAS GIVEN THE REPUBLICANS AN IRREVOCABLE LICENSE TO LIE WHICH THEY DO WITH GLEEFULLY CYNICAL ABANDON.
So McCain, constantly caught in his own memory breakdowns and enfeebled reasoning, cannot be rationally critiqued by the American viewership that suffers from the same erosion of memory and critical thinking. Every time I see this doddering, desperate, pre-dementia politician, I think of Christ's great question: "What does it profit a man to gain the world if he lose his soul?" As a Sufi, I know by now that the greatest "ambition" of a true human being is indissoluble unity with God (read: Lifekind) and the Bodhisattva instinct of universal compassion that it instills and, when needed, arouses. It is obvious from McCain's statements and actions regarding war that he is not, except in the narrow and profoundly hypocritical defense-of-embryo sense, pro-life. Obama and McCain give a clear choice: the welfare (in its highest sense) state versus the warfare state. Pro-life, as the Republicans preach and practice it, is simply an assurance of future soldiers for their Empire Games.
Pray without ceasing in houses lit by bulbs not TV screens. I'm not saying go without media. I'm just saying pray as hard before viewing any TV program as you would when facing any possibly lethal situation. And if you know that the Republicans will enrage, anger or even annoy you, don't sacrifice your precious peace of mind to their lunacy. You, like me, already know who you will vote for: Barack Obama. And you know he is the right man. So don't waste your time in sputtering fury over Palin and McCain; work on behalf of the last man standing between true national security based on compassion and vision versus our ongoing national tragedy as the people continue their jog toward oblivion.
McCain's Integrity
10 Sep 2008 01:40 pm
Andrew Sullivan. ATLANTIC MONTHLY, September 10, 2008:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.
And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.
And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.
Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
posted by David Federman @ 8:06 AM
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