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Derangement - part 4

The Plagiarist

The Plagiarist

copypasty
Outside the Romney event in Florida there was a protest of about thirty people, all supporters of antiwar libertarian Ron Paul who came to shout at the cars on their way in and out of the civic center parking lot. When I went over to visit with them, I found that almost all of them told the same story. Excepting a few cases here and there, they were all former dyed-in-the-wool Rush Limbaugh Republicans who had experienced holy conversions. Many talked about being reunited with liberal family members with whom they had argued for years.
 
"I'm a conservative, I used to be a neocon even, I used to think Cindy Sheehan was...I mean, I ended up going out and buying a Dixie Chicks album, just because I feel bad, you know?" said J.C. Braithwaite, a thirty-something ex-Ohioan who was emerging from a Sleeping Beauty-esque sojourn in the Limbaugh woods. J.C. would later tell me that she once won the Daughters of the American Revolution's Citizen Bee Award and had the Statue of Liberty on her class ring in school. "I get misty-eyed at the 'Star-Spangled Banner,'" she told me. "I called Mike Eruzione's answering machine when the U.S. beat Russia. I want to fall in love with my country again."
 
J.C. is at this protest with her mother and her brother, Aaron. Her brother used to be the reviled family liberal, a "conspiracy theorist" who had a lot of ideas about 9/11 his family didn't even want to listen to. Now Mom, Sis, and Brother are all together under one banner, campaigning for Ron Paul. And while all the protesters here seem genuinely smitten with their candidate, I get the feeling that it's more what Paul represents that turns them on. The vibe here is very science fiction, very Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Romney, an insectoid big shot among the pod people, is to be protested, while the unpodded, still-human Paul crowd holds its banners and tries to stay awake.
 
"It kinda felt like in The Matrix, where it's like, 'Take the red pill,' you know?" she said. "They make it sound like if you supported Ron Paul you're some crazy 9/11 conspiracy wacko. But we've just been lied to so many times, you feel like you've just been chumped, you know what I mean?"

"Well, yeah..." I said.

"And I'm ready to blow up my TV!" J.C.'s kindly bespectacled mom shouted. "Ready to blow it up and watch YouTube!"

"Yeah," said J.C. "I used to watch all that stuff...O'Reilly...Fox..."

"I used to think everything on TV was true," chimed in Mom.

"Now we know," said J.C. "And the worst thing, we used to be so hard on Aaron," she said, referring to her brother, who was holding a banner across the street.

"We thought he was paranoid," agreed Mom.

"Now we all get along again," said J.C.
 
I asked what family gatherings used to be like.

"We didn't even talk at Thanksgiving," said J.C. "About politics we couldn't talk at all. I mean he was the tree-hugging Democrat, while I was the conservative, married to a Republican doctor..."

"Didn't talk much," agreed Mom.

Just then, while I was talking to J.C. and her mother, a reporter for the local Orlando TV station, Channel 6, swooped in to shoot some protester footage. The reporter had a perfect helmet of wavy anchorman hair. One of the Paul supporters leaned over and whispered to me. "Check it out, it's Mitt Romney," he said.

"You mean the hair?" I asked.

"Not just the hair," he quipped.
 
American political movements always seem to have an us and a them, and the them is often more important that the us. With plenty of justice the Ron Paul movement identifies the them as an incestuous oligarchy of insider assholes: congressman and businessmen and TV reporters who show up every four years dressed in nearly identical Halloween-like costumes -ties, sculpted hair, high production values. Canny campaign strategists have always keenly understood the depth of popular distrust of those types, which is why you'll seldom see a mainstream campaign event without a candidate taking a shot here and there at the superficial trappings of his own political class. Even Romney lately has been making haircut jokes -not at his own expense, of course, but at the expense of John Edwards, whose plan for a federal savings program that would save $250 a year for most Americans seemed ripe for ridicule to Romney's handlers. "That wouldn't buy John Edwards a haircut," cracked Romney today, eliciting a half-fart of muted laughs from the crowd.
 
But not many people are buying this bullshit anymore, and that may mark the beginning of something genuinely new in the American political system. The Derangement that I describe in this book kicked off when Americans finally figured out that they'd been betrayed by their mainstream political system, but still failed to abandon that old paradigm completely. The 9/11 "Truth" and Christian End Timer phenomena are both basically crude parodies of the same old left/right canned media Holy War. Adherents abandoned their former champions in the Republican and Democratic parties not because they realized they'd been conned into hating each other, but because they felt those champions of theirs had failed to act on that hate aggressively enough. So instead of having a political awakening, they just went further down the rabbit hole of geeked-up patriotic paranoia, into a place where the other side isn't merely wrong, but made up actually of conspirator-killers or terrorists or agents of Satan, not even really human beings. They reached out to or built movements whose object was not the defeat of the Other Side, but its utter destruction (as in the case of the End Timers) or its overthrow (the Truthers).
 
From that point of view the Derangement was a grotesque black comedy. It was Monty Python's Crack Suicide Squad brought to life; screwed by a corrupt ruling class, the Population at Large rebelled by ramming itself into twin brick walls of pure idiocy. It was hard to say what was more absurd, the preposterous corruption of our politicians or the utterly irrational response of the people they betrayed. For most of the time that I worked on this book, it looked like an utterly hopeless situation, the kind of maelstrom of pointlessly destructive behavior and willful misunderstanding that could leave us all fucked for a generation, with nothing left to do but laugh.
 
But who knows, maybe things aren't so bleak. At the extremities of the Derangement there are signs now that the mainstream attempt to freeze-dry the debate in a permanent predictable struggle over the same old symbolic issues, voiced by the same media-political complex, has failed. And maybe the Paul campaign, as marginal as it seems, offers a glimpse at the new fault line. It's not blue and red so much anymore. It's on the farm and off the farm. And the numbers off the farm are growing.

And sure, some of those people off the farm are Truthers and End Timers and other members of the Crack Suicide Squad rebellion. But increasingly some are people who have their eyes wide open, who are seeing the Big Con for what it really is.
 
"Yeah, I've never contributed to a campaign before, but that's because I couldn't afford it," said Terence Reilly, one of the Paul protesters. Terence does geek-squad-type computer maintenance for a central Florida company; he's got a wife and a newborn child, and he's getting by. He came to the Ron Paul campaign via the usual route; disillusioned with mainstream politics and the Washington media, he surfed and he read and he decided that this little-known politician was the man who stood for his values.

"There are people out there who don't have the time, or the energy, or the...the Internet to find things out for themselves," he said. "They don't take that time."
 
And it isn't just on the Republican side, in the Paul campaign, that I saw this kind of thing. On the Democratic side, the John Edwards campaign seemed, to me, to have been crafted especially to appeal to those voters who felt they'd been left behind by their party. Edwards not only promised to eschew lobbyist donations and corporate bundlers but went out of his way to shed light on the kinds of manipulations that ran the Senate he served in. In fact, part of the Edwards stump speech in the fall of 2007 was an exposé of exactly the kind of behavior described in the congressional portions of this book -in particular, he talked about a slowdown of legislation that would have eased the way for more production of cheap generic pharmaceuticals, a slowdown effected by key members of his own Democratic party who had accepted massive donations from the pharmaceutical industry. This was heretical behavior for a formerly "mainstream" Democrat, and Edwards's admonition to audiences not to "replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats" led to standing ovations when I saw him in Iowa and New Hampshire that fall. Even longtime Democrats like Harold and Patricia White, an elderly couple from a small Iowan town called Monticello, nodded immediately when I asked if they agreed with Edwards's statement that there was "no difference" between the two parties.
 
"He's telling it like it is," said Harold, who incidentally was also a devout Christian --as much as he liked Edwards's views on Washington corruption, he disliked his use of the phrase "give 'em Hell." The evangelical Christian who turned up at speeches of reformist Democrats like Edwards and Dennis Kucinich was another phenomenon I would see a lot that fall. This was something I certainly did not see in 2004, when the makeup of Republican and Democratic crowds was far more predictable.
 
Beyond Edwards, you found some off-the-farmers at the speeches of Barack Obama as well. While Obama almost certainly represented the same kind of obscenely funded insider Democrat who'd let down generations of party members over the years --he raised almost 100 million before the Iowa caucus alone, with heavy support from Wall Street and the other usual corporate villains-- it was the tone of his campaign that was different. Maybe it was because Obama, with his natural charisma, felt he didn't need it, or maybe that's just the way he is, but the Buck Fush/unseat-the-Republican-devil stridency was completely absent from his whole approach. "I'm so tired of Democrats waving Bush in front of me and thinking I owe them my vote," one woman in Nashua, New Hampshire, told me. "Just tell me who you are and let me think about it, okay? I don't need to be hating someone else. I'm really tired of all that. It's tiring, you know? Why do I need to hate some dolt in Alabama? I don't even know those people."
 
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