The jerks we deserve.

It's only June and we're deep into presidential debate season. Did I get my years wrong? I thought this was 2007, not 2008. Fuck a duck, we've already got close to 20 presidential contenders hurling platitudes at us and competing over who can be the biggest caveman on camera. I think this week's prize might have to go to G.O.P. longshot congressman Duncan Hunter, who advocated using "tactical nuclear missiles" to destroy Iranian centrifuges. (There's a man of conviction!) That'll teach those Iranians to threaten ... people with... nuclear ... weapons.... (irony). Christ, they'll probably kick up their uranium enrichment just on the basis of his little demagogic tirade. Then there's the god-stakes, which was a bit more of a laugh than usual since the very same day I heard a political commentator on NPR opining that the Republican candidates were shying away from openly religious rhetoric to distance themselves from Dubya. Right on the money once again, NPR! What's the weather going to be like tomorrow? (How about today?) For chrissake, that Huckabee jerk started one of his answers quoting from Genesis (and I don't mean The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway).

Where do we find these losers? Well... as a grizzly bearded android fabricator from Lost In Space once remarked, "They are non-personalities. We make them." It's not hard to figure out why our politicians, for the most part, act like dicks....I mean... act in ways that seem antithetical to our interests. For them, politics is the art of getting elected. They tell us what they think most of us want to hear. The fact is, most of us don't want bad news... so we vote for politicians that don't give us any. Most of us don't want to think of our nation as having been responsible for death and despair overseas... so we vote for politicians who tell us pleasing lies about our history. When Wolf Blitzer asks presidential candidates - Democrats - what they would do about Iran, they'll all imply that Iran poses some kind of substantial threat to the U.S. No one will provide any background to our relationship with Iran that goes beyond the 1979-81 hostage crisis - no mention of our long history of establishing and supporting dictatorship within their country and, later, our support for a neighboring dictator (initials S.H.) who attacked their country... with WMD's.

It's the same phenomenon that keeps international and national news off the front page of my hometown newspaper. The publishers - like the politicians - assume that we don't really care that much about what's happening in, say, Iraq, because 1) we don't have to go and fight there, 2) we don't pay for the war via added taxation, and 3) we re-elected George W. Bush, who can't tell the ceiling from the floor, as our commander-in-chief. We're insulated from the effects from our own wars, so why should anyone assume we want to know about them? That insulation is the product of our own gullibility. While a good many of us wanted the Iraq war, no one wants higher taxes... so our "leaders" came up with this "invade now, pay later" imperial strategy. Similarly, no one wants the draft, so our politicians lean more and more heavily on the volunteer force, making them go back again and again, perpetually raising the bar like Colonel Cathcart in Catch-22. Bush and our congressional leaders told us we could have a world war without having to fight or pay, and we, for the most part, bought it.

What's the solution to this conundrum? We need to grow up as a nation. We need to face the bad stuff that we've done over the decades, and try to do better. There's no leader who can do that for us... It's entirely up to us. Till then, we'll get the jerks we deserve.

luv u,

jp