Thursday, February 28, 2019
Waiting for the Sun
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 6/1/2007
... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him…We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
- Willa Cather
We bound off the evening ferry onto land toward Market Street as fast as our legs will carry us with rush hour rhyme and reason. Across the Embarcadero, over the red brick road to the first major downtown intersection. People zip around in all directions like smashing atoms, and in the middle of it all a middle-aged homeless man with a stubbled grimace stands by the curb wiping his ass with one of those dinky little white napkins they stash in the old school silver dispensers at the diner, right in front of the swank Hyatt Regency and the cable car turnaround which shoots bubbly tourists up California Street just like you’ve seen on those pristine sunny blue sky day frozen moment postcards. Nobody seems to notice, except two cable car operators who stand and laugh as the next ride loads up.
I walk a block to the Embarcadero Center , a downtown mall and insanely expensive commercial real estate, and wait for a bus due west, toward the Pacific Ocean. About twenty yuppie worker bees from the financial services sector are randomly strewn inside and around the bus shelter. No one talks or laughs or reacts; all eyes are glued to the turn ahead.
The clumped network of wires above that guide the electric system shake a little when the bus arrives. A few people herd like cattle at the door, but most are tired and civilized enough to fall in line. As I board I hold up my bus pass. The driver stares through me and the formality and on to the next rider. A sign in the front of the bus reads:
INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION
It’s the first stop on the route, so we all have a choice of seats. I sit near the back, next to a window, and listen to the low steady hum of the electric bus as it pokes along.
Within a few downtown stops we are jammed tight, the aisles full of feet, hands taloned to the overhead bar. Here and there someone reads but most just stare into their laps, the space in front of them, or off into the distance. There’s not a lot to see outside: tall buildings, chainstores and the slate gray sky. Denying golden silence is the sound of heavy metal pounding through someone’s headphones.
Sitting next to me is a tall man in his early thirties that I’ve seen around town several times throughout the years, but can’t recall where. Through the ride he bounces a knee up and down, shifts in his seat, and puts his head in his hands, his anxiety exacerbated by the snail’s pace at which overloaded clean energy can move.
When we come to his stop he escapes out the back door and is replaced by a middle-aged man in a suit. My new companion carries himself with a certain slow exactitude, sitting down carefully so as not to bump me, then reaching into a black sidebag from which he removes a book I recently read, All the King’s Men. I have an urge to ask him what he thinks about the book, but I drop it when he pulls an IPOD out and inserts the headphones into his ear holes. I wonder how the hell he can concentrate on long-form prose when listening to music – or is the IPOD just a way of cordoning off humanity?
The bus comes to a stop and those exiting thread their way through to the back exit while new passengers file in through the front.
Suddenly a pungent odor drifts through the crowded space. I wonder where it comes from. The man next to me turns the pages of his novel, oblivious.
A few moments later there is a muttering that seems addressed to no one in particular. I search for the voice and find the source of the funk a few seats ahead - a homeless man in his fifties whose face is red-tanned, cracked, and bloated. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, a worn black leather coat and a baseball cap, his eyes open halfway in a woozy drunk fashion as he cradles a fifth of Jim Beam like a baby in coarse, leathery hands. The seats on either side of him are open.
“Turn the heater up,” he yells to the driver.
Many of the other riders stare at him out of curiosity, the pornography of raw poverty, then look away when he turns toward them, lest they be lured into listening. To fill the space, he converses with himself, then hums, then laughs:
“Ah, that cracks me up,” he says, and slaps his palm to his head, as if why didn’t I think of that before.
At the next stop a college-aged girl with a natural look – long straight brown hair, no makeup, jeans, jeanjacket – gets on. She winds through to the back of the bus, sees there are no other seats, and sits down next to the homeless man.
“I used to have a girlfriend,” he says. “She was pretty like you.”
The girl looks over and mouths thank you. She is a little nervous, if nice, probably new to these parts. He feels it and continues to talk to her; she fights the urge to look away.
Just as everything is settling in, the poles that connect to the wires above that power the bus come undone. The driver stops the vehicle, lurches out of his seat, and walks behind the bus to re-attach the poles as we sit in the dead air of a collective gasp. One minute goes by, two minutes, five, and the driver’s still out there, but no dice. Finally he comes back into the bus and tells us we have to get off.
The electric poles are tucked and tied down when we pour out on to Van Ness Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. I look up Van Ness a few blocks and see a southbound bus coming. It’s going away from the ocean, but by now I’m ready to slip back into my pod.
The driver of the 49 Van Ness-Mission could care less when I flash my pass; fifteen people just piled in through the middle and back doors without paying and he just closes the front door and hauls ass in his long gas-powered accordion bus, like he just wants to be done with it all.
I see an aisle seat toward the back of the bus. The Hispanic man in the window seat next to me slides a leg that straddles the dividing line back into his square.
Dead center in the middle of the bus is a big metal wheel that spins one way, then the other, as the accordion that connects front and back crunches up while the bus whips around corners like a snake with no nerve endings at the back, then expands back to its full length on the straightaways. The seats in the wheel are empty; no one wants to face one another.
As we come to a stop at the turn onto Mission Street , a homeless woman in a wheelchair with rotted teeth and stringy strung out long hair panhandles window-to-window at a divider. The bus turns right and the buildings become gray and brown brick, like in a black and white movie.
With no human voices to fill the air, public service announcements drone on over the intercom:
“Eating, drinking and smoking are prohibited on all transit vehicles.”
At the next stop, as the bus is about to take off, a large man with grocery bags in each hand flounders up with a look of desperation; no one wants to have to stand at a bus stop for ten or fifteen or who knows how many minutes. This time the driver waits and re-opens the door. When the bus starts up again the intercom reminds us:
“Please hold on,”
then, a moment later,
“Remember on a crowded bus, always protect purses and wallets.”
High up and off to the side is a St. Pauli Girl billboard that features a snow white buxom Minnesotan of the kind rarely seen in these parts, which reminds me that I’m one of the only Caucasians on the bus, which makes me again wonder how much social progress emerging polyglot demographics will bring (or will majorities of people of color follow whitey's lead and become more selfish and short-sighted once they get a bigger piece of the pie?).
I come out of my head into the floor of the bus, strewn with newspapers, trash, candy wrappers, a red plastic grocery bag, blue powder from a capsized capsule and squiggly spraypainted signatures, when I hear someone say “Spare a quarter?”
Ten feet forward a gaunt and frazzled addict with jeans hanging down past his ass crack bounces from person to person with his pitch. The riders shake their heads; they so just want to be home. The man looks up at me as the bus stops and The Voice comes on:
“Please exit through the rear doors.”
Empty-handed he turns around and bolts out the back door as a young woman gets on with her kids and finds two spots in the front of the bus. The bigger of the two sits next to her, the smaller sits in her lap while she holds a plastic shopping bag with one hand. The kids must have read the script: the younger is quiet and subdued, while the older turns around with his knees on the seat and looks out the window with mute enthusiasm. Once every one is on, the driver puts his foot to the floor.
Minutes later I step down and through the rear door onto a corner with a subway station where people are very friendly. First up is a bible-wielding Spanish-speaking preacher (with a bible-wielding double stepping in stride, translating in English to the best of his ability), then a Socialist Worker pusher, and an elderly Hispanic woman standing back from the subway entrance cooing a soft sell: “Ro-ses, flo-res?”
As I walk along I look at the cracks in the sidewalk old and gray as the day and the few faces that come past me, long and self-contained. A little ways down the block I encounter one of my next door neighbors, who continues to talk into his phone as we brush elbows.
Just before going home, I stop at the corner store for evening provisions. The man behind the counter gives me a nod of familiarity when I enter. We’ve known each other for five years - a decent amount of time by San Francisco standards - and grown increasingly familiar since we discovered we had a shared need to gripe about the dumb and dangerous piece of work that occupies the Oval Office.
I set a bottled water on the counter as we talk about our summer weather (gray, windy, mild) and wonder aloud when the sun will come out again, until another customer steps up and foreshortens our discussion. As I head for the door, the store owner says goodbye, but does not address me formally; he does not know my name.
... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him…We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
- Willa Cather
We bound off the evening ferry onto land toward Market Street as fast as our legs will carry us with rush hour rhyme and reason. Across the Embarcadero, over the red brick road to the first major downtown intersection. People zip around in all directions like smashing atoms, and in the middle of it all a middle-aged homeless man with a stubbled grimace stands by the curb wiping his ass with one of those dinky little white napkins they stash in the old school silver dispensers at the diner, right in front of the swank Hyatt Regency and the cable car turnaround which shoots bubbly tourists up California Street just like you’ve seen on those pristine sunny blue sky day frozen moment postcards. Nobody seems to notice, except two cable car operators who stand and laugh as the next ride loads up.
I walk a block to the Embarcadero Center , a downtown mall and insanely expensive commercial real estate, and wait for a bus due west, toward the Pacific Ocean. About twenty yuppie worker bees from the financial services sector are randomly strewn inside and around the bus shelter. No one talks or laughs or reacts; all eyes are glued to the turn ahead.
The clumped network of wires above that guide the electric system shake a little when the bus arrives. A few people herd like cattle at the door, but most are tired and civilized enough to fall in line. As I board I hold up my bus pass. The driver stares through me and the formality and on to the next rider. A sign in the front of the bus reads:
INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION
It’s the first stop on the route, so we all have a choice of seats. I sit near the back, next to a window, and listen to the low steady hum of the electric bus as it pokes along.
Within a few downtown stops we are jammed tight, the aisles full of feet, hands taloned to the overhead bar. Here and there someone reads but most just stare into their laps, the space in front of them, or off into the distance. There’s not a lot to see outside: tall buildings, chainstores and the slate gray sky. Denying golden silence is the sound of heavy metal pounding through someone’s headphones.
Sitting next to me is a tall man in his early thirties that I’ve seen around town several times throughout the years, but can’t recall where. Through the ride he bounces a knee up and down, shifts in his seat, and puts his head in his hands, his anxiety exacerbated by the snail’s pace at which overloaded clean energy can move.
When we come to his stop he escapes out the back door and is replaced by a middle-aged man in a suit. My new companion carries himself with a certain slow exactitude, sitting down carefully so as not to bump me, then reaching into a black sidebag from which he removes a book I recently read, All the King’s Men. I have an urge to ask him what he thinks about the book, but I drop it when he pulls an IPOD out and inserts the headphones into his ear holes. I wonder how the hell he can concentrate on long-form prose when listening to music – or is the IPOD just a way of cordoning off humanity?
The bus comes to a stop and those exiting thread their way through to the back exit while new passengers file in through the front.
Suddenly a pungent odor drifts through the crowded space. I wonder where it comes from. The man next to me turns the pages of his novel, oblivious.
A few moments later there is a muttering that seems addressed to no one in particular. I search for the voice and find the source of the funk a few seats ahead - a homeless man in his fifties whose face is red-tanned, cracked, and bloated. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, a worn black leather coat and a baseball cap, his eyes open halfway in a woozy drunk fashion as he cradles a fifth of Jim Beam like a baby in coarse, leathery hands. The seats on either side of him are open.
“Turn the heater up,” he yells to the driver.
Many of the other riders stare at him out of curiosity, the pornography of raw poverty, then look away when he turns toward them, lest they be lured into listening. To fill the space, he converses with himself, then hums, then laughs:
“Ah, that cracks me up,” he says, and slaps his palm to his head, as if why didn’t I think of that before.
At the next stop a college-aged girl with a natural look – long straight brown hair, no makeup, jeans, jeanjacket – gets on. She winds through to the back of the bus, sees there are no other seats, and sits down next to the homeless man.
“I used to have a girlfriend,” he says. “She was pretty like you.”
The girl looks over and mouths thank you. She is a little nervous, if nice, probably new to these parts. He feels it and continues to talk to her; she fights the urge to look away.
Just as everything is settling in, the poles that connect to the wires above that power the bus come undone. The driver stops the vehicle, lurches out of his seat, and walks behind the bus to re-attach the poles as we sit in the dead air of a collective gasp. One minute goes by, two minutes, five, and the driver’s still out there, but no dice. Finally he comes back into the bus and tells us we have to get off.
The electric poles are tucked and tied down when we pour out on to Van Ness Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. I look up Van Ness a few blocks and see a southbound bus coming. It’s going away from the ocean, but by now I’m ready to slip back into my pod.
---
The driver of the 49 Van Ness-Mission could care less when I flash my pass; fifteen people just piled in through the middle and back doors without paying and he just closes the front door and hauls ass in his long gas-powered accordion bus, like he just wants to be done with it all.
I see an aisle seat toward the back of the bus. The Hispanic man in the window seat next to me slides a leg that straddles the dividing line back into his square.
Dead center in the middle of the bus is a big metal wheel that spins one way, then the other, as the accordion that connects front and back crunches up while the bus whips around corners like a snake with no nerve endings at the back, then expands back to its full length on the straightaways. The seats in the wheel are empty; no one wants to face one another.
As we come to a stop at the turn onto Mission Street , a homeless woman in a wheelchair with rotted teeth and stringy strung out long hair panhandles window-to-window at a divider. The bus turns right and the buildings become gray and brown brick, like in a black and white movie.
With no human voices to fill the air, public service announcements drone on over the intercom:
“Eating, drinking and smoking are prohibited on all transit vehicles.”
At the next stop, as the bus is about to take off, a large man with grocery bags in each hand flounders up with a look of desperation; no one wants to have to stand at a bus stop for ten or fifteen or who knows how many minutes. This time the driver waits and re-opens the door. When the bus starts up again the intercom reminds us:
“Please hold on,”
then, a moment later,
“Remember on a crowded bus, always protect purses and wallets.”
High up and off to the side is a St. Pauli Girl billboard that features a snow white buxom Minnesotan of the kind rarely seen in these parts, which reminds me that I’m one of the only Caucasians on the bus, which makes me again wonder how much social progress emerging polyglot demographics will bring (or will majorities of people of color follow whitey's lead and become more selfish and short-sighted once they get a bigger piece of the pie?).
I come out of my head into the floor of the bus, strewn with newspapers, trash, candy wrappers, a red plastic grocery bag, blue powder from a capsized capsule and squiggly spraypainted signatures, when I hear someone say “Spare a quarter?”
Ten feet forward a gaunt and frazzled addict with jeans hanging down past his ass crack bounces from person to person with his pitch. The riders shake their heads; they so just want to be home. The man looks up at me as the bus stops and The Voice comes on:
“Please exit through the rear doors.”
Empty-handed he turns around and bolts out the back door as a young woman gets on with her kids and finds two spots in the front of the bus. The bigger of the two sits next to her, the smaller sits in her lap while she holds a plastic shopping bag with one hand. The kids must have read the script: the younger is quiet and subdued, while the older turns around with his knees on the seat and looks out the window with mute enthusiasm. Once every one is on, the driver puts his foot to the floor.
Minutes later I step down and through the rear door onto a corner with a subway station where people are very friendly. First up is a bible-wielding Spanish-speaking preacher (with a bible-wielding double stepping in stride, translating in English to the best of his ability), then a Socialist Worker pusher, and an elderly Hispanic woman standing back from the subway entrance cooing a soft sell: “Ro-ses, flo-res?”
As I walk along I look at the cracks in the sidewalk old and gray as the day and the few faces that come past me, long and self-contained. A little ways down the block I encounter one of my next door neighbors, who continues to talk into his phone as we brush elbows.
Just before going home, I stop at the corner store for evening provisions. The man behind the counter gives me a nod of familiarity when I enter. We’ve known each other for five years - a decent amount of time by San Francisco standards - and grown increasingly familiar since we discovered we had a shared need to gripe about the dumb and dangerous piece of work that occupies the Oval Office.
I set a bottled water on the counter as we talk about our summer weather (gray, windy, mild) and wonder aloud when the sun will come out again, until another customer steps up and foreshortens our discussion. As I head for the door, the store owner says goodbye, but does not address me formally; he does not know my name.
The Honest Republican?
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 4/15/07
He stands with his waders submerged in mud above the article title “Prisoner of Conscience,” clad in beat up old blue jeans, a blue denim shirt under a green hunting vest, a black baseball cap on his head. To his left is a fishing pole, perched on a rock pointing away; at his feet his loyal springer spaniel looks with master directly into the camera. He is everyman. He is Republican Senator John McCain, a.k.a. Straight Talkin’ McCain, and he is running for president.
In the opening paragraphs of “Prisoner” the writer says of his subject: “In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human.” The burning question of the 10,000-word love letter in February’s Vanity Fair is: does John McCain possess the guile necessary to be a successful candidate? And would McCain even want the presidency if he has to sell his soul to get it?
Throughout his 24 years in Congress, McCain has gained a reputation for speaking his mind, consequences be damned, often in opposition to the Republican Party line of the moment. McCain has bucked the GOP – sometimes loudly – on gun show loopholes, lobbying reform, HMO reform, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, climate change, gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, seeking compensation from tobacco companies and upholding the filibuster. In a party long run with and on authoritarian discipline, this is a novelty that the press can’t get enough of.
In his 2000 presidential run, McCain rambled around the early primary states aboard a bus famously dubbed the Straight Talk Express for his direct attacks on the ideological orthodoxies of both major parties and the extraordinary level of access given to the media, a way for McCain’s cash-strapped campaign to get free and favorable press coverage.
McCain giddily attacked the Republican establishment candidate George W. Bush from the rhetorical center and clobbered Bush in the vital early primary state of New Hampshire by almost twenty points, only to get buried in South Carolina by an evangelical militia backed by a shitstorm of slanderous attack ads. Along with the above-ground assault were whisper campaigns claiming that McCain was a nutcase due to his five years in captivity as a POW in Vietnam, that his wife was a drug addict (she had had an addiction to pills following surgery), and that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains have an adopted Bangladeshi daughter.)
Bush’s victory in South Carolina was the beginning of the end for McCain, who marched on to Pat Robertson’s home town and denounced Bush as “a Pat Robertson Republican” and Robertson and Bush supporter Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”
While McCain lost the primary, he piqued interest among a substantial block of independent voters thereafter known as “McCainiacs.” More importantly, McCain won the media, whom he later referred to as “my base,” which was not much of a stretch. Opposite Al Gore’s funereal seminars and George W. Bush’s scripted platitudes, McCain’s shake and bake liveliness and equal opportunity willingness to upend both major party platforms cemented a reputation for integrity that has become conventional wisdom in the national political dialogue. Our lazy media corps love labels that save them from doing their homework (i.e. the tedious and unsexy task of sifting through voting records to see what candidate X is really about), and the labels attached to McCain are uniformly flattering: “maverick”, “insurgent”, “rebel”, or “icon.” The press’s favorite adjective for McCain is “defiant.” McCain’s autobiographies play on this handy image with titles such as Character is Destiny, Worth the Fighting For and Why Courage Matters.
From early 2001, McCain became the media’s go-to guy in the Senate, as he was quick with a quotable quote and often likely to mix it up with someone, thereby creating an artificial controversy guaranteed to rattle around the hollow media chamber for a day or two until the next flavor-of-the day came along. Still smarting from Team Bush’s manhandling in the presidential race, McCain leveled populist attacks on Bush’s tax cuts (“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us”), 40% of which went to millionaires, and in July 2001, a McCain aide talked to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle about the possibility of McCain leaving the Republican Party and caucusing with the Democrats. The assumed benefits would’ve been the committee chairmanship of his choice, a louder megaphone through which to project his voice, and revenge on Bush. Then came 9-11.
When it comes to picking presidents, many Americans favor instinct to empiricism, reducing presidential elections to popularity contests. Despite the dire and dramatic events of the past few years, 55% of respondents in a March AP poll of American voters valued subjective personality traits such as honesty and integrity more than objective observations on policy positions and credentials.
The most obvious shortcoming of this mode of assessment is that politicians are professional chameleons: they thrive and survive by adapting to shifts in public opinion, while concealing that they are doing so. Judging a politician by their honesty is like tipping a hooker on the sound of her sweet nothings. Moreover, when most Americans rely on corporate network news, content-starved newspapers with bite-size AP dispatches, and cable programs that revolve around horse race stories and Kabuki quibbles, public perception of who’s telling the truth will often be out of line with factual reality, sometimes wildly.
Playing on this, George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, like many Republican campaigns before it, ran on a ‘character-first’ platform. Messy details about the far-reaching results of Bush’s decisions were discarded in favor of a contrived dialectic positing Bush’s stubborn resolve against John Kerry’s alleged weakness of will. Bush, who had pulled strings to get into the National Guard and then ditched his commitment, was strong, firm, and constant as the tides, while Kerry, who had volunteered for service in Vietnam and gone on to win three Purple Hearts, one Bronze Star and one Silver Star, was weak and indecisive. The subtext was that a president should be respected and rewarded for certitude, no matter how terrible his or her judgment.
Though Karl Rove & Associates had put a serious hurting on John McCain in 2000, McCain was only too happy to bolster this charade with the knowledge that loyalty to the king would go a long way toward giving him first dibs on the fundraisers and campaign staff from Bush’s well-oiled machine in 2008, while helping to repair McCain’s image among rabid right-wing Republican primary voters.
In a tv spot, McCain said that Bush, the same president who had: 1) stepped into office on the backs of minorities his brother had purposely disenfranchised in Florida; 2) done as little as possible to stop 9/11; then 3) relentlessly manipulated the fear spawned by 9/11 to start a disastrous invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in order to 4) seize Iraq’s oil and commandeer the framing discussions of close 2002 senate races while 5) accusing opponents of being unpatriotic, had “led with great moral clarity and firm resolve.”
At the GOP convention in New York City, held unusually late to milk the third anniversary of 9/11 to maximum advantage, McCain added that Bush “has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time…He has not wavered. He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield. And neither will we.” Lest anyone question his newfound genuflection before President Bush, in September of ’06 McCain told attendees at a dinner hosted by The American Spectator that “Campaigning with George W. Bush was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
In late September of 2005, as the city of New Orleans lay in wake following Hurricane Katrina, John McCain held a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee in which he hit his desk as he doled out heavy-handed cross-examination to the central witness: “You were told more than five months ago to come up with a tougher proposal. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it…Don’t you understand that this is an issue of transcendent importance that you should have acted on months ago.”
The source of McCain’s outrage and indignation? The most corrupt administration since Richard Nixon? An invasion of choice that had started a civil war in Iraq? The most extreme income inequality since the Great Depression? 45,000,000 Americans with no health insurance? The skyrocketing costs of a college education?
Nope. Steroids in sports.
Along with the show trial hearings, McCain (who likes to refer to himself as a “limited government conservative”) proposed urgent federal legislation to regulate drug tests in sports, only to let the (non) issue go a couple months later when Major League Baseball made token concessions.
Earlier in the same year, as bloodshed and chaos grew in Iraq, the Republican Party showed its respect for the sanctity of human life by trying to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen years following cardiac arrest. McCain backed Republicans’ attempt to force Schiavo’s husband to keep his wife on life support, quality of life and multiple court decisions be damned. When the public saw through the publicity stunt, the GOP brought their ace in in a pinch to do damage control. Of the breathtakingly crass sketch, McCain told ABC with grandfatherly earnestness: “I think that the motivation of my colleagues is that we want to give this young woman’s family a chance to care for her as long as she lives.”
Both incidents demonstrated the decoy tactics the Republican Party has used for decades, from McCarthyism forward, to distract the American public from more important matters, including in this day and age the fact that most of us are working longer hours for less pay and shrinking benefits while the rich gorge on ever bigger portions of America’s economic pie. McCain’s response to our fraying social contract has been to oppose unions that would reverse these trends at every step, to back Bush’s plan to privatize (i.e. draw and quarter) Social Security, which would do little to solve America’s retirement problems (it could potentially make them worse), and to support brutal cuts to the tiny portion of Congress’ budget that goes to discretionary spending programs such as Headstart, school lunches, childcare subsidies, infant nutrition programs for the economically disadvantaged and other programs that actually help people. Healthcare? McCain doesn’t talk about it. An urban agenda? McCain doesn’t have one.
While expecting sacrifice from the poor, McCain has recently reversed his opposition to Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In November of 2005 he told Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal: “I just thought [Bush’s tax cut] was too tilted to the wealthy, and I still do…We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me.” Yet in recent months, McCain has gotten over petty concerns about bloated budget deficits and basic economic fairness and now supports making these huge windfalls to investors, inheritors of wealth, and other beneficiaries of America’s 21st century brand of predatory capitalism permanent, just as he seeks deep pockets for the most expensive fundraising season in world history.
McCain followed his Shakespearean performances in 2005 with more partisan water-carrying in 2006, when he made 346 campaign appearances for Republican candidates, endorsing many who were to the right of Genghis Khan, and with the 2008 presidential campaign already well underway, McCain’s carefully crafted image of independence proves increasingly farcical as he panders time and again to the hard right, though sometimes quietly.
At the end of February, on the same night he announced his candidacy on Letterman (generating the autopilot McCain-as-maverick headline “In Newly Unusual Way, McCain Says He’ll Run”), McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate to skip the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly meeting of conservative activists. McCain’s spokesman cited a scheduling conflict, but it later came out that McCain’s people had tried to set up a media-free private reception for attendees, a way of appeasing the right without doing so publicly.
CPAC rejected the offer, but as McCain’s spokesman pointed out, his candidate’s 20-year voting record should be more than enough to bring right-wing Republicans into lockstep with McCain’s bid. For while McCain gets major mileage out of his handful of differences with the GOP (on issues on which Republicans are out of step with public opinion), he votes with his party more than 90% of the time. A study of McCain’s votes in 2005 by professor Keith Poole found McCain to be the 4th most conservative senator in Congress, while voteview.com ranked him as the second most conservative senator for the whole 109th.
McCain has buttressed this distinction with craven 180 degree turns to the right. Though McCain had said in 2004 that a GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” he did television ads in favor of a measure that banned gay marriage at the state level in 2006. Though McCain said in 1999 that he supported Roe v. Wade (“…I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations”), he now says flatly that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Jerry Falwell, once labeled an “agent of intolerance,” now gets on famously with Mr. McCain, who gave the commencement speech at Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University in May of 2006. Falwell returned the favor by inviting McCain to the Religious Broadcaster’s Convention (held in 2007) and offering up Brett O’Donnell, Liberty University’s debate coach, for McCain’s communications team.
As he’s crisscrossed the country on the weathered Straight Talk Express Bus, McCain has traveled back in time to a land of back alley abortions and legal machine guns, where public funds go to the teaching of intelligent design and abstinence education, big powerful weapons blow missiles out of the sky, and Cuba policy is stuck like groundhog’s day in 1961.
Against this backdrop, John McCain recently made a trip to Miami to speak before a group of right-wing Cubans, including veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the speech, McCain decried the rise of ‘socialism’ in South America, or more accurately, the election of leftists supportive of the redistribution of economic spoils to long-exploited indigenous people and opposed to US-imposed free trade agreements. A surprisingly blunt AP dispatch mentioned that McCain “said all the right things about Cuba for [the] audience,” including stating his opposition to ending the embargo until Cuba has free elections and basic human rights, and releases all political prisoners. McCain’s stance on behalf of freedom would be believable and maybe even noble if only he could reserve the same degree of indignation for vastly more oppressive U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but of course their expatriates don’t control 25 electoral votes.
As the 2008 campaign heats up at this sad, early date, the question is not whether McCain can find within himself the guile to compete, but just how low he is willing to go. Down the campaign stretch in 2006, Democrat Harold Ford of Tennessee led his opponent Bob Corker in most polls, giving Ford the potential to become the first African-American to win a Senate seat in the Deep South since Reconstruction. As ever, when backed against the wall, the GOP aimed low with character assassination and innuendo, with an ad in which people “off the street” make crass statements (ex: “terrorists need their privacy”) in defense of views falsely attributed to Ford. The implication of the ad was that the safe-as-milk Ford, one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress, was out of touch with mainstream values.
Playing to the most deep-seated, residual white Southern racism, the ad was roundly condemned, by John McCain among others. Terry Nelson (known for his connections to disgraced former GOP operator Tom Delay), who birthed the ad for the Republican National Committee, was fired by Wal-Mart, for whom he worked as a consultant. But the ad worked – Corker went ahead in the race and never looked back – and Nelson got a promotion not a month later when McCain hired him as his campaign manager. (Joining Nelson will be the ad firm of Stevens Reed Curcio & Pothold, who produced the notorious Swift Boat ads from the 2004 campaign, which McCain said at the time were “dishonest and dishonorable.”)
The one issue that has most contributed to McCain’s image as a man of unshakable principle is campaign finance reform. Todd Purdum’s sycophantic “Prisoner of Conscience” channels this conventional wisdom with the blithe assertion that McCain “has always loathed the cozy and corrupt culture of Washington D.C.” Though McCain has been in front on many of the baby steps to clean up Congress, in the eighties he was involved in the Keating 5 scandal, in which he engaged in a quid pro quo with a crooked S & L chairman whose failing S & L cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and McCain wasn’t above using his recent Commerce Committee chairmanship to steer favors for contributors. Purdum gets away with this distortion because DC’s pay-to-play culture is off limits to mainstream political discussion.
Much more in line with the mainstream media’s antiseptic national narrative is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill which banned soft money in federal elections. McCain deserves some credit for being one of the only people in his party to support the measure, but the truth is that McCain-Feingold is a toothless ‘reform’ measure of the kind loved in D.C. – a great way for politicians to prance before the cameras and claim to be concerned about an issue that is rotting our republic while actually doing very little. If McCain-Feingold really had bite, George W. Bush, second to none in trading dirty deeds for dirty money, never would have signed it.
In the past, McCain could be counted on to cry from the rooftops about campaign finance (ex: “The voices of average Americans have been drowned out by the deafening racket of campaign cash”), but now that he’s focused on becoming president, he’s singing a different tune, one much more harmonious with his current motives. In 2006 McCain supported a measure to make 527 donations illegal, but upon receiving flack from conservative grass-roots groups, he backed off, and in fact has taken a good deal of money from 527 leaders and organizers, according to a recent Washington Post article by investigative reporter John Solomon. The same article pointed out in detail that the long-time crusader has received money from lobbyists – a source of many of his rhetorical fusillades in the past – and a good number of Bush’s biggest fundraisers, including those who McCain criticized in the past for their lack of ethics and pollution of the political system.
The Post article that showed the gap between the mythological Citizen McCain and the shifty candidate McCain was one of the biggest signs that the media’s refusal to question the eternally earnest senator’s sincerity may be at an end. On signs of a breakup, McCain responded ferociously, calling Solomon’s truth serum the “worst hit job that has ever been done in my entire political career,” while failing to cite any factual inaccuracies.
McCain’s twenty fundraisers in March, and the 20 he is doing in April fail to make him any more of a money-grubber than the other candidates, but they do signify that he ought to lose the soapbox that has so long been a part of his act, and give us some real straight talk. We don’t need heroes. We just need someone that can clean up the mess.
He stands with his waders submerged in mud above the article title “Prisoner of Conscience,” clad in beat up old blue jeans, a blue denim shirt under a green hunting vest, a black baseball cap on his head. To his left is a fishing pole, perched on a rock pointing away; at his feet his loyal springer spaniel looks with master directly into the camera. He is everyman. He is Republican Senator John McCain, a.k.a. Straight Talkin’ McCain, and he is running for president.
In the opening paragraphs of “Prisoner” the writer says of his subject: “In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human.” The burning question of the 10,000-word love letter in February’s Vanity Fair is: does John McCain possess the guile necessary to be a successful candidate? And would McCain even want the presidency if he has to sell his soul to get it?
Throughout his 24 years in Congress, McCain has gained a reputation for speaking his mind, consequences be damned, often in opposition to the Republican Party line of the moment. McCain has bucked the GOP – sometimes loudly – on gun show loopholes, lobbying reform, HMO reform, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, climate change, gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, seeking compensation from tobacco companies and upholding the filibuster. In a party long run with and on authoritarian discipline, this is a novelty that the press can’t get enough of.
In his 2000 presidential run, McCain rambled around the early primary states aboard a bus famously dubbed the Straight Talk Express for his direct attacks on the ideological orthodoxies of both major parties and the extraordinary level of access given to the media, a way for McCain’s cash-strapped campaign to get free and favorable press coverage.
McCain giddily attacked the Republican establishment candidate George W. Bush from the rhetorical center and clobbered Bush in the vital early primary state of New Hampshire by almost twenty points, only to get buried in South Carolina by an evangelical militia backed by a shitstorm of slanderous attack ads. Along with the above-ground assault were whisper campaigns claiming that McCain was a nutcase due to his five years in captivity as a POW in Vietnam, that his wife was a drug addict (she had had an addiction to pills following surgery), and that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains have an adopted Bangladeshi daughter.)
Bush’s victory in South Carolina was the beginning of the end for McCain, who marched on to Pat Robertson’s home town and denounced Bush as “a Pat Robertson Republican” and Robertson and Bush supporter Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”
While McCain lost the primary, he piqued interest among a substantial block of independent voters thereafter known as “McCainiacs.” More importantly, McCain won the media, whom he later referred to as “my base,” which was not much of a stretch. Opposite Al Gore’s funereal seminars and George W. Bush’s scripted platitudes, McCain’s shake and bake liveliness and equal opportunity willingness to upend both major party platforms cemented a reputation for integrity that has become conventional wisdom in the national political dialogue. Our lazy media corps love labels that save them from doing their homework (i.e. the tedious and unsexy task of sifting through voting records to see what candidate X is really about), and the labels attached to McCain are uniformly flattering: “maverick”, “insurgent”, “rebel”, or “icon.” The press’s favorite adjective for McCain is “defiant.” McCain’s autobiographies play on this handy image with titles such as Character is Destiny, Worth the Fighting For and Why Courage Matters.
From early 2001, McCain became the media’s go-to guy in the Senate, as he was quick with a quotable quote and often likely to mix it up with someone, thereby creating an artificial controversy guaranteed to rattle around the hollow media chamber for a day or two until the next flavor-of-the day came along. Still smarting from Team Bush’s manhandling in the presidential race, McCain leveled populist attacks on Bush’s tax cuts (“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us”), 40% of which went to millionaires, and in July 2001, a McCain aide talked to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle about the possibility of McCain leaving the Republican Party and caucusing with the Democrats. The assumed benefits would’ve been the committee chairmanship of his choice, a louder megaphone through which to project his voice, and revenge on Bush. Then came 9-11.
When it comes to picking presidents, many Americans favor instinct to empiricism, reducing presidential elections to popularity contests. Despite the dire and dramatic events of the past few years, 55% of respondents in a March AP poll of American voters valued subjective personality traits such as honesty and integrity more than objective observations on policy positions and credentials.
The most obvious shortcoming of this mode of assessment is that politicians are professional chameleons: they thrive and survive by adapting to shifts in public opinion, while concealing that they are doing so. Judging a politician by their honesty is like tipping a hooker on the sound of her sweet nothings. Moreover, when most Americans rely on corporate network news, content-starved newspapers with bite-size AP dispatches, and cable programs that revolve around horse race stories and Kabuki quibbles, public perception of who’s telling the truth will often be out of line with factual reality, sometimes wildly.
Playing on this, George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, like many Republican campaigns before it, ran on a ‘character-first’ platform. Messy details about the far-reaching results of Bush’s decisions were discarded in favor of a contrived dialectic positing Bush’s stubborn resolve against John Kerry’s alleged weakness of will. Bush, who had pulled strings to get into the National Guard and then ditched his commitment, was strong, firm, and constant as the tides, while Kerry, who had volunteered for service in Vietnam and gone on to win three Purple Hearts, one Bronze Star and one Silver Star, was weak and indecisive. The subtext was that a president should be respected and rewarded for certitude, no matter how terrible his or her judgment.
Though Karl Rove & Associates had put a serious hurting on John McCain in 2000, McCain was only too happy to bolster this charade with the knowledge that loyalty to the king would go a long way toward giving him first dibs on the fundraisers and campaign staff from Bush’s well-oiled machine in 2008, while helping to repair McCain’s image among rabid right-wing Republican primary voters.
In a tv spot, McCain said that Bush, the same president who had: 1) stepped into office on the backs of minorities his brother had purposely disenfranchised in Florida; 2) done as little as possible to stop 9/11; then 3) relentlessly manipulated the fear spawned by 9/11 to start a disastrous invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in order to 4) seize Iraq’s oil and commandeer the framing discussions of close 2002 senate races while 5) accusing opponents of being unpatriotic, had “led with great moral clarity and firm resolve.”
At the GOP convention in New York City, held unusually late to milk the third anniversary of 9/11 to maximum advantage, McCain added that Bush “has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time…He has not wavered. He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield. And neither will we.” Lest anyone question his newfound genuflection before President Bush, in September of ’06 McCain told attendees at a dinner hosted by The American Spectator that “Campaigning with George W. Bush was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
In late September of 2005, as the city of New Orleans lay in wake following Hurricane Katrina, John McCain held a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee in which he hit his desk as he doled out heavy-handed cross-examination to the central witness: “You were told more than five months ago to come up with a tougher proposal. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it…Don’t you understand that this is an issue of transcendent importance that you should have acted on months ago.”
The source of McCain’s outrage and indignation? The most corrupt administration since Richard Nixon? An invasion of choice that had started a civil war in Iraq? The most extreme income inequality since the Great Depression? 45,000,000 Americans with no health insurance? The skyrocketing costs of a college education?
Nope. Steroids in sports.
Along with the show trial hearings, McCain (who likes to refer to himself as a “limited government conservative”) proposed urgent federal legislation to regulate drug tests in sports, only to let the (non) issue go a couple months later when Major League Baseball made token concessions.
Earlier in the same year, as bloodshed and chaos grew in Iraq, the Republican Party showed its respect for the sanctity of human life by trying to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen years following cardiac arrest. McCain backed Republicans’ attempt to force Schiavo’s husband to keep his wife on life support, quality of life and multiple court decisions be damned. When the public saw through the publicity stunt, the GOP brought their ace in in a pinch to do damage control. Of the breathtakingly crass sketch, McCain told ABC with grandfatherly earnestness: “I think that the motivation of my colleagues is that we want to give this young woman’s family a chance to care for her as long as she lives.”
Both incidents demonstrated the decoy tactics the Republican Party has used for decades, from McCarthyism forward, to distract the American public from more important matters, including in this day and age the fact that most of us are working longer hours for less pay and shrinking benefits while the rich gorge on ever bigger portions of America’s economic pie. McCain’s response to our fraying social contract has been to oppose unions that would reverse these trends at every step, to back Bush’s plan to privatize (i.e. draw and quarter) Social Security, which would do little to solve America’s retirement problems (it could potentially make them worse), and to support brutal cuts to the tiny portion of Congress’ budget that goes to discretionary spending programs such as Headstart, school lunches, childcare subsidies, infant nutrition programs for the economically disadvantaged and other programs that actually help people. Healthcare? McCain doesn’t talk about it. An urban agenda? McCain doesn’t have one.
While expecting sacrifice from the poor, McCain has recently reversed his opposition to Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In November of 2005 he told Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal: “I just thought [Bush’s tax cut] was too tilted to the wealthy, and I still do…We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me.” Yet in recent months, McCain has gotten over petty concerns about bloated budget deficits and basic economic fairness and now supports making these huge windfalls to investors, inheritors of wealth, and other beneficiaries of America’s 21st century brand of predatory capitalism permanent, just as he seeks deep pockets for the most expensive fundraising season in world history.
McCain followed his Shakespearean performances in 2005 with more partisan water-carrying in 2006, when he made 346 campaign appearances for Republican candidates, endorsing many who were to the right of Genghis Khan, and with the 2008 presidential campaign already well underway, McCain’s carefully crafted image of independence proves increasingly farcical as he panders time and again to the hard right, though sometimes quietly.
At the end of February, on the same night he announced his candidacy on Letterman (generating the autopilot McCain-as-maverick headline “In Newly Unusual Way, McCain Says He’ll Run”), McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate to skip the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly meeting of conservative activists. McCain’s spokesman cited a scheduling conflict, but it later came out that McCain’s people had tried to set up a media-free private reception for attendees, a way of appeasing the right without doing so publicly.
CPAC rejected the offer, but as McCain’s spokesman pointed out, his candidate’s 20-year voting record should be more than enough to bring right-wing Republicans into lockstep with McCain’s bid. For while McCain gets major mileage out of his handful of differences with the GOP (on issues on which Republicans are out of step with public opinion), he votes with his party more than 90% of the time. A study of McCain’s votes in 2005 by professor Keith Poole found McCain to be the 4th most conservative senator in Congress, while voteview.com ranked him as the second most conservative senator for the whole 109th.
McCain has buttressed this distinction with craven 180 degree turns to the right. Though McCain had said in 2004 that a GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” he did television ads in favor of a measure that banned gay marriage at the state level in 2006. Though McCain said in 1999 that he supported Roe v. Wade (“…I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations”), he now says flatly that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Jerry Falwell, once labeled an “agent of intolerance,” now gets on famously with Mr. McCain, who gave the commencement speech at Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University in May of 2006. Falwell returned the favor by inviting McCain to the Religious Broadcaster’s Convention (held in 2007) and offering up Brett O’Donnell, Liberty University’s debate coach, for McCain’s communications team.
As he’s crisscrossed the country on the weathered Straight Talk Express Bus, McCain has traveled back in time to a land of back alley abortions and legal machine guns, where public funds go to the teaching of intelligent design and abstinence education, big powerful weapons blow missiles out of the sky, and Cuba policy is stuck like groundhog’s day in 1961.
Against this backdrop, John McCain recently made a trip to Miami to speak before a group of right-wing Cubans, including veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the speech, McCain decried the rise of ‘socialism’ in South America, or more accurately, the election of leftists supportive of the redistribution of economic spoils to long-exploited indigenous people and opposed to US-imposed free trade agreements. A surprisingly blunt AP dispatch mentioned that McCain “said all the right things about Cuba for [the] audience,” including stating his opposition to ending the embargo until Cuba has free elections and basic human rights, and releases all political prisoners. McCain’s stance on behalf of freedom would be believable and maybe even noble if only he could reserve the same degree of indignation for vastly more oppressive U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but of course their expatriates don’t control 25 electoral votes.
As the 2008 campaign heats up at this sad, early date, the question is not whether McCain can find within himself the guile to compete, but just how low he is willing to go. Down the campaign stretch in 2006, Democrat Harold Ford of Tennessee led his opponent Bob Corker in most polls, giving Ford the potential to become the first African-American to win a Senate seat in the Deep South since Reconstruction. As ever, when backed against the wall, the GOP aimed low with character assassination and innuendo, with an ad in which people “off the street” make crass statements (ex: “terrorists need their privacy”) in defense of views falsely attributed to Ford. The implication of the ad was that the safe-as-milk Ford, one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress, was out of touch with mainstream values.
Playing to the most deep-seated, residual white Southern racism, the ad was roundly condemned, by John McCain among others. Terry Nelson (known for his connections to disgraced former GOP operator Tom Delay), who birthed the ad for the Republican National Committee, was fired by Wal-Mart, for whom he worked as a consultant. But the ad worked – Corker went ahead in the race and never looked back – and Nelson got a promotion not a month later when McCain hired him as his campaign manager. (Joining Nelson will be the ad firm of Stevens Reed Curcio & Pothold, who produced the notorious Swift Boat ads from the 2004 campaign, which McCain said at the time were “dishonest and dishonorable.”)
The one issue that has most contributed to McCain’s image as a man of unshakable principle is campaign finance reform. Todd Purdum’s sycophantic “Prisoner of Conscience” channels this conventional wisdom with the blithe assertion that McCain “has always loathed the cozy and corrupt culture of Washington D.C.” Though McCain has been in front on many of the baby steps to clean up Congress, in the eighties he was involved in the Keating 5 scandal, in which he engaged in a quid pro quo with a crooked S & L chairman whose failing S & L cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and McCain wasn’t above using his recent Commerce Committee chairmanship to steer favors for contributors. Purdum gets away with this distortion because DC’s pay-to-play culture is off limits to mainstream political discussion.
Much more in line with the mainstream media’s antiseptic national narrative is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill which banned soft money in federal elections. McCain deserves some credit for being one of the only people in his party to support the measure, but the truth is that McCain-Feingold is a toothless ‘reform’ measure of the kind loved in D.C. – a great way for politicians to prance before the cameras and claim to be concerned about an issue that is rotting our republic while actually doing very little. If McCain-Feingold really had bite, George W. Bush, second to none in trading dirty deeds for dirty money, never would have signed it.
In the past, McCain could be counted on to cry from the rooftops about campaign finance (ex: “The voices of average Americans have been drowned out by the deafening racket of campaign cash”), but now that he’s focused on becoming president, he’s singing a different tune, one much more harmonious with his current motives. In 2006 McCain supported a measure to make 527 donations illegal, but upon receiving flack from conservative grass-roots groups, he backed off, and in fact has taken a good deal of money from 527 leaders and organizers, according to a recent Washington Post article by investigative reporter John Solomon. The same article pointed out in detail that the long-time crusader has received money from lobbyists – a source of many of his rhetorical fusillades in the past – and a good number of Bush’s biggest fundraisers, including those who McCain criticized in the past for their lack of ethics and pollution of the political system.
The Post article that showed the gap between the mythological Citizen McCain and the shifty candidate McCain was one of the biggest signs that the media’s refusal to question the eternally earnest senator’s sincerity may be at an end. On signs of a breakup, McCain responded ferociously, calling Solomon’s truth serum the “worst hit job that has ever been done in my entire political career,” while failing to cite any factual inaccuracies.
McCain’s twenty fundraisers in March, and the 20 he is doing in April fail to make him any more of a money-grubber than the other candidates, but they do signify that he ought to lose the soapbox that has so long been a part of his act, and give us some real straight talk. We don’t need heroes. We just need someone that can clean up the mess.
The Road Not Taken
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 3/15/07
Date: March, 2007
Location: A parallel universe, where every vote counts
He leans over the podium all folksy with one arm braced, bent at the elbow, his head tilted at the slightest angle. A Cheshire cat grin inhabits his features, though he's quite possibly the dumbest person in the room. A member of the press stands up and asks a question about a war of choice sold on lies that has spiraled downward into bloodshed and chaos. The man at the podium tries his damndest to remove the smirk from his face as he responds in incomplete sentences littered with canned catchphrases, mispronunciations, and zombie-like repetition of his favorite word, "terrorist," a word that settles all matters in his uncluttered mind.
The assembled media dutifully stenograph the response for millions of readers on strict spoonfed diets as another so-called reporter is called on with a cute nickname, a habit the leader of the free world picked up during his time in college sports, when he watched athletes from the sidelines as a cheerleader at Yale. The nickname is meant to establish an illusory familiarity that reflects the privileged president's common touch. The question is about Medicaid cuts in the president's budget.
The man behind the podium suddenly stands up, in umbrage that he, a good Christian, could be accused of not caring about the poor. He shakes his finger in the air and preaches in fragments of how tax cuts for the richest of the rich will grow the economy and trickle down to the neediest. Moreover, he continues, as foam flecks at the corners of his mouth, a nation under attack has no choice but to shift spending from social programs to national DE-fense. "I'll stop at nothing to protect the American people," he says with a crowning fist-slam to the podium.
I bolt upright in bed and turn the light on. I've had this nightmare for going on six years now. Calmly, to restore my sanity, I recall the facts: in December of 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in keeping with past decisions, refused to encroach on states' rights and allowed a proper recount to be done in Florida. A later study of the ballots would show that Gore would've won by tens of thousands of votes had voter intent been directly reflected in the actual vote count, but due to the mass disenfranchisement of minorities and a faulty ballot design in Palm Beach that cost Gore 6,500 votes, Gore had squeaked into office by just 112 votes.
Not much more than a year into his presidency, Gore led the international coalition that rousted the medieval Taliban and its Al Qeada allies from Afghanistan, and kept them out with a long-term troop commitment. On the domestic front, Gore was stymied by a Republican House of Representatives, so he continued Bill Clinton's practice of enacting policy changes through administrative re-writes and executive orders. A competent, clean and open administration buoyed by the national unity received and massaged after 9/11 narrowly won Gore a second term in 2004, though the Republicans took the Senate back due to Democratic retirements in the South.
All this thinking gets me keyed up so I roll out of bed, grab a towel and walk out to the bathroom.
As my legs move freely and my bare feet feel the cold hardwood floor, the nightmare continues to recede into the bulky file of historical what-ifs.
In the bathroom the water comes on; I train the shower nozzle over my palm and turn the heat up. The warmth runs over my hand and through my body. As I disrobe and step under the flow, I touch the wall as one last check. It does not move.
By late morning I saunter out into a typically immaculate March San Francisco day: warm temperatures, a sky blue but for wispy white jet trails, a light breeze whispering in from the ocean. I buy a Sunday New York Times at a corner liquor store and head to my favorite cafe. The place spills over with twenty and thirty-something bohemians and poseurs hiding behind banks of Apples, and the line to the counter is ten people deep. Everyone's out today, doing something fun (there haven't been so many weekend mega-protests these past few years.) I see a table open up so I ditch the line, spread my newspaper over the table, and drape my jacket over the adjacent chair.
Five minutes later I sit down with a depth charge and begin to read all the news that's fit to print. I have major concerns about the future of the planet, but the United States, at least, seems to be moving in the right direction on many fronts. On the inside of the front page, in the news summaries, I scan the latest developments in Washington. On page A6, there's an article about President Gore's unwillingness to play ball with the Republicans on a "TORT reform" measure that will screw consumers and downsize corporate accountability, a "bankruptcy reform" bill that will further victimize poor people with burgeoning health bills, or staggeringly expensive tax cuts for the rich. Gore's fiscal discipline has helped produce a growing budget surplus that is shoring up Social Security for the tidal wave of Baby Boomers about to retire.
On page A11, there's a lengthy piece on the aggressive actions Gore's EPA has taken in court to sue polluters and protect wetlands, forests and the Endangered Species Act from parasitic business interests. On page A12 there's an analysis of Gore's latest budget proposal, which includes big increases for healthcare, childcare, education, public transit, stem cell research, and alternative energy sources, and on page A16, there's a story by Linda Greenhouse on Gore's two Supreme Court picks, who have narrowly saved Roe v. Wade, Affirmative Action, labor rights, and a whole host of fundamental freedoms from the right-wing chopping block.
Once I've plowed through the news section I read the editorials, but they don't have a lot of gravity. The country is at peace, the economy is recovering, and Gore's steady centrism, with some pitches to the left, doesn't create the kind of toxic political environment that inspires pungent commentary (other than among talk radio Neanderthals and their utopiated mirror image brethren on the chimerical left).
I start in on the Book Review section, get through about half of it, and bail.
At home I flop down in my papasan chair and turn on the tv. I rip through seventy or eighty or who knows how many channels past sports events and cooking programs and sitcoms and reality tv and talk shows and World War II docs until I come to C-Span.
Standing at a podium is Tony Blair, the popular Prime Minister of Great Britain who is likely to win a third landslide when he calls England's next election. Not ten feet away is Al Gore, standing razorback straight and stiff in a navy blue suit with his hands folded in front of him, laughing, nodding or clapping on cue, as if by computer command.
Gore and Blair are doing a world tour to promote the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto does not go nearly far enough, but it's a start, and I'm not in the habit of blaming politicians for their constituencies' sense of resource entitlement--Gore's proposals to raise CAFE standards and the gas tax were rejected without debate by Republicans (and red state Democrats) in Congress because the majority of Americans refuse to take the higher ground until they feel a pinch in their pocketbook. This deeply ingrained cult of selfishness and the political and media organs that sustain it box Gore out on his left: much as I wish otherwise, the center of gravity in America's political sphere is peopled by Protestant soccer moms from the Midwest and Catholic NASCAR dads from the Southwest, not secular San Francisco liberals.
The Kyoto initiative is but one of many international agreements Gore has signed or negotiated, along with treaties restricting germ warfare, torture and offshore tax havens and agreements promoting sustainable development and protecting women's health in the third world. Gore's humble, cooperative stances have solidified the vast international good will generated by 9/11 and reinforced the multifaith global drive to crush Al Qeada. Like Clinton, Gore tends to encounter throngs of well-wishers when he travels abroad, and soon I can see why, as he steps up to take questions from the press.
Though Gore has won two victories at the ballot box and led an administration free of major scandals, the "liberal media's" hostility toward him continues unabated, as evidenced by the adversarial tone of the opening question, about the most recent cat and mouse game being played by Saddam Hussein, who refuses to allow inspectors into Iraq to check for nuclear weapons.
"Mr. President, Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giulani have accused you of weakness in refusing to confront Saddam Hussein..."
Gore's attention to the question trails off as he smiles to himself at the latest macho posturing from the right, yet he continues to look the questioner straight in the face out of political protocol. Gore's answer is a miniature essay on the reasons an invasion of Iraq will not work, including religious differences going back over a thousand years, a lack of resources while our troops protect Afghanistan, the enormous costs such an invasion would entail, and the fact that Saddam Hussein in no way represents an imminent national security threat.
On one level I can't help but indulge the frame of reference of all too many ADD-addled voters: he's the same old wooden, dorky Professor Gore, speaking slowly with exaggerated elocution, cautious about every word, explaining every detail like he's talking to an idiot- what comedian Will Durst once referred to as "the human dialtone."
And yet, rising above simplistic and shallow surface reads to higher truths, I appreciate that the words come in long, complete, perfectly-formed sentences, one thought seamlessly flowing into the next, reflecting a lifetime of learning and observing and questioning and expanding and most importantly, a firm grasp of the way his decisions affect the public and the grave moral responsibility that resides in this power. Would that we were always so fortunate.
Date: March, 2007
Location: A parallel universe, where every vote counts
He leans over the podium all folksy with one arm braced, bent at the elbow, his head tilted at the slightest angle. A Cheshire cat grin inhabits his features, though he's quite possibly the dumbest person in the room. A member of the press stands up and asks a question about a war of choice sold on lies that has spiraled downward into bloodshed and chaos. The man at the podium tries his damndest to remove the smirk from his face as he responds in incomplete sentences littered with canned catchphrases, mispronunciations, and zombie-like repetition of his favorite word, "terrorist," a word that settles all matters in his uncluttered mind.
The assembled media dutifully stenograph the response for millions of readers on strict spoonfed diets as another so-called reporter is called on with a cute nickname, a habit the leader of the free world picked up during his time in college sports, when he watched athletes from the sidelines as a cheerleader at Yale. The nickname is meant to establish an illusory familiarity that reflects the privileged president's common touch. The question is about Medicaid cuts in the president's budget.
The man behind the podium suddenly stands up, in umbrage that he, a good Christian, could be accused of not caring about the poor. He shakes his finger in the air and preaches in fragments of how tax cuts for the richest of the rich will grow the economy and trickle down to the neediest. Moreover, he continues, as foam flecks at the corners of his mouth, a nation under attack has no choice but to shift spending from social programs to national DE-fense. "I'll stop at nothing to protect the American people," he says with a crowning fist-slam to the podium.
I bolt upright in bed and turn the light on. I've had this nightmare for going on six years now. Calmly, to restore my sanity, I recall the facts: in December of 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in keeping with past decisions, refused to encroach on states' rights and allowed a proper recount to be done in Florida. A later study of the ballots would show that Gore would've won by tens of thousands of votes had voter intent been directly reflected in the actual vote count, but due to the mass disenfranchisement of minorities and a faulty ballot design in Palm Beach that cost Gore 6,500 votes, Gore had squeaked into office by just 112 votes.
Not much more than a year into his presidency, Gore led the international coalition that rousted the medieval Taliban and its Al Qeada allies from Afghanistan, and kept them out with a long-term troop commitment. On the domestic front, Gore was stymied by a Republican House of Representatives, so he continued Bill Clinton's practice of enacting policy changes through administrative re-writes and executive orders. A competent, clean and open administration buoyed by the national unity received and massaged after 9/11 narrowly won Gore a second term in 2004, though the Republicans took the Senate back due to Democratic retirements in the South.
All this thinking gets me keyed up so I roll out of bed, grab a towel and walk out to the bathroom.
As my legs move freely and my bare feet feel the cold hardwood floor, the nightmare continues to recede into the bulky file of historical what-ifs.
In the bathroom the water comes on; I train the shower nozzle over my palm and turn the heat up. The warmth runs over my hand and through my body. As I disrobe and step under the flow, I touch the wall as one last check. It does not move.
---
Five minutes later I sit down with a depth charge and begin to read all the news that's fit to print. I have major concerns about the future of the planet, but the United States, at least, seems to be moving in the right direction on many fronts. On the inside of the front page, in the news summaries, I scan the latest developments in Washington. On page A6, there's an article about President Gore's unwillingness to play ball with the Republicans on a "TORT reform" measure that will screw consumers and downsize corporate accountability, a "bankruptcy reform" bill that will further victimize poor people with burgeoning health bills, or staggeringly expensive tax cuts for the rich. Gore's fiscal discipline has helped produce a growing budget surplus that is shoring up Social Security for the tidal wave of Baby Boomers about to retire.
On page A11, there's a lengthy piece on the aggressive actions Gore's EPA has taken in court to sue polluters and protect wetlands, forests and the Endangered Species Act from parasitic business interests. On page A12 there's an analysis of Gore's latest budget proposal, which includes big increases for healthcare, childcare, education, public transit, stem cell research, and alternative energy sources, and on page A16, there's a story by Linda Greenhouse on Gore's two Supreme Court picks, who have narrowly saved Roe v. Wade, Affirmative Action, labor rights, and a whole host of fundamental freedoms from the right-wing chopping block.
Once I've plowed through the news section I read the editorials, but they don't have a lot of gravity. The country is at peace, the economy is recovering, and Gore's steady centrism, with some pitches to the left, doesn't create the kind of toxic political environment that inspires pungent commentary (other than among talk radio Neanderthals and their utopiated mirror image brethren on the chimerical left).
I start in on the Book Review section, get through about half of it, and bail.
---
At home I flop down in my papasan chair and turn on the tv. I rip through seventy or eighty or who knows how many channels past sports events and cooking programs and sitcoms and reality tv and talk shows and World War II docs until I come to C-Span.
Standing at a podium is Tony Blair, the popular Prime Minister of Great Britain who is likely to win a third landslide when he calls England's next election. Not ten feet away is Al Gore, standing razorback straight and stiff in a navy blue suit with his hands folded in front of him, laughing, nodding or clapping on cue, as if by computer command.
Gore and Blair are doing a world tour to promote the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto does not go nearly far enough, but it's a start, and I'm not in the habit of blaming politicians for their constituencies' sense of resource entitlement--Gore's proposals to raise CAFE standards and the gas tax were rejected without debate by Republicans (and red state Democrats) in Congress because the majority of Americans refuse to take the higher ground until they feel a pinch in their pocketbook. This deeply ingrained cult of selfishness and the political and media organs that sustain it box Gore out on his left: much as I wish otherwise, the center of gravity in America's political sphere is peopled by Protestant soccer moms from the Midwest and Catholic NASCAR dads from the Southwest, not secular San Francisco liberals.
The Kyoto initiative is but one of many international agreements Gore has signed or negotiated, along with treaties restricting germ warfare, torture and offshore tax havens and agreements promoting sustainable development and protecting women's health in the third world. Gore's humble, cooperative stances have solidified the vast international good will generated by 9/11 and reinforced the multifaith global drive to crush Al Qeada. Like Clinton, Gore tends to encounter throngs of well-wishers when he travels abroad, and soon I can see why, as he steps up to take questions from the press.
Though Gore has won two victories at the ballot box and led an administration free of major scandals, the "liberal media's" hostility toward him continues unabated, as evidenced by the adversarial tone of the opening question, about the most recent cat and mouse game being played by Saddam Hussein, who refuses to allow inspectors into Iraq to check for nuclear weapons.
"Mr. President, Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giulani have accused you of weakness in refusing to confront Saddam Hussein..."
Gore's attention to the question trails off as he smiles to himself at the latest macho posturing from the right, yet he continues to look the questioner straight in the face out of political protocol. Gore's answer is a miniature essay on the reasons an invasion of Iraq will not work, including religious differences going back over a thousand years, a lack of resources while our troops protect Afghanistan, the enormous costs such an invasion would entail, and the fact that Saddam Hussein in no way represents an imminent national security threat.
On one level I can't help but indulge the frame of reference of all too many ADD-addled voters: he's the same old wooden, dorky Professor Gore, speaking slowly with exaggerated elocution, cautious about every word, explaining every detail like he's talking to an idiot- what comedian Will Durst once referred to as "the human dialtone."
And yet, rising above simplistic and shallow surface reads to higher truths, I appreciate that the words come in long, complete, perfectly-formed sentences, one thought seamlessly flowing into the next, reflecting a lifetime of learning and observing and questioning and expanding and most importantly, a firm grasp of the way his decisions affect the public and the grave moral responsibility that resides in this power. Would that we were always so fortunate.
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