This editorial is from the local Tucscon, AZ paper about the two young men battling to take Gabby Giffords' district in the House. It's a hoot, a tad partisan perhaps (but not in an unfair way), and it's a wonderful caricature on the state of American Politics at this point of the 21st Century:
High school graduate Jesse Kelly defeated a Harvard educated Air Force pilot,
a nice American named Dave Sitton and Frank “Spank me, I’m bad” Antenori. Now
that the fat lady has sung and the primary is over it’s time for Act II of “The
Barber of Civility”: A contest between the guy who looks like the Jurassic Park
professor without the pith helmet and a carpet bagging gun-toting Bible thumping
gosh and shucks Gomer Pyle who can channel Sean Hannity.
Jesse will do great among the unwashed, the rural, the illiterate, the
scared goobers willing to cheerfully vote against their own interests, whipping
up the groundlings and the believers with rhetorical red meat so rotten with the
stench of untruths that honorable flies will choose to lay their eggs elsewhere.
And he’ll smile like a man surprised he said something resembling a coherent
thought. And the crowds who hate elitists and grammar and syntax and critical
thinking will slap their knees and hoot. Scan the online comment section for
repugnant speech and unfiltered anonymous hatred of all who differ with the
strict conservative view and and you have found your archetypal "here come the
black helicopters from Kenya" Kelly supporters.
And he will be petted and stroked and groomed and cooed to by right-wing
think tanks and he’ll be showered, nay, flooded with bags of cash from big oil
and all the right PACs looking for a manly mannequin with a pull string. And
he’s a pretty one. He’s tall and he’s handsome and he’s tall and he’s handsome.
Elderly church ladies who can't tell you who the Vice-President is gaze
adoringly up at Kelly, yearning to vote for him and to adopt him and to feed him
apple pie. Goodbye Mo Udall, hello empty plastic Ken doll.
And he will be angry at those who question his ascendency and his
indignant finger will raise up to poke the sky and he’ll thunder incoherent talk
radio babble about freedom and liberty and liberty from freedom and FOX news and
the right-wing machine will give him their cameras and their spotlights every
chance they can.
He won’t represent you. He will represent the Tea Party fanatics, talk
radio freaks, the hand-wringing evangelicals, the gun fondlers and the paranoid.
The rest of you are just not Americans, you Marxists and Communists and baby
killers and you can go to Hell for all he cares. He’ll terrify crowds with his
tales of the liberal straw man, the wretched progressive sasquatch, the
abominable secularists and he’ll shake the scarecrow and he’ll offer himself up
as the great peasant’s torch just waiting to be pressed into battle against the
fictitious kindling. Swaddled in the flag and clutching his sacred Constitution
he’ll weep for America and prophesy a plague of socialism sweeping across the
land that will rival the fire-in-the-sky visions of St. John. Evolution is a
head-shaker and abortion is for harlots and those who are not with him are
devils. The Word is Limbaugh and he is the word made flesh. Hearken to Jesse all
ye Limbaugh Christians, the end times are upon us and the Messiah has a high
school diploma. Reject him not, oh ye dittoheads. The Republicans have their
man, their folksy Baron of bromides, their King of jingos, raised in the womb of
the right-wing echo chamber. And their darling will have an army of fanatical
feverish shock jocks who’ll trumpet at the Walls of Jericho for He who is Him
everyday until Medicare, Social Security, Big Government, Taxes, the department
of Education, our rotting public education system, and those diabolical
regulators and the United Nations all come tumbling down.
At the final debate with Giffords in 2010 he was figuratively hoisted on
the shoulders of believers with pitchforks and torches who cheered their Messiah
with yahoos and slogans in lieu of palm fronds. How can one be civil when you’re
debating an opponent who lies and smirks and makes George Bush sound look
Stephen Hawking? His adherents cannot be moved by facts, they have found
faith.
Sinclair Lewis had his Main Street Babbitt, we have Kelly. This Barber
v. Kelly election will truly be an American spectacle rivaling the Scopes Monkey
trial because its outcome will define us for years. Are we an easily frightened
America aching for the shallow comfort of the primitive and the superstitious or
are we the fearless America that questions, that embraces the future, that is
modern and smart? Mark Twain and H.L.Mencken savaged their respective times as
the gilded ages of carnival hawkers and tent evangelists and smiling shoeshine
salesmen and gullible rubes willing to say yes to any smiling carpet-bagger.
They are gazing up from Hell longing to see this show unfold. This summer the
oldest American story shall repeat itself.
PS:DT--My guess is that the exact characters might change, but the essential elements of the story will be repeated dozens if not scores of times in this election. The New Gilded Age indeed!
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Heard the saying that the game remains the same, but the players change. This is what we see in this situation. The same of the players, playing an old game of scrambled politics.And just as DT has mentioned, yes, "the exact characters may change..." but will and if so, how will that affect the American political stand?
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