"The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment..."

I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine from 1982 to about 1997, at which point it became pretty irrelevant, music-wise (they were always about 7 months behind the curve). However, after cashing in a strange "$1 for three years offer" apparently designed to beef up the magazine's subscription base, I've discovered, in addition to the magazine's new apparent obsession with the vacuous Fall Out Boy (what is the point of this Pete Wentz guy?), they feature the phenomenal work of political writer Matt Tiabbi. His story in the new 10/2/08 issue (hey, Milwaukee - - Metallica is on the cover!) is entitled "Mad Dog Palin," and it's as excellent as it is scathing.

The article is not online yet, but certain highlights are well worth my labored, four-finger typing transcription.

Read the passage below and ask yourself if you'd appreciate this kind of behavior and malpractice from our own mayor:

Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK’d a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the f$%#^* thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that “Taxes are too high” and Obama “Wants to raise them.”

In identifying the Republican Party's bald cynicism, Tiabbi gets it dead right. Depressingly, devastatingly right:

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “Difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

And we can't let ourselves off the hook. We get the government we deserve:

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflective prejudices of their demographic, as they would for a reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance.

...

Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in awhile, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing “I’m Lovin’ It!” during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

And when it comes time to vote all you have to do is put your Country First – Just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, Baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Devastating. And absolutely true.

Time to WAKE UP, America.

And, oh yeah - - that particular issue of Rolling Stone also has a page-long article about Harley's 105th Anniversary Celebration.

Comments

[J.Strupp]

excellent piece.