This New "Honesty" Thing Will Surely Bring Armageddon
Have you heard this? Just recently the Bush administration recognized the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as the theme song for their brand new $1.96 trillion "Federal Budget Plan". Am I the only one who finds this a sad, horrible joke? According to a leading Bush henchman, this acquisition is apparently their way of saying that "we do have a witty side here in budget land". I don't know about you but this really disappoints me - have our politicians given up attempting to pull the wool over our eyes? Have they lost so much creativity that they have resorted to telling us, of all things, the TRUTH? This is probably the most radical policy change I have ever seen.
Why, back in my day, we all couldn't wait to hear the next Capitol Hill explanation
for the latest U.S. fuck-up. In fact, that's pretty much all we ever did in
my hometown of Oblivion, KS: sit around the radio waiting for our senator's
latest reasoning for the general suckiness of life. I remember when Washington
rationalized Vietnam as "a valiant attempt to recontextualize Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness for a new generation"; they passed off Reaganomics as
"a daring conceptualization of a global theatre of the absurd". They
even tried to explain slavery as "a mutually beneficial eugenics program
that has experienced some slight miscalculations in its developmental stage".
Not that I believe any of this, I just think it's cute that they tried. Sort
of like that one time when your best friend in third grade tried to be a badass
skateboarder. He tried that ollie and flipped off his board and ended up totally
eating curb, remember? He stumbled up, spitting out blood and teeth, and you
just sat there and laughed at him, didn't you, you sick bastard.
Where have all the spin doctors gone? (If you say anything about a pocket full
of kryptonite I will slap you.) I was looking forward to being able to mock
the White House's press release "explanations" for the next four years,
but if this new "honest" slogan is representative of a new Capitol
Hill marketing direction, then (to quote S. Dogg) it ain't no fun. Soon I suppose
Bush will also be licensing Dialectical Genocide's "Is Our Children Learning"
as well as "I Sent the U.S. Straight to Hell in a Handbasket Firmly Establishing
China as the Next Dominant Superpower" by Whistlestop Jackson and the Screaming
Mimis. Well, that probably won't happen, mainly because I just made those up,
but you get the idea. Self-awareness doesn't produce good satire, and if Bush
continues down this path Saturday Night Live may very well run out of material.
Who's going to make fun of you when you do a better job making fun of yourself?
I fear for the future of all political-based satire.
Jumal Qazi was right about one thing: politics without rhetoric is shortchanging the people. It's like The Simpsons without Ralph Wiggum, like Iron Chef without that one dude at the beginning eating the pepper. By now we know that politicians will always lie to us. It's a given - yet we still put up with it. Why? Because we love a good story. We Americans love fiction so much that we'll take a decent yarn over the somber truth any day of the week, and where better to get a good tall tale than our pals in the government? There's something about a society that loves to hear its politicians promise them the world simply because they know the politicians will never deliver, something akin to a masochistic ideology of John Q. America and his drinking buddies. Politics needs rhetoric, otherwise America would care even less than it does now. Politicians need to be able to stomp their feet and emit a guttural roar, if for no other reason than it makes political debates a lot more interesting. Take this example of a political debate in a world without rhetoric:
DEMOCRAT: If you elect me, I promise to sign a few treaties you don't care
about and probably play a lot of golf.
REPUBLICAN: Yeah, well… I can do all of that AND die of incontinence while
in office.
DEMOCRAT: Well, you got me there.
KATE HOOPER: Where am I?
Now, the same scenario in our world, where rhetoric and sensationalism are free to frolic:
DEMOCRAT: If you elect me, I will pursue trade agreements with those aliens
from Independence Day, and annex the moon for American habitation.
REPUBLICAN: I will annex not only the moon but Jupiter and the entire Centauri
system as well, and will pursue trade agreements with the aliens from Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, a far superior movie.
DEMOCRAT: Oh yeah? Well, um, your daughter's a whore.
KATE HOOPER: Hey, what?
The latter snippet of conversation will stimulate an untold number of columnists,
analysts and Trekkies to take immediate interest in the political process, whereas
the former conversation would only cause these people to take an immediate interest
in napping. Therein lies the rub: as we're silly humans with short attention
spans, we'll only care about something if we deem it worth caring for, i.e.
if it entertains us. This may be why Bush was even voted into office - he's
easily the most entertaining politician since Dan Quayle, who has, post-Oval
Office, become a national sweetheart. Who knows, maybe we'll be able to look
back on this presidential term with a chuckle as well. But until then, my theme
song will officially be "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". Either that
or Whistlestop Jackson and the Screaming Mimis' other hit song, "I Have
Run Out of Clever Things to Say".