The Republican Brand

Lately I’ve been hearing how the Republicans are going to lose big this election. One explanation for why is because the Republican “brand” has been tarnished.

This is a continuation of the neo-liberal idea of using the market to guide all human activity, including organizing for political power. I claim that the Republican’s most pressing problem is that they consider the Republican Party a brand. As long as they keep doing that, their power will wane. Here’s why.

What’s a brand? It’s the reputation of something you consume. We’ve been conditioned through advertising and public pressure to believe that we are what we buy, what we drive, and what we wear. The key aspect of a brand is that it revolves only around consumption, and not production. That fact is what makes the concept of a brand a poor one for a political party.

Consumer politics is what American politics has generally degenerated into. No longer do people think of working to advance their party. Rather they sit on their couches, consume the advertising in between their favorite TV shows, occasionally lift up the phone receiver to hear the recording of a famous person trying to convince them to vote for a specific candidate. Don’t bother to do any work yourself, or produce any politics yourself, we’ll sell you your politics the same way we sell you dish-washer detergent, adult-diapers and drugs for restless-leg syndrome.

On the other hand, the trend this spring in the Democratic primaries is to use caucuses, rather than primaries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but more states have been doing this. It seemed that only Iowa used caucuses, and every four years the journalists had to explain how this quaint, old-fashioned political mechanism works.

Hillary has been criticizing the caucuses because they are biased against people who don’t have the luxury of a lot of time to spend in the afternoon or evening discussing the candidates, rather than just making a check on a ballot and pulling a lever. But those caucus participants become potential political producers, rather than simply consumers. The parties have their contact information, and can ask them to either call people before the election, or work to get out the vote. Combined with the campaign of Barack Obama tapping into the internet as an organizing tool rather than just a marketing tool, and caucuses become a mobilizing force in the general election.

This is why the Republicans are suffering. They still see politics as something to market from the top, rather than an organization that takes its cues from below. In their model, the elites know what’s best, and then sell it to the masses, or as Noam Chomsky has written, attempt to manufacture consent. In fact, it might be impossible for the Republicans to do it any other way. See Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas.

The opposite end of the spectrum is being suggested by Barack’s campaign, which is why so many progressives have gravitated towards it. While they might not agree completely with all of his policy suggestions, they see the opportunity for more leverage for progressive policies from the grassroots.

The transition to participatory democracy is far from complete, however. The other key component to participatory democracy, rather than consumptive democracy, is public financing of elections. Corporations tend to control the political process now because of the need of lots of money to finance campaigns, mostly through advertising on television. While I doubt that TV ads will disappear from politics in the near future, they are residue of the “brand” style of consumer democracy. As long as we see Republicans speak of their party as a brand, they are still locked into selling ideas to the people, rather than listening to the ideas of the people.

(p.s. The flag pictured above may be purchased at reclaimdemocracy.org)

The Idiot Rating

I’ve been pondering this poll where people are asked if they approve or disapprove of some political figure, say the president. The statistic you get from this poll is the approval rating. Bush, we have been told, is at an all-time low for presidents since the poll began, at around thirty percent. (That’s amazing, really, to consider that almost a third of all American still think he’s doing a good job. Who are these people? Rubes!) Actually, you can go to Real Clear Politics and find out that the average of all polls measuring whether people approve or disapprove of the job Bush is doing is 30.08% approval and 65.2% disapproval.

What has intrigued me is the use of the word “approval.” This is something that parents say about their children. Say my son blows by his allotted text messages of 200 and ends up using 5,749. (Just a hypothetical example.) What do I tell him? That he’s a f------- idiot? Not if I’m a good Dad. No, I tell him I disapprove of his lack of discipline and take his phone away for the rest of the month. When I use this approval/disapproval metric, I can measure the quality of his behavior, or his job performance as an adolescent, and still show that I love him. Our relationship is still sound. Neither one of us will disown the other, or use poison.

But why use the same metric for a president? “Mr. Bush, we think you’re doing a bad job, but we still love you.” I don’t think so. I think it’s time to be honest. We should have a poll that asks people if they think Bush is an idiot. Just imagine being approached on the street by a straight-laced poll-taker and have her ask, “Do you believe President Bush is an idiot, or not an idiot?” Some people might call this push-polling, where you are trying to plant an idea in the subject’s mind. But to counter that charge, you can have another question where you ask, “Do you believe President Bush is a genius or not a genius?”

Now we’re dealing with some effective polling that might have consequences. By disapproving of Bush’s job performance, we’re not calling into question his legitimacy, because we’re still implying that we love him. But if over half the American public think he is an idiot, then he has to deal with that—maybe take some night courses or something. Just imagine a journalist asking Bush during a press conference, “President Bush, how do you deal with the fact that 63% of the public think that you are an idiot?”

Of course the main-stream polling outfits can’t actually ask this question. But some of the more radical ones can, or perhaps John Stewart of the Daily Show. That’s whom I’m directing this post at, really. I want the Daily Show to start polling the public with questions that people can readily understand and respond to honestly. The other question I think we should ask is, “Is President Bush a liar, or not a liar.”

And to just put my money where my mouth is, on my next teaching evaluation I’m going to have a question, on a scale of 1-5, “Is the professor an idiot?”

What’s a Rube?

Let me just warn you a bit, but calling someone a rube is politically incorrect, in that it’s not a nice thing. I first heard rube when I was on spring break from college, and visited a friend’s house in Philadelphia. He introduced his father to me as “the Rube,” and then explained that it was nickname given to him by the urban sophisticates in the post office where he worked. Rube, you see, had come from rural Pennsylvania to work in the big city. A rube is short for a country bumpkin. You can fool them real easy, those bumpkins.

Hillary treats her supporters like rubes. Bush and McCain do too. They act as if they are stupid. Hillary says things like she is winning the popular vote in the primaries. A little fact-checking proves that is not so. She wants to count Florida and Michigan, when she had agreed that their votes would not count. She claims that she is being forced out of the primaries, and that has never been done before. Fact-checking again shows that Bill Clinton claimed victory against Jerry Brown before all the votes were in. She claims that she wants to hear from the entire electorate, when, obviously, she would have been ecstatic to have never had to have campaigned after Super Tuesday. But then hey, maybe she likes to spend millions of her own dollars being a tourist in places she never dreamed existed.

OK, she says these things. But the strange thing is, people, previously sane people who can see it when Bush or Cheney start slinging it, believe her. It’s when I begin to doubt my own sanity. I hold up four fingers and ask everyone how many fingers I’m holding up. The Hillary supporters squint at me and ask if it’s a trick question.

This is why Hillary’s campaign has flummoxed me. It’s not like arguing with a pro-life advocate. That person has an honestly different perspective. Hillary, on the other hand, is pretending to be stupid, and expecting everyone to believe her. Sure, you can mention assassination, because it just reminds people of a time, or date in history. Nothing else. Who would think? Sure, you can say caucuses don’t really count, because those are only the elites who have free time on their hands, not the mobilized people who will get out the vote in the general election. She says we need to cut the gas tax. Never mind that rising oil prices are probably good, and inevitable, in the long run, and that reducing the tax load instead on middle and lower income people would give them more choice in how to travel.

It’s exactly the same thing that Republicans have been doing with voter fraud, by cracking down on people who fake their identities to sway the election. Problem is, voter fraud doesn’t happen. Sure, cracking down on voter fraud keeps minorities and the poor from voting, but gosh, that wasn’t their intent!

Political fictions. That’s what they are. Everyone has to use some of them, or else you can’t get elected, at least not president. Gore used them when he disavowed papers he wrote in college with the same excuse politicians use now for early drug use: I was young and didn’t know better. Obama uses them when he placates the coal industry and nuclear power. People who don’t use political fictions, like Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky, aren’t even invited to the cocktail parties.

But again, the strangest thing about this primary season is that more people are believing political fictions than I’ve ever seen before. It’s as if everyone wants to be a rube from the hills of Appalachia.

(Post script: One of my favorite authors, and the writer to most affect my life, is from the hills of Appalachia, Wendell Berry.)

We are not at war-we are warring

“We are at war.”

Orwell was never more right. I heard the above comment on NPR yesterday (11/9/07) during a discussion of the presidential candidates. The analyst was wrong. We are not at war, but we have entered 1984, the world of perpetual war. It might be Oceana against Eurasia today, but we could be fighting Eastasia tomorrow.

While we are not at war, we are warring. To actually be at war we have to be fighting some other nation-state. What we are doing is messing around in someone else’s civil war, which we started. Incidentally, democracy is not a panacea that delivers peace. It can actually have the counterintuitive effect of causing war. What real democracy does is empower the majority of the people. Now if only a few people have most of the wealth, and all of a sudden the poor have power, it is only rational that they try to redistribute the wealth to themselves. This is potentially socialism. The people who own the wealth hate it, and call it communism.

Democracy also has a problem if there are factions, like Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. The federalists warned about that as we wrote our own constitution, which is why there are so many dikes in it to thwart democracy, since the most dangerous faction is the majority of the people. We laud the checks and balances in our constitution, but those checks and balances are there to keep democracy from getting out of hand, more than to check a powerful executive. Just think, most people want universal health care, but we don’t have it. Most people want to protect the environment, yet we’re the ones causing more global warming per capita. Most people want to get out of Iraq, but we’re still there. In this country, it is democracy that is being checked. Why don't citizens of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have voting representation in Congress?

But enough about democracy, back to war. How did we get into this civil war in Iraq? We got involved because someone committed a crime in the US. Who did it? Somebody. Not a nation-state. Just a bunch of somebodies. Most of these somebodies actually came from the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, but they sell us a lot of oil so we can’t do anything to them. But we’ve got to look strong! We can’t just let some somebodies push us around, and kill 3,000 people. We have to attack! So we start a civil war in another country.

If someone commits a crime, you don’t call it war. What’s the difference if a foreign national commits a crime, or a citizen? Do we call it war if an Englishman steals a purse from an American? What if a Saudi shoots someone? What if an American citizen, Ronni Moffitt, is killed by Chilean operatives in Washington D.C. in Operation Condor in 1976? If Bush had been president then, that would have given us an excuse to attack Bolivia, since the president/dictator of Chile at that time was Pinochet, our guy. The Saudis are our guys.

Hence we are not at war, we are warring. How else can you tell the difference? Just leave. If a nation-state follows you home, then you’re at war. Bush and Cheney would say that we fight over there so we don’t have to fight here. It’s the same logic as the Cold War and the domino theory. And like the Cold War, we designate the enemies and make the war, even if it has nothing to do with communism, or terrorism. We also waste money and lives in Iraq (and cause the death of more than 600,000 Iraqis) that could actually make life safer over here. Instead of actually investing in security in “the homeland,” we put the names of political writers like Naomi Wolf on the No-Fly List to harass them and keep them from making democracy a reality, from enforcing the will of the people, and getting us out of Iraq.

Why "No Fiction Necessary"

I suppose my first entry into my blog should be why I would call it “No Fiction Necessary.” For many years I’ve been pointing out to students in my classes choice bits of history that are too strange to believe. Kind of like a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of goings on. But in a course I taught this Fall with G---, he forced me to wonder why I prioritized factual strange happenings over our own imaginings, the kind of thing artists and poets create.

After all, what does it matter that a bizarre little twist of life happened? It means, I think, that our expectations of what is to come might have to be shelved, and we would be more wary of what lurks around the bend, literally. Asian religions or philosophies, such as Buddhism, and translated for us by Jung, make a rather big deal of these freaky little happenstances in our lives, as if they might be a sign.

An aside on that word, “happenstance.” I was mulling language over one day after reading the Bhagavad-Gita. It says something about detaching yourself from the fruits of life, and attaching yourself to the process. I started considering the word “happy.” Hmm, I thought, for most words that have a “y” on the end the initial part of the word means something alone, like “funny” and “fun.” I looked up “hap” and discovered that it meant “good luck.” Hence, to be happy meant that you were “good-lucky.” To be happy then, meant that good luck would happen to you, which if you were either spiritual or superstitious—you choose—meant that someone was smiling down on you, or up, depending again on your perspective.

So to focus on quirky little, and sometimes big, happenstances (notice now that you have a deeper understanding of the word?), means that your life actually has meaning. Your path is not just a chaotic, statistically driven, slog. Rather, it is a magical path, full of mystery and grace.

An example is in order, I believe, for you to completely grasp this aspect of No Fiction Necessary. But actually, there are three categories of examples, illustrating three modes of the fantastic. The first is a feat that defies credibility. The second is coincidence beyond belief. The third is an ironic outcome.

To illustrate the first, the feat, I will tell you a story about my wife. Growing up in the Sierra Tarahumara of Chihuahua, Mexico, M---- lived in a house with no electricity until she was five, and no plumbing until just a few years ago. Heating was all done with wood—piñon and juniper scents wafted through her village. In her late teens, she was walking a friend of hers (nickname Nalgas de Liebre, or “hare buns,” both for her bony structure and rabbit-like sexual proclivities) to the end of the lane that led to her house, about the length of a football field. At the end, near the dirt road that wound out of town, M---- spied a tail sticking up out of the tall grass, black with a streak of white. M---- had always tried to get her brother to capture a pet skunk for her, like the litter of raccoons (mapaches) that he had trapped. He, showing good sense, had always refused. Now was her chance. Bunny-buns said there was no way she could catch it, and left for town. M----, now alone with her three-year-old son, approached the skunk, which did not flee. Bending over and gathering it in her arms, she carried it to the gate and put it gently back on the ground and laying hold of the tail, steered it down the lane to her house. Once there, she picked it up again and maneuvered it into a cage.

When M----‘s mother caught whiff of their approach, she hollered what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing! M----, with out-thrust chin, said that she was keeping a new pet. Like the skunk, M----‘s parents wilted in front of her confidence. Her father threatened to shoot it, but M---- guarded the skunk with her own body. Lest you believe that it was tame or fixed, the skunk then sprayed its new dwelling, and generally made a nuisance of itself until it died a week later, ostensibly of the same causes as the Arawak Indians and residents of New Hampshire, lack of freedom.

Do you believe it happened? I have eyewitness accounts, and the years of experience with my wife to know that it did. What does it mean? It means that there is more room to move in this world than we are taught, and that humanity’s plastic rules about what is possible, even relatively rigid ones dealing with nature, may be much more malleable than we assume.

The history of Mexico is rife with human doings that seem like one giant tall tale. Take Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. It might be the most impressive collection of audacious feats by one group of people in a relatively short span of time. Think about it, they attempted to conquer and control millions of people with a few hundred men. It is almost more amazing that they thought they could, than the actual accomplishment. We try to make sense of it by saying that the Spanish had the superior technology and the Mexica were paralyzed by their superstitions, but reading the eyewitness account by Bernal Díaz del Castillo dispels those myths. Those conquistadors were good-lucky. (I do not mean to say they were right in what they did, just that what they did was unbelievable.)

In my travels and conversations with Mexicans I have learned that these kinds of stories and adventures abound. I lamented to G--- that American storytellers and writers have a handicap when competing with Mexicans. We just don’t get a chance to experience fantastical stories growing up in Levittown suburbs. There’s a reason magical realism originated in Latin America. G--- concurred, and tossed me a nugget of a Zen koan, “They have their imaginations on the outside.”

I’m still puzzling on it. To have your imagination on the outside means that the wall that separates our dreams from reality was constructed by mimes. We modern cynics decry the possibility of true goodness in today’s world, and we stop searching for it. The path leads both ways, though. What we dream might become real, but the actual world could also turn into a nightmare. Fantastical accomplishments are not limited to the good. To wit again the conquest of Mexico.

Next post: Coincidence or Synchronicity.

First Pardner

If Hillary Clinton becomes president there will be two firsts: the first woman president, and the first president’s husband. What will we call him? First Lord, as in lords and ladies? That’s too gender oriented, but then so is First Lady. From a more gender neutral perspective, the First Spouse? Or perhaps the First Significant Other?

Or we could use a term that annoys me, First Partner. It annoys me because it makes love sound like a business arrangement. The other problem with it is that we might assume that the couple sharing the bed in the white house is a gay couple from an old cowboy movie, call him First Pardner. I would have no problem with that, but it simply wouldn’t be accurate.

Along with the conundrum of what we call that fellow hanging around the White House with nothing really to do except maybe overhaul our health care system, it would be Bill Clinton. Imagine that. Bill Clinton hanging around the White House with nothing to do. What do they say about idle hands? Just imagine what a field day the tabloids would have! If you think we have a dysfunctional press corps at the White House now, every presidential press conference would start off with questions about what Bill was up to.

Actually, it almost makes you want to vote for Hillary. Almost. She’s still the one who was on the board of WalMart. She’s still the one who recently said of relations with Iran, “All options are on the table.” Does that mean an all out nuclear strike is on the table? That’s what “all options” means to me.

And Bill strikes me as a kibitzer, a back-seat president of the worst kind. Hillary might even make him ambassador to France just to get him out of the house.

Playing Chicken in Iran

As I was reading the latest news about the Bush Administration’s current vitriolic rhetoric about Iran, I had an epiphany. I was thinking to myself, “Wow, it makes no sense, at all, to attack Iran. You’d have to be crazy!”

That’s when it hit me! I had thought exactly the same thing about Iraq, right up until we invaded. There is this great game that political scientists play called “chicken.” (Actually we don’t play it, we just watch other people play—we’re kind of voyeuristic that way.) The old-fashioned way to play is to drive two hot-rods at each other, or racing towards a cliff as fast as a lemming, and the first person to stop or swerve loses. Peculiar, isn’t it? This game, which falls into rational-choice theory, seems kind of a stupid thing to do. And the person who behaves more rationally in a larger context, loses.

So only stupid people play this game. OK, that makes sense. Bush was playing chicken, I was thinking. But still, the objective is to make the opponent swerve, and not crash. We can all see now that we crashed into Iraq. Not only did we crash there, but we’re still looking for more people to crash into!

But here’s an irony about the rational-choice theory game of chicken. To win, you have to make your opponent think you are crazy. Start screaming in tongues as you mash the accelerator. Blast Abba full volume on the radio. Stick your head out of the window and let your tongue flap in the breeze. Steve Martin on his first comedy album said that if he were mugged he immediately would wet himself. Mugger thinks, “This dude is crazy! I’m out of here!”

Which is why Ronald Reagan was brilliant. In his little game of nuclear arms escalation with the old USSR (do you ever miss it?) he started ranting about evil empires, and using lasers to blast incoming missiles from a string of satellites. They even called it Star Wars. Gorbachev thinks, “That Americanski is crazy! I’m out of here!”

So I was thinking in the run-up to Iraq that hey, Bush and Cheney must have studied some rational-choice theory at Yale and Casper Community College. Sure they were acting crazy, but that’s just how you do it! Then WHAM!

Now it’s Iran’s turn. Maybe it was always Iran’s turn. Maybe Iraq was just to let Iran know how insane we are. These guys are brilliant.