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BYOB:
Buy Your Own Brainwashing
June 1, 2002
By Cecil Bothwell
In case you’ve missed it, Topps trading cards, the happy
campers who have brought us baseball favorites--not to mention
other sporting heroes--for over 60 years, has a line of Bush
Administration cards right there on the impulse rack by the
check out stand. Collect them all!
Actually, these “collectibles” aren’t Republican campaign
ads per se, they are called “Enduring Freedom” cards, and
are designed to tout the dream team that is out there making
the world safe for democracy. (Yes, I know these jokers weren’t
actually elected, but let’s not get bogged down in facts,
okay?) And while it is true that there are one or two Democrats
in the deck, and tons of cool military hardware, the All Stars
are definitely Bush-league.
You can nab pics of former governor Bush, “Oil Slick Dick”
Cheney, Don “Pop Tart” Rumsfeld, Colin “No-Bin” Powell, Condoleezza
“Super Tanker” Rice, John “The Anointed” Ashcroft, Tom “Home
Boy” Ridge, Norm “The Trucka” Mineta, and the whole first-string
line-up on the National Security Council card.
These beauties are all in full color--except for the black
and white wanted-poster photo of Mr. Forces of Doom Incarnate:
Osama bin Laden. Naturally enough, the Topps designers consulted
with psychologists before printing the Osama card, to determine
if it was appropriate for children. According to Topps’ spokesman
Marty Appel, “The psychologists told us it was good for kids
... They can act out with the card--crush it, tear it up,
throw it out, whatever.” And, hey Marty, we all know that
everything looks worse in black and white.
I haven’t seen the backs of the cards, so I can only speculate
that they must be modeled after the ball player line. There
are probably columns for strikes (busted), ERAs (votes cast
against), stolen bases (data, that is), successful pitches
(for Enron, G.E., General Dynamics, the usual sleazeballs),
errors (hidden), RBIs (Republicans Benefitted Immeasurably),
and speaking fees. (Since these numbers were presumably collected
by Arthur Andersen, they should be regarded as “best guesses,”
but they are probably more or less in the ball park.)
One trading game that is gaining in popularity is to figure
the smallest number of cards necessary to represent a combined
value of $1 billion. (Hint: Oil Slick Dick is worth over three
times as much as an Apache attack helicopter--still an arms
merchant’s bargain at $24 million a pop.)
In the bad old days in the former Soviet Union, propaganda
had to be force-fed to the people by joyless bureaucrats who
mouthed tired slogans over and over again to a bored and unreceptive
populace. But here, it’s BYOB: Buy Your Own Brainwashing!
It makes you proud to be an American.
The mercantile aspect of the Bush war on terrorism is impossible
to overlook.
The local gas station sells patriotic tee shirts and posters
with a bulls eye on bin Laden’s forehead. Hardware and drug
stores have baskets full of lapel buttons, key chain dangles,
and plastic signs with suction cups for car window display--each
bearing flags and slogans and crying eagles.
Lowe’s gives away red-white-and-blue “Power of Pride” bumper
stickers with any purchase (somehow evoking the God fearing
patriotism inherent in purchase of do-it-yourself building
supplies by pitching a slogan that extolls what was formerly
regarded as a deadly sin: a metaphoric Rubik’s Cube with inscrutable
nuances on every facet.) And this is only to mention the retail
biz. The war-ware shopping list beggars the imagination, with
the former governor’s proposed INCREASE in military spending
exceeding the entire arms budget of China--now our most threatening
potential enemy. (On this count it seems like Papa Bush deserves
a card in the Topps lineup, sitting on the board of the Carlyle
Group, which is already raking in hundreds of millions of
dollars from junior’s war game. This is the sort of nepotistic
enrichment that would make local voters drum a county commissioner
out of office--if he awarded huge contracts to his Daddy’s
paving company. The rules seem to be different, as usual,
for the Bush tribe.)
On the other hand, money may not mean much to a man born
with a platinum spoon in his smirky little mouth. No, Dubya
has always set his sights a notch higher--over the fence and
out of the park so to speak--ever since those salad days when
he owned his very own ball club. And now that dream’s come
true.
“Babe” Bush is on a baseball card!
Bothwell is author of The Icarus Glitch: Another Duck
Soup Reader, and associate editor of the Warren Wilson
College environmental journal, Heartstone. His syndicated
column "Duck Soup: Essays on the Submerging Culture" has appeared
in print and on the radio since 1995. http://home.earthlink.net/~ducksoup96/
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