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Hypermodern
Hypocrites
August
27, 2003
By Raul Groom
"Senator, we are a part of the same hypocrisy." - Michael
Corleone, The Godfather Part II
I'm sitting on my front porch drinking and watching the
commuters walk by on their way home from the bus stop. Only
tapwater today; I have to travel to my hometown tonight to
take care of some wedding arrangements, an occupation which
is quickly beginning to dwarf every aspect of what I once
thought of as my life. Sophia and I have given up the nightmare
of the "mixing bowl" for good and have taken to returning
home by an alternate route in the dead of night rather than
bob upon the sweltering sea of honking and mediocre pop music
that passes for a major national highway in the southern suburbs
of this weird poor little rich town on the Potomac.
It always rejuvenates me to go home, where I can hide in
the well-polished personality I constructed for myself in
my teenage years, without all of the pesky dread and shame
that characterized my usual condition as the young son of
generations-ago Northern immigrants growing up in the capital
of the Confederacy. There is something comforting about the
mythology that springs up around you after you leave home
for another city, running fine sandpaper over the rough edges
of history and leaving behind a broad caricature of a man,
easy to inhabit and immune to the dilemmas that face the actor
in his normal existence.
My mind is troubled, though, by the events unfolding in
these hazy days of late August. Like a wave of heat and humidity
that lingers even after a good rain, the uneasiness and macabre
anticipation in the air has not been blown away even by bombs
or blackouts or the growing tide of popular dissatisfaction
with the nationwide Republican government. There is trouble
brewing, but beyond that there is no clear indication of what
will happen next.
The players have positioned their pieces, with the GOP staking
out their most aggressive political pawn structure since the
Nixon machine steamrolled their hapless hand-picked Democratic
opponent in 1972. The plan, as it appears now, is to shore
up the social conservatives and the religious right with ridiculous
judicial appointments and outrageous demagoguery over Democratic
filibusters of manifestly horrible jurists who call to mind
the Nixon-era Republican appeals that the courts should not
be made up solely of qualified people, since "there are a
lot of mediocre judges out there, and shouldn't they be represented?"
Once Pat and Jerry's kids are all fired up and sending in
the $100 checks, the Congressional Republicans can turn their
attention to the big money. This is where things get a little
tricky. Bush himself won't have any problem with that part
of the equation, of course any Commander-in-Chief shameless
enough to hold huge fundraisers while vacationing during two
major wars will certainly dwarf the cash-grabbing ability
of any opponent, no matter how well-connected or Internet
savvy - but Republicans in Congress may be between a rock
and hard place if the economy is still in shambles come next
August.
Bush's recklessness has placed the federal budget in a classic
bind. With interest rates low, the government is able to make
the long-run deficit look smaller by financing the debt in
the short term and assuming that interest rates will stay
the same in future years. This is the trick Clinton used to
make his success in balancing the budget look greater than
it truly was. For the most part, it worked, though it created
the imaginary long-term surplus that was used to sell the
nation on the first round of enormous GOP tax cuts. Bush,
on the other hand, is trying to use the same trick to make
his moronic missteps look a little less heinous, a strategy
that can only be pushed so far.
The effect of this White House's lamebrained and dishonest
fiscal policy, in contrast with the generally harmless puffery
of the Clinton administration, is that eventually the bottom
is going to fall out. As Greenspan has argued in deriding
Bush's most recent tax slashes (call it April the 15th, Part
III), interest rates cannot remain low in times of large deficits,
and we are already experiencing the largest real-dollar deficits
in history, despite right-wing propaganda to the contrary.
This is fine for Bush, whose family connections are all
he has ever needed or ever will need. For lowlier politicians
with redder blood, an impending economic collapse is bound
to make the backers a little jittery. Old men in dark suits
do not like major socioeconomic upheaval, which tends to get
the rabble roused.
The good news for the rank and file of the GOP is that they
are in a position, controlling every branch of government,
to provide the money men with an immediate return on their
investment, but given the new scrutiny that will be on campaign
funds with new finance laws in place, the line between good
old-fashioned money politics and dangerous scandal territory
is likely to be a thin and blurry one, and there are enough
Republicans tired of being bullied by bling-blingin' Connecticut
cowboys that this may be one time when the Democrats find
some allies in their pursuit of the Big One.
The tactical outlook for the Republicans is, as always,
quite good. They will test their Keep-in-the-Vote initiatives
during the increasingly foolish-looking California recall
gambit (I am still snapping up every bet I can get against
Schwarzenegger, who among sane oddsmakers is still a monster
long shot) and make the necessary adjustments to the scheme
to avoid any embarrassing photofinishes like the one in Florida
that almost exposed the Bush/Cheney campaign as the colossal
criminal sham that it really was. The Freeper armies are ready
to suit up and begin their "Vote Fraud Prevention" campaigns,
which operate on the premise that anyone who is not going
to vote for a Republican is probably not allowed to vote at
all. The fliers to be placed in black communities explaining
that the vote is on Wednesday, or that anyone showing up to
vote will have to pay back taxes before casting a ballot,
have already been printed up. The intimidation squads, replete
with the requisite uniformed members, are assembled and waiting.
On the main stage, the issues being "discussed" at the Sunday
talking-head parties are all the ones the Republicans are
supposed to want the Bible Belt politicians are heroically
shoring the nation up against the horde of queers and heathens
who have shaken our once-proud Christian nation to its very
core by crazily asserting that people ought to be free to
assemble for the peaceful purpose of marrying two adults,
and that judges can't post their religion's doctrine in an
attempt to establish their courthouses as sites of divine
worship. For once, the zealots have a compelling argument
- if the Founding Fathers had meant for us to have rules like
that they surely would have said something about it in the
Bill of Rights. And after all, it says very clearly in the
10th commandment that "Thou shalt have a big-ass rock with
all this stuff written on it displayed in a government building"
so the devout jurists in our nation's bread basket really
have no choice in the matter.
The Democrats, meanwhile, are sitting around picking their
noses. Howard Dean is pushing hard for a real campaign to
begin, but the rest of the field seems content to sit back
and let the incumbent Republicans control the terms of debate.
Until recently, I had been suffering from a brain condition
related to the onset of the football season and considered
this to be a terrible strategy. This judgment was the main
reason I supported Dean in the early going it seemed as
if Kerry and Lieberman and Gephart were all acting like Cleveland
Browns linebackers, standing around as the play developed,
waiting to get blocked.
But politics really isn't analogous to football 15 months
ahead of an election. Next summer is the time to talk about
who is flying to the ball, and whether the frontrunner has
that workhorse running back on his team that can grind down
the clock and fend off his opponent's fourth-quarter charge.
For off-year strategizing, we have to turn to some thing a
little more beautiful and a lot more boring. No, not baseball.
Chess.
Until the 20th century, chess strategy was pretty straightforward
white stormed forward to occupy the center, and black tried
to stop him. Over time, though, players at the highest levels
began to find that for black, this strategy had its drawbacks,
chief among them being that it didn't work. White's one-move
advantage, which theoretically should not be enough to produce
a win in a high percentage of games, tilted the struggle for
the center squares, which White can occupy immediately, too
heavily in the fairer player's favor.
The resulting competitive imbalance was no laughing matter.
Chess itself, an institution stretching back at least to the
Sufi classical period in Persia over 1000 years ago, was threatened
with irrelevance and extinction. It was then that a group
of young chess mavericks I can only imagine the wild bacchanal
feast that must have given rise to this maniacal innovation
realized that for black to equalize, she was often better
off waiting for White to establish his position in the center
before committing to a specific line of counterattack.
I won't stretch this tortured, overly optimistic analogy
any further in the general case, as I trust the reader to
connect the dots on her own. However, there is at least one
area of the Four T's of electoral politics (Treasure, Talent,
Treachery, and Taxes) where the metaphor deserves closer attention.
With his series of enormous tax cuts, Bush appears to have
staked his presidency on the patently laughable idea that
the federal government can continue indefinitely to finance
its affairs under the current tax structure, thus spending
about 150% as much money as it takes in. Of course, Bush's
people aren't that stupid they are really only betting that
they can hold the nation's finances together until the 2004
election, like a bunch of half-wits frantically stuffing candy
back into a battered piρata, and Bush, like his idol Reagan,
will clearly be forced to raise taxes very soon after the
votes are counted (or whatever.)
The Bush machine may have miscalculated here, though. The
last month has seen a glaring spike in interest rates, as
anyone looking at buying a home in this crazily inflated housing
market already knows. The wheels are starting to come off
the gravy train, and Dubya may be running out of chips to
cash in. The moon will inflate and melt away fifteen more
times before the votes are cast in November 2004, and that's
a long time for Bush to be standing around without protection
like a king awaiting checkmate, whose pieces have all been
gobbled up.
Though the incident got only a moderate amount of press,
the recent congressional Deep-Sixing of Michael Powell's Big
Media Bonanza was a very big deal, suggesting that Bush's
power to lead the legislative branch around by the nose may
finally be waning, and if there is a precedent for winning
reelection after alienating both houses of Congress and your
own State Department, CIA, and FBI, I am not aware of it.
The game here is like buying a car whoever mentions a
tax increase first loses. With Bush blaming congress for the
horrifying fiscal outlook, the GOP majority may have no choice
but to bite back with a plan to roll back some of Bush's cuts,
threatening to undermine what is essentially George's only
selling point that is based at all in reality. That tax plan
is likely if I may engage in a little stereotyping to
be heavily tilted toward increasing taxes on the poor and
middle class while mostly exempting the rich. If the Democratic
challengers in the 2004 congressional races can wait for this
development, they can introduce their own plans as an alternative
to the Republican one rather than as a bona fide tax increase.
At that point, the Democratic nominee can latch on to the
debate in earnest without looking like a Tax Increaser.
This would be a death blow to the Rove/Cheney political
machine, since aside from the unsustainable tax cuts, the
current executive branch hasn't delivered much in the way
of marketable achievements. Bush is losing two wars and doesn't
even know it less than a week ago the Boy King mistakenly
asserted that the war in Afghanistan was being de-escalated,
but the Pentagon announced over the weekend that they will
be forcing U.S. soldiers to start serving back-to-back tours
of duty not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq and South
Korea. The reason is that given the recent escalation of wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are simply running out of guys
with rifles and are going to have to start recycling them.
Someone eventually ought to tell the President about this,
hopefully as soon as he gets back from vacation.
Meanwhile, the economy is in shambles, the state books are
a mess, the federal deficit is about to spiral out of control,
and it is hard to believe, even for a cynical mob-watcher
like myself, that anybody is going to buy another round of
tax cuts as the solution to our budget problems.
Bush will try to defend his vulnerable center pawns with
Reagan's Trap waiting for his opponent to say "Tax
Increase" and then screaming loudly about how he will
NEVER, EVER raise taxes on the American people during a time
of economic crisis. All the while, of course, his policy people
will be drawing up plans to do exactly that, but the guy who
says "Tax Increase" tends to lose to the guy who
says "No Tax Increase," and everyone knows it's
better to seek forgiveness than ask permission.
The problem with Bush's strategy is that his position is
not at all analogous to that of Reagan in 1984, whose party
did not have the monopoly on federal power today's GOP enjoys.
Indeed, the modern Republican party is so overwhelmingly dominant
that their positioning for 2004 is starting to look a bit
like the Austrian Attack, where the White player storms forward
madly with everything she has, disregarding the defensive
vulnerabilities inherent in such a mobilization and playing
to win quickly and brutally at all costs. The prickly Pirc
Defense, which is the counterpart to the Austrian, is predicated
on allowing White to slide everything out into the open and
selecting just the right moment to slice the opposing army
to ribbons, leaving White's bishops and knights limping and
stumbling about like Tom Delay in the depths of a Naked Lunch-style
bug poison trip.
Which is a very rosy way of looking at the Dems' situation.
Unfortunately, this plan if it even exists outside my fevered
imagination has a couple of problems. One, despite the apparently
passive nature of hypermodern systems, Black does eventually
have to produce some testosterone, come out of her cave, and
launch a counterattack. If Kerry doesn't start his charge
soon, he'll have squandered his advantages over Howard Dean,
and we will all get to find out if Karl Rove was right when
he said Dean was his dream opponent. Though Howard's dazzling,
Sicilian Defense fireworks got him a lot of attention, they
don't mesh that well with the "Hurry Up and Wait" strategies
of the Democratic leadership, and it still remains to be seen
if Dean's got the talent to make it as a national candidate.
The other much more upsetting problem is that while the
DNC is busy fianchettoing its king's bishop and taking care
of that weak pawn on c6, the Republicans are destroying the
country. For the vast majority of Americans, who have to get
up and go to work, save money to go back to school, and otherwise
try to make our way, the situation is dire, and it would be
nice to see the Democrats rise above the petty games of electoral
politics and actually try to fix things.
Unfortunately, having neglected the strategic aspect of
the game for too long in favor of failed centrist tactical
gambits, the Democrats are on the outside looking in, and
the only thing left is for them to engage the Republicans
in this grand game of hypermodern hypocrisy. We spectators
can only hope that the plan is a sound one, and that we can
spend 2005 picking up the pieces of our once-great nation
instead of applying for unemployment and registering with
John Ashcroft's newly created "Office of Freedom Fingerprinting."
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