T he legacy mainstream media has a collective brain like dog’s — it exists
in an eternal present, so that whatever’s happening right now is all there
is. Thus, Hillary’s performance in the first Democratic debate, being as bad
but not worse than her competitors’, means she has a lock on the nomination
for president. The better part of a year lies between now and the convention,
and time would be on the side of whatever force or figure rises to oppose the
woman whose “turn” in power rides a myth of inevitability.
What perhaps ought to be more alarming is the way that the two major
parties are lining up to be a men’s party and a woman’s party, a perfect
acting-out of psychological archetypes in a society churning out millions of
lost souls year-by-year. The American people apparently want a Daddy to fix
all the broken systems and they want a Mommy to reassure them that everything
will be all right. Hillary, of course, wants to be both, but her problem is
that a lot of voters won’t accept her as either.
Her record doesn’t suggest she’s much good at fixing anything. That’s why
the Benghazi affair is such a good stick to beat on her with. That was a
moment when America needed a Daddy with a toilet plunger or a screw gun and
all they got were cables from the home office saying everything was going to
be all right. Mommy couldn’t save the Ambassador to Libya and three other
Americans slaughtered there. The big pretense, of course, is the idea that
congress holds hearings “so something like this will never happen again.”
It’s an interesting neurosis we’ve developed since the heyday of the
assassinations in the late 1960s, this continuing promise to abolish the
unforeseeable. Of course new atrocities happen all the time despite these
ritual committee inquiries — these days, the mass murder of strangers is more
in fashion than targeted political slayings — and there’s always another
incident, and it ought to be obvious by now that we’re not so good at making
sure that bad things don’t happen.
But that’s the Republican-controlled Benghazi Committee’s mission: to
demonstrate that Mommy can’t fix stuff. It will be easily left to Hillary
herself to prove that she’s not much good in the Mommy role either —
reassuring the multitudes that everything’s going to be all right. Instead,
Hillary falls back on an obsessive-compulsive pander tic, kind of an
incessant hash-tag jabber of promises to the familiar cast of supplicants.
Give it twelve months and see how sick of it the voters will get.
To see how much the Democrats have become the woman’s party, just consider
the men candidates up on the debate stage: all pitiful archetypes. Bernie
Sanders plays the meshugganah grandpa role reserved, on the screen, for Larry
David or Alan Arkin. He’s always worked up about something that nobody else
can really get worked up about, always raising his voice and stabbing his
finger in the air in imitation of Yahweh. There’s Jim Webb, a bobblehead
rattling off long legalistic disquisitions that never get to whether he can
fix something or not. There’s Martin O’Malley, known primarily for his
“six-pack” and “guns,” but with the persona of a frightened seven-year-old
who doesn’t want to rile the teacher. And Lincoln Chaffee, a dizzy neighbor
like Kramer in Seinfeld, butting in with cockamamie schemes that
demonstrate he can’t fix anything.
Is it not amazing that the Democratic Party could not grudge up one figure
really worth taking seriously? To me, this is truly symptomatic of how bereft
of significance the party is? I’m not so sure the party will survive this
election cycle. But the disorder across the gradient is equally impressive.
The large Republican field of professional politician candidates is
held in such bad odor as far as being able to fix anything, that the sinister
clown Trump is able to put over his idiotic act of being a Daddy who can fix
everything and anything, just by blustering. I suspect he’ll wear out his
welcome — but if he doesn’t the Grand Old Party is showing serious signs of a
serious crack-up.
Whoever get elected inn 2016 is going to face a crisis every bit as
terrible as the crisis of 1860, only this time when the country blows it
could come from a dozen different directions and be a lot harder to fix than
the secession of Dixieland.
