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At the core of the manifold paradoxes swirling around American governance is the harsh reality that we just can't
keep running our shit the
way it has evolved to run. Neither candidate for president
is honest enough to spell this out and indeed both act as though
easy work-arounds exist for sustaining the unsustainable.
In the case of Mr. Obama, it's
paying limitless TBTF ransom money to overgrown banks to avoid the constant threats of collapse that they whisper in his ear - essentially
a hostage racket. A policy
of managed contraction is
probably the only way to avoid unmanaged and uncontrollable
collapse, and would include
dismantling all the TBTF banks,
but Mr. Obama won't acknowledge
the imperative of contraction and the difficulties it represents. So he stands by hoping that Fed Chair Bernanke will keep shoveling ZIRP privileges, "twist' ops,
bail-outs, and bond buying
interventions to the "primary dealers" -
a line-up of flimflams so
abstruse that all the Paul Krugmen-type
economists who ever lived might
puzzle over them around
the clock until the end
of time and never unravel
their inner workings.
Mr. Romney subscribes
to a set of fantasies out of the Chamber of Commerce playbook that all the familiar activities of status quo wealth generation could easily continue via the marvelous invisible hands of unfettered
corporatism, if only the deadweight of government
restrictions and the squandering of borrowed public "money" were
swept away. His choice of running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan, is meant to embody all those notions -- but more than that appeal to the inchoate mob of Tea Partiers who want to get the gubment's hands off their goshdarn medicare. Anyway, the net effect of Mr. Romney's business fantasies are
so inadequate to the
contractive forces underway that
they would amount to pissing up the
massive rope of history
in a hurricane of events.
So, as the election
race sets up for its terminal lap, expect a completely incoherent debate over the fate
of the nation from a couple of characters
who personify all the hapless contradictions of the public they
will be pandering to. Romney's story appeals to me a little more in its strange psychological
dimensions; Obama's role
as a living, breathing wish-fulfillment
of the liberal imagination is
too obvious in comparison.
First there is the issue of Mitt's family. His Dad,
George Romney, was among many avatars of big business (it used to be
called) in its post-WW2 heyday, as CEO of American Motors, the car company that was a clownish fourth to the "big three" of that day (GM, Ford, and Chrysler). American Motors produced joke cars for losers, foremost the Rambler, featuring seats that folded down flat with the implied use as a rolling bedroom. George Romney got himself elected
governor of Michigan at a
time when the state was so flush with revenue it would have been impossible
to misgovern - though he set up the conditions for a later
spectacular collapse into
the ash-heap of broken dreams it represents
today. He battled Richard
Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1968 and became a laughingstock
by claiming he had been "brainwashed"
by US officials and generals
into supporting the
Vietnam War on a visit there in 1967. It was an unfortunate remark, coming only a few years after the release of a popular movie called The Manchurian Candidate, about a Red
Chinese plot to use brainwashed
Americans to subvert a US
presidential election.
Game over for George.
So, in this age of creeping dynastic ambition, of Kennedys,
Bushes, Browns, here we have another case of a son reenacting the family ambition.
You'd think the American
public would be getting a little sick of this routine, that is, if we
were really the independent and "exceptional"
people we pretend to be. But, alas, here you just
get the worst natural human tendencies to institutionalize
social hierarchy amplified
by the idiotic celebrity
culture of mass-media, pointing
to the conclusion that we
supposed lovers of "freedom" and "liberty" crave domination by
hereditary rulers. The cheekiness of it all by such "regular guy" phonies like Mitt would be
enough to provoke a real political upheaval in a nation less medicated than ours.
Then there is
the question of Mitt Romney's
so-called faith, the preposterous fairy tale called Mormonism. Nobody in the news business today
really wants to state plainly what a laughable package of childish incongruities this belief system is - though Adam Gopnik came close recently via a scholarly
disquisition in a recent New Yorker
that left out most of the comedy - because it is
a cardinal rule of our anemic culture that any and all belief systems are equally valid. But the story of Mormon "prophet"
Joseph Smith is so rich with inane
occult hustling that the Coen Brothers would be hard pressed to satirize it. Of course, it is the perfect
religion for a man who now
vehemently denounces the very same health
care reform policy that he championed
a few years ago as governor of Massachusetts.
Anyway, bear in mind
that, whatever else is going
on out there right now in
the three-ring circus of presidential politics, events are in the driver's seat, not personalities, and
the seeming quiescence of things
on the late summer scene is an illusion that will soon
dissipate.
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