UP@NIGHT

On August 9th, The Decider spoke at the Olympics on national sovereignty:

“Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected….We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for the end of the Russian bombings.” “Georgia and Russia Nearing All-Out-War,” New York Times, August 9th.

Really George, territorial integrity? Mighty strong words from a man who began a war against a country that had not attacked us and was not a threat to us.

Just what are Bush’s remarks worth on the world stage given how the U.S. has behaved? Tears and laughter. But unfortunately this is not solely Bush’s issue. The American people elected him and then reelected him in 2004. In addition, it appears that Bush 3.0, the John McCain version, actually has a substantial number of Americans willing to vote for him. (How many years in Iraq, John? Did you say, 1,000? And what about Iran?) And guess what, McCain claims, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” It’s just so twentieth-century.

In August of 2002, when Bush was still riding high in the popularity polls, I wrote a piece wondering about why the American people didn’t see that Bush was a lemon. Oh, I knew the answers. Of course there was the cynical use of 9/11 (but it was a year later). I knew how the Republican machine had worked since Nixon to divide the country and make so-called liberals appear to be unpatriotic and elitist. (Just as McCain is now trying to do by attacking Obama as a celebrity/elitist.) I knew about their use of racial divides to win the South, etc. But I still wondered. Why did I wonder? Because Americans typically have a pretty good nose for a lousy product. They are good consumers. And Bush was obviously a lemon.

On this theme, I offer an echo from the past, namely, a piece that I did not publish and which I did not even bother to edit for publication. I gave up in frustration. What could political humor do when things were so bleak? But now with the ease of publishing blogs, and the prospects for a real change in November, I offer it as I left it on August 20th, 2002 (except for the graphics and a fixed typo). My, how times have changed. When I wrote it I thought that I was insulting Bush. I now realize that I was in fact insulting the Edsel.

Oh, there is one other reason for offering this now. I hear that part of McCain’s new energy program will put an Edsel in every Republican’s garage. Fabulous gas millage (if you are Exxon/Mobil).

“The Edsel Returns”

I’ve been thinking about the return of the Edsel. For those too young to remember, the Edsel was a line of cars produced by Ford in the late 1950′s. Actually I am barely old enough to remember. Although I do remember images of the Edsel: long, often two-toned, front grilled with what appeared to be a cross between a giant mouth and a nose , and generally very shiny all around. A glitzy wildebeest of a car. The Edsel was named after Henry Ford’s son, Edsel Ford, who served as the nominal president of Ford Motor company, seemed to be a nice enough guy, died at only 49 in 1943, graciously suffering for years under the heavy hand of Henry.

Henry, Edsel, and Edsel

But I am not here to talk about the man Edsel Ford. It’s the idea of the car that’s gotten under my skin. The Edsel became synonymous in my youth with the word “lemon,” as in, that’s a real lemon or that’s an Edsel. It was widely ridiculed. People thought it a silly thing. No one in his right mind would buy one. Yet I don’t recall that its problems were mainly mechanical. People seemed to object to the very idea of the critter, for it was all glitter, and seemingly would not have come into existence had not a very rich and powerful man, Henry, wanted to honor the memory of his son. Its merits were few. It had not earned its place on the open road. It was an upstart. Today we might disparage it as a consumer item calculated to appeal to the tastes of omnivorous Yuppies, except that we do not frown on Yuppie longings as people might have in 1958, nor would today’s Yuppies be caught dead in something so ostentatious. It seems that one of the main problems with the Edsel was that it could not decide on what it wanted to be. It was pitched as a luxury item, yet it just might have a blue collar soul, or at least the pretense of one. People were suspicious. Its outside did not match its inner core. It was an inauthentic auto. And it didn’t take long for Americans back in the late 1950′s to realize that Ford was trying to pull off a marketing coup at their expense. The Edsel line lasted three years, but people laughed as the first models rolled off the assembly line

. For years now I have been envious of my elders because they were fortunate enough to experience and appreciate the Edsel phenomenon, namely, people collectively rising up and saying as they chuckled, “hell no, we are not so stupid as to actually buy a trophy car because corporate America and Madison Avenue tell us that we should.” I have always wanted a chance to experience the American people rallying in this fashion, laughing at the big guys, putting them in their place, bringing the house down. And just recently I came to believe that my chance was at hand. Isn’t it obvious, I thought, that George Bush is an Edsel. Can he not be likened to a car whose career was born of the right connections? Is this man not an upstart? Had this man done anything before becoming president to earn his position? Can anyone imagine that he would have gotten to where he is now if his dad had not been president? Is there not, even for a politician, an unusually transparent mismatch between the core George Bush–ill informed, self-serving, glib yet insecure, business failure, a man with little reason for holding his job except that it serves his friends well–and the image that his handlers present of an involved, well-informed, caring, active, hands-on, captain-of-industry kind of guy? Is he not like the Edsel, all presentation and an unreliable heart.

Sad to say, things have not gone according to plan. In 1958 it didn’t take long for the American people to figure out that the Edsel had to go. It was a mistake. It should never have been made. Yet in 2002 I look around and I don’t understand why people can’t see that there is an Edsel parked right there in the middle of the Oval Office. I fear that something has gone very wrong with us Americans. Have our critical faculties have abandoned us? Are we no longer as savvy as our ancestors? Has the sophistication of Madison Avenue and political consultants broken our will to resist? Do we care less about the presidency than a car? Are we just tired? Is there some sort of kryptonite lying around messing with our superpower powers? Questions come more easily than answers.

I don’t know about you, but I worry a lot about these matters. I lie awake nights and then on the days that follow I can’t take my mind off them. I try to occupy my days by doing the right thing. I try to be a good American and support the economy. I go shopping, moving from one national chain to another. But I can’t seem to buy anything that makes me understand what has happened. Unenlightened, I return home. I try to watch some TV, but there on the tube all I can see are the ever-present faces of the winsome threesome, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Ashcroft, reminding me of their boss. I become discouraged. I try to sleep. I go to bed and say my prayers. Please, Lord, tomorrow when it is morning in America, let the people wake to the realization that they have been sold an Edsel. And then let them listen to what their dad and their dad’s dad taught them. Don’t hold on to a lemon. It won’t get any better. Sell it and make it someone else’s headache.

In a television interview with Bob Costas on Sunday, August 10th, 2008, George Bush told the nation, “I don’t see America having problems.” The response: People laughed. “Just what planet does this guy orbit? I mean, really, no problems, George.”

Here is the strange part. George pretty much got away with passing this sentiment off as “state of the art” for a good part of his administration. We didn’t have problems. We had adversaries. Scary ones, indeed. And once we dealt a blow to them, we wouldn’t have any problems. End of story.

The summer of 2002, after the Afghanistan War had begun, but before the war in Iraq had started, I wrote an essay focusing on how there really was something wrong in America, how we knew it, and how we wouldn’t admit it. But it was simply too out of sync with the times to bother editing for publication. I reread it a few years ago and it still seemed out of sync with the times. If we could just deal with Iraq and terrorism, it would be morning (or at least noon) in America….

But now the essay doesn’t seem so out of touch. The war in Iraq is generally acknowledged to have been a terrible mistake and the economy is tanking. And this has opened the door for more somber reflections. So I offer “The Ostrich Factor,” here and now, unedited (except for very minor corrections and photos) from August 7, 2002. Why? Because we really need a major change of direction in this country, and we have one candidate running for President who appears to believe that if only we could just do away with Islamic radicals, America would pretty much be okay (with a few band aids here and there).

“The Ostrich Factor”

I can feel It. I am sure you can too. It’s no secret. It is there in the shadows of your neighbors’ smiles. It is there behind the strained avowals that America has become a land of solidarity since 9/11. We feel that something has gone wrong with America, and whatever It is preceded the horror of 9/11 and will not disappear in a struggle against its perpetrators. Certainly It is difficult to diagnose and discuss. And in political circles virtually impossible. Jimmy Carter was the last significant political figure who was willing to take on the role of messenger regarding It, famously pronouncing that there was a “crisis of the spirit” in America and a “national malaise.” He actually used the bully pulpit to raise questions about whether the nation had lost its bearings. For his efforts he was trounced in his bid to be reelected by Ronald Reagan, a man whose handlers told us that It did not exist, and that it was really “morning in America.” Of course Carter didn’t lose the election solely because he spoke of these matters. But his attempt to address them left a footprint so deep that no politician since has been willing to engage in a sustained discussion of them.

Politicians do not discuss them. We do not discuss them. We try to bury them as we do the feelings for an ailing friend. America is just fine, thank you. And soon it will be morning again…once we take care of foreign threats and get the economy rolling.

But the economy did roll in the 1990′s, and it was a high time for many. On this we can all agree. Yet if this as good as it gets in America, just where are we? Will posterity remember that we became the promised light on the hill as the Nasdaq went into orbit? Quite the contrary. We dreamed even less than usual of vital collective undertakings during these years. Think for a moment. Just what was our last great national mission? Was it going to the moon, ridding the country of poverty, extending civil rights to all? And who in power speaks of such matters in anything but platitudes these days? We laud past deeds and mouth vacuities about glories to come. We wear little flags on our lapels. But we focus on early retirement. And we certainly don’t discuss whether we have lost our way or if our collective life is meaningful. We prefer the of pretense of “I’m ok and you’re ok.” Is this what happens when great countries enter their twilight years?
A sometimes wise individual once told me that people will buy almost anything when they are unhappy. He was referring to goods, consumer items, commodities. There is no doubt a lot of truth here. More than may be obvious at first. For as any psychologically inclined type will tell you, when there is malaise, depression, ennui, anomie, insecurity, lack of direction, alienation, etc., people will find all sorts of ways to compensate, especially when they are unwilling to confront them and acknowledge them. One way is filling up one’s time with mindless and mind numbing activities, consuming for the sake of conspicuous consumption, for instance. Another is to give oneself over to mania or frenzy–Dow 20,000. Another is to find demons to blame for whatever may be making you feel uncomfortable. The latter may be an especially congenial path if you have spent most of your adult life deeply accustomed to fending off a powerful and dangerous adversary such as the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, our attitude toward “It” appears to be coupled with our attitude toward adversaries. Allow me a seeming digression.

When was the last time that you counted the number of wars that we have been involved in over the last fifty years? There was the Korean War and the Cold War, the latter some forty years long. There was the war in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Grenada, assorted military actions, countless proxy wars, and now a war in Afghanistan, a war on terrorism, and maybe a war in Iraq. However, it seems that foreign nationals are not our only adversaries, for we have also had wars on drugs, poverty, cancer, organized crime, etc. We have had a lot of wars. I know, some will say this comes with superpower territory. And surely many of them were necessary, you will say. But I say, we seem to have a difficult time thinking about problems and getting motivated to do something about them without framing our response in terms of war. There are surely historical and cultural explanations for this phenomenon. I will leave them to the side here. I will say that whatever else our track record shows, it shows that we have often exhibited a rather peculiar mind set since the end of the second world war. Think about it, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on cancer, etc. It’s really quite a strange way to approach these problems. Yet we have come to take it for granted. If we have a problem, we throw a war at It.

This brings us back to It. We are a practical people. We like to draw the lines in the sand. We like to solve problems. We like to move on. But no one seems to know where we should be going. The frontier is dead and the New Frontier turned out to be a bust. We live from pay check to the promise of a comfortable retirement. We feel that something is deeply wrong but can’t put our finger on It. How then will we deal with It? What will be our response? To even acknowledge that we have lost our way has come to seem unpatriotic, a denial that it is morning in America. Surely there will be a temptation to handle it by moving into familiar territory. And war I am afraid is very familiar territory. If I were living in Iraq right now, I would be losing a lot of sleep, because Americans are losing a lot of sleep, and they don’t know why, and they are not discussing it. One thing is for certain, however, whatever It is will not go away with the defeat of Saddam Hussein or any other two bit villain.

As a professional philosopher what I am about to do here on this site, on this day, is sacrilege. Instead of making arguments against John McCain’s ideas (or lack thereof), which I do elsewhere, I am going to mock him. What I will be doing is a form of ad hominem argumentation, which is to say, arguing against the person and not his ideas. Definitely Verboten. But in my defense, first, McCain really doesn’t have any ideas. Second, he started it with Paris and Spears, comparing Obama to a gas pump (which was really the point of McCain’s gas commercial, think about it), and then by bringing in Moses. Third, this is a political contest, not an academic dispute. So, the gloves are off. If Obama can’t respond in kind, I can.

On this site, here and now, and in the coming weeks, you will find revealing insights into McCain the man. Each of these images have been cursor selected for their revelatory power. (Suggestions for additions are welcome. As a matter of fact, following Larry Geater’s idea, let’s see this as a contest.  Submit your entries under Comments.)  Stayed tuned. And in the meantime, take your pick and start circulating some visual memes around the Web.

On how to run a tight ship and be a Cylon, BSG’s Colonel Saul Tigh is John McCain (or vice versa):

On knowledge of the economy, John McCain is Alfred E. Neuman (with green $ backgrounds):

On military preparedness and guns: John McCain is Elmer Fudd

On general competence, anger, and far-sightedness, John McCain is Mr. MaGoo:

The Young John McCain and the Young George Bush. Can you tell the difference?

McCain before and after a recent election make-over:

John McCain having another senior moment, confusing the phrase “a thousand years in Iraq” with “a thousand year Reich.”

And then after “recovering,” some eight or nine minutes later, fantasizing about his place in the cosmos as a celebrity because of his win on American Idol:

The political world is phase shifting, from yellow to at least orange. Just in the past couple of days we have had Scotty McClellan tearing apart the walls of Bush World by revealing truths that we have long known. Bush and Co. have struck back by trying to toss him into the sphere of hell that they reserve for those who are disloyal to the brotherhood. (First rule of Bush World: never speak ill of the inner circle or the gods will strike you down, down, and further down.)

But I am not here to talk about politics. I want to provide a respite. I want to answer a question that I know has been on many of your minds. I know that it has been on mine. Who is the twelfth Cylon?

A couple of months ago, a colleague recommended that I watch Battlestar Galactica. As a born sucker for entertaining Sci fi, whether on the screen or in print, I gave it a whirl. I especially like Sci fi that breaks some of the conventions of the genre. As any BSG fan knows, we are currently in season four. However, because I came late to BSG, I was able to watch the first three seasons on DVD. But now I find myself having to deal with commercial TV, for the fourth season has just begun, and there are no DVD’s. For the solution to one of the biggest mysteries, who is the twelfth Cylon, I must wait months to find out. (For those of you who may not have seen the show, the Cylons are an “artificial” species that human beings created. And they in turn have created Cylons who look and act like human beings, which has led to many trials for both “species.” We have learned who eleven of the human-like Cylons are, but the twelfth is a serious mystery.)

I find this intolerable. I need to know now, not in several months. So employing the finely honed analytical skills that I have developed as professional philosopher, I decided to figure out the answer.

It wasn’t very hard. First, we must keep in mind that we are dealing with a show that prides itself on unexpected twists and turns. It wants to play outside of the box. Second, we must assume that the character who will turn out to be the twelfth Cylon, while already known to the audience, will still surprise us.

The writers have placed clues. The most striking: the executive officer, Saul Tigh, is a colonel. Why is this striking? Because we are on board a starship, a battlestar, in which everyone on board has naval military ranks. (Standard Sci fi fare here.) The Battlestar Galactica is led by an admiral, Bill Adama. It turns out, however, that the second in command–a hard-drinking, uptight, cussing, tough military type–is a colonel. And he is also a Cylon. The trail leads through Tigh, no doubt about it.

BSG has been rife with political commentary. (Sorry, we got back to politics somehow.) And the last shows have only been written recently due to the writers’ strike. We know that one of the techniques that has become commonplace in TV of late is to import political figures into shows. The twelfth Cylon will be such a figure and, get this, he is going to be Tigh’s fraternal twin. (Yes, this will turn out to be one of the most interesting twists in the plot. Up until now, all human-like Cylons have been identical twins. Now fraternal twins will come to the fore….a genetic variation that suggests new possibilities for the species.) You laugh, you scoff. But I tell you that he will be a military person, who, like Tigh, has had trouble with authority. Still skeptical. You will see and believe…..

Behold, I give you Colonel Tigh, a Cylon, and his fraternal twin, the Twelfth Cylon: