CALIFORNICA
REPUBLIC: A STATE OF MINDLESSNESS
CALIFORNICA
REPUBLIC: A STATE OF MINDLESSNESS
Many of my foreign friends have been asking me to explain the present political events here in the 'Golden State' to them in recent weeks, a question for which there is seemingly no certain answer other than "California is the present Cirque de Soleil of American Politics".
Truly, for a state of the Union in which the bizarre has always been more of a norm than an exceptional condition, the state of my birth has within the past year become so 'off the scale' in terms of its sociopolitical culture that it defies rational explanation to anyone whose sense of normalcy has not become permanently skewed by living here for any length of time.
The present Democratic governor, Gray Davis, is the target of what has been (somewhat) euphemistically described by some as a 'popular recall initiative by the people of the state'. The reality (if such a word may be used to describe anything associated with this state) is that a bunch of Republican yahoos, funded by several millions of dollars 'donated' to the recall campaign by millionaire Republican Assemblyman Darrel Issa, have managed to stir up the indignation of just about every feeble-minded conservative dim-bulb in this part of the country and aim it at Davis. The result is the nearest equivalent of a political 'lynch mob' that California has seen since the Gold Rush days of '49 and the political 'street theatre' that attends the whole process has surely completed the transformation of California into a political Disneyland fantasy that would doubtless have made Walt Disney himself proud to witness (or should the word be 'wit-less'?...) .
Governor Davis, a consummate 'politician' in the grand old manner, has had the profound misfortune to find himself at the helm of our ship of state at the unhappy conjunction of several of the worst crises ever to have hit the state's economy. After the Texas oil & energy cartels bled California dry during the past two years of 'deregulated' energy purchases and just as the nation's economy had fallen through the last floorboards of the nation's basement, Gray Davis suddenly found himself and his administration being blamed for every conceivable economic problem imaginable. The reality is that Davis himself is not responsible for anything more than having been too cautious and too conservative in his reaction to the energy bashing that was unleashed upon this state (by Texas energy cartels); in other words, he erred in delaying taking definitive corrective political or economic action until it was far too late to turn the situation around. Cautious, careful and measured as his response to this corporate energy feeding frenzy was, it was eventually a case of too little, too late, as the state's economy quickly started heading for the red ink ocean like a Lemming to a seacliff edge.
Listening to the outspoken Republican right, one would think that Davis himself had not only allowed California's fall to take place but that he had actively engineered it and even enabled it! So much for the 'wisdom' of the political right-wing. The problem we face now is that the 'average' Californian, a once-thought mythical figure (...we now know he not only exists, but that he numbers in the millions here in this state!) possessed of little intuitive understanding of anything more complex than how to use a TV remote control to dial up MTV, feels that infinitely challenging problems of social, cultural, and economic complexity may be resolved with simple solutions that would do credit to a three active brain cell moron.
As California progressively
veers off into the political-economic Twonk Zone, what with there now being a
field of over 200 post-recall gubnatorial candidates on the October 7th
voting slate (and a bizarre field it is, that includes a porno film star, an
overrated ex-Muscle Beach performer turned action movie star hero, an X-rated
porno magazine publishing Czar, and everything lying between the two indices of “stretch of
the imagination” and “outright credibility lapse”), I find myself seriously
considering seeking political asylum in Canada as a refugee fleeing from the
sort of disordered thought process that passes for ‘common California wisdom’ these
days.
Interestingly, as
California’s already schizoid image continues to suffer from this latest
“Recall the Governor” idiocy we are suffering through, the entire nation
remains stolidly marching merrily down the road to economic hell, led by the
Pie-eared Piper (Robbing ‘Dubya’ Hood and his Neocon Mercenary Men—Wolfie, Condie,
Dickie, and Rummy). As jobs
diminish, consumer spending continues to support the entire economy, as the
National Debt threatens to reach an all-time high of +300 Billions, and as the
rest of the world watches the whole Gotterdammerung circus act that is the
American superpower with acute disapprobation, it occurs to me that there
may….perhaps…just possibly be something EXTREMELY screwed up about the whole
conceptual model of American free-market capitalism. Do ya think?…
Mulling this all over
yesterday as I was dodging lead-footed monster SUVs on my bicycle, commuting
home from the office, it occurred to me that what started over two hundred years
ago as a promising radical innovation and experiment in freedom (the American
nation) is today a sick, twisted, and more than just a shade grotesquely
perverse socio-political monster that has mutated into a recognizably dire threat....not
just to its own peoples, but to
the entire planet.
At a time when the Chairman
of the Board for the New York Securities Exchange is retired with a staggering
128 million benefit package, at a time when we routinely pay barely literate
black basketball stars 20 million per yearly contract, and at a time when the
theoretically duly elected representatives who run our nation’s affairs as so
out of touch with contemporary realities that they might as well all be
from Mars (Attorney General John Ashcroft certainly is, at any rate), fully half
the nation still thinks that the solution to all these dire maladies is to
simply wave Old Glory more vigorously and perhaps pray a bit more emphatically.
Sadly, far too many of the
rest of us are so lulled into la-la-land by the sort of Prozac-like brain washing that passes
for governmental wisdom these days, that even recognizing the stark fact that
our nation and its priorities are far out of whack is difficult to
separate out from amidst all the free-floating, self-gratifying consumer fantasies that
distract and divert us daily.
The fact is that between
the corporate fat cats (such as Dick Cheney and his consumer-raping friends),
the right-wing, anti-abortion Christian zealots who think everything can be
solved by studying the Bible harder (led by Dubya hisself), the left-wing
liberals who think that the entire nation should be plugged into one immensely
all-encompassing socialized life
support machine, and the unholy American military-industrial complex that feels
that the only good day is a day in which the defense appropriations flow like
water from a broken spigot (why?…because it’s good for defense business!),
it’s almost a miracle that the Great American Experiment in Capitalist
Democracy has not rotted entirely away from within and collapsed from sheer
apoplectic hypocrisy (just like Mr. Khrushchev—who was sadly
mistaken—predicted, back in the 60s).
Personally, it is my
feeling that the basic structure of any government is inadequate to meet
the needs of its people once the size of the ‘governed’ masses has reached a
certain level of demographic critical mass. Certainly Plato’s direct democracy
never implied that a population exceeding several hundred thousand could ever be
responsibly governed in a manner sufficient enough to guarantee that their needs
were being met in any sort of reasonably efficacious manner.
This would have to be particularly true in an erstwhile
“representative” democracy such as the American model is loosely formulated
around, since the
laws of human nature under such a system as ours (that favor personal priorities
and individual fulfillment above that of the common good) would invariably prevail (as they are now in
America). After this argument, it would seem that ‘representative’ democracy
would only be best suited to smaller groups (such as tribes) and not to national
entities with populations in excess of several hundreds of millions of people!
The
failure of the American
model of a ‘free democracy’ to truly "free" its peoples is so absurdly patent and bitterly palpable that
only brain-dead consumers of mass quantities (roughly two-thirds of the entire
American population, by my estimation) could be fooled into thinking that what
we today call American ‘democracy’ is actually a system that works for the
good of all its common citizens. Consider for a moment that it takes ungodly
amounts of money to campaign successfully for political office in this
‘techno-democracy’ we call America. Without those near-obscene money, no one
stands a ghost of a chance of getting a message across to the public. Thus,
either one uses one’s personal millions (acquired, as in the case of the
Republican congressman Darryl Issa, who made his fortune by selling these same
brain-dead consumers I mentioned earlier hundreds of thousands of poorly
calibrated car alarms that shriek annoyingly day and night whenever a leaf falls
nearby) to run for office, OR one takes the professional politician’s route of
currying campaign contributions from well-funded corporate lobbying groups who
could care less about the welfare of ordinary ‘little people’ (such as you
or I). Either course is unacceptable in terms of assuring the best interests of
the citizens being fairly and equitably represented in any sort of
government of, by, and for the people. And yet that’s what
we have today, instead of anything SERIOUSLY approximating a truly beneficial democratic
process (after all, you may be able to exercise a vote, but the same people in
reference are subtly structuring the propositions you are asked to vote upon in
ways that invariably favor economic corporate entities and not the needs or
basic requirements of the average ‘voter’).
So…the mere facts that we
call this ‘democracy’ and the fact that you can vote ‘freely’ for the
economically skewed and partisan proposition in question doesn’t necessarily
mean that you have any ability to help assure the best possible end-result that
will best benefit the greatest number of people. Instead, we are today stuck
with a presently somewhat ‘jokey’ system that was put together originally for an
American population of several hundred thousands of people only (a fact not
without substantial irony). And that, back
in a time when the concept of monumentally influential bazillion dollar
lobbying interests maintained by immensely powerful
corporations didn’t even enter into the farthest reaches of even such forward-thinking
intellectuals as Thomas Jefferson or
Benjamin Franklin.
Take this basic hypothesis
and add to it the ‘imagineering’ media spin contortions that ‘big money’
allows vested interests to effectively wield to stun the average mind into a
quivering state of constipated passivity resembling little more than warm vanilla custard pudding
and you have a fairly satisfactory pseudo-quantum theory for helping explain
exactly why today's American is so totally fucked up in his perceptions of
everything ranging from from basic reality to exemplary standards of ethical conduct.
The sardonic bright side
of this argument is that, seen from this perspective,
our formerly wonderful State of California is actually no crazier than Florida (remember
the depredatious election actions there that transmogrified an uncertain
political presidential ‘draw’ between Bush and Gore into a substantial
‘victory’ for the Florida governor’s brother?...remember that?), or
Minnesota (World Wrestling’s fledgling ‘Smackdown’ political debut), or
any other region within the United States of America in which American citizens
have been deluded into thinking they are actually ‘free’ to live their lives
in a beneficially fulfilled and positively actualized manner.
I had a colleague
pose a pet theory to me a few years ago that postulated that the onset of the youth
rebellion, which had its roots in youthful revulsion against the sort of treacly smooth
and disingenuous uniformity of
consumer culture that arose after the Second World War (and thus had some legitimacy
as a voice raised against the mass deceptions that our culture is based largely
upon), has today become somewhat more than a little schizoid. That is, in
addition to counter-cultural sentiments being still an expression of
dissatisfaction with the archly deceptive vanilla custard pudding mainstream, part of that basic
(‘legitimate’) anti-social movement has bifurcated into a distinctly
separate tangent that still embodies and directs all of the physical
manifestations and symbolism of protest, yet is strangely completely and totally
bereft of any theoretical basis. That is, violence and t he acting out of brutal
anti-social sentiments are now vested as a fully contained, self
encompassing entity of gratuitous malevolence that has no ties at all to any
articulatable philosophy of protest (Nihilism? Anarchy?). Figuratively
speaking, today’s youthful gang-banger, today’s barely adolescent
mini-mobster has undergone a figurative pre-frontal lobotomy.
So highly refined has this process (of commercial exploitation) become, that one might compare this modern peripatetic state of commercially co-opted and orchestrated youthful hyper-rebelliousness to a status as mind-numbingly insidious as the worst projections of anything George Orwell could have conceived of in his epic masterpieces of a bleak socially controlled future society. The good news relating to all of this is that most of the rebellious kids grow beyond this adolescent specific phase of maladjustment; the really bad news is that many of these same little brainless savages grow up physically (but not mentally) and either create whole families of similarly culturally lobotomised clones, or....worst case scenario.....dispense with the formalities of marriage altogether and simply go around impregnating females with their low-grade DNA. Beyond that, they further develop into completely brainless pawns of the same commercial forces that captured and commercially redefined their formative yearning for protest against the norm.
(Of course, the absolutely worst news is that a disproportionate share of these yahoos have moved to California: QED the current 'recall' ...)
----------------------------------------------------<to be continued on Recall Election Day, 7 October 2003>----------------------------------------------
Art credits: 'Bagged Bear Flag' cartoon, Bennett of the Christian Science Monitor; 'Non-Sequitur' cartoon, Wiley Miller.
