Fuck the Tea Party, too.
In the summer of 2003, I met John Kerry. My father got us some stubs for a Miami Beach Democratic fundraiser, costing more $ a head than I’d make busing tables in two weeks. (He’d picked up the tickets, he told me, from a business associate.) I believe it was my first political campaign Event (in retrospect, this seems like an inauspicious moment to be introduced to the Democratic elite). Dad and I argued on the way over. I’d been telling him about this Howard Dean guy for a month or so already, and only recently had anyone actually written an article about the guy so Dad was still dismissive, even more so than before anything had been written at all.
“There’s just no way that guy’s going anywhere. I think Kerry is the real deal. He’s the only candidate that can really make a stand. He’s the only one who’s electable.” The reason for this seemed to be threefold: he was a war hero; his initials were freaking JFK; and he was tall.
The party was no Democratic revival. “Beautiful coiffed professionals,” I wrote, uh, in my blog (not worth clicking, I assure you), “mostly young, networking and flashing smiles, drinking El Presidente while a tan-sunglassed DJ in a beanie and a guayabera spun downtempo cheese.” Nobody seemed to be talking about politics, or if they did it was like you’d talk about sports.
I did talk to a few guys who seemed to be out of place at the event—balding, shlubby. They were not sold on Kerry, but they were openly contemptuous of Dean.
“I lived through that already, only he was called McGovern, and we can’t fuck around like that this time.” I didn’t really know shit about McGovern (I was pretty sure that he ran against Nixon) and I supposed that this Conventional Wisdom probably had some truth to it, but some of the things I’d read about Dean sounded like things that just don’t happen in Democratic politics. They seemed just wild enough—just scrappy enough—to be serious.
I mean what the hell did I know? I was just learning about the damn primary system as we went along; I knew there was one, but now here we were in the middle of the process and it felt absolutely demoralizing, as if we were losing the damn election a year before it even began…Surely there’s something more to this that I’m not getting, some character-strengthening ritual. But I felt totally unprepared to have an opinion on any of this that wasn’t just from the gut, and my gut was clenching up.
McGovern. Ever wonder why history classes leave out the history that’s most relevant to a person who might want to figure out what the hell has been going on during his or her lifetime? In high school AP History we’d spent two days on Vietnam, memorized the answer to one question about Watergate… we’d basically been told that the ‘80s happened, and that was left at that. Every once in a while now I just feel this panic—
Wait, what happened in the 80’s?! I know there was the Cold War, and kinda funny-colored pop culture stuff that we used to think was lame but now we think is ironically cool, but…Iran/Contra what? Moral Majority who?…Why don’t I know what HAPPENED?
Yo, FUCK Plymouth Rock.
* * *
“We are not a nation of truth-lovers.” HST, Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail 1972
* * *
Six months or so ago, before graduation, when I asked ‘What is to be done?’ I meant it as half-hypothetical, like a bong-clearer kind of question. By any indications it looked like Bush was unbeatable. Nobody was standing up to him as he took us to war, nobody except a Kennedy, some Southern fogey, and some doctor in Vermont. Who would be able to stand up again in a year?
Things were a bit different now. The Bush bull had knocked over just enough plates to sound a few alarms; Iraq was definitely not an Accomplished Mission, while in the meantime, just this very week, finally, the press was writing about Bush’s State of the Union nucular lies. What the fuck is Read my lips, no new taxes (Ah! I know that one. That was in the 80’s!) when you compare it to lying about nuclear war?
Not that this was the first big lie that he should have been busted on, although if you were going to pick one to put the crown on I think that’ll do.
Many of us had known about the yellowcake lie since basically the week after the State of the Union speech, while it had taken the media something like 6 months to catch up. Outside of the loony left, the country had not yet been openly exposed (by which I mean, via TV and the main newspapers) to any hard evidence of the scam. But soon after the press started reporting Joseph Wilson's report, the White House went and pulled an even more thuggish stunt like leaking the identity of his wife Valerie Plame, who was a CIA operative specializing in the nuclear black market.
Man, I thought with just a little excitement, they are slipping bad. I knew about the CIA leak—me, who still didn’t totally understand what Watergate was all about—so this has gotta catch up with them soon. The wall was starting to break. Now Bush was on the defensive, and there was time enough yet for his incumbency to start to get pretty heavy. Any minute now. Their clocks are ticking. It’s just gonna be a matter of who’s going to be there to get the country out of bed.
Surely the appropriate response would not be hard to formulate. Surely it would be as simple as standing up and loudly speaking the truth. Up until then, the only person to do that was Howard Dean. His underdog bid, driven by what seemed to be less a campaign than a movement, had slowly become the top contender—whether or not anyone at the Kerry event cared to acknowledge that—only because he spoke his mind and lots of regular people liked that enough to do something about it. The fact that he was the only candidate (well, the only white male candidate) who had actually opposed the war apparently made him unelectable.
* * *
“McGovern is the only major candidate…who invariably gives a straight answer when the people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, abandoned as a hopeless loser…
On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man.”
--HST, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
* * *
As a 2000 Nader voter (well, would-be Nader voter) I was ready to give John Kerry a small cynical benefit of doubt. Certainly if Bush was not just sexing-up but lying, that lets Kerry off the hook for being such a pussy earlier. Maybe now he’d start pulling punches. Better late than never, right? The more you thought about it, the better it started to sound—he’d signed onto our country’s last “Great War,” came back and testified to the great trauma we’d blundered into; now he’d be ready to reclaim that young man’s destiny, and pull us up from this stumble backwards. Maybe, with the news starting to break, it would happen right here, in Miami Beach. Maybe this would be the night…And so I broke the first rule of politics: don’t get yr hopes up.
We gathered in the lushly landscaped backyard, and looked up at the house’s broad patio as John Kerry came out. I remember thinking that he had great hair, and that his health care plan sounded alright but whatever. He sure was tall. He’d started with the Supreme Court, gotten big cheers when he hit the inevitable Ashcroft bell, and then—long long minutes later—Bush’s foreign policy. Finally. My ears perked.
“Unwise,” he called it.
Unwise!? What about lies? It isn’t even a mistake—it’s a crime. (“Worse than Vietnam,” I’d told my father, though we’d called an unspoken truce on that one; my reasoning was that the reasons for not going to war were not so readily apparent so early, to so many people.) It was a murderous fraud. The first public admissions of that are right now starting to play out all over the news and this man running for President won’t even acknowledge it.
Right when he was done speaking, I headed straight to beer bucket in the corner for those top-shelf imports; anything to justify having taken the night off of work for this.
People were standing around beaming as he made his way through the crowd. Charisma, I heard the word several times. Dad asked me, ‘what did you think?’ I shrugged and took a gulp. Kerry was working his way through the crowd toward us. His hair was huge. Dad said I should move forward to try to shake his hand—“Go on.” He stood behind me, waiting. I gripped my beer close, and let others move in front of me as Kerry passed, shaking hands all the way, right out the door and on to the next stop to give the same speech.
As we drove home Dad said, “I think he’s our man.” I vowed to myself to read more about Howard Dean’s platform.
* * *
I stayed up late that night writing in the blog. (Let that be a warning to you, reader, about the quality of this post hereafter.) I should have taken notes on the Kerry event but already I was starting to fade on that whole journalist idea. Instead I wrote about lies, great terrible lies, lies and cancer.
“The perverse readiness to accept and ignore lies (at least lies about national policy. not lies about blow jobs)…seems to be the societal equivalent of feverish hallucination. You accept that you are seeing a dancing pink elephant fly into your malarial bedroom.
And that's where Radiohead finds themselves on Hail to the Thief—fighting the fever.”
Awesome transition there, right? I was not yet fading on the music journalism thing (though that would come soon). All I could muster myself to write about those days was Radiohead, who had just released their sixth album that week. I wrote a lot about Radiohead, all of it rambling, just south of the border of Raving.
Along with the Wrens’ Meadowlands, it was my favorite album of the year – while the Wrens struck a deeply personal note, Hail to the Thief was all politics. And by politics, I don’t mean elections (the titular reference to 2000 notwithstanding) – I mean apocalypse. Hail to the Thief is a fin de siecle, a synthesis of the band’s thesis (The Bends, OK Computer) and antithesis (Kid A, Amnesiac). Radiohead had been through despair and into paranoia and misanthropy, then had fractured into cosmic mysticism, and somehow came out the other end with a seer’s eye looking out on the world. Now each song is its own little crisis of what is to be done? The very first track is virtually a cover of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, even entitled “2+2=5,” and it argues with itself like the half-mad Underground man—between the willful ignorance of sophisticated despair (“Are you such a dreamer/to put the world to right?/I’ll stay home forever/where 2 and 2 always make 5”) and an accusation of guilt, which comes with the apoplectic guitar assault, a warning finger to the sky: “You have not been paying attention, paying attention, PAYING ATTENTION”…
oh hang on a second. Not all this again. You could write a book about their music (well. I could.) although what the hell would it tell you. All I meant by bringing Radiohead up here was to quote their mournful hymn “I Will,” in which Thom burrows into a bunker and intones serenely about how:
“I won’t let this happen to my children/
Meet the real world coming out of your shell
With white elephants/sitting ducks
I will/rise up”
White elephants and sitting ducks. We were heading down paths we couldn’t afford to tread, and we could not do a thing about it.
Dean wasn’t a hypothetical challenge to the very system like Nader; he was potentially worse for all involved. The Dean campaign was really threatening to everything because if he didn’t play by party rules and did rise up on the strength of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party with its truest passion and Principle but he still couldn’t beat George Bush, well…
Why bother considering the scenario? Dean was unelectable—I mean who knows but come on. Not in this town, not in this primal age. And just that very fact was almost more troubling – for this guy, 22 years old and three months out college with no idea what to do next – than the very question of who could Beat Bush? ABB was not a winning ticket…
I’m wandering; sorry. This was a tough period for me, maybe you can tell. Anyway Kerry’s campaign floundered, while Dean picked up incredible amounts of steam—all of it from the grass roots on the internet. And though I didn’t read up on him much or even follow the blogs, I knew it was out there—it was inevitable that it would be out there. But I stopped paying attention.
I took my first solo road trip, that ritualistic flouncing through the fertile expanse of America. The best way I could do it was to connect dots of cities in which I knew people, which means my trip throughout the country went straight up the East Coast, over through Canada and then down into 2 more blue states. Everything else was a hurried blur; I made the drive from Chicago to Durham in one trip. After it all, America somehow seemed like a smaller place.
* * *
Howard Dean continued to climb right up to the point where this doctor from Vermont, coasting in on huge crushes of money from the grass roots on the Internet, received the endorsement of none other than Al Gore. Then everything fell to shit under Dean.
Right around this time, I fell in love. Blake sure didn’t know what a primary was either, and I didn’t know what to think about Dean’s screeching plummet from the top. So I took note, fostered a passing interest in John Edwards--who really made a better JFK, but he never got the chance--and then moved on. John Kerry was our man. Maybe it was for the best.
“There’s just no way that guy’s going anywhere. I think Kerry is the real deal. He’s the only candidate that can really make a stand. He’s the only one who’s electable.” The reason for this seemed to be threefold: he was a war hero; his initials were freaking JFK; and he was tall.
The party was no Democratic revival. “Beautiful coiffed professionals,” I wrote, uh, in my blog (not worth clicking, I assure you), “mostly young, networking and flashing smiles, drinking El Presidente while a tan-sunglassed DJ in a beanie and a guayabera spun downtempo cheese.” Nobody seemed to be talking about politics, or if they did it was like you’d talk about sports.
I did talk to a few guys who seemed to be out of place at the event—balding, shlubby. They were not sold on Kerry, but they were openly contemptuous of Dean.
“I lived through that already, only he was called McGovern, and we can’t fuck around like that this time.” I didn’t really know shit about McGovern (I was pretty sure that he ran against Nixon) and I supposed that this Conventional Wisdom probably had some truth to it, but some of the things I’d read about Dean sounded like things that just don’t happen in Democratic politics. They seemed just wild enough—just scrappy enough—to be serious.
I mean what the hell did I know? I was just learning about the damn primary system as we went along; I knew there was one, but now here we were in the middle of the process and it felt absolutely demoralizing, as if we were losing the damn election a year before it even began…Surely there’s something more to this that I’m not getting, some character-strengthening ritual. But I felt totally unprepared to have an opinion on any of this that wasn’t just from the gut, and my gut was clenching up.
McGovern. Ever wonder why history classes leave out the history that’s most relevant to a person who might want to figure out what the hell has been going on during his or her lifetime? In high school AP History we’d spent two days on Vietnam, memorized the answer to one question about Watergate… we’d basically been told that the ‘80s happened, and that was left at that. Every once in a while now I just feel this panic—
Wait, what happened in the 80’s?! I know there was the Cold War, and kinda funny-colored pop culture stuff that we used to think was lame but now we think is ironically cool, but…Iran/Contra what? Moral Majority who?…Why don’t I know what HAPPENED?
Yo, FUCK Plymouth Rock.
* * *
“We are not a nation of truth-lovers.” HST, Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail 1972
* * *
Six months or so ago, before graduation, when I asked ‘What is to be done?’ I meant it as half-hypothetical, like a bong-clearer kind of question. By any indications it looked like Bush was unbeatable. Nobody was standing up to him as he took us to war, nobody except a Kennedy, some Southern fogey, and some doctor in Vermont. Who would be able to stand up again in a year?
Things were a bit different now. The Bush bull had knocked over just enough plates to sound a few alarms; Iraq was definitely not an Accomplished Mission, while in the meantime, just this very week, finally, the press was writing about Bush’s State of the Union nucular lies. What the fuck is Read my lips, no new taxes (Ah! I know that one. That was in the 80’s!) when you compare it to lying about nuclear war?
Not that this was the first big lie that he should have been busted on, although if you were going to pick one to put the crown on I think that’ll do.
Many of us had known about the yellowcake lie since basically the week after the State of the Union speech, while it had taken the media something like 6 months to catch up. Outside of the loony left, the country had not yet been openly exposed (by which I mean, via TV and the main newspapers) to any hard evidence of the scam. But soon after the press started reporting Joseph Wilson's report, the White House went and pulled an even more thuggish stunt like leaking the identity of his wife Valerie Plame, who was a CIA operative specializing in the nuclear black market.
Man, I thought with just a little excitement, they are slipping bad. I knew about the CIA leak—me, who still didn’t totally understand what Watergate was all about—so this has gotta catch up with them soon. The wall was starting to break. Now Bush was on the defensive, and there was time enough yet for his incumbency to start to get pretty heavy. Any minute now. Their clocks are ticking. It’s just gonna be a matter of who’s going to be there to get the country out of bed.
Surely the appropriate response would not be hard to formulate. Surely it would be as simple as standing up and loudly speaking the truth. Up until then, the only person to do that was Howard Dean. His underdog bid, driven by what seemed to be less a campaign than a movement, had slowly become the top contender—whether or not anyone at the Kerry event cared to acknowledge that—only because he spoke his mind and lots of regular people liked that enough to do something about it. The fact that he was the only candidate (well, the only white male candidate) who had actually opposed the war apparently made him unelectable.
* * *
“McGovern is the only major candidate…who invariably gives a straight answer when the people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, abandoned as a hopeless loser…
On the face of it, the “McGovern problem” looks like the ultimate proof-positive for the liberal cynics’ conviction that there is no room in American politics for an honest man.”
--HST, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
* * *
As a 2000 Nader voter (well, would-be Nader voter) I was ready to give John Kerry a small cynical benefit of doubt. Certainly if Bush was not just sexing-up but lying, that lets Kerry off the hook for being such a pussy earlier. Maybe now he’d start pulling punches. Better late than never, right? The more you thought about it, the better it started to sound—he’d signed onto our country’s last “Great War,” came back and testified to the great trauma we’d blundered into; now he’d be ready to reclaim that young man’s destiny, and pull us up from this stumble backwards. Maybe, with the news starting to break, it would happen right here, in Miami Beach. Maybe this would be the night…And so I broke the first rule of politics: don’t get yr hopes up.
We gathered in the lushly landscaped backyard, and looked up at the house’s broad patio as John Kerry came out. I remember thinking that he had great hair, and that his health care plan sounded alright but whatever. He sure was tall. He’d started with the Supreme Court, gotten big cheers when he hit the inevitable Ashcroft bell, and then—long long minutes later—Bush’s foreign policy. Finally. My ears perked.
“Unwise,” he called it.
Unwise!? What about lies? It isn’t even a mistake—it’s a crime. (“Worse than Vietnam,” I’d told my father, though we’d called an unspoken truce on that one; my reasoning was that the reasons for not going to war were not so readily apparent so early, to so many people.) It was a murderous fraud. The first public admissions of that are right now starting to play out all over the news and this man running for President won’t even acknowledge it.
Right when he was done speaking, I headed straight to beer bucket in the corner for those top-shelf imports; anything to justify having taken the night off of work for this.
People were standing around beaming as he made his way through the crowd. Charisma, I heard the word several times. Dad asked me, ‘what did you think?’ I shrugged and took a gulp. Kerry was working his way through the crowd toward us. His hair was huge. Dad said I should move forward to try to shake his hand—“Go on.” He stood behind me, waiting. I gripped my beer close, and let others move in front of me as Kerry passed, shaking hands all the way, right out the door and on to the next stop to give the same speech.
As we drove home Dad said, “I think he’s our man.” I vowed to myself to read more about Howard Dean’s platform.
* * *
I stayed up late that night writing in the blog. (Let that be a warning to you, reader, about the quality of this post hereafter.) I should have taken notes on the Kerry event but already I was starting to fade on that whole journalist idea. Instead I wrote about lies, great terrible lies, lies and cancer.
“The perverse readiness to accept and ignore lies (at least lies about national policy. not lies about blow jobs)…seems to be the societal equivalent of feverish hallucination. You accept that you are seeing a dancing pink elephant fly into your malarial bedroom.
And that's where Radiohead finds themselves on Hail to the Thief—fighting the fever.”
Awesome transition there, right? I was not yet fading on the music journalism thing (though that would come soon). All I could muster myself to write about those days was Radiohead, who had just released their sixth album that week. I wrote a lot about Radiohead, all of it rambling, just south of the border of Raving.
Along with the Wrens’ Meadowlands, it was my favorite album of the year – while the Wrens struck a deeply personal note, Hail to the Thief was all politics. And by politics, I don’t mean elections (the titular reference to 2000 notwithstanding) – I mean apocalypse. Hail to the Thief is a fin de siecle, a synthesis of the band’s thesis (The Bends, OK Computer) and antithesis (Kid A, Amnesiac). Radiohead had been through despair and into paranoia and misanthropy, then had fractured into cosmic mysticism, and somehow came out the other end with a seer’s eye looking out on the world. Now each song is its own little crisis of what is to be done? The very first track is virtually a cover of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, even entitled “2+2=5,” and it argues with itself like the half-mad Underground man—between the willful ignorance of sophisticated despair (“Are you such a dreamer/to put the world to right?/I’ll stay home forever/where 2 and 2 always make 5”) and an accusation of guilt, which comes with the apoplectic guitar assault, a warning finger to the sky: “You have not been paying attention, paying attention, PAYING ATTENTION”…
oh hang on a second. Not all this again. You could write a book about their music (well. I could.) although what the hell would it tell you. All I meant by bringing Radiohead up here was to quote their mournful hymn “I Will,” in which Thom burrows into a bunker and intones serenely about how:
“I won’t let this happen to my children/
Meet the real world coming out of your shell
With white elephants/sitting ducks
I will/rise up”
White elephants and sitting ducks. We were heading down paths we couldn’t afford to tread, and we could not do a thing about it.
Dean wasn’t a hypothetical challenge to the very system like Nader; he was potentially worse for all involved. The Dean campaign was really threatening to everything because if he didn’t play by party rules and did rise up on the strength of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party with its truest passion and Principle but he still couldn’t beat George Bush, well…
Why bother considering the scenario? Dean was unelectable—I mean who knows but come on. Not in this town, not in this primal age. And just that very fact was almost more troubling – for this guy, 22 years old and three months out college with no idea what to do next – than the very question of who could Beat Bush? ABB was not a winning ticket…
I’m wandering; sorry. This was a tough period for me, maybe you can tell. Anyway Kerry’s campaign floundered, while Dean picked up incredible amounts of steam—all of it from the grass roots on the internet. And though I didn’t read up on him much or even follow the blogs, I knew it was out there—it was inevitable that it would be out there. But I stopped paying attention.
I took my first solo road trip, that ritualistic flouncing through the fertile expanse of America. The best way I could do it was to connect dots of cities in which I knew people, which means my trip throughout the country went straight up the East Coast, over through Canada and then down into 2 more blue states. Everything else was a hurried blur; I made the drive from Chicago to Durham in one trip. After it all, America somehow seemed like a smaller place.
* * *
Howard Dean continued to climb right up to the point where this doctor from Vermont, coasting in on huge crushes of money from the grass roots on the Internet, received the endorsement of none other than Al Gore. Then everything fell to shit under Dean.
Right around this time, I fell in love. Blake sure didn’t know what a primary was either, and I didn’t know what to think about Dean’s screeching plummet from the top. So I took note, fostered a passing interest in John Edwards--who really made a better JFK, but he never got the chance--and then moved on. John Kerry was our man. Maybe it was for the best.
posted by Greg Bloom at 4/03/2005 11:40:00 PM
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