DEAR DEAD PARROT READERS

This is it. Four years of the Bush administration has left American democracy reeling on the ropes. Consider the blows we have taken over this time:

--four years of serial lying

--four years of stonewalling

--four years of systematic distortion

--four years of secret government by the extraction industries

--four years of crony capitalism

--four years of warmongering and militarism

--four years of profiteering

--four years of deteriorating social services

--four years of lost jobs

--four years of busting labor's chops

--four years of assaults on the environment

--four years of less and less accessible health care

--four years of catering to "the haves and the have-mores"

--four years of mindless triumphalism

--four years of cuddling with the Saudi royal family

--four years of kissing up to the gun lobby

--four years of crassly calculated photo ops

--four years of denigrating opponents' patriotism

--four years of alienating former allies

--four years of undermining constitutional rights

--four years of muddling church and state

--four years of "Gott mit Uns"

--four years of widening the gap between rich and poor

--four years of media conglomeration

--four years of right-wing court packing

--four years of corporate welfare

--four years of spiraling deficits

--four years of assiduously cultivated fear

--four years of soft-focus gay-baiting

--four years of putting women in their place

--four years of letting faith trump evidence

--four years of Tin Man at the top

On Tuesday we have our chance to come out counter-punching and make sure that the four years do not become eight. By voting

and getting out the vote for John Kerry, we can give ourselves something to celebrate on Wednesday morning and we can give our

country the gift of responsible government again. I will be thinking of all of you that day.

David

DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 11/26/04

DP'S POLITICAL LEXICON

The architects of right-wing dominance in American politics, a project now 40 years in the making and, one hopes, ready to move on from dizzying triumph to precipitous decline, have understood one thing brilliantly: that power grows out of the barrel of a word. To control the meaning of language is to control thought, and to control thought is to win elections. The right's central achievement in the semantic wars has been to endow the word "liberal" with such lethal connotations that even liberals reflexively recoil from it as from a snub-nosed .38. If a little extra firepower is wanted, the word "Massachusetts" will deliver the coup de grace. To what pass have we come when a president can campaign by denigrating one of the states he serves--a state, moreover, with a glorious history in the cause of the freedom that he that he is always claiming to espouse?

As important as gaining a majority on election day is maintaining the upper hand in post-election commentary. Here the operative principle is one that typifies the administration's approach to every issue: what actually happened is less material than what is believed to have happened, than what others can be made to believe happened. As a White House aide told reporter Ron Suskind this fall,

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality" (NY Times Magazine, 10/17/04). Suskind and his type, the aide sneered, were hopelessly old-fashioned in their pedestrian concern with discernible facts.

Bush's choir of mouthpieces has been working hard since November 3 to construct an alternative reality out of what took place on November 2. Among the words they are massaging in the process:

mandate (noun) -- This word used to mean an authoritative command or an authorization to act. In reference to elections, it implied a substantial majority of the popular vote, a la FDR, LBJ, or (like it or not) Reagan. A 3% win, attained with the advantages of incumbency and of total unscrupulousness over a candidate with Kerry's manifest weaknesses, constitutes not an authoritative command but a lukewarm acquiescence. Of course Bush has governed for the past four years as if he had received a mandate in 2000, when he actually lost the popular vote by half a million; and it's not surprising that he would be quick to claim one now. But the fact is that he eked out a squeaker and that his winner-take-all mentality is scarcely better justified than his loser-take-all mentality was.

out of touch (prepositional phrase) -- In column after column, we blue staters are being scolded for our failure to appreciate the values of the heartland. David Brooks (Times, 11/18/04) clucks that "the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush."

On its face, the argument that 56 million people have "lost touch" with 59 million would seem no stronger than the argument that 59 million have "lost touch" with 56 million. Who is out of touch with whom? As for reduction of the opponent to a stereotype, let's consider the subtlety and fair-mindedness of the imagery summoned by the Republican surrogate Club for Growth in an anti-Dean ad in Iowa last January: "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading..." begins a man on the street. At this point the man's wife jumps in to complete the sentence: "...body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs."

It is hard to know how Brooks would suggest that we get back "in touch" with someone who thinks in these terms. Or with Phil Burress, the thrice-married former pornography addict whose Ohio organization "gathered 575,000 signatures to put the [same-sex marriage ban] on the ballot...then helped turn out thousands of conservative voters on Election Day" (Times, 11/26/04). Or with the Ohioan who told my son that he intended to vote for Bush because "Kerry is a pussy." Or with the jeering occupants of a truck that roared by my wife and me as we campaigned on a streetcorner in New Hampshire on November 2. Handpainted on the back of the truck were the words "King Terry/Queen Kerry/Go Bush 04." It took us a few minutes to register the point: that Kerry had committed the unpardonable sin of letting his woman get on top.

In 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison of Massachusetts published the first issue of The Liberator and began his determined campaign for the abolition of slavery, he was hopelessly out of touch with the values of the country, both north and south; and he remained so for almost three decades. It was not for him to change his views because a large majority of his countrymen disagreed with them; and it is not for us to change ours because we have been outvoted by 3%. If we stay in touch with the values--liberal ones--on which the nation was founded, future elections will sooner or later take care of themselves.

[Political Lexicon, an occasional Dead Parrot feature, investigates the euphemistic or otherwise distorted language that politicians and the media use to blur the outlines of real-world issues.]

DP REVIEWS

The most brilliant book of this political season is Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? (Henry Holt, 2004). It was brilliant when I read it in July, and it looks more brilliant still in these sad days of November as we wait interminably for the clock to start ticking on a second Bush administration. What Frank has done better than anyone else is to explain the central conundrum of our politics today: how millions of working class people have been conned into voting against their own economic interests.

The answer to this seemingly unanswerable question is what Frank calls "The Great Backlash." He illustrates its operations chiefly with the recent political history of his home state of Kansas; but there is no doubt that the patterns he observes play out all across that vast red expanse in the center of our election maps.

Ironically, since one of its signature rhetorical flourishes has been that liberals are "too angry," the Great Backlash is a campaign driven by anger at liberals, whom it has successfully portrayed as an arrogant elite dedicated to demeaning ordinary folk. According to this remarkable story line, conservatives (despite the fact that they now control all three branches of government) are relentlessly marginalized victims, downtrodden and spat upon. Whatever the cultural issue du jour may be, it is less important than the abiding animus and grievance that hold the whole fantasy together. In fact, as Frank points out, backlashers often prefer to lose on the issues so that they can fan the animus and grievance to a whiter heat.

The purpose of mobilizing all this rage is nothing less than to redefine social class by pushing economic realities out of the picture. Wages, benefits, and working conditions all come off the table when elections turn on who knows how to cock his pelvis like a homeboy, who looks more authentic in a hunting outfit, or who thunders more convincingly against various biblically-identified abominations. But no sooner have the votes been counted than the whole bait-and-switch scheme reveals itself: the agenda was economic after all. Frank summarizes: "Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care about is an economic regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution."

The good news here is that Bush will presumably let the marriage amendment die a quiet death now that it has served the purpose of returning him to office. The bad news is that he has four more years to continue remaking the American economy on the Walmart model. A skilled purveyor of the backlash narrative, Bush once told his docile publicist Bob Woodward that the difference between them was that Woodward was "more elite." The you're-one-o'-them-stuck-up-left-wing-journalists-and-I'm-just-a-humble-tribune-of- the-people stance seems so astonishing in a person of Bush's background that we must pause to remember the terms of the new discourse. Being "elite," we are asked to believe, no longer has anything to do with either wealth or power; it is simply a matter of having a condescending attitude. Meanwhile, the money keeps flowing toward the power. According to the latest analysis of contributions in the 2004 campaign, corporate PAC's favored Republicans over Democrats by a 10-1 margin (Times, 11/26/04).

Frank plumbs such paradoxes with a sharp eye for detail and a piquant wit. Early in the book, he quotes a Pennsylvanian who in 2001 told Newsweek why his small town had voted for Bush: "Rural America is pissed. These people are tired of moral decay. They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street." After the equivalent of a pregnant pause, Frank writes: "Let me repeat that: they're voting Republican in order to get even with Wall Street." Where we go from here is no clearer than it was before, but this eloquent and sharply-written book offers a much better understanding of the mentality we are up against.