In times of darkness and defeat, it is helpful to recall the words of the great sages – for example, legendary former Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas. Asked how it felt to be playing in his first Super Bowl – the “ultimate game” – Thomas answered, “If it’s the ultimate game, why are they playing it again next year?” That’s not quite how I feel about the recent presidential debacle – for one thing, neither of the star combatants was either as witty or as fun to watch as Thomas – but it’s in the emotional ballpark. We’ve survived Richard Nixon, we’ve survived Ronald Reagan, we’ve survived Bush No. 1, and by God we’ll survive the Frat-Boy Emperor and his personal cabal of ideological crusaders, poll-marketing hustlers, militarist dead-enders, and careerist thugs.
Whether their own most immediate targets will survive is another matter. As the election loomed, the war on Iraq was officially de-emphasized and duly retreated from the front pages. With Bush safely re-throned, the 8,000 troops encircling Fallujah were slipped from their leashes, and an all-out assault began on that city with a couple of days of long-distance bombing runs and artillery. Always “smart bombs” and “precision targeting,” we are told, duly echoed by the “embedded” official media, even though the best available information (see The Lancet study discussed here last week) is that many thousands of Iraqi civilians are being killed outright by the American assault, and untold thousands more seriously wounded. (The U.S. numbers are about 8,000 soldiers severely wounded in addition to the 1,100 already dead; we can only guess the corollary figures for Iraqi civilians, because, in the omertô words of Gen. Tommy Franks, “We don’t do body counts.”)
Beneath that shadow, any more polite drivel about “moral values” being the determining factor in the election is simply a willful hypocrisy. As another sage, Gore Vidal, reminds us, “In America, the only morality is sexual morality,” and therefore the wholesale slaughter of innocent foreigners in a corrupt and dishonest cause raises no debatable public question. Moreover, the entire “moral values” dodge was contrived by poll-writers to replace the literal, “Do you oppose civil rights for gay people and reproductive rights for women?” Asked and answered in English, the proper response becomes obvious: “Too bad, Buster, it’s a free country, so kindly buzz off.”
The Preachers’ Brigade
That’s not to say we won’t spend the next four years fighting off official assaults on civil rights, women’s rights, sexual freedom, and the whole gamut of cultural and political liberation this gang of reactionaries has been trying (and failing, remember) to roll back for a generation. Yet, the “cultural wars,” inevitably, are largely the emotional reverberation of something else – the neoconservative determination to expand U.S. military power abroad, whatever the consequences to the locals. That has required a docile or at least cooperative public at home, paralyzed by the largely hysterical prospect of “terrorism.” The ascendant corporate interests are also openly determined to undermine the autonomy and economic security of working people – they call it “establishing a more flexible labor market.” So privatizing Social Security, abolishing overtime and ergonomic rules, undermining health insurance and other hard-won benefits, and dumping private environmental costs onto the public are all on the announced Bush agenda.
All those burdensome tasks – opposed, as it happens, in much greater numbers than just elected the Crawford Coriolanus – are made much easier in direct proportion to the extent that many of us are preoccupied with the burning question of whether sometime, somewhere, teenagers, the unmarried, and gay people are having sex without permission. So we can expect four more years of sanctimony on such matters, while the real work of expanding empire abroad and redistributing income upward at home marches on.
In Search of Morality
Closer to home, the Party of Moral Values returns shortly to Austin carrying plenty of baggage in the shape of felony indictments for campaign money-laundering, among other peccadilloes. As Vidal points out, on the contemporary morality scale, neither stealing money nor stealing elections really counts for much. Yet if the downfall of Talmadge Heflin – described by one fellow wag as “the endangered Houston Toad” – tells us anything, it is that Texans will finally begin to object when the state’s budgetary axe falls unapologetically on children. It’s a lesson not entirely lost on Heflin’s colleagues; among the names on the first bills filed to restore funding for children’s health insurance were those of a couple of Republicans from now-swinging districts. Goaded again by the courts, they vow, as well, to “fix” public school finance; lacking both the wherewithal and the backbone to pay for it, look for another sales-tax tithe imposed most heavily on the lowest-income brackets, so our betters can take yet another new federal tax break.
Among the leadership, Gov. Rick Perry is in such a bad mood from the shadows cast by his personal rainclouds, Strayhorn and Hutchison, that he found it necessary to snub the United Nations, refusing to sign a ceremonial declaration even President Bush found unobjectionable. Hardly the way to win friends and build Coalitions. Over at the House, Speaker Tom Craddick counts the electoral casualties among his chairmen even as he contemplates the distant footsteps of DA Ronnie Earle. If Colyandro crows, can Craddick be far behind?
But if it’s truly sex you want, there is the Open Austin Secret that at least two of Craddick’s remaining chairmen, fixtures of the GOP leadership, have each been recently evicted from domestic bliss when their spouses discovered the actual nature of all that late work down at the Capitol. That’s the trouble, of course, with moral values and political vision: It’s always so much easier to see the speck in the other fellow’s eye than the beam in one’s own.
This article appears in November 12 • 2004.
