Jane Smiley: The Bogeyman

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/the-bogeyman_b_83480.html


If I were the Democratic candidate for president, and it was September and my opponent were John McCain, here's the ad I would run: A street in the middle east. Some cute children playing games. Some women carrying groceries. A dog trotting by. Back to the children. Cut to McCain singing "Bomb bomb bomb Iran", but speeded up a little, to remind people how crazy he is. Cut back to Iranian street scene. The dog joins the children. Blow them up. Ever see "Failsafe"? That's what happens at the end. The last few scenes are of folks minding their own business on the streets of New York. Then they're gone...The next ad I would run would be film clips of American soldiers in Iraq, dead, dismembered, dying. Cut to Walter Reed Army Hospital. American soldiers, men and women, struggling with their injuries. Cut to funeral for American soldier. Cut to John McCain, smiling, welcoming a hundred years of war in Iraq...But I'm not going to be the candidate, and, according to Bill Clinton, if Hillary is the candidate, she is going to sell us out, because "she and John McCain are very close," and they've agreed to use the campaign to put the voters to sleep so that they can get on with consolidating the military-industrial corporate base of the US government.

The press concedes the race to McCain already. In Sunday's column (which I read in the International Herald Tribune, my Times substitute), Frank Rich maintains that Bill Clinton's surge into the primaries will bring him serious trouble from the Republican noise machine, as they rake up one indiscretion after another and throw them in Billary's face. If McCain wins the nomination, according to Rich, the Clintons can't beat him because when Bill and Hillary were in law school, McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and because Independents like McCain. Apparently, while everyone will rake up Billary's past, McCain's will be allowed to slumber peacefully, and, with the connivance of the swooning press, the US will get to elect a crackpot.

You may remember that in May of 2006, McCain stumbled into the commencement exercises at the New School in New York City, intending to give the same speech to those lefties as he had given to the graduating class of Liberty University, when what to his wondering eyes should appear but a 22-year-old girl who gave him a sound talking-to....Those kids sent the old man home with his tail between his legs. I would show that, too, in my campaign ads.

Any Republican president would be a disaster, but McCain would be the biggest disaster of all, because, both by who he is and what he professes, he encourages the US, as Reagan did, to engage in sentimental, nostalgic wishful thinking about the effects of American "goodness" and "power". The nation, which is at last waking up to the disasters of the last twenty-eight years--the disasters of the "free market" and "making the world safe for democracy" as a cover for ruthless exploitation of all natural resources no matter where they are and who owns them--would succumb the fantasy again, at least long enough for those disasters to be compounded and rendered absolutely unfixable. McCain is a walking delusion--that we really are brave, that we meant well, that mistakes were made but the policies themselves were sound. McCain reassures us that we weren't so bad after all, when we were. We can't come to terms with why the US is in the pickle it is in without consigning McCain to the dustheap.