Turn on the radio or TV and scan any political programming. Can you find anything which is wholly free of negative criticism? I bet you can’t. In the final days of the Republicans, dirty pool is the order of the day. The wingnuts are running scared and are finally trying to openly paint Obama as a communist. Bitter stuff from Krauthammer in the Washington post and hauntings from evil old badgers like Grover Norquist confirm the infirmity. Sky/Fox, as expected, have pulled out all the stops, returning to interview Joe the plumber who has mutated from Kevin Costner into Joe McCarthy since we last saw him. Defeatist noises from McCain have hardened into a dispersal of anti-socialist/communist rhetoric by people who do not understand the meaning of those definitions. If you are a Cuban living in Miami you could be forgiven for being nuts but otherwise there is no excuse.
Of course in these harsh times it is easy to be cynical, particularly in the US where nobody has a clue what an internationally held common definition of something is. You need your ‘evolution’ re-branded as a godless conspiracy against faith and called ‘intelligent design’? No problem. You want your ‘social democracy’ jazzed up to mean ‘communism’. You got it; we’ll even slur socialism while we are at it because half the population still thinks the US and Soviet Union were on opposite sides of WWII. You may then begin to ascribe all criticism as ‘cynicism’ and wind up forgetting what that means too. Yes it is no different from any previous election and yes it was the Democrats who opened a pandora’s box by invading Vietnam but the Republicans took the hinges off it, turned it upside down and set off to open more in every corner of the world. But this time the stakes are high, if the US makes a third consecutive mistake then the fictional world of Dr. Strangelove becomes and instant reality and Europe will have to go it alone.
The Palin made reference to Obama’s links with Bill Ayres, who had been a key member of the Weathermen group, the student radicals who caused damage to property in several states in the seventies. It was a cynical move according to some commentators. Well, sort of, more specifically it was ‘strategic falsification’, but then that would have made for over-complex headlines. And that’s the rub. It is a godsend to the troubled anxious public, to have a ‘Ross’ or a ‘Brand’ to divert themselves from the complex world of economics. In the US, it is a cheap slur like the Plain’s to keep the myth of the terrorist boogey man going. That simple and saleable definition of the ‘T’ word will have mileage long after Obama is elected.
It’s just not the Queen’s English now, is it? It proves that there are many linguistic terms with which North Americans have yet to get to grips with. We can all feel thoroughly ashamed that when we hear the word ‘Anarchy’ mentioned, we mentally picture a composite of our perfect bogey man, scarf masking their face, chucking a petrol bomb at a line of police turtles. Unless you are that bogey man, in which case the reverie is composed of images of your last continental holiday which happened to be in the same place as the most recent G8 meeting. But that’s just an unfortunate etymological upbringing. We all know what the word ‘irony’ means don’t we? Apparently not. ‘It’s like rain on your wedding day’, as Alanis Morissette sung, well no, not unless your groom is made of something soluble. The word ‘irony’ then becomes an overused idiom to replace ‘that is really a shit thing to happen’ and in North American English is used for everything from amusing coincidences to stupid mistakes to horrible disasters.
All this confusion of translation and terminology has perhaps taken us towards a terminal fatalism. As soon as the Palin was revealed, the wind went from those of us on this side of the world who hope for a new beginning after the horror of two disastrous republican administrations. They probably won’t vote for a black man we say. We are mentally preparing ourselves for a third term isolated from the US precisely because we want a Democrat victory so badly to reverse all the damage and make us believe in politics again.
So maybe the ‘moose that roared’ and her party will again convince that particular section of the white working class to do something which is again against their own self interest. Perhaps skullduggery will produce the same result as it did in Florida eight years ago with the help of massive fraud. It won’t though. The poor moose is the size of small caravan, not a very bright creature that will sometimes turn towards a hunter thinking they are a source of food, thus enabling the Alaskan caveman to shoot it in the face at close range.
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