“Always leave them wanting less.”
—Andy Warhol
Good morning. It’s Monday in twenty-twelve and in keeping with my resolution the fucking bet I supposedly “lost,” here I am, as promised, scowling mightily at this jibbering idiot of an unfriendly bartender — and I’d gleefully come back, often, to annoy her with further fictional drink requests save that I loathe airports and especially this one as my ex-wife seems to be nearly always lurking about in it somewhere — cursing my recalcitrant iPhone, waiting for “unforeseen weather conditions” to improve the flight officer to pull out of whatever skywaitress he’s currently dousing his unresolved maternal neglect in and generally feeling pretty well misanthropic and in a bad mood at everything.
Airports: The only solution to their puzzle I’ve ever been satisfied with is a truly massive amount of good booze. Which is what, of course, this shit-hole of a bar entirely lacks. That very same solution might be applied to blogs I suppose; it’s a form I have vowed … many times and publicly, too … never to indulge in.
And have so successfully avoided until two nights ago! Goddammitsomuch! Some of you may even remember the extra-large hassle I was in with my editor at the Northfield News and how desperately (and at what immense cost!) I avoided his fat-headed and inane “Tell us, Erick: What’s a blog?” story; the rest of you may rest assured that careless use of the word will result in bared fangs, a noted increase in the bloodthirstiness quotient and the unusual disappearance of all the good drugs when you are around, funny how that works innit? Find something else to call them in my presence please; English is an incredibly rich language and I have faith in your abilities.
Yet, nonetheless and again: Here I suddenly am plop in the middle of la blogosfera, victim of a viciously rigged game and — barring alien invasion, death by autoerotic asphyxiation or the coming of the Mayan apocalypse — your unworthy and unwilling host for the next one hundred three Mondays. Jesus wept. I’ll be in my fucking mid-forties before I’m released from durance vile up in here. But a deal’s a deal. I said I’d write it for two years if they’d immediately hand over the negatives. Great. “Put ‘er there, pardners!” I’m not happy about it but the alternatives did not bear examination. Listen to your mothers, children: Never gamble.
Still … blackmail and gambling debts aside … it’s my name on the Gottverdammt door. Ergo: It’s my way or go screw, baby. These pieces will be longer than you like and I’m only doing one a week. One. Each. Week. If your familiarity with the classics of English literature, the history of the 20th century’s wars or obscure 1960s proto-garage bands is low you may have trouble understanding many of the allusions. Too bad for you, you culturally illiterate fuck: I’m never writing to a ninth-grade level again, goddammit and if you don’t like it you are warmly invited to please just grab the Cheetos, the HFCS-laden carbonation, the remote and make life easier for both of us by going away. If your attention span is short, go read what Ashton’s PR crew is tweeting about whatever manufactured shit they need you to believe he’s thinking about on this fine California evening. If that’s too much — and aplusk isn’t all bad, you know: he loves the children even if he is, on the evidence, functionally retarded — I’ve noticed many of you really and truly like a television program called Dancing With Stars. Be my guest and get the fuck out of here, not letting these photons strike your glutinous lard as you leave. Also be advised I’m working with a fairly questionable net: My editor these days — and I would basely curse the writing-gods if I thought it would do any good — is a goofy Wapanese Mr. Mom who can barely read comic books. There’s a solid shortage of editors with the requisite Communist qualifications around just now in case you haven’t noticed and you gotta take what you can get. It’s really annoying.
Last (or at least last before I get down on it): Although I plan to engage a whole wide spectrum of subjects in this-here Simulacrum Weekly — and I mean the full gamut, kids: I will inflict my enterprise reportage upon you; I will assault you with unwarranted textual criticism; I will write music reviews; I will abuse inanity, savage ineptitude, post thoroughly insensitive jokes entirely too often and undoubtedly I will use a lot of damn swears; I may even publish poetry under my own byline, fuck you very much — I should warn you in advance: I feel some pretty serious rage coming on and the Iowa caucus is tomorrow.
Listen, listen, listen: I’ve been voting for US Presidents a good long while now.
In 1988, legal by a matter of days, I voted for George Bush the Elder. I thought then — and still think now — that despite being fundamentally and in his very Bones the elitist, being most venal and being also possessed of what has to be the ugliest family in Christendom, he was a basically sane, moderate guy. Certainly a conservative and a thoroughly hard-ass player in the national security state, o yes! But generally, a pretty solid guy. Not “someone you could have a beer with,” idiot: Someone the world could work with. A professional and much more prag- than dogmatic. Former DCI, former ambassador, Vice President, kept the White House on track and out of Nancy’s paws as St. Reagan’s cognitive facilities began to steal away, managed the end of the Cold War reasonably well if you don’t count the triumphal crowing and the dismal failure to follow through in Afghanistan … how far wrong could he go, right? (Admittedly, the Afghanistan screw-up was as bad as it gets.) Still … crony capitalism had some limits then, back when grown-ups used to run things.
Not like now. But that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves. Back into Papa Erick’s magical time machine with you.
Okay, I knew he was deeply tangled up with Iran-Contra and all its many badly-planned illegalities (Republican VPs are traditionally the go-to guy for covert Latin American shenanigans dontcha know; please also see: Richard M. Nixon 1952-1960) but I knew he was going to skate cleanly away from it which is also the historical norm and hey: Director, DCI? However, once I saw Governor Dukakis — up until that moment the dude I’d planned to vote for: a Massachusetts liberal wonk in the accepted Camelot mold, yes? — in that. Fucking. Tank … I was done with him.
Done.
This was a cat who — while he’d served in the US Army in Korea and was unlikely to wet himself if he heard a shot fired in anger — you just had to wonder: What. The. Fuck? Was he doing in that fucking tank? Not that anyone really had to ask. “Hey, Guv: Why don’t you take your shiny new helmet, stick it in the breech of that cannon, stick the muzzle up your ass and order the Massachusetts Nat’l Guard to yank.”
Fucking lame. Such unbelievably weak sauce. This is a ‘Leader of the Free World?’ No. I’ll take the greedy CIA spook over the pandering ‘I’m more smarter than you’ Masshole any day: At least you know he’ll be consistent; also George Bush hired miles better speechwriters not to mention the inimitably ruthless Lee Atwater (who was as fun to watch as he was existentially horrifying).
In 1992, of course, everything was a whole different ball game. Big Bill was my guy, all right (this was before I realized what a disorganized, grabasstic clusterfuck the Clinton White House was) but there was … hmmm. There’s really only one way to say this:
There was an element of unseemliness in the way Wall Street and the media dumped Bush for Clinton in the space of about six days in mid-summer ‘92. It was like watching the hottest, most popular senior cheerleader remorselessly disentangle her social-life from her faithful if slightly staid boyfriend of five semesters in favor of the cute new transfer and it tasted, then, a bit like the kind of organized quasi-fascism (or maybe not so fucking quasi, eh?) that Occupy is fighting against now — trying to fight against, “TRYING TO FIGHT AGAINST!” — now. It was hard to really see, too; only oblique hints, suggestions, phrases in the printed campaign coverage that meshed in my dome with sentences from the electronic coverage and with the obvious, slatternly panting of the communications companies just offstage.
I don’t believe there was some mass secret meeting in the bowels of the Harvard Club or anything remotely like that … but it was very sudden and seemed nearly inexplicable. Whoooosh. We’re meant to believe all the air went out of Bush’s campaign because some whitebread fake journalist from MTV was oh-so-mildly disrespectful to him? Or because he’d carefully and responsibly cajoled Congress into raising income taxes a negligible amount when we bloody well needed to (and as pretty much the whole nation except that pimple on the ass of civilization Grover Nordquist agreed)? You’re joking, right? It was really weird. It gave me chills when I first realized that it was happening so quickly and as I watched it develop I lost some serious sleep.
So. Eerie.
The same guy, eighteen months before, had the highest approval rating of any President in modern history. And then Wham! Clinton — an obscure Southern philanderer with an unusual touchy-feely thing and a team who always considered ‘92 practice, or a dry run for 1996 — had it locked — locked! — by August. Stipulated, that Buchanan’s over-the-top speech didn’t help the GOP in any way … but I didn’t like it, not one little bit … even though I was totally for Big Bill in those naïve days and actually squirted a few tears during his brilliant acceptance speech at the convention.
(Part of that, I should point out, was due to sheer relief that he didn’t drone on for four hours in policy-wonk mode like he did during his speech at the convention in ‘88. Yikes.)
Like many of you I’m contrary and I detest being told what to do or being tricked into doing something. So I voted for Bo Gritz, the famous Special Forces colonel. And I said “Fuck you!” quite loudly as I pulled the lever in the booth. (Downtown Seattle; clean, recently-constructed out of modern plastics but to the old clunk-chomp! design and the only time I’ve ever used — or ever expect to use— one.)
Total protest vote, baby: I’m still proud of it and likely always will be. And yeah: I got some pretty harsh looks as I handed in my ballot.
But no one dared say a word.
I did sort of the same thing in 1996, yo. Clinton was strong but in no wise unbeatable and the GOP in its infinite hypocrisy followed some sort of union-seniority rule system and put up a tired old man who had not the merest chance of victory against that crazy Southern Baptist horndog who was — face it and laugh, children — the 20th century’s greatest retail politician. “By a country mile, son.” <grin> Ol’ Slick Willie — I had stopped calling him “Big Bill” by this point and he was only just barely my guy at all anymore, may Allah’s curse eternally plague all centrist Democrats — didn’t need my vote in 1996 because Bobby Dole had no motherfucking chance. </grin> So, giving the dual-finger fuck you dance to the GOP and the Green Party, neither of whom evidently wanted to field a real candidate — and for reasons of my own, none of which have anything to do with me agreeing with the evil old bastard in any way on any subject whatsoever from then through now and until the Omega Point at the end of time — I voted for Pat Buchanan.
Yes: for President.
I was pretty cranky that day, too. Almost as much as right now. Ye gods! this bartender …
And then … and then, darlings, then there was a moment, during the returns … when I suddenly realized I was not alone in voting for the weird Nazi storm-bringer. A shitload more people in California voted for Buchanan than anyone predicted … and my breath kind of caught, for a long minute early Tuesday evening.
I may not abandon the practice entirely but I’ll certainly be a little more careful with the protest-votes in future. ‘Cause you never really know, until the mezzosoprano sings.
[Before continuing, I’d like to point out that if I had thought for a heartbeat that Clinton had even a snowball’s opportunity in Hell to lose to Bush or to Dole I would have voted for him without compunction and with a big, fat, shit-eating Southern grin of my own. It should also be noted that those were protest votes against myself, too, in a way: Gritz and Buchanan are both right-wing whack-a-doos, yes? I am demonstrably not.]
Let us not discuss November-December 2000 more than necessary, please. My rectum still fairly aches. Erick Sommers, in one of his last acts of Century XX — a time when he was quite the Green — thoroughly betrayed his party and (what were, then) pretty well all of his political principles by working really hard to move as many votes away from Nader (the Green Party candidate if you remember) to Gore — whom Erick Sommers loathed for his apparent spinelessness and for his many transparently manipulative costume-changes, á la Dukakis Redux — as possible.
I committed this heinous treason for the fairly obvious reason that W., heh-heh-heh, hiya, fellahs, wasn’t quite up to the measure of his old man, surprise, surprise and I was terrified by the kind of people he would tend to surround himself with. Not to mention, you fucktarded American morons: Dynastic restorations are never really that great for the society they “restore themselves” in. Even in, maybe even especially in a democracy — the reasons for which must be altogether too clear, yeah? So can we please not do that anymore?
2004 was the proverbial straw; I was truly disillusioned when Kerry couldn’t get it up enough to beat George W. Bush. Disillusioned and really quite firmly displeased. So I got really busy with my good friend Nathan (after I dragged him kicking and screaming back into the well-lit world, that is; about ten days after the election) and busted heads and balls to put a seekrit Muslin socialist in the White House. It was a long three years and — as it was obviously in the bag by November 2008, mo’fo — I barely even bothered to vote.
But I felt I’d helped earn the world a solid win (consider carefully the words “President Palin” if you disagree that much, for the last three years would’ve surely killed John McCain) and I was not voting against my own interests, nor using the franchise to protest for once, or even really compromising my beliefs that much. It was really nice! So I went and voted, all casual and I woke up the next morning still pleasantly buzzed and boy! is the Dominionist right in the United States all hot’n’bothered about a black man in the White wom … sorry, House. In the White House.
Which brings us to the point of today’s gai sabre: In all these many elections I have never seen anything as ridiculous as the current Republican crop of allegedly Presidential contenders. Never. Not the MV Monkey Business, nor President Carter’s hallucinatory encounter with Dodgson’s pissed-off rabbit nor yet happy campers counting to potatoe. Nothing comes close. I am simultaneously amused, frightened and thoroughly appalled and my only consolation is that — for a group of cats so hellbent on dethroning the Kenyan usurper — they are not an impressive bunch. And I can only suggest that in some not-murdering-the-Tea-Party-in-its-infancy manner, we have earned this clownfest.
So for now: fuck it. I am going to drink copiously, fly to my job interview in NYC with the one percent, go to MOMA and go collapse on my rented bed. We will talk more later.
See you Monday.
