Taki's Mag

We are facing another US presidential election. The two candidates have been picked, most likely by hand. It is depressing how fast these contests come around and how similar and pointless they have become. It seems like only yesterday I was recovering from the 2008 campaign between Senators Obama and McCain. And now the game has started all over again. Why?

I came across an unpublished essay I wrote entitled “Agog with Politics.” It is a fragment from November 2008 that was never submitted for publication. So little has changed between then and now. We are going through the same expensive process, this time between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. Does it matter who wins? Aside from the winner himself and his extended entourage, the outcome will make little or no difference to the citizenry at-large.

Agog with Politics
(November 16, 2008)

The first billion-dollar presidential campaign is over. It came down to Barack “Slippery” Obama v. John “Crackbrain” McNasty in a quest to become the nominal leader of Ex America II, the lone surviving “superpower.”

I no longer refer to this country as “America.” I call it “Ex America II” in light of the fact that the North American republic of 1789 is no more. It was obliterated by the bloodbath variously called “the Civil War,” “the War Between the States,” or by my Southern diehard friends, “the War of Northern Aggression.” The last term is most accurate. The conflict commenced in 1861 when Lincoln decided to prevent the Southern states’ peaceful secession. Thus ended the republic of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, and along with it the US Constitution.

In its place came “Ex America,” which lasted from 1865 until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Big Brother regime in the 1930s. Since then, it’s been “Ex America II.” It is a world of fear, fantasy, and force along the lines of Charles Beard’s “perpetual war for perpetual peace” and Henry Miller’s “air-conditioned nightmare.” I’m referring to World War II, the Cold War, and now Washington’s crowning achievement, GWOT, the “Global War on Terror.” GWOT is predicated upon an alleged all-consuming “clash of civilizations” between the West and a reawakened Islamic world. This is a contrived scenario, albeit widely accepted by the misinformed. 

This is supposedly why these two professional politicians, Barack O and McNasty, were fighting. It hardly mattered which of them won the prize. WEP would retain power. Whoever controls WEP stays in power. Status quo ante. More fear, more fantasy, more force and deception.

The Washington Establishment Party (WEP) presented a deceptive “choice” to a confused, unwary American electorate. It must be evident to most neutral observers that the Democratic and Republican Parties constitute little more than two WEP front organizations and that there is no substantive difference between them save for style and spin. WEP is a revolving door for ambitious career politicians. 

Representing the Democrats in one corner was an upstart mystery man, the junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. His career trajectory has been astounding. Barack O is a brilliant talker—cerebral and crafty. A consummate con man. During the campaign he posed as an outsider promising “change.”

In the other corner was Arizona Senator John McNasty. He was a Navy brat from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. Son of a famous admiral, he finished near the bottom of his class. He fought and crash-landed in Vietnam. Surviving prison camp, he launched a second career by cashiering his first wife and marrying an Arizona beer baroness. Bankrolled and renewed, McNasty became a permanent Capitol Hill fixture. McNasty is an ex-wrestler, an entitled roustabout with a hair-trigger temper who’s intent on telling the rest of the world what to do in true neocon style. He is a bully like G. W. Bush.

Our current predicament at the dawn of the third millennium begs the question, “Can democracy be regarded as a waste of time, a wrong turn in humanity’s history?” My answer is yes, it probably should be regarded as such. Think of all the time, money, and effort spent on these elections which could have been avoided if there existed a system such as that of the ancient Venetian Republic, where governance was left up to a patrician class composed of duty-bound individuals who elected a figurehead king. 

In this manner, the average person would not be bothered and caught up in the spectacle of irrelevant elections which has resulted in putting mountebanks, opportunists, and jackasses into the White House and Congress and keeping them there for a long time.

The 2008 election confirms what has been suspected by thoughtful people since at least 1900. Politics is passé and a pack of lies.