Fuckabee - from the Fifth Avenue Gazette

Who’s Afraid of November Already?

America – While the Democrats in this country have come a long way, baby, committing to supporting either a woman or a black man to be the most powerful person on the planet, what are we to make of that other ravenous monster, the GOP? Does the Republican Party represent fiscally conservative, small government-leaning, responsible, free-market-favoring modern thinkers or is it hostage to a reactionary, backward-looking, exclusive blend of theocrats and plutocrats?

One thing is for sure, anyone who tells you, “we are not a collection of red states and blue states, we are the United States,” (you’ve overused that line, Barack) is either mouthing a sound bite or sadly deluded. Here in this country there is an us and a them, and which one is which to you depends very much upon whether or not you consider Mike Huckabee the sort of man whose beliefs should represent those of the world’s only remaining true super power. I suppose it also depends upon whether or not you could credibly support a man like Mitt Romney, who left his position as a corporate rapist with a billion-dollar personal fortune to drive a state into near bankruptcy as its governor while subscribing to a faith that testifies to talking salamanders, a tribe of white Indians and Jesus in Nebraska.

Now lots of Republicans evidently support a 71-year-old Vietnam veteran who, though fiscally conservative and socially regressive, has nevertheless worked with both sides in Washington for a long time to at least attempt to bring about some sort of corrective progress vis-à-vis the old guard. Kudos to those Republicans. I, that is “we,” good readers, differ with John McCain, but I don’t consider him radically different from us. In fact, perhaps he’s enough like us to be one of us, only angrier and with ill-fitting suits. I suppose he’s also a bit more repetitive, my friends.

Frighteningly, however, as many Republicans as there are supporting McCain at this moment, just as many nominal Republicans appear torn between one of two versions of radical extremism that point backward to a time when ketchup was a vegetable and George W. Bush was strung out and more likeable. I won’t mince words with you. Mitt Romney, my friends, is a nutless scrotum. He’s an empty, ugly, ever shifting, convoluted shell with no content. I’ll also tell you this; Mike Huckabee is something else entirely.

I can actually comprehend, given the infotainment media culture that drives our cash-fueled, failed experiment in democracy, how it is that Romney, despite cockamamie beliefs and a demonstrable record of pandering to any vote at any cost, could have some success in a protracted series of Republican primaries and caucuses. For one thing, he’s got nice hair. For another thing, he has spent the gross domestic product of Costa Rica to hypnotize gullible voters through sensory overload. Still, government is not a business, or at least it shouldn’t be. So Romney voters, take a cold shower and come to your senses.

What strains credulity, even my own, is that a significant percentage of American voters eligible and willing to participate in the electoral process, will cast a vote in support of a man who does not believe in evolution, Eskimos, a woman’s right to drive or rodents of unusual size. Mike Huckabee is a man of the 19^th Century. A good man, no doubt – a kind man, a gentle man, a well spoken man who would make a good neighbor. I have no axe to grind with him.

Neither have I really any axe to grind with people who identify with him. I know those people. I came from those people. It’s because I came from those people that I remember what Nietzsche wrote: When they were seen dancing they were thought insane by those who could not hear the music. I try not to dance in the presence of my people. I also don’t discuss with my people such inflammatory topics as, oh, natural history, cross-cultural studies, race relations, feminist theory, archaeology, my love of shaved pussy, rigorous scholarship in any discipline or the fundamental tenets of basic Western fucking science!

Putting it into perspective, Huckabee did well yesterday but he did well only in a primary and only in a three-way race. In other words, he garnered the support of about one-third of one-half of voters. He represents, thus, about one-sixth of “us.” The quotes are instructive. There is no such thing as “us.” There is the “us” who believe it is inconsistent to put retarded defendants to death while defending the rights of a cluster of cells, and there is the “us” who believe our constitution gives us the right to own hand cannons and the right to force a rape victim to bear a child. There is the “us” who believe our education system is threatened by under-funding and lax educational standards and there is the “us” who believe it is threatened by the absence of prayer and the heretical teachings of Galileo.

“But Tony,” you’ll say, “it’s only one-sixth.” You’re right. I could find one-sixth of Americans who get off on extreme bondage and discipline, the sick bastards. I could find one-sixth who think tofu is food, maybe. I could even probably find one-sixth who consider NASCAR a satisfactory substitute for football and those are some blasphemous sumbitches indeed! Still, these idiosyncratic differences aside, those one-sixths are still American just like us only with a profound mental deviance.

Not so in the case of evangelical Republican voters. Given who voted for Mike Huckabee, one-sixth of “us” is a significant number and it is also an important number to bear in mind going forward. To those of us who do not believe the world is seven thousand years old and our ancestors flew bareback on pterodactyls, what happens between now and the convention in the three-man circle jerk in the center of which John McCain now sits poised to swat blurts of departing opponents’ jizm is of little consequence. We should hope those three claw each other to ribbons. That would be best for “us.”

But what happens in November, well that matters a ton. We all know that. I don’t have to write it but I did so to make myself feel good. And so the question for “us” is which of “them” are we more eager to face and which of them is less likely to swiftboat either a black man or a rich broad right smack in the ass? Who should we want to run against? It’s a choice between a former P.O.W. who’s tight with purse strings and doesn’t like abortion but does think wetbacks are human beings, on the one hand, and one of two lunatics who appeal to voters’ beliefs that our children would be better off in the next four years if our government focused on deregulation, downsizing and giving them the right to pray openly in school for the funds for a fucking blackboard, on the other.

Remember, the people who voted for Mike Huckabee last night are the same people who brought you a 5-4 Supreme Court coup d’etat in 2000 while we sat back and lamented.

So I’m not telling you John McCain is your friend, although he’ll call you his friend thrice in a sentence. Truth is, he’s never coming to your house for coffee. He says he’s your friend. So did my ex. But just like her he won’t call, he won’t write, he’ll make you suffer for years and he doesn’t mean anything he tells you. But at least he has not so far indicated his intention to burn witches, burn books, suspend the teaching of quantum mechanics, suspend reason, hoard lentil soup, abstain from caffeine or pray to an angel named Moroni.

I haven’t a closer here. I don’t know how to wrap-up an incoherent tirade about an incoherent process that will anoint a man through some arcane allocation/apportionment/allotment matrix and so well, that’s that. Vote how you want. Just beware: they know who they are. I just hope we do too, cuz brothers and sisters, we aren’t them.