Culture of Deception

“My husband and I’ve thought about this next election. We realized that McCain is more than seventy years old. It’s his last chance. The other candidates are younger and have many years ahead of them. So, we’ve decided to vote for McCain.”

While driving to work, I heard a caller say this on Air Talk, the Larry Mantle radio talk show, KPCC.

Think about it. One of the best reasons to vote for McSame, right?

If this represents the way a large part of Americans reason or just gut check the issues, then the very foundation of our democracy shakes on sandy grounds. Does this murky thinking reflect the quality of our public educational system?

A crisp sunny day awakes us with a blue sky here in Southern California. The miracle of humanity begins to scurry, we hop into our cars and off to work. Busy people, we want to make the money that buys the things that we enjoy with our families. The paycheck routine seldom allows time to contemplate the big picture, or any picture at all for that matter.

The sunshine drives shards of brightness through the cracks in the curtains and roof top windows. We awake to the light, though, the more we ignore the darkness, the more we allow it to thrive. Soon darkness can take over the sky and the light fades such that we seldom ever awaken, if not only in our dreams.

The Matrix

We enter into a fabricated world, a virtual reality, like that depicted in the movie The Matrix. It’s a place we inhabit but our eyes are covered, the brain perceives images and an entire life in a society, a culture, a world, but it’s all merely a video feed plugged into the nerves at the base of our skull. We become so incapable of discerning what is real that we lose all sense of it. Our critical thinking dwindles. We drift into an existence without awareness.

The Secret Service code named Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, as the Matrix, referring to the movie by the same title. McClellan acted as the main video feed into the mainstream news channels, the one who fed the lies at the president’s requests. Bush often referred to his ol’ pal Karl Rove as “The Architect,” referring to the character in the Matrix movie as the master mind that created the enchanting delusions which people believed as reality. Karl Rove worded most of the spin that McClellan presented to the media.

Rove, the Architect, and McClellan, the Matrix…they fabricated a whole world around Bush, albeit one of intentional deceit. From Bush all the way through his entire administration, a constant marketing campaign of propaganda fed deception to the public about life and death issues, including healthcare, war, and the economy. Matrix, Architect…code words. People in organized crime like the Mafia use them to cover illegal activity.

Dispelling the Deception with a Vengeance

Once a fervent spokesman among Bush idolaters, Scott McClellan now peddles his book entitled, “What Happened.” It claims to illuminate how Bush’s public image as beer drinking, ranch hand was mere chimera. By now though, to most of us, it’s redundant to talk how the real Bush lives in his own loser’s bubble.

McClellan’s testimony as an eye witness offers one more of the volumes and volumes of solid evidence in the public courtroom. Will the justice system function as it should? Will its wheels turn and begin impeachment proceedings? The eye witness testimonies of the Bush Administration’s criminal conduct now bust the seams of the bookstores and libraries. Does the US justice system do anything?

Without the light, the colors of flowers would pale and turn their smell sour. The leaves of grass would rot. Without the light of day, truth itself becomes unrecognizable, if not entirely lost.

Can The Working Class Get Tough?

Democracy depends on the working class. We are the majority vote. Like the leaves of grass, we have to keep our feet planted on the ground and respect our
common sense, as Thomas Paine once called it. If we fail in the basics of life, we lose our footing, nothing else supports us.

Growing up on a small, remote Oregon farm, my mother could size up a sleazy politician by mere glance. Economics did not allow her to finish high school, yet, she was smart enough to tell you if the town’s Evangelical or Southern Baptist preacher was nothing but a flimflam. Her generation lived by a hard-bitten skepticism that pierced through the darkness of deception and into the light of truth.

What happened? What generation picked up the torch after that generation of America’s working class, the ones who fought in World War II and knew how disastrous war meant for everyone involved?

Was it too much TV for the baby boomers? Did the baby boomers overdose on the Pollyanna Disney characters? Hopefully the Bush years have taught the “baby boomers” and the “gen-Xers” about the consequences of political indifference. Too bad we Americans have to always learn by experience and mistakes rather than by reading a history book. The tide has turned though.

Even legions of hardcore Bush devotees have turned their backs on the con artist. Among the growing list of fall guys and disgruntled sycophants, we find high level officials, including Colin Powell, Paul O’Neil, George Tenet, Douglas Feith and so on and so on.

Like some of these authors, McClellan became a fall guy. From Bush’s Texas days, he was in it for the money and the glory. As may be the case for many baby boomers, money took a priority over any civic duty to a higher good. Only after the chips fell against him, did he rediscover his civil duty to unveil the lie. Although years late in divulging Bush’s already well documented intentional sham, McClellan has made a noble gesture by adding to the mountainous public testimony.

Even the top Israeli political officials and U.S. defense contractors, the strongest of Bush supporters, the most fervent instigators of the war and investors in Bush, have turned their backs on the now unpopular mess. When the war was popular, many prominent people were behind it. Defense contractors are still enjoying the huge profits from Bush’s propaganda.

Today, though, only those in blind darkness would support this total disaster of duplicity.

And that’s exactly where McCain and his followers are right now.

Citizen McCain Embraces Bush’s Chimera

The son of a celebrated four-star admiral, John Sidney McCain III started his Navy career as a pilot. After being shot down during a bombing mission and taken prisoner, he returned home. Thanks to a famous father, McCain enjoys many gratuities. Thanks to his father’s status, US News & World Report printed a 13 page spread, describing his ordeal as a POW.

Shortly thereafter he attained captain’s rank. His POW ordeal, more than anything else, gave him the credibility to launch his political career. He then took over his father’s old job as liaison to Congress, enabling him to hob-knob with many elected officials.

“I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else,” said Carol, McCain’s first wife, mother of his first three of seven children, when asked about the grounds for their divorce.

So, when Hagee, whose initial claim to fame derived from his right-wing family values, endorsed McCain recently, it was just another spin on reality for the sake of votes among the dreadfully gullible fundamentalist holy rollers. Any association with the wacky Hagee buys votes for McCain from the flocks of sheep that follow the zany preacher.

Shortly after his divorce, a travesty of Hagee’s view of family values, McCain found new love with a daughter of wealth, Cindy Hensley. His marriage with Cindy afforded him more gratuities, including the connections and cash needed to catapult him to a Senator seat for Arizona.

When McCain and Cindy needed to move quickly from Phoenix to Tucson, her cash made the move easy to buy a new house. McCain had to establish residence in Tucson to take the Senator slot from retiring John Rhodes. His rivals called him a carpetbagger and opportunist.

Rebutting his critics, McCain told a little story about how much he had to move around his whole life as a Navy serviceman and cited Hanoi as the city where he’d lived the longest in any one place. The symbolic reference to Hanoi recalled his claim to heroism. McCain, like the Architect, had learned how to spin a political narrative more powerful than the truth.

As a legislator, he’s not particularly effective. The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act took torturous paths to enact. And despite this law he helped to establish, McCain’s campaign has taken huge amounts of contributions from lobbyists who expect payback in political favors.

Though again, as part of his image building, McCain participated in campaign finance reform mainly to restore his reputation after the Keating Five incident in which he, among four other senators, took huge campaign contributions.

His media acumen has proven his greatest, perhaps his only, survival skill. He has been smooth in spinning a response to suit his political needs for the moment. In 2006, Chris Matthews (MSNBC) said, “The press loves McCain. We’re his base.”

Although as McCain advances in age, his media instincts falter. He’s made many gaffs during his current campaign. Unbeknownst to him, someone cam corded him while singing about bombing Iran in some morbid sense of humor, undignified for a senator, much less a presidential candidate.

Like Bush, McCain stitched his political career in mythologies. Just as Karl Rove architected an artificial reality for G. W. Bush, he now constructs that sham magic for McCain’s campaign.

In 2004, former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke published Against All Enemies a blistering testimony of his career in the White House under President Bush. On CNN Clarke said, “they’re saying some of the exact same things about McClellan they said about me.” Bush’s propaganda machine routinely smears any dissent or criticism.

Now that Bush is raising campaign funds for McCain, the new presidential candidate mimics Bush’s policies, making it possible for Bush to serve a third term at least vicariously.

I knew an American working class that made decisions from a tough, bitter, and skeptical gut. A carpenter could see the snake oil salesman in an Evangelical Preacher like Hagee. A plumber could smell the slimy stench of a rich kid charlatan like G.W. Bush from great distances. Now it’s time that all America’s working class wakes up and finds the light. We are the majority vote.