Lewis Carroll Could Have Been a Political Pundit Today - He Obviously Understood the Candidates)

Listening to the presidential campaign “debates” is like listening to a play written by Lewis Carroll:

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.
'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least, — at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing, you know.'
'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'Why, you might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see!"'

"Impenetrability! That's what I say!" "Would you tell me, please," said Alice "what that means?"
"Now you talk like a reasonable child," said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. "I meant by 'impenetrability' that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life."
"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

When Congressman Ron Paul points out by rhetorical question that we are being attacked because we’ve made so many enemies by attacking people, Rudy Giuliani answers with an irrelevant, immaterial, non sequitur salad of pseudo logic. “America’s Mayor” seems to say terrorists aren’t attacking the U.S., they’re attacking U.S. citizens. There been five hundred attacks all over the world, he says, then names a number of people – all of them U.S. Americans.

That’s a paraphrase, by the way, the actual circular argument made so many convolute cycles, one lost track. Pretty “impenetrable.”

“’I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’ ‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.”

Neither do I, Alice; oops I mean Rudy.

Then we have John McCain pontificating that we “have to get control of spending.” To listen, you have to first get control of your breath – it’s breath-taking. The near $800,000,000,000 (eight hundred billion) we’ve spent on Iraq – an expenditure McCain has supported and continues to support is “controlled spending?”

"’When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.”

That seems true of all Humpty Dumpties, doesn’t it?

McCain and the others, on both sides of the congressional aisle, moreover, don’t seem to relate spending in Iraq and elsewhere to any of the several issues discussed in these “debates.” To the question from a (supposed) moderator concerning why, if we can afford a trillion dollar war in Iraq, we can’t have health care insurance, we get the answer “inflation.” The war – costs climbing like a homesick angel toward a trillion dollars, isn’t being paid for by inflation? That doesn’t bear upon health care costs? The price of gasoline and everything that has to be hauled? Social Security solvency?

“’Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice.”

And Mitt Romney, looking the camera right in the eye, says “the free market” will work with the health care “situation.” FREE market? Against mega corporations who by owning the government body and soul pay no taxes, take everything the public manages to withhold by frugality right back in the form of subsidies. “ear-marks,” outright grants, and “allowances” like the infamous “oil depletion allowance (funny how that’s not been mentioned once in all the discussion of oil company profits, isn’t it?).

“If - and the thing is wildly possible - the charge of writing nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line, ‘Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.’”

Egad, maybe that’s it – they’re all on a SNARK hunt; and the Snark has turned out to be a Boojum.

And John McCain – who wants to get control of spending – intends to let twenty million illegal aliens stay here U.S. “They’re god’s children.” So god is footing the bill for everything they destroy, steal, siphon from that health care system all the candidates talk about without mentioning them, and send back to Mexico? John, and all the others, professes great concern for national security but is quite happy with leaving twenty million unidentified alien people, and allowing millions more to pour through the gates unannounced.

"’But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.’ ‘How do you know I'm mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn't have come here.’”

When, in the middle of it all, Ron Paul insists upon truth, he sounds positively Socratic. “Begin at the beginning,” the king said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”

McCain, though, though is having none of that where Iraq is concerned – especially with the spending. No, John says we may be there “not forever.”

Hmmmmm – where have I heard that before. Oh, yeah – Lewis Carroll again. “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

That was the Cheshire Cat, I think.

Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, bless their hearts, ask shouldn’t anyone who doesn’t purchase health insurance have to pay form his own pocket (that, presumably, is with what “anyone” has left after the government steals from him, the corporations steal from him, and the illegal aliens steal from him)?

That’s, of course, unless they’re illegal aliens from Mexico – they are “children of god.”

“’Tut, tut, child!’ said the Duchess, ‘everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.’

And it goes on and on, and on. Giuliani, McCain and all the rest of our would-be generals instruct the moderators, their fellows onstage, and the nation on the tactics of “the surge” (the same “surge” that Bill O’Reilly recently insisted “means something real in Iraq,” only to say in the next breath that “the surge of Mike Huckabee in the polls means nothing.”

“Un-dish-cover the fish, or discover the riddle… take a minute to think about it, then guess,” said the Red Queen. “Meanwhile, we’ll drink to your health – Queen Alice’s health, she screamed at the top of her voice . . .”

On the other side of the debates – the Democratic Party side – things were palpably worse. I can seldom stomach the drivel characteristic of democrats post John Kennedy, but in this instance, I force myself. It’s always a ton of laughs, a theater of the absurd as Carroll-ian as any ever written, but to caricature politics with women involved – especially the like of Hillary Clinton - would have strained even Lewis Carroll.

“I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then”

The Home of the Brave wrapped in chintz and drowning in romance novel, tabloid “interests” – that means emotion, emotion, emotion – the microcosm that was the male struggling to deal with an empowered female (Kipling’s servant become the master?) in premenstrual syndrome has become the macrocosm – a nation struggling with it. With Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party candidates found themselves where the individual male trying to deal with his wife, daughter, or girl friend has always been. When Hillary had played the female’s trump card, tears, everyone not in a coma knew that in the world down the rabbit hole wherein it’s all happening there was nothing anyone could do or say that couldn’t somehow be taken advantage of, and because none dared say “shut up,” the Red Queen’s competitors and all the MOCKINGBIRD media pundits were sent into a polemical furor.

“’The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh, my dear paws! Oh, my fur and whiskers?’”

And – oh, dear god! – someone has “played the race card!” That’s after the gender – all those men (now there’s a stretch), ganging up on poor little Hillary - card had long since been played, mind you. The two supposed front-runners (more sports, games, and Hollywood war movie analogies – funny how no one ever uses a reference to theater, especially comedy and clowns) are now in a furious verbal duel. The have such exceedingly different ideas, you know – just like the Republicans.

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle, for Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoilt his nice new rattle; just then flew down a monstrous crow as black as a tar-barrel, which frightened both the heroes so, they quite forgot their quarrel.”

It’ll work out, I predict. “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t it ain’t. That’s logic.”

Anyway, the “campaign” goes on; of course, anyone who’s not comatose or brain-dead otherwise and has been paying attention to history post World War Two knows that all of it will make not the slightest difference in what the nation does.

"’Now, here, you see,’ said the Red Queen, ‘it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Obviously – it absolutely astonishes me that like the tabloid magazines at the checkout counters everywhere, millions of people buy this patent nonsense - this Barnum and Bailey show is a fraud, a clown’s opera like the rest of television’s advertisements and “regular programming,” the modern-day version of Roman emperor Commodus’ “bread and circuses.”

The military industrial complex corporations who rule here will do as they damned please. In Iraq, we’ll run the Red Queen’s Race, seeking victory no one has defined (doesn’t a political outcome sought by military means mean killing the majority?), using tactics only a moron would pursue (attack first, then do the planning – doesn’t that sound like something from Alice in Wonderland? – then, once you’re in Indian territory, where you can find the enemy only when he finds you, and identify him only when he shoots you, you leave the circle of wagons?). The U.S. dollar will concomitantly continue its slide toward total collapse (talk about people buying the tabloids – how about a nation who thinks you can spend $800,000,000,000 on a war without affecting the economy?!).

“Write that down,’ the king said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.”

Actually, it seems the king’s jury must have been smarter than the public in the United States – they would have begun looking for alternatives to the “shillings and pence.” The spending – piles, mountains of newly printed money - on the military, munitions for Iraq and Afghanistan will continue (“but not forever”), even accelerate. Like Alice Down the Rabbit Hole, the same people who believe they live in a republic (need I define the word?) will find themselves powerless to stop the raid on their bank accounts, those of their children and their children’s children. When George W. Bush and his Bush League strategists have attacked Iran, the effect on the nation’s economy will be absolutely – I mean no way out - devastating.

As individual households’ budgets go to hell, welfare and entitlement programs will grow apace, accelerating the national metastasis. The corporations of course, will move on to greener pastures or import more quasi-slave labor from Mexico and South America.

First among the welfare programs – in fact, it’s already begun – will be that having to do with the housing sector. The “feds” efforts to stave off – if you think we’re not in one, you’re among the wealthy (or maybe you’re Amish) - the recession will blow the already Brobdingnagian (oops – that’s Jonathan Swift) debt balloon even bigger (which means the bang! When it pops will be even louder). The easy credit form of welfare that started it all will lead, in other words (and maddeningly) to even more easy credit.

“Insanity,” Albert Einstein wrote, is continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results.” Lewis Carroll put it another way:

"’In my youth,’ father William replied to his son, ‘I feared it might injure the brain; but, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, why, I do it again and again."

How anyone can believe we will solve the crisis in the housing market by doing what caused it only people like these morons campaigning for president could explain. More Alice in Wonderland:

“’Be what you would seem to be,’ said the Duchess, ‘-- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

“’I think I should understand that better,’ Alice said, ‘if I had it written down; but I can't quite follow it as you say it.”

Neither can we, Alice – but that’s life down our own, particular rabbit hole.

While the “stunned and stolid, brother to the ox” public goes on, stupidly indulging the political plenipotentiary Cheshire Cats - “This time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of its tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone” - their theater, the government will require more money than ever, and taxes – those taxes each and every one of the “cats” says they’re against – will increase.

Oh, they’ll sneak a lot of it in – inflation itself is a tax, you know – but in order to hoodwink (they don’t – nobody is that stupid) foreign investors in the dollar like China, they’ll pull out the political prestidigitation – taxes on beer, liquor, cigarettes, and entertainment, consumer goods, airline tickets, and the like. License fees will increase dramatically. They will be more of that “soak the rich” bullshit (maybe the slickest doubletalk deceit stunt of them all, come to think of it – a way to “launder” taxes through the corporations to the wage-earner – a lot like a minimum wage law intended to make illegal aliens competitive with the “representatives'” constituents). Kiss all that tax reform being ballyhooed by the candidates good-bye, in other words.

“’Take some more,’ the March Hare said to Alice very earnestly. ‘I’ve had nothing yet,’ Alice replied in an offended tone. ‘so I can’t take more.’ ‘You mean you can’t take less,’ said the Hatter, ‘it’s very easy to take more than nothing!’”