8.30.04
Just 63 Days Left: Throwing Baths
By Mark Grueter
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As the Republican convention gets underway, I’m trying as hard as possible to remain alert and awake and to guard against the mindlessness that others are constantly encouraging me to participate in. The current climate of hyper-obfuscation such as it is, there could not be a worse time to even slightly relax one’s critical capabilities.
Two days ago, I received a group email from a graduate student at New School University (a place where I studied) imploring the rest of us to share her outrage over what she imagined was an “RNC event” about to take place at the New School. Because of the New School’s reputation as a progressive institution, this student felt as though the school had no business welcoming Republicans into its halls. A couple hours later, a “protest” had already been arranged (I facetiously volunteered to bring the placards), without anyone bothering to actually investigate what was really happening (Mark Twain once observed that if you give a man a reputation as an early riser, that man can sleep till noon. Same principle can be applied to the New School student body’s reputation for progressive thought).
Two minutes of research allowed me to discover that not only was the event in question not an RNC one, but that it was actually just a comedy show, put on by both Democrats and Republicans. I tried explaining this to my New School comrades but I was ignored, determined as they were to imagine themselves stalwarts of the left. Upon notification of the impending protest, the Vice President of the New School sent out a letter seconding my explanation while adding that the New School wasn’t even sponsoring the event - that the individuals hosting the event had simply rented out the space and that, by the way, the event was being put on by National Journal’s Hotline, which is a liberal outfit anyway.
It’s not that most people have no idea what the hell they’re talking about that bothers me; it’s that most people don’t even care or want to know what the hell they’re talking about that is cause for concern.
Which leads me to an even more important point. Alarm bells go off in the head whenever I encounter anyone who refuses to deal with details and instead relies on pious platitudes or emotional appeals within the context of a debate. On Iraq, Republicans and other supporters of the war, instead of answering specific criticisms regarding mounting casualties and chaos (more Americans deaths so far in 2004 than in all of 2003) or poor planning, or prisoner abuse, or the lack of WMDs, typically fall back on general, vague, unfulfilling assertions about how removing the despot Hussein was a good thing and that’s all that really matters. Likewise, instead of addressing specific accusations regarding Kerry’s statements and behavior around and concerning the Vietnam War, Democrats reply with thuggish and irrelevant questions like “how dare you question a decorated veterans service?” - as if Kerry weren’t running for President on the claim that he is a war hero.
The litany of phony sentiments (they don’t really rise to the level of argumentation) in defense of Kerry is too much to take sitting down. We’re told that a person’s position on the Vietnam War has no bearing on how they’ll conduct present day foreign policy. We’re told that it doesn’t matter if Kerry was in neutral Cambodia or not, even though he repeatedly said he was, which contradicts the official history and the version of events as described by everyone who was on the boat with Kerry. We’re told it doesn’t matter that Kerry accused military officers at all levels of collaborating in “day-to-day” atrocities and even war crimes (A contention, by the way, most veterans vehemently disagree with). What matters, they say, is his position on welfare reform. I humbly submit that if Kerry didn’t want to ‘dig up old wounds’ it might have occurred to him not to have boasted so loudly about his service and medals during that terrible war.
If Vietnam is a distraction from the “real” issues then that means we’re all just too stupid to consider several issues at once. Many issues are being discussed and all political questions are interrelated. Kerry himself could have controlled the debate if he had simply explained himself, in detail, from the very beginning regarding the questions over his service in Vietnam. Instead, he waxed pompous and insisted that his record was immune from criticism.
One of the more fascinating aspects of this year’s presidential race is that John Kerry opposed the war in Vietnam before he enlisted, which begs the obvious question: Why would anyone volunteer to kill people in a war they didn’t believe in? On the other hand, we have George W. Bush, who did the exact opposite. He believed in the war (or at least pretended to) but did everything he could to avoid fighting it. Why aren’t we discussing these matters? If this isn’t an intriguing issue to consider when evaluating a person’s character and/or their ability to lead, I don’t know what is.
From the floor of Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Hillary Clinton correctly stated that the GOP was about to put on a “bait and switch” convention. Schwarzenegger, McCain and Giuliani, the popular faces of the GOP, are the bait to lure moderates into the fold, while the real decisions are made by right-wingers behind the scenes. She also said that Bush did the same thing in 2000 by pretending to be a compassionate conservative. Mrs. Clinton, however, apparently does not have the wit to appreciate that her husband was a bait and switch artist himself: running as a liberal champion of the working class, Bill Clinton consistently signed legislation betraying the very causes he campaigned for.
Hillary went on to say that what the Bush administration has done is to “throw the baby out with the bath,” which I believe is a rather peculiar contortion on an expression that never made much sense to me in the first place. It was a clumsy way of criticizing Bush’s disastrous economic policies: 4 million have fallen into poverty, 5.2 million have lost health insurance (including me), and so on and so forth. It was just another example of how proverbs and tired talking points have replaced actual thought; and it perhaps explains why Democrats have had such a hard time outgeneralizing an incredibly weak administration. Politicians and their defenders scarcely answer questions anymore. And journalists, when confronted with a non-answer, are either too timid or too stupid to ask a follow-up question that forces a confrontation. John Kerry, afraid to appear on a real news show, appeared on the admittedly “fake” news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – as opposed to a real show like Hardball with Chris Matthews - because he knew the groveling Stewart would only ask tit questions.
Republicans and Democrats are obviously very divided, as is the country at large. I think this is a good thing and I hope to see many collisions of thought as the election continues. Unfortunately, this week in New York, we can only expect a few scattered, thoughtless, physical clashes between protestors and the police, which will obviously accomplish nothing. I doubt we’ll see any conflict, as far as ideas go. My only hope for the GOP convention is that divisiveness will somehow rear its head. That, unlike the Democratic convention, we will not be bombarded with vacuous calls for unity, optimism and positivism, nor we will be relegated to a series of bromides, platitudes and clichés concerning rising suns, better tomorrows, hopes for futures, throwing baths and every other sort of goddamned nonsense you can think of.
Click here for Grueter's previous column.
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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City. He can be contacted here.
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2004 Me Three