Hipublicans

"Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie says he's booked several musical acts to take center stage at Madison Square Garden -- country to classical, blues to punk (hey, it's not your father's party anymore). "

-Washington Times.
(emphasis added)

Anti-modernists of all stripes have a clever tendency to wear modern clothing. Osama bin Laden used satellite phones. Pat Robertson appears daily on the 700 club. Cultural reactionaries of all sorts use the internet. Some even appropriate the cultural clothing of their adversaries.
After all, what is Christian rock? Sure, there are actual, real rock musicians who integrate religious content in their music. U2 is just a prominent example. But is U2 a Christian rock band? No. Christian rock is like any artform perverted to serve an agenda that isn't appropriate to the form. Christian rock primarily represents the agenda of Evangelical Christianity, but this is an agenda very much at odds with what rock and roll is at its roots. Although rock had some of its roots on Gospel music, it is formally and culturally associated with rebellion, sex (does one need to mention that "rock and roll" was a term originally used for coitus?), and drug use, all of which stand in opposition to the tenets and strictures of evangelical protestantism.
The appeal of Christian rock is that it attempts to lend modernity and cultural breadth to a subculture sorely in need of same. One of the primary facets of evangelical and other rigid forms of American protestantism is an iconoclasm in the classic sense and a desire to avoid the worldly. Christian rock is part of an attempt to make forms of christianity more seductive to a populace otherwise heavily exposed to worldliness by making these forms more closely resemble that of the outside world. Home schooling as an industry is another attempt- an organized and mainstreamed retreat from the wickedness of modern society.
Likewise, selecting punk music for the Republican National Convention is expression of a similar impulse. Like so many aspects of the conservative movement (and there can be no doubt, notwithstanding the prominent placement of cultural moderates like Schwartzenegger and Giuliani {though anyone so delighted to play Jesse Helms as cultural commissar is suspect on this account} at the Convention, the Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of said movement), this is an attempt to disguise its pale homogeneity in a rainbow costume. Republicans filled the stage at the 2000 convention with the faces of blacks, asians and hispanics for the very same purposes.
Punk rock is a nebulous artform, but it is hardly ideally suited for the Republican party. Punk rock and punk culture has long been associate with politics, but its politics tend toward the leftist, even the radical leftist. Exceptions may be made for skinheads. Punk is a subculture or family of subcultures that enshrines nonconformism (although this sometimess results in a physical conformity- you can often spot a punk a mile away) and tends to reject conventional boundaries (Straight-Edge culture imposes boundaries, but these are hardly conventional). This hardly makes it an ideal soundtrack for the party of trickle-down economics and the Federal Marriage amendment. Punk is only inserted into the Republican Convention in order to make it seem "cool." I suppose the party of Brent Bozell, Dennis Hastert, and William F. Buckley needs all the help it can get in this regard.
Now, in the beginning of this entry I linked the Republican Party with anti-modernism. This is clearly not entirely accurate. There are large swaths of the Republican Party that can in no way be described as anti-modern. Neoconservatives may often be mad and carry bizarre assumptions about the world, but they are not by definition anti-modern. For many neoconservatives and some of their movement conservative compatriots, anti-modern sentiments seem forced, the result more of message-discipline than personal conviction. Ann Coulter, for example, has no problem self-justifying her own unwed promiscuity, but she communicates all the cultural-reactionary pieties when necessary. Another faction within conservatism that lacks an anti-modern agenda (at least in intent) is the economic libertarian wing. Grover Norquist's aims, though, if actualized, might result in the demolition of the modernist program, are far from the backward-looking program of Pat Robertson et. al. Whether the Republican Party can be seen, in aggregate, as anti-modern or not, they have as one of their best tools the cynical appropriation of cultural particles that, in their original state, would doubtless work against them.
They can only win if the forces of cultural modernism lose. It is unwise to look at the problem of creeping cultural backwardness in a manner that ignores modern society's greatest assets and instead unthinkingly employs the strategies of the last war. This begins by identifying and redefining one's threats not as they have become so successful as defining themselves, but as the culturally sterile, fear-driven, power-hungry, no-fun, boring louts they are. If we do this, it hardly matters if they bring the pro-Bush version of the Dead Kennedys on stage.

Note of course that one of the cleverer ways in which the right has diminished liberals and those left of center in general is characterizing us as no-fun, Politically Correct man-hating lesbians and tree-hugging scolds. Americans are a self-contradictory lot. We may not like our 11 year old kids dressing like Britney Spears or smoking weed, but we have a pretty strong libertinish don't-tell-me-what-to-do impulse that tends to function pretty well when we aren't being manipulated into fearing for our lives. Find a way to convince America that the Republicans want to spoil its good time, and you're already halfway there.

Luke, I am your father.

From this Reuters piece we get this delicious quote from the prez:

Bush said those who oppose the system "really don't understand the threats of the 21st century. They're living in the past."

HAHAHAHAHA. George W. Skywalker wants to build Star Wars and his opponents are living in the past? To anyone with a funtioning brain, it should be clear that if our enemies attack us with a nuclear weapon, it will be in a suitcase. Or it will be a dirty bomb. If we are attacked by a chemical weapon, it will be in the ventilation of an office building. It will not be in a ballistic missile warhead, almost certainly. And even if it were, tests on anti-missile systems has yielded disappointing results at best, even when rigged to make it easier.
Missile defense systems are a defense department boondoggle, a waste of billions of dollars better spent on programs that actually serve to protect America from harm, and that serve our larger interests. There are only a few explanations why Bush would cling on to a Cold War relic like Star Wars, and none of them reflect well on the man.
It may be that he thinks it's to his benefit politically to give yet more pork to defense, and defense contractors. Or it could be that he actually believes both that the systems will work and are necessary for our collective safety. Or he may believe that a missile defense systems will intimidate our enemies, in particular rogue states like Iran and North Korea. Which would mean he's still wedded to state-centric foreign policy thinking and the bizarre taste for brinksmanship that characterizes the neoconservatives- he's married to a fanatical and already discredited ideology. Perhaps he thinks the idea of giant missiles shot into other missiles at high speeds is just the thing to excite the death-worshippers who make up his base. But there's always a possibility that he's just a slave to his own muddleheaded sense of consistency and determination.
Any way, we have a president whose defense and foreign policies seem contingent on a world that no longer exists, and perhaps never existed. The dangers to this country, despite what our president may think, are primarily from non-state and extra-state actors. And what serious dangers remain from state actors have not been resolved by his ham-handed and insensitive approach. Iran and NK have blossomed as nuclear dangers, and Pakistan, the country we have entrusted to deal with South Asian Al Qaeda, may have deliberately sabotaged our opportunity to tear their organization wide open. We have turned a largely isolated Arab tyranny into a factory for Arab radicalism, and lost more than 900 soldiers in the bargain.
What we need is a foreign policy that actually knows what century it is, not just one that claims to. We need a president and a vice president who understand that diplomacy is not a dirty word, that you catch more flies with honey than H-Bombs, that going around and calling everyone who disagrees with you a sissy makes you look like a dick.

Disgusting

Via Digby, we have this GQ article about Abu Ghraib, and the man who blew the whistle on it.

Joe Darby, the only man in the whole sordid affair whose actions do America proud, will have to spend the rest of his life like a mob witness. What is even more disturbing is that he is being protected not from the military, but from every high testosterone dipshit in Appalachia.

Something is wrong with the spirit of America, and it's not going to go away because more people watch Benny Hinn on television. The sort of person who can hate a man for standing witness to a moral sewer like Abu Ghraib and refusing to keep his mouth shut is the sort of man who can stand witness to the crimes of fascism and remain silent.

George W. Bush's case for his own presidency in 2000 was that he would restore honor and dignity to the White House. Now, we all know that really means "no more blow jobs." There are a number of problems with this. The first is the conflation of private and public morality. Many great men are not good men, and many great men are greatly flawed. Thomas Jefferson held slaves, and had children with one of them. It is hard to imagine the relationship was exactly consensual. FDR slept around. JFK slept around. Martin Luther King Jr. slept around. This may diminish all of them in some way, but it does not mean they weren't great men, or great leaders. This foolish conflation is a part of the moral infantilizing of our culture. It is accomplished in part by the entertainment business, for sure, but it is also accomplished by organized religion, political movements, and the unhealthy logic embedded in parts of our capitalist economic order. The solution is obviously not to ban or destroy each of these, for that is absurd and would be equally unhealthy. I don't know what the solution is, but part of it is standing up to evil the way Joe Darby did.

The sickness that makes protofascist goons want to murder a moral hero is the sickness that allowed the war in Iraq to be taken on in the way it was taken on. Whether you agree that the Bush administration tried to convince America that Saddam was involved in September 11th, it is clear that his appeals, and perhaps the war itself, tapped into a dark desire among Americans for revenge, revenge for September 11th. There are a million men in this country whose frustrations with life are such that, given the right permission, they would beat a man to death with their own hands. Perhaps more than a million. Which is not to say they are criminals, or psychopaths exactly. Perhaps I'm going a little over the top. The civilians who had the most enthusiasm for the war are not necessarily sick people, but they are the next tier down in terms of bloodthirst.

Most of these men didn't know anybody in the towers, or on the airplanes, or in the Pentagon. For many of these men, or the type of man I'm talking about (and I imagine they are mostly men) September 11th and the Iraq war are an obsession and an abstraction. For these men, and those like them, the war with Iraq didn't have anything to do with Saddam, the flesh-and-blood bastard; it was about Saddam the symbol of all that is evil. Bush sent Americans to war not just by appealing to our fears (using the terrifying image of a mushroom cloud to achieve a political end) but by appealing to our hate, our brutal side. This man who claims to represent a culture of life is the same man whose governorship saw more human beings executed than any other, who presided over a bloody and unnecessary war in Iraq, the man under whose leadership our men committed atrocities in Abu Ghraib.

The conventional wisdom, and I've even seen it echoed today by Matthew Yglesias, is that Conservatives value Character and Liberals value Cleverness. You know, I value both, and I'm a proud liberal. But besides that, this is just more branding, more marketing. The fact is that the people who call themselves conservatives might value character individually, but what the conventional wisdom is saying is that they are uniquely susceptible to a specific type of appeal. They like their foreign policy macho, their morality Manichean, their economic policy social darwinist, and their theology literalist. Our discourse, on all sides, is too degraded and spectacular for character to be real. Bush, for them as for most of us, is not a person, but a Personality. What matters is that a mantra and a storyline exist to wipe away all doubt and complexity. Not all conservatives worship at the altar of Chauncy W. Gardner, but enough do that this election will be closer than it ought to be.

Again, I don't know what the solution to the sickness in this country is, but I think replacing Bush is part of it. Not because I think John Kerry is some kind of magic bullet. He's not. He's a politician, albeit a largely decent and competent one. I trust Kerry to govern as a president, not as a king. I trust him to be accountable to the American people. I trust him to work hard to work hard to solve the real problems facing our government- terrorism, a troubled energy policy, a healthcare system that doesn't work, an economy that favors the powerful to the exclusion of everyone else.

I don't know what the solution is, but I know it involves November 2nd.

Pssst.

Bush won the debates in 2000. Pass it on.

Daddy

Here's an AP Wire story about Bush's visit to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Charley:

President Bush arrived two days after Charley hit and promised rapid disaster relief. His father had been criticized for responding too slowly following Andrew despite his quick visit to Miami-Dade County.
"Yeah, if I didn't come, they would've said we should have been here more rapidly," Bush told reporters during his tour.

It's good to know the president is so sincere and his motivations so decent.
Not only does this quote largely confirm that the trip to Florida was influenced by politics, it again reveals the kind of bizarre family dynamics that animate Bush. We have Bush practically whining that people might impute politics from his actions. But we also have him responding to the type of criticism that prevented his father's reelection. There are any number of things that sank GHW Bush's attempt at another term, but the perception that he was out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans was probably the most important. The story that he didn't recognize, and was awed by, a supermarket scanner may have been a myth, but it fit. Bush was widely regarded as being unconcerned and inattentive to the domestic front in America. The recession of the early 90s was painful, and Bush was commonly seen as doing nothing about it.
The current President may not be his father, but he clearly has issues with how his father was perceived, and an intense desire not to make the mistakes his father made.
The media culture in this country is a currupt and cruel thing and worth rejecting, even when the object of its petty wrath is an ineffectual and uninspiring president. It creates stories for all of its players, and those stories are sometimes immune to facts. It likes things simple. Scott Peterson is a Killer who dies his hair, Michael Jackson is a wierdo, Al Gore is a serial exaggerator, Bush is "the candidate you'd want to have a beer with," even though he's actually a tee-totaler. The great media megaphone decided that Bush's father was a Wimp, Out of Touch, and someone who Breaks His Promises. Some of it was true, but a lot of it was bogus- the kind of Reader's Digest view of the world that issues forth from the pens of Maureen Dowd or David Broder.
So Bush the Younger apparently established his presidency as a mirror of his father's. The scion of a political dynasty, the fruit of Greenwich Connecticut, would paint his overeducated self as some dumb, plain-spoken hick. No one who with a ranch that manly, no one who pronounces the word nucular, could be out of touch. Instead of leaving it a smoking chaos like his father, George W would invade Iraq and turn it into a democracy. He would confirm he was no wimp by appearing in a photo op on an aircraft carrier, wearing a codpiece and a flight suit. Mission Accomlished! Instead of being a chilly secular northeasterner like his dad, he would pander to the religious right like no other president.
So you see moments like the one quoted above where the president's response to Hurricane Charlie has as much to do with avoiding his father's failure as it does the lives and livelihoods broken in the wake of this natural disaster. Sad, really.

On a lighter note, despite Bush's animating quest to outdo his old man, it is becoming clear that W has a diminishing chance of escaping his father's fate.