© 2012, UrbisMedia
The political reality check that the Republican Party received two days ago was like a Hurricane Sandy storm surge that wiped out a half-dozen of Mitt Romney’s mansions and caused one of the greatest political power outages in American history. For many years, certainly since the presidency of George W. Bush, but extending well back to the misty hagiography of St. Ronnie, many of us in the “secular/socialist/uber-government regulation/tax-and-spend, etc.” (oh, did I leave out “anti-American/Muslim-appeasing”?) segment of the population have been wondering just how long the incipient and insidious cognitive dissonance and perverted ideology of one half of the American two-party system would be able to sustain itself against a shifting climate of reality. How long would the bubble of self reinforcing myths, lies, delusions and denials go on until the inevitable indifferent cruelty of math, science and facts would overtake it? The answer, or at least movement closer to it, might have come with the 332 electoral votes that gave Barack Obama four more years and proves that at least a slim majority of the American electorate is capable of behaving with rational self-interest.
The Republican Party in America now hovers somewhere between falling into the mindset of a 1930s Munich beer hall putch, and becoming a national snicker. That equation remains to be fully explicated in the coming months and years, but for the moment the Republicans have invited nearly every metaphor for chaos, dissolution, and schismatic recriminations, that pundits and commentators (I guess that includes me) given to analysis and gloat have been able to summon. Republicans are like an ant hill that has been pissed on and by your neighbors dog, frenzied sharks feeding on their own entrails, and a new religious sect in which some addled profit has suddenly found an alternate set of “golden tablets” that have inscribed upon them that the old “golden tablets” are total bullshit. One could go on for hours like this, but it would only belabor the point that the American Republican party is in full-blown cognitive dissonance.
For thirty years the Republican Party has lived in an increasingly expanding carbuncle of alternate reality that may have burst open on them on Tuesday night, suppurating its noxious pus through the newsrooms at Fox, right-wing radio, the pulpits of evangelistic Christianity, and pooling around the feet of the Kochs, Adelsons and Roves. (Yikes, I hope you weren’t eating while you read that.) It was easier dealing with the Republicans when their leader claimed “I am not a crook” than when St. Ronnie announced that he could return America to some version of a Frank Capra movie. It’s easier to prove a lie is a lie than a myth is not a possibility; but “Republican America” grew over the years in a self-deluding cocktail of dream and denial into a construct that might have been created by the brain of George Bush and a litre of vodka.
Nevertheless, as Republicans scurry around like foundering vessels in a maelstrom between the Scylla of science and the Charybdis of math (Oooh! I really like that metaphor) looking for answers (and people to blame), conspiracy, the mother’s milk of Fox News ratings, is always ready to hand. The “liberal media” comes in for its usual share. But far more interesting is an “explanation” for the shellacking that Mitt Romney and many other Republicans took in this election that it all would not have come to pass were it not for that meteorological October Surprise of Hurricane Sandy, which not only blew away homes and power, but blew New Jersey’s corpulent governor, Chris Krispy Kreme, the Republican national jelly doughnut, into the slender arms of President Barack Obama. No kidding. I have actually seen Fox news pundits and attending blonde bimbo jokes incarnate offering this hypothesis like a herd of bulls with diarrhea. This of course allowed them to substantiate their claims that the polls were being manipulated and that their prophesied Romney “landslide” would have otherwise ensued; but it is more interesting to approach the hurricane Sandy hypothesis from the point of view of what happens when people become so inured to inventing masturbatory alternate realities and pushing all the rest into some subconscious holding tank for cognitive dissonance.
To take this further we need to consider the cognitive corner that Republicans have painted themselves into. In part, they might have more empirical support for a conspiracy hypothesis that goes all the way back to the Kennedy-Johnson years when Jack Kennedy sent federal marshals and troops to crack the walls of Jim Crow and prejudice in the early days of the civil rights movement, and Johnson bravely promulgated the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act that delivered the southern states (soon after to be coalesced into the insidious “Southern strategy” employed by Republican presidential candidates from Nixon forward) to the Republican Party, and which eventually formed the basis of the porcine Mr. Rove’s pronouncement of a “permanent Republican” political hegemony in America (well permanent up to 2008 at least).
While at first this might seem to have been counterproductive for the Democrats it is turned out not to be counterintuitive. This is because it delivered to the base of the Republican Party not only the residual white racist component that is still harboring its hoods and rebel flags, but also conjoined the “South shall rise again” myth with the “America is a Christian nation” myth. While these are not inconsiderable political bases, they have nowhere to go and they distorted the so-called “conservatism” of the party. Republicans devolved to where they have no way of dealing with political exigencies and realities that are incompatible with their internal mythologies; they have turned out to be fingers in a dike against a demographic hurricanesurge that they choose to replace with their “blame hurricane Sandy and Chris Krispy Kreme” explanation
.
Where this really gets interesting for me is how all of this secular stuff plays out with that other element—the religious element— of the Republican reality bubble. Let’s play with their toys for the moment. Let me grab a few tabs of Oxycontin, watch a few Mel Gibson movies, and sit myself down in that chair that Clint Eastwood likes to talk to. After flipping through a few relevant pages of the Book of Mormon and Atlas Shrugged, I can get myself ready to enter the Republican bubble of cognitive dissonance. Where it probably sounds like this . . .
So you’re saying that Hurricane Sandy—which we know as right-thinking Republicans could not possibly be the result of global warming caused by us—was, ahem, caused by, ahem, God? An all-knowing God, who must’ve known what he was doing? An all-knowing God who was helping out with his great flood of the eastern seaboard the black guy!? How can that be? We are the Christians; we are the ones who’ve taken his son who died on the cross to be our Lord and Savior. How could God turn on us and bring meteorological favor to that (we just know he is) Muslim? Wait! Could that mean that Barack Obama is part of God’s plan? Holy shit! That would mean that our religious narrative doesn’t square with our ideological predispositions!Arrrraaagggghh! Such dissonant, incompatible, contradictory, notions play havoc with our Republican minds, especially our blonde, blow-dried, Fox News bimbo minds. OMG! We need somebody who can really do a quickie rewrite to return to our comforting alternate reality; Ronnio, Ronnio, wherefore art thou, Ronnio?
So, here we are with a substantial chunk of our citizenry and electorate bitch-slapped by math, science, demography, and even the hand of God? This is going to be tough to deal with and, since there are no holy books and golden tablets available to point the way, we only have hypotheses and probabilities to ponder. It appears that there will be, already is, blood spilt; Republican blood, spilt by other Republicans. Blame will be assigned, heads will roll, the search for who will fill the void of leadership (since the only mantle left for Mr. Mitt is his magical underwear) is afoot. Chris Krispy Kreme is seen as Judas by some, and Huckabee, Jeb and God knows who else await their opportunity to give their “friends, Republicans, Christians; I come not to bury Romney, but to…” speech. A “moderate” Republican* (what the fuck is that!?) might even emerge (from where?). It will be bloody; it will be entertaining, and more than a little crazy, too.
But there is also the danger that the sanguinary metaphor could become reality. There are elements of the fractious Republican base that are both literally and figuratively “armed and dangerous”. Pushed by conspiracy theories ranging from the United Nations black helicopters, to Obama’s intentions of installing sharia law, the prospects for violence in the form of assassination attempts, to homegrown McVeigh forms of mass terrorism have a greater prospect of being enabled by a desperation born of the aftermath of cognitive dissonance. That puts us a long way from forming that “perfect union.”
____________________________________________________________
© 2012, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.9.2012)
*One whose scrotum doesn’t shrivel a if the word “tax” is mentioned.