1 Boring Old Man

Anxiety is not only a symptom of mental discomfort. In fact, it’s a normal emotion that signals danger. Sometimes it’s a danger you can see or imagine in the near term, then it’s called fear. Other times, it’s a vague discomfort, a feeling of danger being around the corner, but it not being clear what that danger is. And I feel it about this coming campaign.

When I look inside at my feeling, it’s not about the candidates. Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama are both competent, actually exciting choices. While I prefer Obama, they’re both contenders. McCain couldn’t be as bad as Bush/Cheney. It’s not possible. But I’m worried that he’s a lightweight, who is flirting with senility. But even McCain isn’t the source of my anxiety.  I think it’s two things:

Neoconservatives: Our country has been run by the Neoconservatives [including Cheney] from the American Enterprise Institute for eight years. I’m afraid that McCain will continue to rely on them – probably not so much as Bush, but any is cancer in my mind. Solution: Don’t vote for McCain.

The Wreckers: This is where my anxiety is focused. Whether it’s part of a vast "right wing conspiracy" as some think, or simply a large group of people using the same techniques playing off of each other doesn’t matter. The impact is the same. What Rush Limbaugh says outright with his Operation Chaos is true of all of them – they work by bloodying up people. They will rale on the Reverend Wright, flag pin, William Ayers themes ad nauseum. They’ll macerate Hillary about Bill’s philandering, her "snipergate" gaffe, her smile endlessly. Once a candidate is picked, they’ll find other such things that pour out from a cornucopia, bouncing from Rush to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal and back again. Since 1976, the Republicans have found the Democrat’s Achilles Heel more times than not. They’ve jury-rigged a way for the Democrats to pick the weakest candidate. This time – they’ve failed at that somewhat. Both candidates are strong people – though both are from vulnerable minorities. 

So my anxiety is that the Democratic candidates won’t be able to campaign. They’ll be pulled into the shoals by the Wreckers and dashed on the rocks. In the classic Hitchcock version of Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, a gang of cut-throats inticed sailing ships to crash onto the shoals at night by dowsing the warning lights. They looted the wrecks and killed everyone on board under the evil leadership of Charles Laughton. In movies like this, particularly 1939 movies, good triumphing over evil is guaranteed. With our modern Wreckers, that’s  not necessarily the case. But to stick to the golden age of film for just a moment, salvation usually comes when one of the bad guys has a turn of conscience. In this case, the loyal wife of Laughton’s chief wrecker turns out to have a heart. No such luck in the modern political arena. Even whistle-blowers like John Dean only "turned" when the noose began to tighten.

The Bush Administration has been amazingly resistant to whistle-blowing. Such people have been effectively neutralized or dragged through so much muck that the meaning of their revelations has been left blowing in the wind. The only casualties have been way down the chain. So my fantasy of emergence of  one of the many possible whistle-blowers that could put something of a cap on the Wreckers’ activities isn’t very viable.