The post super week letdown
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
Like
tens of millions of Americans, I waited anxiously for our two day
super week, beginning on February 3 with the Super Bowl (New York
Giants v. New England Patriots) and ending two days later with Super
Tuesday’s primaries in 22 states. Clear winners would then shape
the super contest in November for the presidency.
The
rituals began in sports bars across the country. I put the chip into
the dip, raised my beer glass, without taking my eyes off the screen,
and understood I lived in a Super Nation. “Super,” said the young
woman next to me, responding to a completed pass. In the stadium in
Arizona the audience paid up to $19 thousand per ticket on E-Bay.
They couldn’t see one hundredth as well as bar patrons watching
close-ups of athletes in pain on giant plasma screens.
Super
indeed! And don’t compare this to Romans watching lions chew
Christians.
No
other empire had such a super military. Don’t remind anyone that it
hasn’t won a war since 1945 — with a little help from the Soviet
Union — to defeat Hitler’s armies.
We
still have a super economy, albeit sinking into recession. The number
of dot.com and drug trafficking billionaires and multimillionaires
continues to grow and enjoy super-power and super comfort. The less
affluent and less super majority suffer super psychic and material
deprivation.
Imagine
not being able to shop at post holiday super sales, and get super
discounts! The documentary movie “Supersize Me” dramatized the
virtue of eating super meals at McDonald’s and the other chains
that specialize in super fattening food.
The
Super Bowl, the most watched television event in the country, pitted
players that had endured seventeen games of mutual battering, bone
breaking, concussions, torn cartilages and sprains.
Dozens
of injured players sat on sidelines or in hospitals watching their
steroid-riddled brethren — juiced by injections of speed to make
them more “competitive.” An injured player receives a Novocain
injection to mask the pain so he can keep playing. “That shows
heart,” say the announcers.
Pre
game ceremonies feature squadrons of military jets streaking over the
stadium. During half time, top entertainers sang and played. A super
party! Four years ago a Janet Jackson breast accidentally slipped
from its flimsy covering. Scandal!!!
The
TV network paid huge fines for this insult to public decency. I
recall Jackson replacing her milk gland, and the players resuming
their physical mauling. That’s clean sport!
This
year a drum roll accompanied an armed group marching onto the field.
“Present arms.” The super TV screen showed marines in Iraq. An
American Idol winner sang the Star Spangled Banner. Cut to ads for
credit cards from a bank that has lost billions in the mortgage
scandal, and from Ford pushing a gas guzzling truck. The game lasted
60 minutes; the super TV show, three and a half hours.
Sports
Bar discussion centered on which commercial was best. At home,
according to medical experts, more men suffer heart attacks and
strokes eating too much fat, drinking too much and feeling depressed
over the loss of money they had wagered on the Patriots. A small
price to pay for super sports culture! We love sports. We play them
when we’re kids and bet on them ever after.
The
nation had one day to recover before the next super event. On Monday,
February 4, Hillary Clinton called me three times. I tried to
interrupt, but she kept talking saying the identical thing: vote for
me. Obama didn’t call, but at a busy San Francisco intersection, a
middle-aged Obama lover pleaded that “he has soul and will do great
things.” What does he stand for? I asked. “Hope,” replied an
eighteen-year-old woman. “Faith,” said an elderly Latino man. “We
can do it,” laughed the three of them in chorus. How about the
issues like cutting the Defense Budget and global warming? He — like
Hillary — has been vague.
“You’ll
see,” they assure me, “he has the soul of Martin Luther King, the
charisma of John F. Kennedy.”
With
those solid assurances, why press for details? The super primaries
came after months of candidates insulting each other. This spectacle
revealed the essential certainty about U.S. electoral politics: the
cardinal sin is telling the truth.
The
media adores the primaries, which offer the corporate press a form of
paradise, a chance to fill pages of newspapers and the airwaves —
audio and visual — with endless pap.
Unlike
the Super Bowl, the Democratic primary did not come up with a winner.
Hillary holds a very slim lead in the
number
of delegates pledged to her. Several primaries in states like Texas,
Maryland and Virginia might offer further clues as to who will get
the prize. If it stays close, pundits
predict non-elected Party bosses will decide on Hillary in hotel
rooms in Denver, the site of the August Democratic Convention.
The
Republicans face chaos and disarray. At least Rudy Giuliani’s
pitiful vote tally in Florida removed him. Romney dropped out after
Super Tuesday, leaving front-runner Arizona Senator John McCain and
former
Governor
Mike Huckabee (making him very vice-presidential) and, far behind,
Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul of Houston. (Libertarian means
anarchist with money). Paul swears to get out of Iraq, and reduce the
destructive military budget and stop the invasion of civil liberties
carried out by agencies empowered by Congress to deal with Bush’s
war on terrorism. Paul doesn’t believe the government should tax
citizens; nor does he think labor unions should have rights. He got
between 3% and 21% in most of the primaries.
Huckabee
took states with large Christian fundamentalist voting populations —
his home state, Arkansas, and other Bible Belt states, like Georgia,
Alabama, West Virginia and Tennessee. This is quite a feat. A 21st
Century candidate for President does not believe in evolution, and
assures his flock that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth
simultaneously. Like Bush, who also doubts evolution, Huckabee thinks
the popular children’s cartoon show, “The Flintstones,” is a
documentary.
Ironically,
McCain’s victory came in states that will vote Democrat:
California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut. Huckabee
picked up the evangelical vote, but even if McCain chooses him for
running mate, the Republican right wing will remain antagonistic.
The
Party bullies hate Huckabee’s populist language and policies. As
Arkansas governor he empathized with the poor and didn’t kick out
all the illegal immigrants. He backed social and jobs programs for
the poor. But the ultra rightists save their real animus for McCain.
Rev.
James Dobson, a heavyweight “family” partisan, was “deeply
disappointed the Republican Party seems poised to select a nominee
[McCain] who did not support a Constitutional amendment to protect
the institution of marriage, voted for embryonic stem-cell research
which would kill nascent human beings, opposed tax cuts that ended
the marriage penalty, has little regard for freedom of speech.” He
further derided McCain for his “legendary temper and often uses
foul and obscene language.”
The
Arizona
Republican endorsed
McCain, but complained that “McCain often insults people and flies
off the handle." His talk of more war and never “waving the
white flag in Iraq” has caused many to wonder about his prudence.
Seventy per cent of the public, after all, want the troops to come
home. If the Iraqis begin to attack US forces in the next few months
and casualty rates rise again, McCain will look much less attractive.
The
Republican Party, once united behind Reagan and the Bushes, now spins
out of control. Bush’s neocons and their Iraq war combined with
Bush’s soft position on immigration — don’t kill or deport all
of them — has caused splits and defections.
From
now until the November presidential vote, the public will suffer the
heaviest marketing blitz in history. Slogans and sound bites will
fill the air like jingle bells. No candidate will err on the side of
veracity and confront the fact that he or she has no answers to deal
with the nation’s diving economy or the futile wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan; nor will they address spending national treasure on
death and destruction.
Super
candidates don’t offer solutions. They stick to change and hope —
and talk of “my health plan” while using superlatives to refer to
the abysmal state of the country’s affairs. How else to win
elections? In
1972, I made the “The Jail.” In the film, the jailhouse chef
addressed prisoners’ complaints about the inedible food he cooked:
“You can’t please everybody.” The Democratic candidates should
learn this lesson and tell the majority how they’ll fix the
economy, reduce the Defense Budget and get the hell out Iraq and
Afghanistan as soon as they take office.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and author of A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD and
WE DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE (winner
of best activist video award at S.F. Video Fest). The DVD is
available at roundworldproductions@gmail.com.
