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Friday, January 4, 2008
DREGULATOR VOL. VII # 1: OPRA-BAMA AND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
"If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, November 18, 2003
Iowa, Schmiowa. Huckabee, Schmuckabee. Hilary...dammit.
Maybe it's just the paranoia talking, but Obama's unquestionable sex-appeal notwithstanding, Iowa felt a little witch-burn-y. At the end of the day, boys still hate girls, girls still hate girls, and everyone hates mom-age women with a lot of hard wind in their lungs, unless they happen to be old whores with hearts of gold. Even Oprah is looking a bit thyroid and shrill now that she's thrown her huge hat into the Ring of Power and dedicated her stupendous influence to manifesting something other than unconditional self-love.
Hilary's defeat recalled, for me, the words of Ice Cube: "They'd rather see me in the pen/than me and Lorenzo/rollin' in a Benzo."
Plenty of people would rather see Hilary's heat chained next to Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton than have her ovulate in the Oval Office. Yoko Ono was right - women are the N-word of the world. After this six-year trip down Christian Republican hegemony-lane, if you have three holes in your body and want any serious reverence, you'd better be a bowling ball.
Ironically, Hilary might have one last-ditch, all-or-nothing chance to win American female hearts and minds: she needs to be busted in a torrid extramarital affair. This would endear her to tabloid housewives to a degree incomprehensible by the ruling class. The supermarket shoppers of America would gladly forgive Hilary if she'd only whup out a genuinely female display of poor judgment based on something as real and irrational as human Love. But she's not that kind of animal, and they know it, and that's why they don't like her. Staying with Bill, after all, was politically prudent, and even women whose greatest intellectual accomplishments to date involve using food stamps to buy menthol cigarettes understand that this represents a rather scurvy compromise in terms of quantifiable human feeling. Hilary, as the queens in "Paris is Burning" might have said, just doesn't possess Lady Realness.
Americans are so romantic and/or brain-damaged by Hollywood narratives that they would rather gamble everything on a dreamboat trip to an unknown destination (Obama) than re-invest in an older, wiser, proven disappointment (Hilary). As a country, we are still haplessly immature and emotionally retarded by the Power of Dumb Mythology (i.e. the gratifyingly infantile World of Disney, as opposed to the hardcore and sometimes depressing Joseph Campbell). Our crazy-dreamer-style political decision-making is based on a totally optimistic disregard for actual politics, the learning process, and logic in general. We've been absolutely clobbered at the table in the last 6 years, but we're still voting from instinct instead of intellect. Americans would rather play Texas Hold'Em than learn to calculate probabilities... but the interesting and encouraging thing about Americans is that we will eventually learn to calculate probabilities by playing Texas Hold'Em.
It's our great talent, and only hope for competing with the stunningly self-abnegating, industrious groupthink of the Chinese: we still have the accidental genius that seems to happen when spoiled Americans overindulge themselves. Elvis. Madonna. Lowrider bicycles. Richard Pryor. Miles Davis. Gay fabulousness. Grand Theft Auto.
These are our proudest exports: bursts of louche creative expression that have always been slightly too controversial, sexy, and intoxicating for our politicians to get too close to.
Obama isn't as developed on the issues as Hilary, but nobody cares: he's got superstar magic, he's the new TV toy consumers crave. The Presidency, ultimately, will probably go to the candidate wearing the biggest codpiece, again. There's still a slim chance it might be Hilary, even if the junk in her trunk is alarmingly foreign to Commanders in Chief, and Americans squirm like tweens when she tells them what to do. But it's doubtful; Obama put the hammer down, everyone's skirt blew up, and that's how the nuts are dealt.
The next President will inherit a horrible job. The lifelong enmity of a lot of guys named Muhammad. Light sweet crude at $100 a barrel.
A Justice Department that will doubtlessly continue to investigate itself in connection to ongoing investigations of itself.
But there is hope, audacious and otherwise. Americans are geniuses when it comes to effing around. All it's going to take is one guy who comes up with a car that runs on crack, and our whole economy will boom all over again.
Dramatic reversals, fiends. It's the one thing about life that Hollywood ever got right.
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COMMENTS
"Barack Obama's stirring victory in Iowa ... says a lot about America, and also about the current mindset of the American voter.
"Because tonight voters decided that they didn't want to look back. They wanted to look into the future -- as if a country exhausted by the last seven years wanted to recapture its youth."
--Arianna Huffington
Did she really say "recapture its youth"? I think that proves your point.
Posted by: Steve M. at January 4, 2008 2:31 PM
Live! From America! Tuesday November 4, 2008!
CELEBRITY TAG TEAM DEATH MATCH!
CHUCK and MIKE vs. OPRAH and BARAK!
Hangman's Horror Rules! No time limit!
Oh gawd. These next 4 years are thoroughly gonna be fucked.
Oh yeah, uh... hope. And, uh, change. Yuh.
Posted by: MP at January 4, 2008 9:13 PM
Aww, come on, MP. Chipper up, buckaroo. There's going to be something like an ineffectual stab at nationalizing health care, probably! And, um...stuff.
At least Obama won't look like a fool at international dinner parties. He's got that cosmopolitan swerve. It might not be so bad to have an American president everyone wants to have sex with again. Too bad Hilary couldn't have worn tighter Spanx and a bullet bra, and been photographed emerging out of a public restroom somewhere after having obviously just having gotten a hand job from someone.
Still impossible for a sexy lady to be powerful in America. What a lame bunch of dorkishly repressed Papists we are. Boooo. I wish I was French. Or Brazilian. Or Argentinean. And in charge, and naked.
Posted by: Cintra "Queer for Rachel Maddow" Wilson at January 5, 2008 1:15 AM
Iowa voted for the black guy because he's sexier? Really? Iowa? Have you seen the demographics of Iowa? Do you really think that in Iowa they vote for the black guy because he's black, or because of his "codpiece size"? Really? Because Jesse Jackson would have defeated Walter Mondale on Feb. 20, 1984. I'm sure he had the biggest codpiece in the state that year. Instead, he got 2%. Also, even black people don't vote for Obama just because he is black. Because of course, for them, he is not "black" enough. Black women, by and large, like Hillary more. White women are the ones who vote against Hillary. Then of course, there is the John Edwards problem. You see, Hillary (she uses two l's, not one) came third in Iowa, not just second, so John beat her too. If Obama's black sex magic made him come first, (pardon the pun), what was Edwards' secret? Is he maybe an undercover octoroon, so perhaps he too has some secret codpiece science we know nothing about? Or maybe Obama and Edwards selling different goods than Hillary was? Maybe the Clinton experience you extol is exactly what everyone dislikes, or maybe they think that Edwards and Obama sell a better brand of change. Or, maybe they remember that when Bill ran for his first term he too lacked "experience." Obama and Edwards are nothing like each other, and they both beat Hillary -- I'm just sayin'.
Posted by: Jose Montoya at January 6, 2008 11:32 PM
Note to MP: It's far too early to worry about Barack (he tends to rock the c) in the Oval. Remember the 70's flicks that would feature Jim Brown in the first reel, only to him conveniently dispatched by the third? Obama has to stay alive in order to win -- let's see how well he does at that first.
Posted by: J. Montoya at January 6, 2008 11:47 PM
I just want to say " hi " to Cintra Wilson -- hi, Cintra! I haven't bumped into you for years. I work, I own my own home, so what do you say? It's encouraging to see that you haven't retired from being a writer! I enjoyed Colors Insulting To Nature -- that captured, for me, what Cintra is all about.
-David Greenberg
South San Francisco
Posted by: David Greenberg at January 16, 2008 5:05 PM
If it looks like a duck
Quacks like a duck
Swims like a duck
Is aided by taxpayer dollars and fly's around and craps all over your state like a duck..
What evidence is there to suggest she/he/it is a male politician with a wig and stuffed bra? Is her husband's desperation not understandable?
Posted by: Sir Philip at January 17, 2008 2:25 AM
Isn't, rather..
Posted by: Sir Philip at January 17, 2008 2:27 AM
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