This will be the last of these columns before the presidential elections. When we next meet, the 2009 occupant of the White House will be a done deal. Unless George Bush has pulled something totally unholy and we are living in a totalitarian dictatorship, either Barack Obama or John McCain will be the 44th President of the United States. The smart if cynical comment has always been that all politicians are 95 percent identical and thus these kinds of "either-or" elections are essentially pointless. The equally smart response is traditionally, "Yes, but that 5 percent is where we (especially we in adult entertainment) survive."
I freely admit I have been rooting for Barack Obama since he first launched into the primaries, but, in this context, it hardly matters. What concerns me right now is that, after eight long years of the Bush regime, the majority of us - myself included-are hardly able to think straight. We are reeling from nearly a decade of having our intelligence insulted. Since George Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, we have lived in a world of double talk, double think, plausible deniability, deliberate deception, and actual making-it-up-as-we-go-along make believe. The result has been the frightening spectacle of the American Dream being transformed into the American Nightmare. The economy has been wrecked, foreclosures and evictions sweep the country in a riptide of misery, and we are mired in a still unexplained war that continues to claim the lives, limbs and mental health of our servicemen and women.
Maybe worse than the material toll, exacted on all but the super-rich over most of this decade, is the convoluted positions we have come to accept as normal. Federal agencies - from FEMA to the Justice Department - are overrun by Bush political appointees, selected not for their talent but for their loyalty and religious-right ideologue beliefs. The result has been that patterns of discussion on any number of topics have abandoned logic and taken on a surrealist dogmatism that's part Orwellian and part Old Testament. To criticize the president was to aid the terrorists. The culture wars were waged, and adult entertainment was a popular target, but not the only one. Scientists were forced to defend Darwinian evolution from the attacks of creationists and, maybe more seriously, delay the development of treatments for Alzheimer's disease and spinal cord injuries because of the supposed "evils" of stem cell research.
Core lifestyle choices like pornography, abortion, marijuana, gay marriage - and a host of other items the religious violently oppose - were condemned on evidence that was unproven or wholly untrue. Pornography caused rape, to terminate a pregnancy was murder, marijuana turned your brain green and lead to heroin addiction, gay marriages were simply an abomination. Nonsense far beyond disinformation was delivered by screaming media-mouths like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin with such regularity that we started to believe they had a right to their odious opinions. The only time under Bush when the absurdity abated was with an intervention of hard reality, as when Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005, and the Bush power structure was revealed as an inept tissue of lies and inefficiency, only good for protecting the profits of corporate cronies.
The proposition that all politicians are the same only holds good when all things are relatively equal. Should Obama win the presidency, the simple fact that he isn't George W. Bush could be all the radical change we need. But I don't doubt that any Obama administration will see its share of scandal and corruption. The Clinton era had its scandals, but they were manageable - sex and minor real estate deals, not torture and war crimes. Even the corruption of the 1990s was a forward looking dot-com corruption (where, in fact, online porn first made its bones), not the polluting retro greed of Bush's oil baron backers for whom our president was quite willing to go to war. The real problem with the Bush aftermath is that it's going to take us a while to remember how sanity and the real world feel.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
This article originally appeared in the October 2008 edition of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
