The scene is classic pulp fiction. The madam of the local whorehouse asks the police chief why his cops are raiding her bordello when she’s paid all her bribes. The police chief shrugs. “It’s election year,” he says.
Perhaps one of the reasons our politicians achieve so little is that now every year is election year. Through primaries and caucuses, through approval ratings, and incessant cable news, the two-year/four-year election cycle blurs into one long, continuous campaign. Our elected officials perpetually run for office and need to be constantly raising obscene amounts of campaign money, watching poll numbers, and doing absolutely nothing to offend real or imagined voter support. And when things go wrong – as they so frequently do – they search for smokescreens to cloud the issues, and divert attention from the real problems.
No question that we have problems here in 2006. The pointless and illegal war in Iraq drags on. The federal deficit grows beyond all reason. The city of New Orleans is still mostly in ruins, and another hurricane season is on its way. We are perpetually beset by a spectrum of seemingly insurmountable threats, from terrorism to global warming, and if that weren’t bad enough, the lid appears to be coming off an unprecedented political corruption can-of-worms. In this current election, our senators and members of Congress – especially Republicans – will need all the smokescreens they can get, and, just like the town whorehouse in classic pulp fiction, adult entertainment is always an easy target when some incumbent wants to boost falling poll numbers with a bout of hysteria over some perceived decline in moral values.
The trick is so easy to turn. Want to distract the taxpayers from how they’re being robbed blind by Halliburton? Or make them forget that the U.S. government is so deep in bed with Saudi Arabia that it’s truly pornographic? Just spark a contrived conflagration about something as totally irrelevant as teen porn on MySpace, and the Federal Communications Commission’s control of the Internet, fan the flames with prurient publicity, and soon you have an all-enveloping toxic cloud— as thick and titillating as a whore’s cheap perfume. Other predicable smokescreens are already being moved into place. A ludicrous act is currently before Congress to waste crucial legislative time debating how to protect the Grand Ol’ Flag. But the big issue will yet again be abortion. Now that South Dakota has made it a crime – with no exceptions for rape, incest, or to preserve the mother’s health – a challenge is on its way to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and put the entire nation back in the Dark Ages of illegal, backstreet terminations.
The thinking is bizarre to the point of scary. As when Republican state Sen. Bill Napoli, one of the prime movers behind the ban, described what he thought might constitute an exception. “A rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated, so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.” Before anyone could ask if Napoli was joking or insane, the senator plowed on. “When I was growing up here in the Wild West, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved.” The problem here is that Napoli grew in the 1960s, not the 1860s, and he watched the Wild West on TV, just like the rest of us—but facts don’t deter his fantasies of hillbilly shotgun morality. “You just didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen. I don’t think we’re so far beyond that, that we can’t go back to that.”
And, while Napoli turns the clock back a hundred years, the North Pole melts, Iran goes nuclear, and only the rich get health care. Okay, so a country gets the leaders it deserves, but this has exceeded the boundaries of absurdity.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
