The Farce Along the Potomac

03/18/2006

Paul Munnis

This Democrat has gone past the point of anger, angst, horror, outrage, and incense where GOP governance is concerned. Indeed the Bush Administration members are now seen by me as actors in a gigantic play – a farce—I finally “get it.”

The audience is sitting in the fifth act of an eight act play. We hope it to be a comedic farce in that it has a happy ending where the main actors are thrown out of government for the next forty years or so. But no mind – the theater is in-play, right now, and the media is poised to assure that you in the audience do not miss even a single line of the Principal Actors’ delivery.

We are witness to a badly scripted play starring idiot-savant characters acting out in the most outrageous way and for ends that at first seem to have no purpose except to tear down American government and to anger the audience while mocking our very institutions of human government. It is as if the inmates are running the asylum and GOP governance seems a parody of pure madness personified by the head actor himself.

There is a deeper message though as the authors seek to convince us that we take government way too seriously—actually we pay attention to government when instead we need to ignore government and instead turn to ourselves to manage solutions to problems that we hand off to government officials to solve. The message of this farce is that government doesn’t know how to solve our problems – they fumble, and bumble—and they pass our problems around as children playing the game of “hot potato” might do. When a hot potato is dropped they improvise with a cover up for the miscreant, there is no elimination of actors. They use improvised Commissions, form Study-Groups, provide for Congressional Oversight, provide massive cover-ups based upon lies, form Task-Forces even as the key actors specialize in using Government Secrecy as a way of managing those that would demand moral and ethical behavior. Such behavior is denied to the audience members and thus creates the needed tension. The joke is on “We the People,” and illustrates how mankind prefers to delegate problem management to others rather than to operate the mechanisms of real problem solution—“Let George Do It” is shown to be a bad idea. The theme is one of representative government that fails and it shows the vulnerability of our man-made institutions.

Yet wait - did “The Founders” anticipate this by allowing for Federalism, for States Rights, and for Local Government? Is there an unlit exit to this insane confined auditorium? Maybe its just a matter of emphasis? Hmmmm.... ponder that one.

When I say that the Bush Administration staff are actors in a farce I am not kidding. Karl Rove. For example, is the mad-hatter scripting out a plot to touch everything in American government and to turn it to ash. Cabinet members run the many side-shows in this theater. Each a Director in his own right.

If you asked a group of college students to write a college farce and to present it so as to illustrate all that is conceptually frail and hence vulnerable in the administration of government then this is exactly what they would script. They would model it on “Alice Through The Looking Glass.” To a more relaxed audience it would seem hilarious – no sane government would ever do these things. Except that this farce is not meant to entertain—it is meant to antagonize the audience and to show that they rely far too much on government—and it succeeds only too well in its goal of needling mankind. It is repetitive but after all that is how people learn—through rote, through repetition, and from their mistakes too—or do they learn from their mistakes? This is a cosmic question—a matter for Zen pondering of the third kind.

We leave it to the reader to count the number of failed governance parodies and the modalities that are part of this farce. Here are a few for starters: There is a “military” (a subset of government – supposedly belonging to “the people,” but who take direction from just one man) and it is cast as an economic furnace that burns wealth during both peace and war. Like the blood-plant in “Little House of Horrors,” it demands: “Feed Me.” And like that plant the demands are so loud and omnous that one never pauses to ask—“what will happen if it is not fed?” Will it just die of malnutrition? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Ah, there is so much to ponder in life.

A metaphor of POW torture and abuse is used to show that the military can do what they damn well please and none can do anything about it except the president and if he does not want to redirect the military – then so be it. Even the Congress, supposedly a separate branch of government charged with oversight and given the purse strings as check and balance, is in reality handcuffed by a small group of media controllers who spin the military management out of control and are directed off-stage by prompters located in the “Lobby” wing of the theater.

There is a Department of Homeland Security that specializes in promoting national insecurity. They show terrorists the way to San Jose and they replace damaged levees with worse ones. They coach on using ports and cargo containers to sequester all sorts of things.

In California, “The Arnold,” has discovered leaking levees as a source of wealth and he wants money sent to his State too. Why should the Louisianna pols get it all?

The mid-west is aloof, concentrating on bio-science and going it alone too. A dangerous idea to be sure especially as we approach the age of bio-politics whose leading edge is an abortion wedge and mercy killing shots across the social bow are tracked with medical RFD implants.

There is a Treasury that prints money having no value and then pronounces the Economy to be healthy. Now that is advanced medical practice done to the tune of cold hard cash to be sure.

There is a Department of Justice that breaks the third leg of government and shapes it to represent justice denied. It is punctuated with figures in dark robes that call Inquisition down upon the heads of the audience members if they seem to stray from their scripted role. They control the fate of reviled actors like: “Tommy,” Honest Abrahamoff,” and “Scooter,” actors who are sacrificed to make a point of Justice served as both wry comedy and farce.

Initially there was once a Department of Labor that represented business owners but the parody has played itself out as it does not seem to matter what the workers think or want. They are just cattle grazing in the fields of the “ownership society.” Just feed and water them.

There is a State Department that does not practice diplomacy and insults and disparages every government that they are supposed to make friends with. There have lists of nations that are ranked according to their contribution to human stability and peace and the list has an inverse sorting algorithm that promotes those who are members of the “Axis of Evil” to a central role in the international part of this ongoing farce and epitomized as “Governments Gone Astray.”

We have auction booths run by the FCC and the Department of Land Mis-management. Another side-show is run by the Bureau of Indian and Casino Affairs and yet another run by the Bureau of Mines charged with culling energy workers for profit.

NASA has a display of fizzled rockets and bad styro-foam panels on display and an empty checkbook to show for their years of work. They run animations of a “Mars Lander,” whatever that is and they remind us that hey put the Internt satellites into orbit.

Each Department of Government is a side-show of lessons to be learned about how not to govern the people of a nation.

The writers give pet names to the actors. There are such names as Dubya, “W,” Dickie, Rummy, Condi, Woflie, Snow-Job, Dishonest-Abe, and Brownie, plus a Yale graduate cast of thousands all hired to administer a post-war Iraq as a shadow surrogate government under the seige of enforced occupancy. They are there to assure that government fails through a parody of actual American management incompetence fueled by bad education and cheered on by good intention. Their appointed leader and controller was Paul Bremer (Pauley) and he shows that such surrogates can fail without consequence to the nation or to the managers themselves. There is also a throw-away in-house lawyer who was yanked from nomination to “The Court” to represent them and if needed a guy called Gonzales is lead in to confabulate Congress on the interpretation of the laws that Congress passed.

It is as a giant put-on meant just to anger the audience and to inspire them to throw tomatoes at the actors. It is a sort of participatory theater of the absurd. It has its own audience rules where you can be sequestered away in a foreign jail and tortured if you do not play your part or if you try to end the run of the play by vigorous opposition. God help the audience member who yawns.

Anyone not with the actor company is against them and thus anything is fair game between actor and the audience. A special pact has been written to govern this behavior and is called the “Patriot Act.” This act is designed to show that even the Courts of The Inquisition can be bypassed whenever needed and can be run in secrecy. That too is a part of this Yalie conceived farce. It has a counter-point of “Freedom of Speech” and a counter-counter point of “domestic spying. “ This play cannot end until the eighth act and then the challenge is to see if the audience wants yet another four acts added to the play as improv-theater. In fact this presentation is part experiment to see if mankind is as self-abusive as they seem in their administration of a free election process that was designed to obtain a democratic government (with a lower-case D). Freedom is but illusion is the lesson that we are taught by the actors. The length of the play is designed to give the audience time to be hypnotized.

This is a progressive play - run in many side shows. Each having its own lessons to be learned.

We do not want to seem prejudicial to Yale and yet their star economic graduate/actor and his family is now running the world’s biggest economy and they seem bent on getting even with the Kennedy’s for daring to enshrine Harvard even as they seek to poke fun at a GOP actor, Henry Kissinger, for taking himself too seriously and acting upon world-peace with far too much pomp and circumstance. They thus shifted the role over to a “black” and then over to a “skirt” to show the effects of civil rights on governance. One gets the same outcome regardless of race or gender is the intended object lesson. Yet there there is the ring of rivalry and vendetta between scripted lines of the family actors and members of the audience too. One cheers or boos the characters as they wish and we are told free speech is okay up to a point. Culture is a part of the tension and there is a battle between the rich, the midlle-class, and the poor. Tensions abound betweeen Christians and the followers of Mohamed with hate directed at the Jews. Every segment of society is set against every other segment of society creating a ten digit exponent for total chaos.

The give-away that we are engaged in a prank game of theatrical farce comes when they compare the current president to Ronald Reagan ( a very professional actor in his time) and attempt to set “Ronnie” up as an icon for the neo-con movement. That is when you know they are playing a mammoth joke on the world and are engaged in total farce. Ronnie called the neo-con’s “The Crazies that we need to keep in the basement of Congress.” They are showing that they got out of the basement windows and are now in control of the government of the USA having snuck in through the front-door by legal election and not once - but twice as if to prove a point. They are getting even too and as a joke they are sanctifying Ronnie as an icon of all that they aspire to and thus creating the perfect ongoing sense of the spirit of farce.

I thus have to opine that these actors are playing their roles in a superb manner even using improbable improvisation at times such as when a major hurricane blows up or natural disaster rains havoc upon the audience members. The play’s authors seek to show how government fumbles all of the challenges they are confronted with – the message is: “You can’t trust these guys. Don’t even bother.” It is punctuated with the notion that government is all illusion and is surreal. “Handle your own problems - don’t fop them off,” is the recurring message. They want you to know there are no heroes in Washington.

The actors are totally involving the audience too. They are certainly showing how badly government could be run (is run?) if one sets their mind to really do so in a mean-spirited way.

It gets a little heavy at times, especially upon the people of Iraq, but as all Yale students know, if you aren’t one of US then you are really nobody. “US” can be stretched to become “U.S.” with just a little punctuation spin and thus the play involves the whole nation of America and Iraq too and the whole world is involved as a result of “globalism,” a tie that binds people and nations. How brilliant is that as a plot line and how irreconcilable it is as a parody of world-peace?

Therefore in a sureal sense nobody who really counts is hurt and so it’s a kind of virtual reality farcical play based upon the insanity of government, the abuse of power and it illustrates the long and illogical reach of government over the governed. Thus the play accurately describes the permeating madness of political power gone wrong along the Potomac. It also shows how unreliable man-made laws really are. It illustrates the human comedy called: “civilization.”

The play has at least another three year run unless the audience tires of the plot and stomps out in a huff. It won’t matter – they will declare themselves as “great” and then recruit yet another audience - maybe from Canada or Central or South America. For this next audience they will perhaps make Iran the sacrificial lamb and act out a parody of nuclear fear and loathing. They are looking at North Korea as an alternative nation to bomb and harass– dare we say it – as their “Plan B” in case of unwanted theatrical pregnancy—a way to abort the plot without violating the taboos of a manifest ownership society (nobody of prominence wants to own a bastard). Their choice will thus come down to cultural selection for a protagonist. Do we give the audience more of this extension of mid-east evil religious strife or do we switch to the Orient where ethics and motives are dark and mysterious and are unknown and un-grocked by feeble western minds? Sterotypes will count heavily in making the choice.

We see this farce as a construct of the secret Yale Skull and Crossbones Club—a spur of post-graduate illuminati alumni members at work in the idle courts of the rich and totem of the under-achiever society of playboys bereft of real objectives in life except to cynically mock those who toil daily for a glass of wine and a crust of bread. These children of the Capitalist Elite have decided to do a huge put-on as a post-graduate joke and to provide an object lesson to those Yale-ies yet to come concerning both civics and government. They scoff at college students that burn Churches as a joke—they have a bigger scheme than that—they seek to become legendary figures that will be talked about for as long as the Yale student body is recruited from corporate American households and for as long as youth can construct pranks on a gigantic world stage owned by the elite parent. They will burn nations instead of Churches because it is far more inclusive that way.

The object lesson they convey is that life imitates the actors’ stage behavior, hence art. It is the notion of “tell the audience that you are right for long enough and they will eventually agree with you,” a form of auto-suggestion. The challenge to future generations is: “Top This If You Can.” One lesson is to show that the rich and powerful can get away with murder and get the electorate to love it—even to the point of voting for more of this type of “entertainment.” It’s a giant game of “Survivor.” It is not original material though. It has its origins in ancient Rome, inside of a coliseum and among gladiators and lions and Christians and their controllers with the quality of the stage scenery and amusement value simply indicated by the Emperor’s thumb-direction. Life or death is thus determined - c’est la vie.

In this virtual-reality play they have Congress fronting for the theater audience using corporate America to underwrite the wages of the actors and controlling access to Treasury loot and who are portrayed as “entertainment angels” who “Linger in the Lobby,” and they spend much time telling one another to “break a leg,” They mean it too. They note that some idiot junior management is trying to restrict the use of the Lobby and to weed the Lobby patch but they know it will be just a matter of audience manipulation and of providing a separate entertainment cast just like a good side-show at a circus does. In fact this theater has many side shows. Each side-show is run by an appointed cabinet member who was sanctioned by the Senate. Each is a principality of government. A State unto themselves.

We end this theater review with a suggestion to the audience member. The play lasts a long time. It is tiring and boring in the extreme. You need to—once in awhile—check out, go to the bathrooms, stand in the Lobby area and watch the characters there, eat some pop-corn, and visit with other Lobby members, then compare notes and fortify yourself with strong drink for a return to the next auditorium from which there is no immediate escape. Like Kabuki, the play lasts far too long for audience comfort and is acted by transvestites who over-act in the extreme. Also, note that the actors themselves get tired. They need to rest, cut some brush, eat, get paid, buy stock, and do other vital things like vacation. Thus the overall rate of the play seems steady but it’s actually quite choppy in a micro-sense. During a down-cycle when the actors are preoccupied you can just slip out the side door and lay low in the grass until the next election. That is your main hope for personal tranquility for the next three years. Just lay-down and ignore it all. While pondering you can wonder where John Kerry, yet another Yale grad --but not a memebr of the Skull and Crossbones Club—really fits in. Is he Pirate or Privater? Is he Sailor or Soldier or Civilian? Is he a winner or an under-achiever. Yes—there is much to ponder indeed.

Good Luck My Friends - as the Bard advises: “This is the Winter of Our Discontent.” We pray that from pondering the play itself and the messages of this farce, will come needed object lessons leading to Spring, and to a revitalization of spirit. Spring has always come before and there is every reason to think that it will show up once again. After that Fall lies ahead with its message of possible re-birth through election. The Summer is for pondering.