[Newspoetry] Mad City News Flash: Kerry debate plans

[emerick at chorus.net]

House-on-the-Rock, WI: An Exclusive Eye-Witness Story-Line

Yours truly came as close to fame as he ever comes when driving upon WI Hwy 151 to the southeast of Mount Horeb on late Sunday afternoon.  151 is a divided four lane rural highway leading from Milwaukee, past Madison, thru Dubuque Iowa and on toward Cedar Rapids and points west in Iowa.

Now the moment that was a brush with destiny came when Kerry's motorcade came west as I returned from Iowa to my home on the west side of Madison.  Suddenly, police-like care began to pop-up, blocking the U-Turn Not-Permitted-Here u-turn lanes that we build into multilane divided highways, in a strange and primitive ritual that future archaelogists shall speculate much upon.

(While I could go on to discuss those future speculations, it seems safe, for the imediate moment, to leave those future discussions alone, knowing full well that they will not happen until some later time, and that no one will have the temerity to pre-empt my discussions of what future archaelogists shall have to say, or not to say, possibly, about the all too improbable present.)

Well, to cut a short story long, I being a man of few words, and every moment demanding that I review muy vocabulary, for lost words, words that get lost on the blue event horizon.  Southwest Wisconsin was kind of like that, along 151 yesterday.  The toasty sun itself had swept the sky clear, leaving only that blue that has no color to it, that blue truer than robin's eggs, truer than waters that only ever fake the color of blue, bluer than the eyes of us Nordic Americans, us German-Norwegian-Swedish Americans who once were the people of the upper plains.  We are fading out out faster than the American Indians -- for we have not even reservations that might nominally shelter us from the ever rising, ever erasing tides of face-less, soul-less Americanisms -- those that ultimately serve only the great commerical gods.

Speaking of God or gods, I was coming around to mentioning Kerry's passage and roosting at that great place we call the House on the Rock, out near SpringGreen where summer theatre can be enjoyed in the evenings under the woods, where FLWright chose to cast his summer home (his winter place in Arizona was yet a thing to come).

And, last year, or so ago, Neil Gaitman wrote his rollicking good fictional story American Gods (title same), on the rise and fall of gods, on the loss of the old cruel gods, on the heartless nature of the new commerical gods.  Fine sequences of the story spin toward and from a nexus that is, oh, pinioned against the fictionally exaggerated House on the Rock.

Kerry came here to get away from interference, I suppose, to plan his debate on foreign policy.  Bush's message is simple "Look, I may have fucked up everything in the last four years, but you know where I stand: I'm a sure thing and the times call for certainty.  Even the certainty of failure is better than the grave and gathering dangers that the hard work of making things better undertakes.  Vote for me because I am a simple moron, even if I am an incredibly rich snob.  I am like so many of you voters wish you could be -- totally irresponsible, and thus totally predictable as a failure."

But, of course, Bush will flip-flop all this around -- just as he has flip-flopped the flip-flop derogative -- for Bush flip-flopped on his reasons for tax-cuts favoring the rich, even as the conclusion was always foregone.  And, he has flip-flopped environmental policy on its head, from protecting the environment, to ravaging the natural resources once protected from rapine and lust.  So too has he flip-flopped America's finances from prospective great fortune, to prospective budget failures as far as the eye can see.  So too he has flip-flopped a jobs-generating economy into a jobs-losing exporting industry.  And, he has even flip-flopped to seduce religion into a cesspool of corrupt partisan divisions.

Oh, yes, if I were advising Kerry on debate plans, I'd tell him to wait, during the debate, until Bush pulls one of his cynical and misleading wisecracks.  And, then, so I'd tell Kerry, "Forget the rules of debate.  Walk over there, to Bush's podium -- cover his microphone with your big hand, and wave the other hand, fist-formed, in that bastard's face.  And, say, in a stage whisper, sure to be picked up by all the mikes you aren't covering, "You son-of-a-bitching snotty-nosed, cocaine-snorting little bastard!  You owe me an apology but you never have paid any debt you owed to civilization.  I saw your kind of sneaking assassins out in the jungles in VietNam -- a war that you conveniently ducked in an alternative service you didn't even complete honorably."  And, if Bush doesn't cower or run away but stands there looking stupid (as he usually does, in moments true to his character), then walk away gracefully, loudly saying, "Debate is not possible with any wildman like Bush."

But, if Bush starts to respond, physically, then slap the little bastard silly.  Punch his lights out.

Oh, what would the Secret Service do in such moments?  Would the ones guarding Bush shoot at Kerry and the guards guarding him?  Would a bench-clearing brawl ensue, as aides from both sides joined in a general melee and the audience dissolved in a fracasing fight?  Would riots erupt on American streets, in American neighborhoods everywere, as deep divisions that Bush has created finally broke and bled freely, from the bruises he has inflicted on the sadly distraught body politic?

None of this would happen, but if it works for hockey and football games, and, occasionally, is tolerated in the great American past-time, itself, the gentlemanly art of baseball, then why should it not happen at last in a Presidential debate?  It's time for Kerry to take the kid-gloves off, to come out of his corner, and to start swinging.

That's my advice -- if he really wants to save America from the worst presidency in this century, in the last century, in any century.

And, Nader is wrong -- Kerry may be far less than Nader's ideal, but at least he is better than Bush, and has a chance of being President.  Only the madly independent would ignore the ugly reality of an offical election, of the power that is vested by its formal ritual.  Only the madly independent would be so psychofantic as to believe that it proves anything to vote for Nader or any third party candidate.  When the world is mad, 'tis folly to be sane -- and even more folly to think that one is not affected by the mad choices of a possible majority gone mad with fear.

Oh, the American electorate shows us all too well that they are Cowards, indeed -- they foolishly fear the wildly improbable more than the immediate events happening directly to them and negatively affecting their own lives.

The power of two, says Mike Moore, is such that if you could find one person every day, and persuade them to vote your way and, also, to go out and find another, as well, then 2**N for N>22 will carry any state, and N>28 would clearly carry the nation.  And, my friends, there are extra days, 35 to be precise, before the election -- so all this could happen, but you have to be persuaded that you do make a difference, not one-by-one, but one-plus-one, where each is going on to go out and do likewise.

A debate, though, is plainly but a waste of time -- because the spin-doctors are already vampirishly planning to suck the bloody moment dry of any meaning, before it could affect any person's thinking or voting plans.

Well, on this morose thought, I pass these words, already overflowing your patience and buffers, on to you.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick