FEAR EATS THE BRIAN

Fear is the mind killer. – Bene Geserit maxim

It’s a campaign of fear and consumption. – Marilyn Manson

I know your deepest secret fear. – Jim Morrison

I have been wishing lately that FDR had never coined the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It would be so useful right about now. I finally saw one of the Bush TV commercials, and it was so plain that the name of the game is now going to be fear for the whole of the election. Eight fucking months of unrelenting trepidation psychology. That much was clear to my, by now, expert eye. So far, other anti-Bush commentators have raged against Bush’s lack of taste in using images of national tragedy to make his pitch. (See Jimmy Breslin below.) I find myself a little beyond that. Taste isn’t even on the radar. The ads are straight subliminal massage. Scientology should be so deft. Expensive and slick, the Bushites have their hand right in the pants of the numbed of the nation. Horrible scary threats – foreign and domestic – abound, and George, and only George will protect us. George is deep-selling himself as what cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the Strict Father model with the added plus of God as his corner-man.

That I see George as more performing simian that warrior patriarch, and have real problems with those grown-voters who might buy such a clearly nonsensical and nursery illusion should probably disqualify me from further comment, and maybe I should accept my sensei-status and fuck off to a cave. What worries me, however, is that, for this strategy to succeed, the electorate have to be reduced to an infantile near panic. This is clearly the plan of the cognitive scientists of the right and the post-Orwellian consumerists who are getting their fat consultancy cheques from the Bush campaign

The knee-jerk reaction to the Bush psycho-strategy is obviously to fight fear with fear. I rumble of corpo-fascist take-over and warn that “if we don’t defeat Bush in November, there may not be another election.” But is that the way to go? If the battle – and the larger culture war – is being fought between the cognizant of the coastal margins and the willfully stupid of the interior, how sensible is it to play on the fears of the cognizant? Do we really want to go the same route and infantilize the only ones who may have a clue what’s happening? But then again, how the hell does one get across a radical, positive, hopeful, maybe even utopian sales-job in a climate of abject terror of terror itself?

Does this require some discussion? The comments board is over there, or, better still, write byron4D@aol.com for longer postings.

You might also notice that I have used quotes from Frank Herbert, Marilyn Manson, and Jim Morrison at the head of this post, wondering also what might be found in the annals and rhetoric of our own culture to counter all this ugly and bloodily judgmental religion. Are we ashamed of our own poets of resistance, or afeared they will antagonize the dumb and dumber?

I hope this can be the start of something productive. If you agree, please mail it around...

JIMMY BRESLIN

Breslin, as a columnist, was one of my early-scribe heroes. Fidicen sent me a link that indicates he’s still rocking there at NY Newsday. Here he is on the Bush commercials. Just a snippet, hit the link for the full story

In his first campaign commercial, George Bush reached down and molested the dead.
But this only in keeping with both Bushes. George Bush, Sr., had the badge of officer Eddie Byrne, who was gunned down in South Jamaica, and he stood up at Christ the King High School in Middle Village and held it up and said he would have this badge on him forever. Some chance. Bush then led high school girls into insane cheers for the death penalty.
Now, right off, this second George Bush came up with the badge of a Port Authority cop, George Howard, who died. He was from Hicksville. His mother gave Bush the son's badge. When Bush came back to the trade center a year later, he reached into his pocket and whipped out that badge and he had a tear in his eye. What makes it worse is that this George W. Bush acts like he's entitled to treat the remains of a dead man like a souvenir. Now he shows a commercial with dead bodies, or body parts, covered with an American flag being taken through the smoke and flames of the world trade center attack. It caused people who had lost family members in the attack to complain about using the dead or parts thereof being used for a politician's gain.
"Bush is afraid to let us see the dead being brought back from Iraq," one fire fighter said yesterday.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/columnists/nyc-bres0306,0,4578571.column

CRYPTIQUE – Would Adam or Steve please pick up the white courtesy phone?