| |
The Land Beyond
Smart and Dumb By Mike Tully
There was a moment in one of the 2000 presidential debates when
the man who would lose the plebiscite but win the Presidency was
asked about affirmative action. He didn’t know what it was, but
said, if it meant quotas, he was agin’ it. Don’t like quotas, never
did (except for that Yale legacy thing). Al Gore sighed one of his
deepest Aunt Bea sighs and muttered, "That speaks volumes."
Well, it did, and still does, but not in the way I thought it did
at the time, and probably not in the way Al Gore thought it did,
either. My reaction to Bush’s stammering, ignorant answer was to ask
myself: why in the world is this moron running for President when he
doesn’t realize that quotas have been repeatedly struck down by the
courts? I know he was not permitted to darken the door of a law
school, but surely his stable ponies had heard of Bakke and
Adarand? They must have known that affirmative action does
not mean quotas because quotas are illegal. So, their guy made a
fool of himself by ranting against something that does not exist,
didn’t he?
No, he didn’t. Existence was not the issue. Reality didn’t
matter.
While Al Gore and I and other pseudo-intellectuals stuck our
liberal fingers down our we-know-better throats, the Bushmen were
happily concocting a fantasy world wherein affirmative action can be
albatrossed with the "quota" label because there is no place for
affirmative action there. Affirmative action will always be defined
as a quota and will always be wrong in that world. Affirmative
action will not exist in any meaningful form there, because every
benign attempt at correcting historical deficiencies, every nuanced
ploy to achieve diversity, will be tarred with the accusation of
quota and the Bushmen will oppose them. Diversity, while a
compelling governmental interest in the United States of 2003, is
not a compelling governmental interest in the fantasy world of the
Bushmen.
So, Bush seemed ignorant of Bakke, Adarand,
Johnson v Santa Clara County and other cases that flapped
against the wind of his quota accusation. But, Bush’s
handlers found a way to elevate ignorance to "the vision thing" by
selling their product as a man who was above all that nonsense about
affirmative action and diversity. He lived in a different place,
that "shining City on a hill" where there is no affirmative action,
where diversity is not necessary, and teens actually engage in
abstinence. Enough people bought into the fantasy world that their
numbers – aided, certainly, by the failings of the Gore campaign –
made the race so close that lawyers had to be brought in to fix it.
Not a problem: five of the nine lawyers were Republicans. The
majority of five earned their fantasy world credentials by declaring
that their opinion was never to be cited as precedent. Never. In
other words, pretend it never happened. This is not real. It’s just
a dream.
Normally, that kind of historical aberration would be cured in
short order as the public awoke and shook off its post-election
hangover and asked itself who it slept with the previous November
and why. But, the public didn’t wake up in time. The public was
still sleeping it off, and a clever band of radicalized criminals
stole in under the radar and set our bed aflame. We’ve been acting
like people with our pants on fire ever since.
But, it’s still an hallucination. It’s a fantasy, but a different
kind of fantasy, evil stranger-danger instead of
dangerous-but-glamorous stranger, a new Gotham City type of
world with spies and opportunists swarming like termites and the
ever-present "Yellow Alert!" warning dangling over us like an
Orwellian ribbon tied to a tree. Yellow alert means the
danger level is "elevated." Do you realize we haven’t had a break
from "elevated" since the Bushmen came up with that cockamamie alert
notification months ago? Can you stay "elevated" for months at a
time? The only people I know who could wound up in rehab.
The chronic state of fear, the constant alertness, the ongoing
distractions, the induction of the Boogie Man into the Politics Hall
of Fame, all serve a president and administration that have been
peddling fantasy ever since the debates and Bush’s "quota" gaffe.
Gore and I looked on the debates as smart versus dumb: a good
scenario for Gore, who, like him or not, has an intellect that
dwarfs Bush’s. But Bush and his handlers invented a world beyond
smart and dumb. It didn’t matter that Gore knew the law of
affirmative action and Bush didn’t. The law simply didn’t matter to
the Bushmen and, in their crazed genius, they realized it didn’t
matter to a substantial number of voters either. Gore droned on like
the good kid in class while Bush lured us outside for a beer. Who
wanted to be in that stuffy old classroom when it was sunny outside?
Who wanted to hear about law, taxes, foreign policy, and the economy
when there was a good Western on? Gore tried to be FDR. Bush became
Little Joe. Who the hell wants to wake up with FDR?
The big issue for the coming election season is whether the
Bushmen can hold their political Jonestown together, or whether
enough people will shake off the potion to vacate the land beyond
smart and dumb and return to the world where even smart people do
dumb things and pay for doing them, sometimes by losing elections.
Eventually, the high unemployment rate, scary economy, metastatic
debt, American deaths in shady foreign adventures and the corrosive
effect of lies, damned lies, will be as hard to ignore as reveille.
Of course, the moment the electorate starts rousing from its
slumber, the alert status will rise, the Bushmen will embark on
another overseas adventure, Ashcroft will drill more holes into the
Constitution, and all shall conspire to stampede the American herd
back into its fantasy world, bedbound, kept, secure and sedated.
The next presidential election might well be decided by voters
who rise from slumber like Rosemary Woodhouse
and scream, "This is no dream, this is really happening!"
(c) July 9, 2003 by Mike Tully |
Mike has been writing a regular column on
Inside Track
Online since July 1, 2003. |
