Paper Bag Time

Calhoun’s Cannons for Nov 16, 11

I watched as many of the Republican debates as I could stand without having to arrest myself for cruel and inhumane punishment, something candidate Michelle Bachman is four-square in favor of. So it’s clear to me its paper-bag-over-the-head time because nobody has any sense of shame any more since most of the candidates are suffering from The Sarah Palin Syndrome: no real-world assessment of self except some glowing, aggrandized version of, “ Of course I’m qualified to be President! I’m Wonderful Me!”

Even worse, I don’t think the public has any sense of shame either, which likely comes from too many people watching too many Mean-Girl, Gong-Show “reality” programs. In that world, talent-bereft, unqualified, humiliation-proof narcissists are the norm. And when those shameless characters show up on the political/public stage, the voters clearly don’t hear alarm bells going off in their heads. I mean, in a sane world, most of the Republican candidates wouldn’t have any poll numbers higher than zero.

So, it’s paper bag time for cowboy Rick Perry. He can’t even remember what he’s supposed to be adamantly opposed to. This is a guy whose brain can barely manage to operate on bumper-sticker slogans. Paper bag over the head for him.

And Newt? Really? Newt? He’s a hack who truly knows no shame. His overweening sense of his own wonderfulness has allowed him to shamelessly spend years turning up like a bad penny to haul his tired old failed ideas out of his portmanteau for all who will listen, blissfully unaware that the sane people in his audience are rictus-smiling and nervously edging out of their seats. Shhh, don’t make any sudden moves. Keep smiling. The door’s that way. That guy has so much shameful baggage, he doesn’t need a paper bag. He needs a Luis Vuitton suitcase the size of New Jersey, all charged to his $500,000 revolving Tiffany account. Paper bag him.

Ditto for Herman Cain. He needs a whole lot of paper bags to carry the lists of names of all the ladies who are coming out of the woodwork to complain of his improper canoodling. Plus, during a sit-down with newspaper editors from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he apparently had trouble understanding which Lybia was under discussion. Oh, Gaddafi, right, you mean that Lybia? In a reasonable world, his polling numbers would be minus-zero

As for More Water-boarding Michelle? Please. Paper bag.

And it doesn’t stop with presidential candidates. Jack Abramoff has hired some big PR flaks and will soon be staging a comeback. You remember Casino Jack, corrupt and corrupting lobbyist who would sell his grandmother to his mother then sell them both down the river? Major player in Bush’s Washington who has been spending time in jail for his efforts? Well, he’s coming baaaaccckkkk. And, unlike Nixon’s hatchet-man, Charles Colson, who found God while in prison, while Jack is claming a similar enlightenment, he isn’t planning to return to a quiet life of private penance for his sins. Oh, no. Jack’s back. Shameless. No paper bags for him. But will the public care? Will they boo and hiss and demand he go away? Not likely. Not in “Jersey Shore America.”

Not in Penn State America, either. Before the growing list of victims has even been identified, the alleged molester, Jerry Sandusky, appears on TV brazenly soft-soaping and justifying his behavior as “horseplay,” while the first reaction to all this by some Penn State students was to riot to protest the firing of their legendary Coach who did “as little as possible” to protect the boys, thereby doing “as much as possible” to protect the man who was preying on them. And now everyone is changing their stories, scrambling to cover their bare behinds with gym towels that are now suddenly the size of a micron.

Have we really come to this? Has our common sense, our basic sense of decency, our critical sense of what’s real versus what’s fake been so corrupted that we no longer know the difference? Or care? If so, then it’s time to bring back the paper bag.

In the Nov. 24 Rolling Stone magazine article, Matt Taibbi observes that the Occupy Wall Street movement “was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it.”

Gold star for Matt. He’s got it just about right.

O.K., Rick, Let's Do That

In the GOP debate last night, candidate Rick Perry said, "Maybe it's time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like, 'Let's get America working again and do whatever it takes to make it happen.'"

Whatever?  O.K. President Obama will present a jobs package tonight, so let's see how many Republicans will vote for it.  The jobs package will be a "whatever." Shall we place bets on the votes?

Want more "provocative language," here's something that all the GOPers who are babbling on about "job creation" need to remember:  Jobs are created from the bottom up, not the top down: Demand, then supply. 

A manufacturer of widgets doesn't wake up one day and say, "Oh, look, I just got a nice tax break, I think I'll go out and hire 10 people to make more widgets, even though nobody's buying my widgets because they have no jobs and no money to buy widgets and so I've got a warehouse full of widgets I can't sell, but with this nice tax break, what the hell, I think I'll just go make more of them that I can then store in another warehouse."

Or, as what has actually happened too many times, "Oh, look, nice tax breaks for moving my widget company off shore, so I'll lay off all my American workers, hire Indian workers and make bazillions of widgets to sell to the Chinese, then lobby Republicans in Congress to vote to get even more tax breaks on all my nice profit. After all, I'm a 'job creator!'"

So please think about that "provocative" reality the next time you hear some GOPer talking about "job creation" and "job creators," and "job creating tax breaks."

Thank you.

The Creepy Factor

So, Rick Perry declares he's running for President and the media pundits start visibly drooling and swooning and getting shivvers up their spines at all the manly manliness of the Dude, and salivating at now being able to push the election coverage into a simple-minded 24/7 empty of content sports metaphor with ratings and rankings and minute by minute plays to be called, and suddenly, watching him on the news, everything blurs and doubles and suddenly its all deja vuish again as Perry morphs into George Bush and I get cold chills and think, Aw, Gawd, we're gonna now bomb Iran because they may have weapons of mass destruction and then put the war on the national credit card since deficits don't matter if it's a Republican who's running them up, and give more tax breaks to rich people and oh, God, in no time there he'll be in a crotch-stuffed jump suit and  Texas-sized boots, all hat and no cattle, clomping across the deck of an aircraft carrier only to fall to the deck to raise his arms to heaven and thank Jeeeesus for his Victory over the Heathen and, while he's kneeling, to also pray for rain for Texas, then go on to dismantle Medicare, Social Security, EPA regulations, education reforms so as to turn the U.S.A. into one big polluted states-rights successionist Texas filled with minimum wage jobs, a country being run by a handful of wealthy oligarchs overseeing the serfs. 

Oh, Boy, America can't wait. Yeeee haw!