THE ROVING EYE Value-added victory
By Pepe Escobar
Ohio is
settled. Now let's flatten Fallujah.
"Islam"
is just a code word. The Bush armies view the world
as a supreme menace. Realpolitik practitioners who
dream of the return of post-World War II alliances
are flawed: George W Bush's US and Western Europe are
now two separate universes, as much as the blue
(Democratic) states of the US west and northeast coasts, plus the
industrial Midwest, are confronted to the alternative
universe of the red (Republican) states of the
Confederacy and the Old West.
Considering the
Bush administration's track record and the way
strategist Karl Rove's negative campaigning was
conducted, there's no reason to believe in Bush II's new
mantra of "reaching out" for "broad support". The
Rove-Cheney-Bush machine simply does not need it. The
proof: Vice President Dick Cheney, in his introduction
to Bush's victory speech, claimed a broad mandate. A 51%
majority is not a broad mandate. It's a narrow mandate -
because it excludes the wealthy and progressive
northeast and the west coast plus the industrial
Midwest.
I'm a believer
During the long, bitter presidential campaign there was
never a national debate over an economic program -
only the obsession with security, the logic of
fear. The Rove-organized machine smashed any possibility
of unity by bombing the electorate with its usual weapons
of mass destruction: fear, ignorance, intolerance
and religious righteousness. The US corporate media played
along with this strategy and are now repeating the mantra that
"moral values" gave the election to Bush. There's no
effort to analyze how cynically these values have been
instrumentalized.
William Faulkner wrote that in the
American south the past isn't dead; it isn't even past.
The south would never elect a Yankee president to begin
with. That's a key reason for the Democratic defeat, apart
from John Kerry not deciding what he really stood for
and his campaign doing nothing to counteract the Bush
machine.
As the much-documented negative
campaigning worked its marvels, it also managed to
convince millions of farmers, factory workers,
carpenters, shop clerks and waitresses all over the
dreary wasteland of rural red states to vote for Bush -
against their own economic interests. It's a remarkable
feat, to persuade the poor working class and the
struggling lower middle class to vote for tax breaks for
billionaires. How to fool them? Simple: by promoting
"moral values".
In Ohio for instance, a number
of sources have confirmed to this correspondent that
support for a constitutional amendment against gay
marriage - included in the ballot - was essential in
drawing the "values" armies to the polls, thus carrying
the state for Bush. The amendment was approved in all 11
states where it was submitted.
With
approximately 40% of Americans declaring themselves
evangelicals or born-again Christians, according to a
series of Gallup polls, the heartland and this composite
of the Confederacy and the old West is a right-wing wet
dream: God, guns, gays. The Democrats never stood a
chance in rural, working-class areas - even though these
people would benefit from the Democratic platform on
taxes and better health care. But as this correspondent
recently saw in Arkansas, Oklahoma and northern Florida,
for instance, they all see Democrats as an arrogant East
Coast elite. The perception of course has been
mercilessly reinforced for years by the Republican
machine and its media surrogates.
God, guns,
gays The Republicans bet that in the battle
to win the cultural war, ordinary people don't relate
to issues (it's too abstract, it requires reflection)
... they prefer "values" (it's so reassuring in such
a complex world). God, guns, gays. That's it.
The environment is also a no-go in the heartland:
most ordinary people view it as another elitist game.
Game, set, match. Oregon's governor, Ted Kulongoski,
a Democrat, may have touched the heart of the matter
when he said the Republicans have created " ... these
social issues to get the public to stop looking at
what's happening to them economically. What we once
thought - that people would vote in their economic
self-interest - is not true, and we Democrats haven't
figured out how to deal with that."
Rove was
right when he confidently predicted - based on field
data collected by his formidable regimenting machine -
that the high turnout in this election would concern
most of all the evangelical right. The church-regimented
Bush armies literally stormed the polls. So the evidence
seems to be clear: by applying a brilliant diversionary
tactic of mass manipulation, you can make people vote
for "values" against their own pockets. Especially when
they fear a world they cannot understand.
Even
on a purely technical level Rove had the upper hand. He
calculated that the demographic shift in the US
population from 2000 to 2004 represented seven precious,
additional electoral votes to the red states. So to
start with Bush only had to keep the states he won in
2000 - which he essentially did. Kerry started with the
disadvantage of having to capture at least one
significant red state. It could have been Ohio - but the
Rove "storm the polls" machine was prepared.
As Bush is on a self-proclaimed mission from God,
the Bush armies in the red states just had to transfer
from the churches to the polls. Political scientists
will spend generations analyzing how a
mobilized God-fearing minority managed to take over a major
political party, marginalize Republican moderates and capture 51%
of the electorate - even while the economy is
going down, there's no end in sight for the Iraq
disaster, and al-Qaeda is openly acknowledging its
long-term strategic goal of bankrupting the US. "Fear"
is the unifying theme. Fear of "terrorists" - and fear
of gays.
The new 'civil war' The 51%
majority who voted for Bush fully deserve what they're
going to get. But not the other 48% - and much less the
rest of the world. Among the overwhelming output of the news
networks and the blogosphere, among the torrents of
e-mails circulating the world and examining every single
angle of the most crucial election in the post-modern
era, one voice seems to stand out. He describes himself
as Aris, a solitary American face-to-face with his
computer - and himself:
The unavoidably obvious explanation
is that Americans are by and large morons.
Simple-minded, uninformed and under-educated, intellectually lazy
and proud in their ignorance to boot, self-important
and self-righteous, arrogant and benighted idiots.
They are a reflection of George W Bush, and in him they
saw themselves. That's why they love him and trust him
so. Their reality is the faith-based myth that America
is blessed and always right and great and perfect
and freedom is handed down by God and not
man-made constitutional governments and cultures of
tolerance and inquiry. They are certain that the "real"
America is in the unpleasant, xenophobic, homophobic,
red states in the middle, where everybody has a
white picket fence in the brain and they don't seem aware
of their own squalor and the fact that they make
ends meet only because the far more prosperous blue
states continue to subsidize their light-beer guzzling.
But of course the 51% is not totally made
of "morons". As this correspondent has seen first-hand - the
standard greeting: "You're not from around here, are you?"
- they learn about the world "out there" from fake news,
staged events and sound bites. They might even
suspect something is wrong with their alienation, but
they are too scared - too lazy? - to contemplate the
implications. And most crucially, they are often decent
people who want to do the right thing. But they are not
provided the instruments for it because nobody,
certainly not America's corporate media, is showing that
they have been taken for a painful ride by the
Rove-Cheney-Bush machine.
There's a form of a new "civil
war" going on in the United States. It's up to the rest
of the world and world institutions to give full support
to the 50 million-plus American voters - plus the
millions of forgotten, invisible faces of America who
didn't even bother to vote - who are now engaged against
Bush's "jihad". Bush's "jihad" terms are well known. The
matter of Ohio has been dealt with. Now it's on to the
flattening of Fallujah - and then the bombing of Iran,
Syria, the whole hit list. That's exactly what al-Qaeda
- and the neo-conservatives - want. That's a jihad our
world cannot afford.
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