Dope

I had a large post today. Alas, the system froze for some reason, the blogger didn't post, and it is gone. Hmm, I don't feel like reconstructing it at the moment. Here, at least, is how it started out.

Remora
The crocodile tears of Rambo

Years and years ago, LI was a graduate student. I lived in a house with a flying circus of roommates, one of whom was a Mexican Marxist on a downer. The low was due to a deadly combo of misplaced affection, excess alcohol and Ronald Reagan. To cheer himself up, H. would rent films and watch them while drinking Papst Blue ribbon and eating little pieces of cheese and sausages. To liven the meal up, sometimes he would stick little toothpicks in the sausages. His favorite film, the one that he considered one of the great comedy classics of all time, was Rambo. Sometimes I would join him. I didn't find Rambo as worthy of repeated viewing as he did, but it was funny.Our favorite part was the final scene. After Rambo had personally kicked North Vietnam into the sea and freed a whole campful of MIA/POWs that were getting the guinea pig treatment from the sadistic Orientals, Rambo confronts some conventional military type who asks the sweat drenched superhero (the sweat oozed out of him by the bucketloads in the film, as I remember) what he wanted. In a strangled voice that was apparently some hommage to Clint Eastwood's on screen laconicism, Rambo said:

"I just want... my country... to love me... as much as I love it!"

At least, that is how I remembered it. At this point both H. and I would completely crack up. This had to be one of the funniest things ever said on film. I've since looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out I'm misremembering the line --- it is "We just want ...etc."

I'm not much of a prognosticator, or I would have understood that a whole new political sensibility was going to spring from Rambo's crocodile tears. A weak-kneed jingoism, a lachrymose nativism. This first became evident under the first Bush's term. The weirdly resentful revolt led by Buchanon in 1992, which dominated the Republican convention even as its candidate was visibly a minority phenomenon, arguably cost Bush I the election.

Well, we wonder whether the same thing isn't happening again. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been shamelessly playing to the tearful jingoists. It's a constituency that is captured, heart and soul, by the senile barking of Donald Rumsfeld, and whipped into a frenzy by every newspaper headline that hints at skepticism about its general bellicosity. So far, so good. However, it is easy to imagine that this kind of constituency might hold its panderers captive in the end. A replay of 1992 is a distinct possibility, with Bush having to mouth a position that is much more reactionary, much more nativist, than one he really holds. We think that if Bush can't navigate between this vocal group and the rest of the country, which may find extreme and expensive foreign policy adventurism mildly repulsive, he might do himself in. ...

Well, this is as much of the post as I've reconstructed so far. We'll publish the rest of it in the next entry.