To Where Do Conservatives Think of Exiling Themselves?

When Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II were elected, I often heard leftward-leaning folks threaten to leave the U.S. Usually this threat was expressed right before the election. "If Reagan gets reelected, I'm moving to Canada"--for example. I don't actually know anyone who ever exiled themselves thusly. I do know one fellow who has insured that he and his family now have dual citizenship in the U.S. and a European nation, just in case self-exile becomes an option.



Someone in class today raised the question of where rightward-leaning folk threaten to move to when elections disappoint them greatly. I owe this person a debt of gratitude because I had never thought about this question before.



As the person and others noted, Canada is probably out because many conservatives like to point to it and its healthcare system as embodying a cautionary tale. Is Dubai a possibility? I have no idea.


I've heard one can stash money in some place called the Cayman Islands, which I think are in the Caribbean, but I don't know if these islands are especially welcoming to conservative Americans.


I presume almost every nation in Europe would be unacceptable. Sweden has a shockingly effective combination of capitalism and socialism. The Swedes have universal healthcare, free college education, generous parental leave, and so on, but they also produce steel and cars, and they have a trade-surplus. They also talk very deliberately, and they listen during conversations, so Sweden is really not a comfortable place for most Americans, who like to talk first and listen later.



I think Swedes make their own jet-fighters, too, so they don't buy a lot of military equipment from us, and ever since the 18th century, they have become positively allergic to going to war--but we must remember that they did quite a lot of raiding for about 200 years way back when, circa 700-900 A.D.E. Maybe they got war out of their system, so to speak. Who knows? And there are only 8 million Swedes total, so with regard to possible invasions, the options are limited. They fought Norway a long time ago, and all the issues were settled. They don't like how Danes speak, but otherwise, I think they're okay with Denmark. They get along fine with Finns. They seem to pretend Russia doesn't exist, except for that terrible Chernobyl thing. They focus like a laser-beam on what to do during the summer. Is that a liberal or a conservative trait?



Conservatives seem to loathe France. Dennis Miller said that "France is dead to me" when the French leader balked at supporting the invasion of Iraq, for example. The French seem to have been unaffected by this announcement. How odd. One would think Dennis Miller's sentiments would hit France like an earthquake. :-)


Alaska is a possibility, I should think, because, well, look who's governor there--and you don't actually have to leave the nation. You just have to take a long flight, and in you're in a state governed by a person who galvanized the Republican base.



Numerous poetic possibilities exist, including "Sailing to Byzantium," in which Yeats dreams of "living" in a kind of permanent world of well wrought art, and Dickinson's poem about dwelling in possibility. Possibility is a very good town indeed.



Probably so-called conservatives and liberals have much in common, including the fact that neither actually exile themselves after a disappointing election, or at least very few of them do so. Also, for a long time, many people have argued that the Democratic and Republican parties are more similar than they pretend to be.



The Republicans may have to work on redefining themselves, however, at least for the purposes of the political spectacle. For a long time, they were very effective at demonizing "liberals" and thereby defining themselves by defining the "Other." They also once at least pretended to stand for fiscal restraint, but Reagan and Bush II pretty much ruined that with massive deficit spending. Ironically, Clinton seemed more economically prudent than they. Also, the Republicans wedded themselves to a particular strain of American Christianity--a mixture of wealth, interest in politics, and fundamentalism, best embodied, arguably, by Pat Robertson, who rails against a women's right to choose abortion, against homosexuality, against liberals, and against feminism, but who has accumulated a great deal of financial wealth (no camel-through-the-eye-of-the-needle stuff for him) and even ran for president once.




I wonder if they could go back to their not-so-distant roots and become Eisenhower Republicans. Eisenhower golfed a lot a balanced the budget, didn't he? Also, he didn't like Nixon. I think Eisenhower would find people like Rove, Gingrich, the writers at The Nation, the people on Fox News, et al., as just too petty and mean--and wound up a bit too tightly. I think that after you've directed a war against Hitler, you get some perspective.


The Democrats, of course, will have to learn how to handle success. They tend not to handle it well. (Nor do the Republicans.) If the Democrats were crafty, they would pursue some items on the Libertarian agenda, especially those connected with restoring civil liberties.

I really like discussing politics and occasionally blogging about politics because I know almost nothing about the subject, so I'm unencumbered by knowledge and experience. I especially like talking politics in the presence of one friend, in particular, who possesses a wealth of theoretical, social-scientific, and practical knowledge of politics. I suspect he simply hums songs in his head while I'm talking, and when I stop opining, he says something like, "That's interesting."



I'm not quite through gas-bagging, unfortunately, although undoubtedly you've stopped reading by now. So I'll just add that it is a well known fact that the Democratic Congress did the Democratic President Carter no favors, and I do wonder if the same will happen with Obama. I also wonder if right-wing radio will lower the temperature of their remarks; it's a genre that seems almost addicted to borderline hate-speech. I'd rather listen to a conservative countepart of the more-or-less liberal Thom Hartman, who engages in calm debates with conservatives. It's conversation-radio.



And who shall run for president in four years? Palin? Gingrich? Romney? I do hope Ron Paul runs again. I liked hearing him bring up going back to the gold standard. No one ever seemed to want to engage him on the issue. Go figure.

Anti-American, Un-American, American, Feminist

Congressperson Bachman from Minnesota has raised the specter of certain members of Congress (and of Obama) as being "un-American," or "anti-American," and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin has claimed that the "folks" in small towns love America, whereas, presumably, the folks in cities don't love America. William Bennett, on his radio show, opined that "liberal feminists"don't like Palin because a) she works b) she's attractive and c) she's happy.

Oh, my, there's so much to sort out here, especially for poets.

As a poet and a literalist, I tend to interpret "un-American" as "not-American." In other words, a Swedish citizen or a Chinese citizen would qualify as un-American. However, I am aware that Senator McCarthy defined "un-American" as Communist. I think that definition (his) is too limiting. I think a capitalist who is a citizen of Great Britain could be un-American.

"Anti-American" is more difficult. An anti-American person might be one who disagrees significantly with something economic, social, political, or aesthetic about the U.S.A., or about the Western Hemisphere, which consists of North and South America, and which, bizarrely, is named after an Italian. If one concedes that both the Constitution and American traditions value dissent and disagreement, might one proceed to argue that "anti-American" is "American"?

Meanwhile, Bennett's sentiments constituted a blast from the past, especially the 1970s past, when those opposed to, unfamiliar with, or frightened by feminism liked to caricature feminists as physically unattractive, unhappy ("bitter" was a code-word back then, as was "angry," as in "she [a feminist] seems so angry"), and not traditionally employed.

My definition of feminism is pretty basic. I define it as a perspective that advocates for and values the equal treatment of women in society, economics, politics, and the arts. Therefore, I don't agree with the premise that feminists would be bothered by how attractive Palin is, assuming she is attractive, and I assume she is, within certain conventional boundaries. I think she is a physically attractive person, but I think most people are physically attractive. I don't think feminists would be opposed to Palin's working, although I am reminded of the old joke about a White feminist and a Black feminist converging at a rally; the White feminist says she is protesting so that she can achieve employment (probably middle-class employment). The Black feminist says, "I've always worked"(at jobs that weren't so great).

I think I'm an American, by virtue of having been born in the United States. I think I am anti-American to the extent I disagree with certain policies put forward by the U.S., and with certain aspects of American culture and American history. I don't think I'm un-American, but that's chiefly because I think that term is a smelly red herring dressed up as an adjective.

I'd just add that feminists, be they White, Black, male, female, or whatever, are (in my experience) in favor of employment, physical attractiveness, and contentment. That Bennett thinks otherwise makes me think he is stuck, psychologically, in a place that's about 40 years old.

If he weren't well paid and well employed by such entities as CNN, I might attempt to generate pity for Bill B. It's as if he missed a lot of history. Rip Van Bennett. I suspect Bennett started out as an academic, didn't really like academic work, teaching, and academic pay, and decided to become a professional conservative media performer--not a bad gig in the Reagan and post-Reagan era.

Now, however, the act, the gig, is wearing a little thin. Memo to Bill: "louder, funnier, and more original"--that's what your act needs. But I'm glad you're employed, attractive (in a full-figured way), and happy. A lot of people I know think you're an asshole and a fraud, but I'm not willing to go quite that far. I think you got stuck in a gig, just like the guy who had the plate-spinning act on The Ed Sullivan Show. To be a member of the Punditocracy is to be a citizen in one of Dante's circles of Hell, and I think Bill B. would understand the reference. To change myths, I think the likes of Bill Bennett and George Will sold their souls to the Conservative PR machine and to popular corporate media. The machine and the media have lived up to their ends of the bargain. Bill and George are well paid and well known. However, the part about the loss of the soul is a problem, maybe.

Sarah Palin, Cubist Painting

As Murray Edelman has asserted, politics is largely a matter of spectacle in the U.S. It is often optimally viewed as a performance of one kind or another, and the alleged differences between candidates or parties are often contrived or exaggerated for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of, say, people or problems or "solutions."

Oddly enough, I caught a glimpse of what Edelman means way back when I was 16 and attending something called Boys' State, a kind of mock-governmental conference sponsored by the American Legion. One male per high school in California would converge on Sacramento and play politics, annually, in the summer. We were all juniors in high school.

Ronald Reagan spoke to us assembled high-school junior males (who had just elected, as our "governor" and "lieutenant governor" two African Americans--that says something about the 1970s, but that's another story).

We sat in the auditorium and listened to a warm-up act, and then Reagan arrived: BAM! Photographic lamps went on, TV cameras materialized, he entered the auditorium, surrounded by an efficient entourage, shook hands, smiled, worked the crowed, smiling, smiling, got up on stage, said nothing but said it well, got off the stage, shook hands, worked the crowd, everything being filmed, BAM! out the door. It was a schtick. Of course, I was mightily impressed. He was our governor! But something in the back of my mind told me: I just saw a schtick.

I thought of this when I watched the "debate" between Biden and Palin last night. It was the oddest political spectacle I've seen in a long time, and I think Biden thought the same thing. He looked at Palin sometimes as if she were from the moon, and it has almost nothing to do with politics (in the sense of policy or beliefs or what to do next or yadda yadda). It has to do with spectacle, and it has to do with gender, and something has gone terribly wrong.

I hate pretending as if I know anything about Sarah Palin because I don't know anything about her, really. I do think McCain made a reckless choice when he chose her (that's not her fault). I think it is evidence of an impulsive side he can't control.

But as I watched her last night, I saw an amalgamation of traits, affects, effects, gestures, gimmicks, and tricks that don't add up. Or rather, they add up to a kind of robot badly assembled, or a Cubist painting.

The parts include the following: cute--but a bit too old to be cute (mutton pretending to be lamb); "beauty-contestant"; anti-intellectualism (having knowledge about issues is a symptom of being "elite; when talking to your audience, drop the g from ing in words); put your head down and get through this awful event (she had loaded her rhetorical gun with statements, and she was going to shoot them regardless of what questions were asked); something vaguely corporate ( the suit, the glasses, the coiffure); cheap tricks or worn-out jokes ("There you go again": Reagan's line TWENTY EIGHT YEARS AGO; the "white flag of surrender": that is meaningless); the winking at the camera; the lame folksy reference to extra credit in third grade.

Sarah Palin is whoever she is. I don't know who she is. I'm sure she is someone with a unified personality. But Sarah Palin as political spectacle is a symptom of our political system, and something is terribly wrong. The amalgamation of traits she attempted to hold together with glue and tape during the debate is freakish and bizarre, and it says not all that much about her but volumes about how conflicted and fragmented our society is, particularly around issues of femininity and power. I think she's trying to do some kind of job she's been given, and she doesn't exactly know what the job is, except . . . get out there, make noise, be cute.

Reagan made the schtick work. Countless other politicians have, too. Clinton, Roosevelt, Nixon (until he disintegrated), Carter, Bush I, Bush II, take your pick. It has nothing to do with ideology, beliefs, or policy. It is a performance of a show named "Democracy": whatever.

Biden and Obama make the schtick work. The Clintons, too. The parts seem to cohere. They are at least plausibly familiar or familiarly plausible. McCain, too--except for his strange impulsive side.

In the spectacle of Sarah Palin, the schtick has come undone. I was fascinated by the spectacle of her last night because it suggested how badly politics can go wrong and in how many complex ways it can do so, and once again, I have to say it has little or nothing to do with ideology (I think in many ways Hillary Clinton has had to assemble herself into a Cubist painting, too). Sarah Palin the concocted, "prepped," inappropriately chosen, impulsively selected, hastily assembled political entity is a monstrosity. Who Sarah Palin the actual person is, I have almost no clue. Sarah Palin, candidate? A bizarre assemblage. A reflection of her society.