COUNT OF MANIFESTO

Primaries are approaching. That endless spectacle where the wise and the honest are separated from the electable. Of course you can be wise and honest as long as it’s plain as day you’re unelectable…. otherwise you’ll be shot. How the wise and honest accomplish this feat is one of the mysteries of body language. But accomplish it they do and you’re convinced you’d never see them across the desk at a used car lot. Since a substantial part of the Presidential job description is being able to lie with a straight face, they’re off the hook.

Along with the coming soundbites and fury are the inevitable calls for the elimination of the electoral college. Antiquated, undemocratic, a pointless formality. So, I might point out, is Congress, but as of yet I hear no cries for its abolishment. All of the electoral college’s “faults” would be piffle were it not for its real shortcoming, dullness. The fact is the only other college around without a football team is the College of Cardinals and they have pomp, pageantry and that puff of smoke.

Despite all this I think the electoral college worth saving. Almost all the artifacts handed down by the Founding Fathers have lately disappeared. The Bill of Rights is gone. The Constitution is gone. Well, not exactly gone, its language just simplified to read, “All powers not vested in the corporations are too insubstantial to be worth comment in this document.”

So the electoral college is our last artifact, and in the name of Madison, Jefferson and the heroic paper boy who delivered the Federalist Papers, I say keep it. It’s PR just needs a little sprucing, that’s all. Start with a mascot. Something warm and fuzzy. How about a Panda? The electoral college Pandas. Better already. Now all we need is a football team. A great coach would help. Maybe Charlie Weis will be available after this year.

Don’t get me wrong, Edwards’ fairness in America is a fine vision. It’s not that I don’t like the “Two Americas” phrase. I used it myself in a screenplay I wrote in 1995. It’s just fairness will never get anybody elected. I know, what about Jimmy Carter? That was in the stars, an extraordinary conjunction of Vietnam and Watergate. And Edwards has fine position papers, they’re just too abstract and timid. What’s required is a bold vision, something that will inspire, put him above and beyond Mrs. Nafta and company.

Kennedy committed the country to going to the moon in ten years. Edwards should commit America to a new Manhattan project, a NASA for the 21st century, a scientific breakthrough in the creation of energy that will make America truly self sufficient in 15 years.

Self sufficiency, now there’s an American virtue. It sure beats scavenging around the Mideast. Not that scavenging doesn’t have its place in history. Great ideas are few and slow in coming and human needs and desires relentlessly proceed and the gap is filled by two endlessly recycled strategies, stealing and getting  it cheaper.

What ever happened to American ingenuity? It certainly can come up with a better idea than either an oil grabfest with the Europeans and China or having our workers compete with Sri Lankans. Edwards should put forth that better idea, a consortium, public and private to discover a new form of energy. The status quo parties should be allowed in so they don’t lobby the idea to death.

It’ll cost a fortune. But so does the current foreign escapade which yields nothing  This puts America in the world vanguard for a century. And talk about fairness, in Kennedy’s language this would definitely be the great tide that would raise all boats.

True independent thought seems to be dead. All sides, left, right and everything outside and in between are hunkered down in their private enclaves, passing their cherished notions among themselves until the sacred cows grow fat on the rich feed of ingroup political correctness. Despite apparent animosities and some long distance sniping, it’s clear everyone finds this static landscape of immobilized certainties quite soothing. I guess it’s the reassurance that no one is going to stray far enough from their entrenched notions to be a problem.

So in the interests of bringing maneuver to this Western Front of an intellectual landscape and just plain fun I thought I’d load up the virtual concession wagon with basting sauce and take on some of these sacred cows from time to time. I’ve designed a neon for the occasion.

“Edwards and the Vision Thing” was about an issue that would put Edwards above and beyond Mrs. Nafta and the rest of the PAC rats. Saving New Orleans and universal healthcare are obviously issues that Edwards should make a strong stand about, but so will all the other candidates. They will make a pass at the energy crisis, but compromised by their support of the status quo, they will offer up ridiculously underfunded and ineffectual solutions.

The Clinton administration set aside a little over a billion dollars for its “Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles”. To put this completely inadequate effort in perspective, the cost of the current travesty in Iraq is approaching 500 billion dollars. That says everything about the priorities of the status quo and the politicians wedded to it and terrified of being called “liberal big spenders”

Of course Edwards will be called a “Big Spender”. Parents pay for their child’s college education. It’s a lot of money. Are they big spenders? No, because it helps set up their child for life. Well this would help set up America for generations to come.

Where’s he going to get the money?, he will be asked. The same place the Republicans get it when they decide to have a war or do one of their bailouts. Come to think of it, after GW stole the last election, maybe the American middle class should have incorporated, declared bankruptcy and got bailed out.

The coming scramble for diminishing resources will involve us in one Iraq after another, unless we break the stranglehold of the status quo. Edwards should bring together the people who have the expertise to create an alternative and the entrepeneurs who will develop it. There are a lot of top notch scientists who would be thrilled not to have to make their living designing new bombs, but rather discovering the next generation of alternative energy.

From Ocean City in the Sinepuxent to Marina Del Rey in the Ballona Creek, an iron curtain of corporate uniformity has descended across the Continent. Wouldn’t it be a relief in this kudzu like proliferation of sameness to see a business like the following.

Publishing is a tough biz. You shell out a mint for a run and in a wink of an eye the book is remaindered for nickels and dimes. There is another way. You own the rights to the content (which few read anyway). Make a few minor changes to the cover design tailored to broadening its market, voila your project has a second life. With the right changes, a very profitable one.

Take Schumacher’s book “Small is Beautiful”. The point is not that it did okay targeting the niche audience who are interested in “saving the planet”. Why loose out on the incomparably larger audience of avid readers who couldn’t care less if we went to hell in a handcart?

Just take a look at the example below and you’ll agree there’s no way the republished work won’t sell rings around the original.

Say you’re keen on starting a war like the neocons today, the cons is short for constricted arteries as they are old and nothing warms an old man’s heart like seeing young men go off to war. I say war, but no President actually declares one any more, it’s too much trouble I guess, or maybe it’s a numbering thing, unlike the movies they’re reluctant to have World War 3,4,5 etc.

But they want their war. They’ve been working the nuclear angle but it might not have the legs since they got stung on their previous WMDs routine. Publicity is always helpful and they own the media. Unfortunately Rupert Murdoch is no Randolph Hearst and we’re lacking a bona fide Lawrence of Arabia to glorify it all.

So how to start this Iran thing? This is proving as difficult as starting a fire in a damp bog. First off you need an excuse and there have been many. Wars have been fought over salt and water, babes in incubators, dominoes, wife stealing, remember the Maine, remember the Alamo, remember 9-11. I think the remember thing is a second tier idea given the country suffers from historical amnesia.

What about making the world safe for democracy? Democracy is always a good one despite intruding on Wilson’s territory. Still only 10% of the people actually vote here so maybe the phrase doesn’t have that spine tingling effect anymore, and some finger pointer might grumble about rigged elections or Pinochet, Musharraf or other of our dictatorial friends.

An “incident” is always tried and true. Gulf of Tonkin sort of thing. An expert in this field had this to say.”The most favorable move both from the political and military standpoint would be a lightning blow to be delivered under the pretext of some incident which will provoke Germany to abrupt action.” -Hitler 30 May 1938.

1938?! Just shows a good idea is a joy forever. Hire some suspicious looking characters to graffitti the wall of an Iranian McDonalds with “Yankee Stay Home” or “falafels rule” and away we go. On the other hand there’s no telling these days when a stray passerby with a digicam will ruin the whole thing.

I’ve got a better idea. Start this war with a typo. Typo?! you say. Hear me out. A junior analyst at CIA comes forward, I say junior because you’ve already used up the brass foul up excuse, and informs your media that we’ve been fighting the wrong war due to a clerical error. He holds in his hand a crucial memo advising the President to go to war with Iran only Iraq was typed instead. An honest mistake. They are neighbors and n is only three letters away from q.

Lest you think this typographical approach excessively novel, there is the Zimmerman letter and WW1. The President only has to offer his profound apologies, saying he’ll see to it the mistake is rectified and make good on the 600 billion dollars spent by embarking on the war he was supposed to fight all along, the war with Iran.

Is it me or does the current regime in Washington seem a little over the top in its handling of Iran? I mean what ever happened to gratitude? Let me take you back a bit. The late 70’s. After Vietnam and Watergate reform struck like a plague. We had endless investigations by Congress and we had Mr. Rogers in the form of Jimmy Carter as President.

Just when the outlook for realpolitik seemed hopeless the Iranians up and overthrew our Shah, I mean their Shah, and seized hostages and the US embassy. Maybe they were still pissed over the CIA removing Mossadegh, the democratically elected president of Iran in 1953 and replacing him with our man in Teheran, the Shah. This seemed only fair as the Soviets had their puppet governments in Eastern Europe, surely we should be allowed to have ours. Or maybe they were tired of the Savak the Shah’s secret police. This also seems reasonable as torture has only lately become respectable.

Thanks to the Mullahs, the hostage crisis sent Carter’s popularity spiraling downward with the election coming up against Ronald Reagan. So far so good. The Mullahs were also helpful in brokering a deal with Reagan’s campaign head and future CIA director, William Casey to delay the release of the hostages until after the election. This was even better as it assured Reagan the election. How the Mullahs the avowed enemies of the Great Satan America and not exactly friends with CIA Casey were contacted back channel one could only speculate on? I wonder if they were filed on Casey’s rolodex (this was before cellphones) under M for Mullah or A for Ayatollah? Maybe there’s more to their relationship than meets the eye?

There are those who question the legality of a private citizen secretly negotiating with a foreign power to influence an election, but the world being what it is, I wouldn’t want a president who wasn’t capable of doing just that.

Sure enough Reagan gets elected and almost instantly the hostages are released. The working relationship with the Mullahs turns out to be so chummy when Congress refuses to give Reagan the money he needs for the Contras in Central America he secretly has arms sent to Iran in exchange for cash. He gets some bad press over IranContra but meanwhile reform is forgotten, unions are busted, the Cold War won and all’s well with the land.

Just for all this you’d think the realpoliticians would have a little soft spot in their steely hearts for the Islamic fundamentalists. But there’s more. GW has just been elected. His presidency is stalled going nowhere. Suddenly fundamentalists attack the trade center and it’s all turned around. (Sound familiar?) Neocons have their new Pearl Harbor, Patriot Acts are passed and wars dying to be waged are waged.

Maybe these guys think they paid off the debt giving Stinger missiles to the Mujahedin in their battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. So these fundamentalists seem to have taken the fun out of fundamentalism. They helped both Reagan and Bush, helped turned back the ugly tide of reform, and helped win the Cold War. I think they deserve better. The next time some high Washington official rings them up on their cell, take a cue from old Casey, it’s Mr. Mullah.

Nothing is more dismaying than seeing a workman trying to do a job without the right tools. It is with dismay therefore that I see the President and his assistants struggling to dismantle that great edifice the Constitution. Rather than laboring mightily away with Patriot Acts, Presidential findings, executive orders and the lot, which are the equivalent of trying to reduce the Great Wall of China to dust using a nail file, I suggest adding the following amendment to the Constitution. Insisting on using an exceedingly fast track, the President can whisk the Amendment through Congress and the State Legislatures in the morning and be back on his mountain bike in the afternoon, satisfied at a job well done.

The gains of postmodern art criticism are legendary. It has deconstructed the crumbling pillars of aesthetic and moral judgment. It has seen to it that no clique is left behind. It has elevated self justification to a fine art and in the process created a richness of syntax that makes Heidegger seem like Mickey Spillane. But ironically after all this ground breaking work, it has balked at taking on what would be its finest achievement…. ironic because after antiquating aesthetic and moral judgment it has allowed political correctness and aesthetic absolutism to stand in the way of elevating Adolf Hitler to his proper place as the greatest artist of the 20th century.

It is amazing that at this late date there are those who still scoff at the idea of Hitler even being an artist, never mind the greatest artist of the 20th century. Picasso is their choice. Absurd. After all, who’s greater, the man who created a memento of Guernica or the man who created Guernica?

The fact that Hitler himself regarded himself as an artist means little. These critics derisively point to his early work they dismiss as pedantic and uninspired, completely missing the point that as a visionary he was preparing to leapfrog over scores of modernism’s pet fads… impressionism, fauvism, surrealism, etc..right into the heart of postmodernism. In their defense this all would take place on an unimagined scale. They were not prepared to see WW2 as a happening, Buchenwald as an installation, and the rubble of Rotterdam and Stalingrad as conceptual art. Perhaps it was the fact that he could use the Luftwaffe rather than a local moving company to place the rubble obscured his artistic achievement. There are not many artists who can count on the Wehrmacht as part of their palette.

Critics continue to believe that just because he had a rather consuming day job, he was politically motivated. Not only critics but historians as well have been pursuing the Hitler as political animal theory to its sorry end, making many of his momentous decisions “mistakes” in the process. They are only mistakes because they are erroneously regarded as political rather than artistic. Hitler was not a politician who dabbled in art, he was an artist who dabbled in politics and used it to further his art. Who but an artist could have been so jealous of other artists? Hitler was an artist from beginning to end. The time is long overdue for the crowning achievement of postmodernism, a retrospective of Adolf Hitler’s work at the Whitney.

It’s decades overdue because everyone so completely misunderstood Goering’s utterance, “When I hear the word culture… I reach for my revolver. (This of course was his paraphrase of “Whenever I hear the word culture… I release the safety catch of my Browning!” from Hanns Johst’s play, Schlageter). They took it for some atavistic attack on culture when it was a brilliant postmodernist expansion of the notion of culture.Goering after all was an avid art collector, perhaps over avid, and Johst was a playwright. The critics couldn’t see past the patina of archaic revival and the distortions associated with the infantile stage of Fascism. The mature Fascism we have now not only has more transparent and better production values, but more importantly sees no need to exterminate people, when it can simply reduce them to shoppers.