As the World Churns
The contest among Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Huckabee is our primary TV soap
By Mick Farren
Back in January, just prior to the California primaries, I observed how all the subjects that would normally take up air time on TV news were being obliterated – except for sensational murders, sports stars on steroids, and the mandatory funny animal bits – by constant coverage, some trivial in the extreme, of the various swings and roundabouts of the seemingly never-ending presidential election. Iraq all but became the forgotten war, aside from the occasional set of casualty figures, and a brief furor over more steroid use by Blackwater mercenaries. George W. Bush was able to claim his surge was a success, without being challenged on the facts, but all else was either sound bites of the candidates, actual debates, clips of debates, or talking-head, pundit-analysis on any of the above. Now the field has been narrowed down to Obama/Clinton on one side, and McCain and the trailing Huckabee on the other, the saturation coverage has morphed into some surreal, verging-on-fantastic soap opera, maybe closer to Twin Peaks than As the World Turns, but a soap all the same.
The male lead is, of course, the poised, handsome Barack Obama, with his elegant mannerisms and even more elegant suits, but who, according to the portion of the script written by the attack dogs of the right, is a secret Muslim fifth-columnist, a one-man terror cell, who, if elected, will sell us out to Al Qaeda within hours of his inauguration. (And if his middle name and picture of him in turban aren’t sufficient proof, his refusal to wear an enamel pin of the flag in his lapel clearly brands him as un-American.)
Pitted against the devious Obama, of course, is the ruthless and power hungry Hillary Clinton, with her equally devious repertoire of cunningly faked emotions who will rail, pout, and posture as the moment or circumstance dictates. According to this twisted plot, Hillary is really motivated by a psychotic will to power after being globally humiliated by her husband Bill, who is not only a serial philanderer, but the Tony Soprano of the Democratic Party, with Ted Kennedy snapping at his heels like a jealous Paulie Walnuts – the twin hit-men of the left.
But what is a soap with sex? This of course was seemingly supplied by the otherwise bumbling former POW, John McCain, who had supposedly engaged in an allegedly torrid affair with a hot-blonde telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman. This appeared to have all the making of a perfect soap scandal, only marred by the fact that McCain at times bears a remarkable resemblance to a boiled potato, and Iseman looks like a younger and less severely groomed version of his wife. Then overnight, by a process that I have yet to fathom (the unfathomable often being a key element in soaps), it turned out to be all the fault of The New York Times. Meanwhile Mike Huckabee, who plays bad bass guitar, and will appear on any TV comedy show that asks him, seems to be counting on the votes of every American who believes that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs in 4000 B.C. to, if not make him president, maybe the evangelicals’ VP or, at least, a force with which to be reckoned at the Republican convention.
The one area that doesn’t seem to figure in the daily drama is the White House. George Bush hardly rates a cameo in the 2008 political soap. The war drags on with the only end seemingly in Bush’s imagination and speeches, while the mounting stack of corruption charges, the torture debate, and the efforts to immunize the telecom giants against class action suits for domestic spying are hardly mentioned by anyone but Keith Olbermann.
The real question is, do I believe a word of these endless theatrics? The truth is maybe in there, but it’s become so bent out of shape that belief can only be suspended as we wait for the next day’s installment, and maybe the plot device of the evil twin.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
Published: 03/05/2008
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