Like Cyclops, diminished, diminutive and struggling under the weight of a self-regenerating plague of bad ideas, CPAC completed its 2009 conference in D.C. Once giants, these always-myopic visionaries rallied to cheer for fall and winter as the only meaningful seasons: “Let’s keep it dying and cold boys. Life is too messy, too unpredictable. Gotta keep reality on ice—or at least headed that way.”
As ebullient as a crazed, albeit articulate “Jack in the Box,” Michael Steele, the African American chairman of the Republican Party popped in to do his best imitation of Mama Barracuda—the self-loathing co-conspirator in The Last Days of Louisiana Red who wishes to resurrect the good old days of the ante-bellum south. But no conjuring can stop Steele, who now knows that the repudiation of the Republican Party was at root a PR failure. So Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”
Could Brother Steele be looking to tap into the “happy darky” myth where all one needs do to influence black folk is to create the appearance of change. “Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man!" These discordant accolades leaked from the lips of Michelle Bachmann, a Minnesota Congresswoman who famously asserted on Chris Mathews’ “Hardball” show that Barack Obama was un-American. So the “off the hook” Steele “be da man.” Her “you be de man” came as Steele finished up his speech in which he sought jovially to give reality a bad name.
One wonders if the CPAC attendees routinely dress themselves in front of one of those carnival mirrors that distort shapes and sizes, and that maybe the weird images giving back to them is the only world they know. The corridors down which they predictably tread are slowly transforming into funnels emptying into an antediluvian abyss. To paraphrase a line from “Hustle and Flow,” “It’s hard out there for a Cyclops, especially when said Cyclops is trying to be a pimp.” CPAC please….
Of course the always angry Rush Limbaugh brought the CPAC house down by calling President Obama a socialist, and asserting that John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch who was fired in part for profligate spending on redecorating his office ($1.3 million, including a $1400 trash can) and in doling millions in bonuses before being shown the door, was actually stimulating the economy. The Cyclopian Limbaugh loves logical fallacies almost as much as the republican leadership loves hypocrisy: hard to have real conversation when the folk you’re talking to would rather create fictive narratives that they can then dispute than actually discuss objectively verifiable events.
This is all bad faith, the juvenile intellect that can’t fathom a world in which their fancily fashioned falsehoods properly promoted don’t take priority over the lives being lived by actual people. Yea, I know: it worked for eight years. But it’s past time for bad ideas to stop fighting sleep.
Tell Cyclops to close that big ass eye and go the hell to sleep.
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