The Grinning Corpse

by Hunter [courtesy of Daily Kos]

Some people should not make a habit of smiling. On most people it looks good; some, though, seem not to have the proper face for the task. When John McCain smiles, the look is reminiscent of a skull wrapped tightly in a large wet sock. He smiles so rarely during speeches that it is disconcerting; he does it with such a pained grimace that it is very nearly frightening.

If I were to come up with an overall theme for the Republican National Convention -- and fortunately for both me and them, I am a partisan of the opposite stripe, and therefore unlikely to ever be hired on for such a task -- it would have to be The Grinning Corpse. I picture a happy, stoic stiff, unconcerned with its own demise, unaware that the hands of the clock have kept moving in its absence. It smiles broadly, very nearly daring the world to kill it off once again, just so the bag of bones can laugh it off yet one more time. That is my overall impression of nearly everything involved with this administration, and of the party that has wrapped itself so tightly around them. The remaining Bush days, filled with happy talk of Iraq, and of torture and crime, and drill baby drill. A middle finger to any patsies still concerned for the environment; a halfhearted grunt in response to any plea for an energy policy more substantive than a longer-handled shovel; a vacuous stare towards any of the rest.

That is not to say I consider the election over -- far from it. If modern elections have taught us anything, it is that polices, strategies, and realities hardly matter. You could nominate a dog for President, and it would have a decent chance, so long as it were handsome. You could even get the Supreme Court to approve of the whole thing. No, elections are about narratives, and narratives are about talking points, and talking points are about replacing the good, wholesome reality that exists outside of every window with a version more friendly to your interests, and easier on the eyes of the voter you are trying to woo. And it all works. The tasks of actual government and policymaking is, after all, a triviality to pass the time between election seasons.

Partisan snipe or not, the Republican convention was, in a single word... redundant. The event was so predictable as to pass for, what? A lackluster reenactment of another convention, perhaps? The primary and nearly sole noteworthy decoration was a behemoth screen onto which patriotic treacle could be spread like butter on bread -- and that was it. It was a magnificent design decision, for on that towering screen the Party could represent any America they needed to, and gladly did. Cornstalks, sunsets, people saluting flags. People riding bicycles while happy, and incidents of horrific bloodshed, all set to music and the needs of the Party. No need to look outside: watch the screen. No need to ask difficult questions: look at the fluttering flag.

Every such convention is mired in forced sentiment and over-the-top displays of national emotion, but setting it all upon a single screen, so that there is nothing else to look at, nowhere else for the eye to wander... you almost have to admire it, as simple tool of indoctrination. A single canvas, upon which their America could be painted, an America where war is simple, and funerals burst with patriotic pride. An America where ethnic people are quiet and happy, and nobody is ever behind on their mortgages. But all of it is so paper-thin that it would vanish as rapidly as flicking off a light, if a Democrat was elected to the most solemn post. Or if anyone looked outside.

It was either a most dour party or a most ripping wake. But aside from the sheer spectacle of the Palin speech, the event was noteworthy primarily for being so perfect a copy, in sentiment, of every other Republican national event of the last decade. Nothing was different from the conventions of 2000, or 2008; the faces changed, but the speeches were utterly interchangeable. A happy corpse in deed and tone; a Halloween ball, complete with masks. Or maybe, more simply, a televised echo. An eddy of politics just now dislodged from eight years ago, ready now to be made anew.

Indeed, there seemed a palpable sense of relief when the convention was all but canceled for the first day thanks to hurricane Gustav. The pundits made no bones about it: the Party had "dodged a bullet" because President Bush, their President Bush, was obliged to cancel his appearance. The perfectly obvious and purportedly rational reasoning behind the punditry: the Republicans intended, as much as possible, to pretend that he and his administration did not exist. The convention was designed to exist in an absolute vacuum. There was the screen, and nothing else. There was relatively little interaction with the host city. There was almost no mention of the current administration. According to news reports, the convention schedule was carefully tailored so that television pundits would have little chance to weigh in with commentary of their own, during the proceedings.

In the absence of Bush, or his administration, or his policies, or their outcomes, the Republican Party was free once again to set the sails of their political fantasies, and shout -- once again -- how grand and different it would be once they were put in charge of it all. Again, that is. And it was uncanny:

Instead of Zell Miller, ex-Democrat turned bitter, self-parodying curmudgeon, the role was played this time around by Joe Lieberman. His duty: to assert that regardless of facts on the ground, all sensible people know that conservatism is still the beacon it once was, and will be again, because the other party is mean.

Instead of George Bush as lovable but dazed and addled-sounding speaker, serving up the words from a teleprompter as if they were moths fleeing from his mouth, the role was taken on by John McCain. His identical duty: to assert that he is a different kind of conservative from the much-despised last version, and has, among other things, the basic human empathy and awareness that his dunderheaded predecessor lacked.

In the honorary Reaganesque role of new hyper-conservative star to be heralded by the party as their savior, their primary if not sole qualification being that they are one of the few members of the party not well enough known in Washington to have yet been discredited, the part was ably filled by Sarah Palin. Her duty: to get through the evening without screwing up, thus exceeding all declared expectations.

The rest of the Party was admirably played by caricatures of themselves, at least insofar as time permitted.

The War On Terror was portrayed by a short film, in which the deaths of thousands were replayed and the narration featured a deep voice of the sort that would otherwise be doing movie trailers. The film had all the subtlety and nuance of a Bugs Bunny vs. Hitler cartoon, and it was held up as representation of what the Republican Party thought terrorism meant, as concept and as enemy. In its Orwellian ham-handedness, it was terrifying.

The McCain role is noteworthy since, after all, he is the actual nominee. After watching an entire evening of slide shows narrated by people who likely looked and sounded like your grandparents, one could have forgiven the audience for nodding off before his speech -- but they did not. And they were rewarded in the manner Republicans have become accustomed to, for the first part of McCain's victorious speech was, whether this be taken as partisan snipe or not, dismal. It was disjointed. It was abominably written, and read worse. It bore no common theme, at least none that could be easily plucked out of it. Most of all, it was agonizingly generic -- a zombie speech, a Frankenstein's monster of a speech, stitched together from the dried corpses of better speeches. It seemed intentionally generic, in fact -- spoken in front of a screen that was at intervals an emerald green, or mottled green, or eventually Generic Sky Blue With Generically Waving American Flag, Sans Landscape -- an intentionally monochromatic creation.

It is now a mere few days since that speech, and I cannot remember a single thing said during the vast majority of it. Not a stick. It was not policy based, or history based, but a series of assertions and platitudes heard in other campaigns of the last two decades. It made scant reference to the last years, but asserted success in the next. It made the same attacks against the other party that are always made, except more woodenly. It railed against big government in the same manner as every conservative speech ever rails against big government -- and ignored that conservatism, itself, had bloated it. It railed against entitlement programs, and the incompetence of government, and scary judicial ideas, and not a stick of it was different from the speech given by Republicans before they held the reins of power. The professional Senator railed against Washington. The professed Maverick ticked down the list of doctrinaire conservative bugaboos. The skilled enabler of earmarks thundered against earmarks, as all conservatives always have, every year, to absolutely no effect once they return to the Capitol to divvy up the next batch.

One of the few memorable parts of the speech, for me, was the inexplicable trundling into education policy. What? McCain is no more known for his interest in education policy than he is for his trapeze skills, so to suddenly devote an extended portion of his speech to it gave the impression he might be having an out-of-body experience. The language, though, was the key. It was, in tone and policy, the exact copy of the Bush administration rhetoric on education. It was uncanny: Bush himself could have read the same speech, and not changed a single word -- in fact, he may have said it word for word, for all I know, in some State of the Union Address or election-season oration.

And that is the damnedest thing, because for the life of me I cannot fathom why John McCain would be going to the Education well, and proposing policies that he himself had decades to turn into law, and never had, and the Bush administration itself has had eight years to implement, and never did. It is representative of the worst of the conservative failures: the failure to actually do anything, once in full and complete power. Conservatism unleashed has proven skilled in exactly two things, in government: coming up with creative rationales for ignoring existing law or gutting its intent or enforcement, and at staffing every nook and cranny of government with more conservative cronies. It is superb at the machinery of destruction; it has never built a single thing, and mocks the very premise.

Then, at the end of the speech, John McCain retold the story of the time he was once a hero, decades previous. He retold it from his previous retellings, using the same words and phrasings, but no matter. It was indeed compelling, because it would be nearly impossible for it to be otherwise. And that was it. The rest of the speech was packing peanuts, simply there to fill the space around the Heroic Thing, the sole justification for trusting conservatism yet again, the sole justification given for why a McCain is not a Bush.

And that was the convention. A rerun, played in a darkened convention center, and not ten percent of it would have to have changed in tone or substance if it had run it a decade ago. Scarce mention of Bush, and scarcer mention of Cheney. The Iraq War mentioned only in the same way that the Iraq War has always been mentioned by Republicans, for the last half-decade: something that is simultaneously a great victory and never-ending. Ethnic bugaboos; Democrats are not patriotic; we are at the brink of a great and threatening social chaos, caused by all the foul people who do not think like us.

Even before the convention was over, a few detractors here were referring to McCain as Zombie Reagan. It is certainly a more fitting nickname than Maverick. The entire Party shuffles forward on the corpse of their old ideas; they are impervious to any notion of failure or even self-awareness. Family values can be the mantra one moment; the next they are welcoming onstage the child that impregnated a governor's child as if he was the Jesse Owens of teenage sex. Allow me to introduce the woman I cheated on my first wife with: she will be your First Lady, and we will finally have decorum in the White House. The rest of you adulterers, however, will be going to Hell. Let us reform the cretins of Washington; never mind that they are us. Experience matters, except that it was all the most petty of election season lies, and you'd have to have been extraordinarily gullible to have thought otherwise.

There is nothing satisfying about watching a party reanimate itself based on nothing but blind self assurance and ideological dismissals of all previous error. It is depressing.

Pet Sematary Conservatism, should we call it? I'm not sure.

And I am not sure I want to know what might be coming next.