Remora

There's an election day coming up -- which fills LI with about as much enthusiasm as an arachnophobe contemplating a new species of tarantula. The election process this year has been particularly grim, seemingly run by the utterly braindead for the utterly braindead, and processed by the utterly smarmy. In the meantime, the electorate is completely left out. DC decides what is important -- the war with Iraq, for instance --and decides how people should feel about it, and then gets all surprised when they don't feel that way. Wellstone, before he died, was pulling ahead of his opponent partly because of the war issue -- Wellstone voted against it. Now, to you and me, that might mean he'd tapped into ambiguity, to say the least, about the upcoming war. But not for the press. No, that was about Wellstone being kinkily independent, and people voting for him expressing himself, in spite of their own limitless enthusiasm for what DC decided about Iraq. For the DC line is that the war is wildly popular. Any evidence to the contrary is, well, a problem with the country. Just as the country had this wierd problem with impeaching Clinton -- DC decided this was just the thing to do, and just the thing to obsess about, and the country, for some reason, had other problems.

On the smarmy front, we have William Saletan -- the man who proclaimed Bush "toast' in the last election. Impeturbably pompous, a man who has the cleverness of that college room-mate that freshmen learn to dread -- you know, the one who just talks on and on, mostly about his own magnificent accomplishments -- this is the man is gracing Arkansas this week for Slate. Of course, it is an effort for a man of Saletan's rare sensibilities to have to encounter the gross flesh of Arkansas. He discovers a man missing teeth in a diner, as well as a man who is unshaven. He goes to hear Hutcheson, the Republican incumbent, make a speech:

"I do want to introduce my wife Randi. She's right over here," he says. With a giant whoosh, every head in the room turns. This is no ordinary political wife. This is the former staffer Hutchinson married a year after divorcing his wife in 1999. Around the room, dozens of people stare at the new Mrs. Hutchinson and mentally subtract 50 rosaries from the senator's penance. She isn't the bimbo they expected. She's pale and bulky with a weak chin. She's wearing almost as much makeup as the Fox News correspondent. She looks older than her age. "How old was his first wife?" one reporter asks. "Older," says another."

Wearing too much makeup, is she? Bulky, is she? Ah, not up to the exacting standards of our ace reporter! Poor Saletan, who sees the stye in his neighbor's eye, but doesn't see the redwod tree sized log in his own!

LI is reminded of what George Bernanos's says about imbeciles in Les Grands Cimetieres sous la lune, the book in which he decisively broke with the far right over the Spanish Civil War. It is 1937, and Bernanos had been very close to Action Francais, the proto-fascist group. But as he watched the right drift into supporting Mussolini and Hitler, he begins to rethink his position -- which was always based on a very Pascalian Christianity. He remarks that, in a previous book, he had vowed to move the reader, "to anger or to affection, I didn't care." Now, he says, moving the reader, at least to anger, tires him out:

"The anger of imbeciles has always filled me with sadness, but now it fills me with horror. The whole world echoes with this anger. What else? They like nothing better than understand nothing at all, and they will even gather themselves in groups to do that, for the last thing man is capable of is being stupid and mean all alone, a mysterious condition reserved, no doubt, for the damned. Understanding nothing they assemble together, sorted not by their particular affinities, which are feeble, but after the modest function they hold from birth or chance, which entirely absorbs their little life. For the middle classes are the only ones to furnish forth the imbecile; the superior classes monopolize the fop, a genre of useless stupidity, while the inferior classes only suceed in manufacturing sketches of a gross and sometimes even admirable animality."

Yes, Saletan is an exemplar of this imbecility, right down to the faux Mencken attitude. Multiply this attitude by his cohorts and fellow travellers -- the media, the political consultants, the politicians themselves -- and you have a perfect machine for destroying the motive to vote. To vote is a contract, a way of sealing a pact with the nation. It is, after all, our nation -- that is the story. But the idea that the average voter is a species of dog to whom galvanic shocks are administered every six years, via tv ads, to get him to salivate in the voting booth -- this is the entire attitude of DC. Look at the funny dental work! Look at the makeup! Am I funny now?

Disgust, disgust, disgust -- the great enemy of vision. The Saletans of the world really do fill me with horror.