Tag Archives: delusion

I am not a sleeper.

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

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I shouldn’t take politics so personally and I shouldn’t feel so strongly the stretch of tenterhooks from the mean-spirited, delusional shitshow that is this nation’s Republican party, but I do. I live here, after all, and the empathetic fabric of my skin is stretched just as tightly as anyone’s. I grew up in Republican-land and I was even a productive member of their society. But actually being hard-working and productive didn’t mean I got credit for it. I didn’t. Every generation realizes, at some point, that working is only a tiny part of doing well in the rat race. It took me longer than most to figure this out. When I realized that hard work meant little, when I realized that I’d get much farther if I bought a giant shitty truck, gained 50 pounds and joined the pseudo-anarchist right-wing, when I realized that I’d have to repeat Limbaugh or Randian talking-points at work and around my buddies, I lost all desire to martyr myself to the Protestant work ethic. I refused to live my life as a sleeper agent.

A good way to make an enemy is to restrict opportunities to members of a club. The stupidest way to make an enemy is to restrict membership of that club to the dumb, the lazy, and the mendacious.

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My strategic analysis of the current situation is that unless a discharge petition goes forward, John Boehner is going to have to ride this out to the end. The people who think he’s going to be a statesman and break the Hastert Rule are mistaken. He doesn’t identify with anyone; he and his are very well set up; there is no motivating impulse that will wobble him from his historic path. He might even see a path to the Oval Office. If so, then we are fucked because there’s no arguing with a delusional wannabe-tyrant. That seems like a stretch given Boehner’s orangey loucheity, but greater turns in history are known.

More specifically short-term, John Boehner has already lost in any reasonable scenario. His only option for a win is the unreasonable scenario. If no Rs vote to discharge a D bill, the next step would be for the executive to invoke Article IV to avoid default. If Obama invokes the constitution to make interest payments then Boehner must either choose to give up (giving up his majority and maybe his seat in the election) or keep going without a budget. He would have nothing to lose. A louche and callous character argues for destruction, in this scenario.

What does Boehner see at the end of this path? Will he throw a couple dozen Rs under the bus along with his majority? Is someone planning a coup? That really is the only option for the Tea Party right now. Anything less will be another humiliation for them. They can’t win national elections; they can’t win much territory without gerrymandering; their only option is to continue the shutdown, assume that Boehner won’t bend the Hastert Rule, and keep their fellows from breaking ranks, somehow. Do we instead get an entire year of shutdown even without a default?

An entire year until the next election is a long time. An actual slide into deep recession maintained by Boehner’s adoption of the Tea Party mantle is a path into uncertain darkness. Can the country hold out until the election, then through the lame-duck Congress all the way to January 2015? I don’t think it can. We’ll either get enough Rs signing a discharge of a continuing resolution, some kind of coup, or John Boehner acting like a human being. I predict the former, followed by a D-House next November. Then an attempted coup. Followed by Boehner crying real human tears that smell of citrus.

Homeland

15 Thursday Nov 2012

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I was never into 24 when it was on. I’d already drawn my conclusion about the torture-porn ticking-time-bomb fantasy so I felt no ambiguity about the show’s main emotional draw.

My starting point is that if our hero has a terrorist in custody and believes that the prisoner has information that is needed to save lives, then the hero should know the state of the art of interrogation and act accordingly. As in: don’t give into the terrorist’s fantasy about being martyred through abuse. And if you go off-book and abuse a prisoner, don’t whine about how the politically-correct justice system won’t allow you to be a properly unaccountable psychopath. In a real-world ticking-time-bomb scenario (has this ever happened, in the entire history of counter-terrorism?), I’m sure the judge will be understanding. Own up to your mistake for the sake of civilization. It’s not like you’re going to be tortured or abused during your probation.

Homeland isn’t about torture, though. It isn’t about terrorism or the power of the aristocrats who treat the State like the family business. Homeland’s thriller context is a simple cloak of fantasy around the relationship between an organically nutty single person and a horribly abused and damaged married person. The show owes its success as much to that dynamic as it does to the cloak and dagger. The fact that the show’s context is stuck in 2005 adds to the draperie of delusion.

It’s important to note that the show is not a delusion playing out in Carrie’s manic brain. Not quite, anyway. That would be too obviously indulgent. In that scenario, Saul Berenson is Carrie’s shrink, (really, Carrie’s shrink is her sister? That fails the delusional smell test on so many levels), the CIA is Carrie’s occasional sanitarium and is also Berenson’s main place of employment. Brody is the poor bastard with severe PTSD and post-concussion syndrome who Carrie is obsessed with and who breezed through Berenson’s care recently (and who Carrie met in group). Looked at cynically, this framework of Carrie’s self-delusion works as a realistic context but doesn’t really have the kind of punch needed to bring in ratings. So that’s not what the show is about.

In the actual show, everyone is deluded, except maybe Brody’s daughter. Not only is Carrie a real (ex-)CIA agent who keeps working cloak-and-dagger jobs, but all kinds of other unlikely things happen as well, including a young and vigorous Dick Cheney who never fell out of the public’s willful suspension of disbelief. The unreality that cloaks all these characters is a major part of the genius of the show. People fall all over themselves to cite the delusional facts of the show in their commentaries, but the real indulgence is watching all the character’s delusions simultaneously instantiated as reality. Also hot, crazy people get it on and don’t quite get away with it.

So maybe I should give 24 another chance. If it’s about something else—the story of a guy who slowly finds himself becoming an violently abusive dad who alienates himself from society and loses himself in work, but not really, so the guy’s guilt doesn’t have to be real—that might actually be interesting.