I sat down and wrote that headline about Herman Cain on or around Oct. 15. Within a couple of minutes of starting the blog, I got a phone call about my mother’s declining health, and so the last seven weeks or so have been a blur as I did my best to help out in a very difficult situation. I apologize to anyone who might have wondered what the hell happened to me; I have been living largely out of a suitcase and my car for virtually the whole seven weeks. While it’s not inconceivable that I could have found time to blog over that span, what I couldn’t find was the will to do so. If I thought the idea of all of us playing along with the goofy notion of a Herman Cain presidential run was a silly waste of time before, it appeared to be all of that and then some as I wrestled with trying to comfort my mother through the miasma of modern health care. I may write about that someday, but not now as the agonizing process is still under way.
I’ve confessed numerous times that this blogging stuff bewilders me as I wonder about the various ways that the Internet savvy maneuver to increase the number of visits to their site, etc. Confronted now with an ongoing healthcare situation, I haven’t got a clue what kind of frequency I can muster for this process. Seems like an ideal time to shake up the grand plan and simply blog about whatever I feel like whenever I can manage it. In the past the blogs have largely been political – and that almost certainly will be the focal point going forward – but I’m not going to confine myself in that fashion even within any individual blog posting.
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As noted above, I was going to write seven weeks ago that the very notion of a Herman Cain presidential candidacy was just a monstrous vanity exercise that was barely more valid than the Pat Paulsen presidential runs that began more than 40 years ago. At least then we didn’t pretend it was a legitimate exercise of the electoral process, which is what is being done with the preposterous Cain bid.
As the timeline makes clear, I was prepared to dismiss the Cain candidacy eons before the various claims of sexual harassment and other improprieties had emerged, and still contend that it should be so dismissed even if somehow or other every last charge against him were proven to be baseless. The chances of him being completely innocent of all those charges are roughly the same as the odds of Clarence Thomas actually having been the victim of a high-tech lynching 20 years ago rather than an instance of a marginally qualified Conservative right wing mascot being elevated to the highest court in the land by Republican pranksters with a far greater sense of irony than civic responsibility.
So there’s obviously precedent for this sordid Republican prank, but there’s no reason we should fall for it all over again. Cain’s chances of winning the Republican nomination were never much better than my own, because when you simply start adding long strings of zeroes and commas, the number way to the port side becomes largely irrelevant. Every last sentient being who went along with the Cain charade knew in his/her heart of hearts that it was never going to happen, but they went along with the gag anyway. If this were any other time in the nation’s long history, I suppose the gargantuan waste of time would be a tolerable – if inane – exercise in a political process run amok. But given the precarious state of just about everything these days, it ought to be abundantly clear that we can’t spend time horsing around. There’s just too much at stake.
An ultra-Conservative black Republican character should be relegated to its proper place in the vast American cultural landscape: either as a slapstick creation on Saturday Night Live or snuggling alongside Ginny Thomas in the Supreme bedroom as Mrs. Faux Justice makes crank late-night phone calls to the real victim of that 1991 debacle, Anita Hill.
For let’s remember that in the end there actually are real truths in this world, inviolate facts that exist and succinctly describe modern events and individuals, despite all frantic efforts to insist that there are two sides to everything. All the PR pronouncements in the world can’t truly change reality; what it does is change people’s perception of reality. Just because some Heritage Foundation think tank knucklehead tells you there are no absolute truths doesn’t mean you have to play along.
Want a sampling? O.J. did it. Global Warming is real. Herman Cain will never be nominated by the Republican Party for President or much of anything else. Jesus was a Liberal. The Iraq War was a monstrous bait-and-switch lie that devastated two countries and continues to do so today. Much of the economic woes of 2011 can be traced to an obscene 2001 tax cut and dismantling of the estate tax, two wars (one pointless, the other mismanaged), Wall Street greed and criminal negligence on the part of the government charged with patrolling the financial sector.
Want some more? Clarence Thomas did it, even if the only two people on the planet who know that for sure are Thomas and the much-maligned professor. Tax cuts have a trickle down effect far different from the one described in right-wing press releases when they try to sell them to the American public. The Congress is bought and paid for by special interests who have ruled the roost for 30 years and show every indication of doing so for the foreseeable future, the quaint protestations of “Occupy This or That” notwithstanding. Gayness typically has a genetic component that means the God that politicians so crudely enlist on behalf of any number of wretched causes created the very gays that they so condemn and vilify.
Remember, it’s possible to insist that the world is flat while you sail around it without so much as ever approaching the ledge of anything at all.
- T.S. O’Connell