(A Campaign with "True Believers")
There was one thing for certain-- we came from a family of misfits.
"Ron who?", I asked my younger brother over the telephone, as he once more pontificated about the problems of the age from New York City like a humble Midwestern transplant dissecting the foul contradictions of media, politics, globalization, and society.
Ah, so much well-meaning verbosity that otherwise fell on deaf ears. . . . . .
Though his lectures were fascinating, I wondered how this would gain him any traction in the business world. "How worthless is a decent education", as Oscar Wilde once quipped from a lonely drawing room with a weary sigh because my brother had recently graduated from an excruciatingly liberal Ivy League University and was too grounded even for that sorry lot-- a nattering, gooey cacophony and mental "mind-splorch" of students and faculty who paddled around in a "pink", splashing punchbowl of sheltered fancies and politically-correct shibboleths that couldn't meet the world squarely, like men.
Pot-smokers puffing away at the "stink-weed" with red-rimmed eyes, flitting lesbians, and identity-politics jannisairs with the mentality of Hamas who would make fine agitation fodder to stir up the right-wing feeding frenzy on Fox news, a blousy red-faced pundit pounding his fist on the table with sky-rocketing blood pressure and veins that throbbed in his forehead.
Poor, moderate Jesse.
On the run from "The Nazis" of the business world and "The Communists" of publish-or-perish academia, he was making a bee-line for the gentle plateau of PBS-- sort of a gray, sheltered, socialist compromise of "muddled mediocrity" that didn't accomplish "jack". While his application "treaded water" at a bland public affairs program, he was ensconced in thought like Rodin's "The Thinker", like so much fried neural glucose and "young pup" vitalism.
A word with you, dear reader. Thinking makes you crazy at that age, like a snake devouring its own tail in a radical avant-guard illustration on a tossed matchbook cover that you stared at in a lonely cafè of guttering candles. It was your ticket, your invitation, to join the French Resis-TANCE as you pondered over your insignificance in the cosmos and what separated man from "rodent". Thinking kills, and I should know. . . . . especially if you're bumbling with women in your post-collegiate early-20's and feel the twinge of Darwinian unfairness in your foreseeable time frame.
If you don't turn to angry nihilism and fantasize about throwing Moltov cocktails at "the system", you load all your swell-hearted hopes, dreams, and aspirations onto a single gimp-legged pack-mule and send it through the mountains because it's your only teeth-clenched, sexually-repressed outlet. It is the irrationality of the human condition that keeps us from slitting our wrists, I suppose. And here was that gimp-legged mule. . . . . RON PAUL!
(-- And you're reading it here, aren't you?!)
I was 26 years old. At this point, all the idealism on a "macro" level had been wrung out of me. I had a disgust for politics, namely because I myself would never make it in politics. Too many competing interests, too many bulging-eyed hostiles with whom one attempted to softly reason, those desperate legions who got a-hold of and starting ripping a candidate apart like a flopping seagull on a lifeboat of starving, matted-haired men. So much for a beautiful flight toward the sun, the unpolished amateur with big ideas. A crude form of social-Darwinism in effect, for those who didn't exceed the margin of natural law.
Another principle of natural law: give it an inch, and it will take a mile-- we deserve what we permit. A once proud American schooner was laden down with barnacles and other "gorping" parasites sucking on to the hull below the waterline that needed to be scraped off like that long-overdue point in time when a lunking computer hard drive needed to be de-fragmented, lest the system grind to a complete halt. We were like a morbidly-obese man on dialysis with a 400 pound tumor in his leg being wheeled out for a grim diagnosis at the hospital.
And here was Dr. Ron Paul, offering to slice "The Gordian Knot" in half with one stern surgical stroke of libertarian-constitutionalism that severed this unholy, burgeoning growth. Of course, he would never get elected. Even if he miraculously did, he'd face a hostile congress and a nation jealously holding on to "what's theirs" like five-fingered suckerfish with their tens of millions of collective "gorping" orifices. But it was a symbolic thing, taking an existential stand, and why my brother and I ultimately got involved-- like Ambrose Bierce going down to fight alongside Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and never being seen or heard from again. . . . .
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Born against the grain, Jesse and I would forever frustrate the Disney/Microsoft/Nike/MTV/ McDonaldland Imperium that attempted to chop every last American into neat little sticks of firewood and were destined to be thrown into the furnace of computer-modeled commerce-- and by extension, the legdermain of data-targeted politics that predicted our every move. But here Jesse and I were, stubborn as hee-hawin' mules swatting flies with our tails "off to pasture" who didn't cotton to such notions of "all-things-being-equal" flow-chart manipulation that snapped up the graph with a couple of clicks and auto-regression lines. In a word, we could not be fooled by the slick, soulless inducements of the ultra-modern age and were part of that tough 5% who would never go along with that continuous blast of corporate white noise. No amount of digital media could "scrub clean" our gnarled DNA that sprung from rich soil.
However, the only thing that mattered in this teeming aggregate of human flesh-- of focus groups and putrid wants, of computer models and infantile taints like the howling colic-- was "pressing the lizard brain" of the masses far below. For what were we, for the most part, but a bunch of animals that responded to a batch of conditioned reflexes in a psychology experiment? And there Jesse and I were, talking long distance, for all we knew feeling like the last cognizant human beings on earth in a big ole' lizard pit called "The United States of America" as we both agreed that something had to be done. No more talk, but ACTION.
By this time, Jesse got the job at PBS and was working his thoughtful, "subversive" influence on the website which of course, would not get through the thick skull of the average poster. It always went back to their world of coddled middle-of-the-road illusions that was like so much "gunk" stuffing up the system like soap-suds and gray crud. Nattering idiots gunning for Barrack Obama, mostly, who thought he was some kind of trans-racial Messiah like the second coming of Christ. Short of jumping up on a chair, firing a pistol in the air, and declaring a beer-hall pustch, little could be done to alter the course of this foolishness.
But there was the Ron Paul campaign. . . . . pure and true and Don Quixote-like, akin to some kind of loopy, far-out populist revolution from below. All I knew was that he was a messianic robe to grasp onto in this time of national darkness and cosmic absurdity-- current events and headlining media personalities swirling around like some kind of nauseous screwball cartoon sucking you down with the undertow of pessimism and rottenness.
And who would I meet out here across St. Louis in the stark night of exurban sprawl like phantoms rattling the chains of strict libertarian/constitutionalist discontent?
Frankly, you don't want to know. . . . .
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For a long time, I never got "a real good look" at Ron Paul. My brother kept playing him up like the man on the white horse, like "Richard the Lion-Hearted" returning to these shores to liberate us from "Federalism", the grasping tentacles of federal powers "gone mad" since Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. There is no fool like a young fool as he drooled on inside "The Cult of Personality". But I was no fool, as I squinted at "our man".
My jaw dropped when I saw him on the YouTube videos my brother sent me. He was kind of spacey, off-kilter, and perhaps a little "out-to-lunch" as he wobbled around an interview like a dazed bobble-head on the dashboard of some vintage 1960's automobile of American "can-do" optimism. He reminded me of one of those wise, Timothy Leary-like elders that Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise would meet on some distant planet in a galaxy far, far away-- the head of an enlightened, fantastical society that could only exist on a cardboard television set, if not inside a science fiction writer's imagination as he clasped his hands in front of him and extended the olive branch of peace like a man shot high full of pain-killers.
His code name might as well have been "Moon-bat". . . . .
Which would explain his massive appeal on the internet, among folks "who didn't know the difference". Democracy at its most unfiltered, the internet presents all kind of fads and personalities and causes which unsightly people can grab onto like barnacles, the full darkness and horror of their "gorping" orifices sucking desperately for sustenance.
And here were the Ron Paul "trues"-- nerds, geeks, dorks, and libertarian losers honking nasally-- the faithful, the desperate, the obsessive-compulsive, "the true believers" bubbling up randomly from the depths like a foul stench-- baffled libidos and a 100 trillion thoughts zapping through addled, limping gray matter that could not translate into effective action out here or anywhere.
A puny rodent can not press an anvil above its body and at large there existed a local online community of activists that danced around the impossible like Faerie Children around "Stone Henge" and clogged up my e-mail box with over 100 messages a day. Irrelevance. Oblivion. For all the passion, you can not build a winning structure out of mud, pus, and slime that will be sliced open like an oozing, infected boil when tested.
It was too much, I had to flee for my sanity. Unless you're aiming for lightsome transcendence, mass movements are too scary. For I am a man, not an orifice. Just call me apolitical.
-- "Now I know how Winona feels about her fans!"
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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