I know, I know, I can't be pleased. Obviously I loathe, detest, and despise our current two-party system, or else why am I constantly skewering both the Republicans and the Democrats? So why am I bashing the poor little Reform party, which is only trying to start making a chink in the megalithic binary system that has American politics in a straightjacket? Shouldn't I support an effort like this as something that might finally bring diversity back to American governance? Isn't it good that someone else should appear on the scene to give these lumbering, torpid behemoths a run for their money?
Well, yes and no. Nothing would make me happier than to acclaim the advent of a third party--even if it were small and puny and thought of as the lunatic fringe--that could start making a dent in the American political scene and offering the public an actual choice on election day. A real alternative to Demopublican politics would indeed be a welcome change, even if its candidates were doomed to be trampled into the sawdust by the elephant and the ass. Our country does indeed badly, badly need a political force that can shake up the system and force the representatives of the other two parties to start examining and revising their positions. However. The Reform Party ain't gonna be that force.
The Reform party, as we know, is the brainchild of H. Ross Perot. To me, once you set aside Pat Buchanan's inaugural address to the 1992 Republican convention--in which he spewed hatred and bigotry from here till Tuesday while everyone else applauded and threw flowers instead of yelling "SHAME!" and lobbing bricks--the scariest thing about the 1992 election cycle was H. Ross Perot. Here is a multibillionaire with a track record of using his position as CEO to enforce intrusive and narrowminded codes of personal conduct on his employees, who has in the past suggested that the way to deal with crime in Houston is to suspend the rule of law, rope off minority areas and go house to house searching everyone for drugs, who has hired investigators to probe into the personal and sexual lives of his employees to see if they came up to his high moral standards and fired an Orthodox Jew for coming to work with a beard--who, incidentally, hates and fears gay people even though he clearly knows very little about them--and somehow, suddenly, he's running as a populist. Hello? Since when does being an oligarch qualify you to represent the interests of the working class? Hasn't the thinking traditionally been that the interests of plutocrats like Perot are somewhat opposed to those of the people whose salaries he's trying to keep down and whose hours he's trying to maximize? What made American voters think that Perot is a scrappy little underdog fighting for the common man, when in fact he is a paranoid megalomaniac who believes with all his heart that owning half the country gives him the right to run it?
No, as far as I'm concerned, the only good thing to come out of the Perot candidacy was the H. Ross Parrot character on Sesame Street. Perot has figured out, apparently, that he himself is no longer a viable candidate, but he's still the driving force behind the Reform party, whose most successful representative is the current governor of Minnesota, Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Now, I have no particular beef with Jesse; I know little about his politics and platform, or about his effectiveness as mayor. It is true that we do not normally consider professional wrestling to be the proving ground for politicians, but in a way, it makes sense. Just as Reagan, the "amiable old ex-B-movie actor," was the perfect front man for the treacle-on-the-outside, heartless-capitalism-on-the-inside Republicanism that defined the 1980s, Jesse Ventura is a good enough type for the rough-and-tumble, mud-and-Jello, we-know-it's-fake-but-we-love-it-anyhow farce that is politics in the 1990s. No, it's this whole year 2000 presidential campaign that's got me spooked. Because apparently the two potential Reform party candidates are Pat Buchanan--which is scary enough--and...Donald Trump.
Pat Buchanan is as twisted a piece of evil as the radical right has ever produced, and to see him back in circulation scares me deeply. However, he has provided the world with a fairly telling printed record of his bigoted lunacies, and even though he refuses to cop to his antisemitism, xenophobia, and hatred of homosexuality on television, the media hates and fears him enough to keep dredging up those embarrassing quotations. I don't think we need to worry about him getting elected. But if I were a member of the Reform party, I sure would worry about the fact that the same organization that's thinking about running this embodiment of all that was putrid in the Reagan-Bush legacy is also thinking about running Donald Trump. For God's sake, enough with the billionaires! Is it not enough for you all that the politicians we currently elect are all so beholden to big business and corporate soft money that none of them have the spine or the will to articulate or advocate anything that might benefit us and displease them? Do we actually have to give corporate America direct control over our major institutions of government? Do we want to be ruled like kings by whoever owns our miserable hardworking hides?
Maybe that would be best, in the long run. If we elected Donald Trump, at least we would no longer have government by the rich for the rich masquerading as democratic rule. We'd have a straight-out oligarchal system where money translated directly into power. The rich would get richer, the poor would go to the wall, and we would all know why. Then maybe the revolution would finally come. Or maybe Trump would just pass out $100 bills on the street and pass an edict commanding all slot machines to pay back at a rate of 80%, and America would joyfully acclaim the ascent of the ruler they have long been craving. Either way, at least we'd know where we stand. But really, if that's what we want, why doesn't the Reform party just run Bill Gates?
Which all points out something that was completely obscured by H. Ross Perot's whole 1992 tack. The attraction of a multibillionaire candidate, it seems, is that he can offer practical, hands-on, businesslike advice that will get this country out of the ditch of bleeding-heart liberalism and social engineering in which it is floundering and restore us to sanity, rationality, and profitability. You get under the hood and fix the car; you run the country like a business. Well, as MicroSoft proves daily, the richest man in the world can't even get under the hood of Windows 95 and fix that; and if the country were run like MicroSoft, nothing would work and you wouldn't be able to buy a brand that did. We're so in love with the romance of capital that we forget what a nightmare corporate culture is--how wasteful, redundant, lopsided, skewed, unjust and, yes, inefficient most large corporations are. These people ruin our lives 40 hours a week. Do we also need them to be ruining the country? I mean, more than they are already?
But regardless of how you feel about Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan per se, you must admit that a party that can consider either of these guys to be an equally viable candidate is a party with some serious focus problems. Do they have a platform? Or are they, as it seems to be, simply the party of wackos, egomaniacs and big, big, BIG money? Because I'm not sure we need another one of those.
Writing in Bill the Cat,
The Plaid Adder
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