STATE OF THE DISUNION

The man -- his smile, his rhetoric, his ease, his obvious superiority to the ruck -- is unfair to the Union of Snake-Oil Salesmen. Selling ice-boxes to Esquimaux (or whatever we´re supposed to call them in these days) is all in a day´s work for our pesident. That is because there are Esquimaux out there. He can sell his message to the public because we are there. But the great amphitheater he daced last night is a Great Void. True, you see the Hairy One (that´s what her name means in Italian) leaping up and down with applause, but trust me, she is just an Illusion. She is not there and she certainly is not listening to the Message, somewhere in her crafty little invisible head a machine goes round and round tallying what this elegant man is saying in terms of what it means to her Job. This will advance those desperate to have an Armenian genocide, for their cyber-votes are here; that will do well with the homosexual ¨community¨ which is also part of her constituency. Oh, I can use that one against him in November says a hoary senator from the Tea Party. Yum yum say those whose legislative wages are paid by lobbyists, that´s worth a few mill. Bingo! shout within their incorporeal selves the sales reps from states with defense industries. But don´t worry. None of them are really there. They live in Elsewhere, a marvelous country populated exclusively with professional politicians. It´s what Obama says there that speaks to such souls as they have left. For is Obama not, also, the President of the PPs, a class apart?

That there is nothing worse than democracy except every other form of government is an adage tested and true, but it is irrelevant to the State of Disunion address we heard last night. Once ´elected´these people no longer have anything to do with democracy, they are a Governing Class, a classical corporate oligarchy, which deals behind doors and lives on the Free Lunch. Bit by bit, day by day, they recede from reality, devoid of meaning and any importance save to themselves. Too bad, for it was a good speech and given by an almost good man, that is: he might be entirely good were he not one of them.

To such an audience, how can one give a good speech or sell a program? If Saint Francis of Assisi, a saint mostly known for walking around shoeless and talking to the birds, appeared before the joint houses of Congress, what he said would fall into the same abyss -- Now listen, Frank, we have to stick together on this thing or you won´t have a habit to wear next time you want to convert people to your Better Life! Because what counts in PP-Land is staying there and not being exiled to America. That would be worse than the Gulag. Have you ever seen an ex-politician? What a sorry figure he cuts! Belly up, the catfish eat him rather than the other way around. Lawdy me! says Frank. Please Massa. Out there it´s Hell.

Hell it is. Even on the level of substance, the remedies offered seem pretty hokey. Take money away from the Big Banks and they´ll find out some other way to take your money and put it into their own pockets. Does the Great Leader really believe that to correct the Education Deficit in America (seven years, I calculate, from the days when I was in the Eighth Grade in Balboa, California, reading books that now puzzle Juniors and Seniors in our colleges) what is needed is a further expansion of educational opportunity, via community colleges? There was a time when a high school diploma did indeed fit you for a decent working wage, and if our high schools could be brought back to their 1939 levels, that would be a mighty reform. Like elects like is a rule in education as in government: giving more money to the best teachers would be great, if it weren´t teachers who chose them.

Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra? flung Cicero in the court-room. For how long are we to stay patient, eh? With the Afghanistan farce? With the health care joke? It would be no bad thing, for instance, to make sure that hospital in America were not places where we get sicker. They could start with the world-famous Massachusetts General, whose general filth is not far off that available in Somalia. But will that happen? One thing our president got right: he knows that we know what´s wrong with our disunion. That´s visible and palpable to million upon million of us. As it is visible and palpable that nothing that is said in PP-Land is real. You can´t sue them, it costs a fortune to join them, and whatever we do, so long as PPs exist, nothing, nada, will change.