"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."
-- George Orwell
The sister-state-with-a-good-personality that advertises as a tourist trap the actual Field of Dreams from the eponymously-titled 1989 film primps its porky self every four years and welcomes in the gentlemen callers and call girls of the Official National News Media, the camp followers of the dingy foam of beady-eyed political pros and effervescent caucus volunteers that cling like barnacles to the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, their carnival-colored buses, turgid classic rock anthems, and overbearing optimism blaring with certainty that Something Wicked This Way Comes. "Open wide, Iowa, while I shove my meglomaniacal happy-face ersatz altruism down your throat," is the tacit campaign slogan of every candidate, no matter in what slot of the political roulette wheel the ideological ball has fallen.
While the Field of Dreams Movie Site, 200 miles west of Chicago in Dyersville, Iowa, is closed from November through April, the frenetic campaigns fueled by dreams of power are open for business, even as snow piles up on the state highways and cars veer crazily in uncontrolled ice skids; proof that indomitable ego is stronger than poor weather or plain sense. It's not a fit night for man nor beast out there, so in what category should we place these relentlessly upbeat glad-handers lusting to be your next president?
It's a moot point how many of the candidates actually visit the movie's cornfield-edged baseball diamond as the whole state becomes a living nightmare of bull-horn marketing and meals interrupted by the forced handshakes of grinning creatures dedicated to 'public service,' still trying to tie up that Senior Class Presidency that eluded them ages ago, hoping to convince the next suspicious yokel or milk-fed maiden, high on the fumes from deep-fried corn dogs or congealing pork grease, that only they can master the Free World by dint of eerily whitened teeth and EZ-Read soundbite solutions. Meanwhile, parts of the state have been gutted into ghost towns by the sacred corporate Free Trade Economy touted by most of the Serious Candidates as the Ultimate Cure, along with ethanol subsidies, for low-wage work, outsourcing jobs overseas, the disillusioned unemployed, higher prices, and the recently emerging housing catastrophe. Said ghost towns and vacant factories are rarely on the itinerary of the candidates unless it's to make a point about their ineffectual opponents: Too many uncomfortable angry questions; too much blatant misery for an upbeat flag-festooned backdrop amiable to the national camera eye. "This is America? Boarded-up windows, 'For Sale Cheap' signs, empty plants and desolate streets?" the discomfited viewer might ponder. Just add some Wal-Mart boxes with 'Made in China' crossed out and you've hit a home run of the utter despair that's hollowed out pockets of the Midwest and Plains states, all but ignored in the roar of cars and buses hastening to the next campaign stop.
Instead of risking a damaging collision with brutal reality, the potential presidents tend to hew to the wood-trimmed Affluenza of chummy restaurants and whole-bean coffee shops where the home-grown clientele is more likely to be employed and willing to ask pre-digested questions provided by the candidate's advance team. That the Solons of Big Mediocracy often edge out the local bumpkins in the front rows at these events is only as it should be -- the candidate needs video of him or herself issuing proclamations from Mount Sinai of optimistic change, hard-won experience, lower taxes, and fun for everyone but terrorists, and must impress the media Conveyors of Conventional Wisdom to cite an attribute of probity or wit for the next day's column, stand-up report, or TV chatterbox visit. That the Sages of the Print Page or Plasma Screen often instead meander into lengthy disquisitions on the price of the candidate's haircut, where they attended elementary school, or whether they prefer pearls or diamonds, gossipy effluvia that would have made Walter Winchell cringe, never dispels this hope. Of course, should the candidate shout with joy too close to the microphone or claim to have seen something inexplicable in the sky, the Bought and Bored Press Corps, and their Masters back at Corporate News Central, will verbally straight-jacket the candidate and reprimand them to a media rubber room as 'unelectable' with the not-so-subtle subtext: 'They're too crazy to be president.' That's all right, goes their thinking -- they were, coincidentally, just a little too uncomfortably populist for corporate branding anyway.
While the Big Media can't bring themselves to call the sitting president a liar as he laughingly flaunts his prevarications repeatedly to their faces and carefully self-censors any mention of that protuberant personality flaw, they eagerly tag themselves junior psychologists as they ferret out the 'true character' of the various deprived-of-sufficient-childhood-affection Senators, Governors and Congressional inhabitants running for the office from such trivia as the price of haircuts and the depth of necklines.
And just who is this regiment of over-paid Invaders from the East who desert their McMansions and Significant Others to traipse into the cold barrens of the Midwest, delivering news of the future Electoral-College-chosen King or Queen to the Boobs couched in front of the Tubes, Internet, broadcast or cable? They are bright eye-winking ornaments on the acceptable vanilla frosting of the Big Media cake; dependably and willingly servile to the interests of the Corporate Class, and therefore incapable of making waves if they were drowning. The worst excrescence of the Broadcast News school of journalism, exceptional as to facial features or modulated voice or hair texture, but neutered in pursuit of any story other than those pre-approved by the glass-walled fortresses of malarkey in New York, or the flourescent-lit shrines of anonymously-sourced information in Washington. They remember Dan Rather and the Bush AWOL documents; they won't be going there.
While some may be aware that the tripe they promulgate would disgust any self-respecting fish caught wrapped in it, the forgettable and often erroneous vapors they exude satisfies the dictates of Conventional Wisdom -- that sour stew cooked up by their editors, publishers, program directors, or executive producers of what is safe to say and what opinions match the ongoing effort to keep the parent corporation profitable and the public subdued. Their careers, mortgages and children's college funds all depend upon them ignoring the sacking of Rome to provide reports on how the Visigoths were dressed or a detailed analysis of the sharpness of the weapons used.
It's illustrative that the newly-minted Despot of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, reportedly prefers being interviewed by Western journalists, specifically those from the World's Only Superpower. As Tariq Ali writes in "Daughter of the West": "...the general [Musharraf] often contrasted the deference with which he was treated by the US networks ... with the 'unruly' questioning inflicted on him by local journalists: it 'misled the people'."
The current crop of candidates crisscrossing Iowa need have no real nightsweats; we have the best-trained, most deferential journalists in the world -- no truly 'unruly' questions will drop from their lips to 'mislead' the people, only trivia tricks and shallow 'gotchas' to numb their minds into ignoring the sources of their thin wallets and vanishing Constitution.
As in every election year for the past two decades, it is incumbent upon any American who cares about the country, and the dimensions of the southbound handbasket into which it's being deposited by our corporate and governmental elite, to find out about the candidates using the Big Media only for a point of reference or comic relief. Aside from the backbone of the Internet, C-Span is offering the speeches and public events of the various Party Chosen, a much better way to gauge their character than the strained pap presented by our biased American media, assiduously working on behalf of their corporate parents and Washington overseers.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago.
-- Milton Mayer on the rise of fascism in Hitler's Germany, from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45," published by the University of Chicago Press.
