Cthulhu '08: Why Vote For The Lesser Evil?

All right. In some ways I hate to do this (and in some ways, I've been longing for it) but it's time. So far in this column, I have avoided turning to politics. I feel largely unqualified to discuss it, as I know that the modern world, and the blogosphere particularly, are filled to overflowing with pundits and commentators and experts of every color and stripe, and here I am, just a guy who writes novels and teaches English in a podunk town, in a state only kept out of the category of "backwater" by the existence of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and the Dakotas. Who am I to talk about the world of movers and shakers, policy and diplomacy? What do I know about the science of politics?

I am a citizen of a democracy. I am a person with eyes and ears, with thoughts and beliefs, and the ability and opportunity -- one of the rarest gifts, historically, even if it doesn't seem like it nowadays -- to speak my mind and have other people listen. So even though I may not have the specific education in politics and international relations and law and history that would grant me the officially recognized and sanctioned right to pontificate on the tides of the times, I have both the privilege and the duty to state for the record what small things I see and what small things I believe. The average man's opinion, freely and publicly expressed, is what makes democracy possible, and its loss -- perhaps its theft -- is what has put our democracy into danger in the last fifty years. We need to try to free ourselves from this subtle oppression, this belief that the average man's voice is lost in the crowd's, and that the average man's vote means nothing in the grand scheme of things. These are lies, and they are insidious, and they pose a greater threat to this country and our freedoms than any foreign power ever has or ever will, because while people will die rather than have their freedoms stripped from them, they will often give those same freedoms up in order to be released from the weight of responsibility, and they will thank their oppressors for helping them become carefree slaves. Because I know this, and because I have a voice and a place to shout out my words, and because I have honor, I am bound to say what I think, and bound as well to try to reach as many people as possible with those words -- and as an aside, if you are still reading after these two paragraphs, so are you bound, as well, so let's have some audience participation, mmkay? Thus, here we are: the time is right, here in the heart of the American political season, and this is the largest forum that I have access to, and so this is where I must stand up and say my piece.

John McCain is an asshole.

There. Now I feel better.

No, of course that isn't all I have to say. Have you seen the length of my other entries on this thing? I haven't written a single-page anything since high school.

The man is an asshole. That's my contention. In order to prove this, let us define our terms, especially since the term "asshole" is, like most profanity, so oft-used and oft-ill-used that the specific meaning is lost in repetition and the stretching of the term by people with tempers but no imagination to fit almost any situation. "Asshole" has always been reserved in my personal lexicon for a specific type of distasteful person -- in my case, it connotes a certain kind of arrogance. An asshole is a person who believes that their own best interest is inherently the best interest of anyone around them, and believes that the best route to serving the asshole's self-interest is the fastest and easiest -- inevitably the path most harmful to those around him. In other words, the asshole believes that by doing nasty things to other people, like crushing them and tossing them aside after their usefulness has ended, he is actually doing the best thing for them, as he is making his own life better, and if the asshole is happy, that means everyone around the asshole is happy because the world revolves around the asshole. And because this kind of man thinks of himself as publicly minded -- serving the common good by serving his own interests -- but is actually perfectly selfish and self-involved, the asshole very often goes into politics. What's worse is that the asshole can find much success there, as he is the perfect pawn for special interests, but with only a modicum of charisma and charm and intelligence, he can seem like a good and honorable man when he is, in fact, an asshole.

George Bush is an asshole. So is Rush Limbaugh. Since it isn't exclusively a Republican or conservative category, Al Sharpton is often an asshole, and Louis Farrakhan is every second of every day. Ralph Nader is a huge asshole. Ross Perot, however, is not; he may be a hyperactive little wackadoo, but I really thought he wanted to do what was right for everybody, and was just sick of watching the assholes screw it up. Al Gore is not an asshole, and Bill Clinton is only an asshole in his private life, never in his public; Ronald Reagan was one, though George H.W. Bush wasn't, interestingly enough. Of course, as the vice president of one asshole and the father of another, his own lack of asshole status won't earn him much in the way of a positive legacy. But maybe he's just a dumbass, for his willing cooperation with assholes. Like Sarah Palin.

So why is John McCain an asshole? I'm sure there are many reasons, and those more intimately familiar with his record and personality should be able to list several; I only have a few. But then, how many times does someone need to act like an asshole, before he earns the label in our hearts (Is the answer to that blowin' in the wind?)?

Let's start with his divorce. John McCain married a model named Carol Sheff before he went to Vietnam; while he was a prisoner of war there, she suffered a debilitating car accident, and became less attractive -- four inches shorter, heavier, needing crutches to get around, presumably heavily scarred. She didn't tell him about the accident while he was held captive, not wanting to add to his burdens as a POW. A few years after his return, he met and "fell in love with" (read, "thought was really hot and seduced") his current wife, Cindy, who was 17 years his junior and extremely wealthy. They began an affair, and eventually McCain divorced his first wife, and then married Cindy a month after it was finalized.

Not every divorce is a bad thing. Even an illicit affair doesn't make someone an asshole, though it's a pretty damned good sign. And I'm sure that there were other contributing factors to the demise of the McCains' marriage: certainly the both of them had been through severe traumatic experiences, and had to handle them separately rather than together; perhaps their relationship would have been strengthened if they had been able to help each other to deal with their respective suffering. But the issue in this case is the timing: McCain returned from Vietnam in 1975, and he and his first wife stayed married for 5 years after that. McCain spent this time trying to get back into active flight duty, despite his debilitating injuries, because he wanted to be an admiral, like his father and grandfather before him (And by the way, a military man who is basically unfit for active duty, who needs a special dispensation to be permitted to fly despite his injuries, but puts himself into the line of fire anyway because it is important to his own ambitions, thus endangering the other men who rely on him to be able to carry out his duties? Asshole.). He met Cindy at a political shmooze party, monopolized her company, and got her to meet him for drinks; they started the affair not long after. As soon as he married her, he moved with her to Arizona, her home state, and her wealthy businessman father got him into politics. This is not the story of a marriage that falls apart, and a man that falls in love a second time despite the odds and finds new happiness; this is the story of a man who wanted a wife who could serve as an asset to his ambitions, and when the first one lost her assets, he went out and found a new trophy wife with better connections. Doesn't it seem that way to you? How else to read it? The man was not so deeply traumatized by his POW experience that he had to leave the military, he had no problem being a part of the social scene, and he clearly was not emotionally crippled and incapable of handling a relationship. Perhaps his first wife was the root of the problem, perhaps they lost trust or something else -- but why, then, did he wait until after he had met and seduced the young and lovely millionairess before he ended the broken marriage to his first wife?

You know why. Asshole.

But John McCain is not just an asshole in his personal life, he's also a political asshole. We have here a man who represented the last state in the union to recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday, and yet he congratulates Barack Obama on becoming the first man of color to be nominated by a major party. Asshole. At least Strom Thurmond stuck by his racist convictions. McCain is a man who has made much political hay of his war record, using it as a shield -- because nobody is allowed to criticize the man without also mentioning the fact that he is a hero for serving his country as he did, for acting so selflessly while he was in the Hanoi Hilton, refusing to be released until all of the other men were released, as well -- and while his actions at that time were certainly honorable and admirable, he does not deserve the current accolades; he has betrayed his own heroic past by supporting foreign wars, by placing soldiers in harm's way in order to accomplish his own political goals, and, most tellingly, supporting the use of waterboarding as an interrogation device. I do not believe you can claim the status of tortured martyr when you support the creation of other tortured martyrs simply because it is politically expedient to do so. You do that, you only get to be an asshole.

And just in case you thought these asshole tendencies were only in McCain's sordid past (although I've always believed that a man who claims to be pro-life is automatically an asshole), let's look at his recent choice of running mates. Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old, two-year governor of one of the least populous states in the union, whose only previous political experience was as a mayor of a town even smaller than the one I live in. Now, this choice of vice presidential candidates was an asshole move in two ways. First of all, McCain did not do what Barack Obama did, what even George Bush, Jr., did; they chose running mates who would help to overcome their own personal weaknesses as candidates -- Obama's lack of political experience, and George Bush's raging stupidity -- even though that makes them look slightly less impressive in and of themselves. They made choices that, ignoring the vile miasma of corruption and inhumanity that surrounds Mr. Cheney, were better choices for the good of the people; Joe Biden will help Obama be a better president, just as Cheney kept George Bush dancing on his puppet strings instead of sitting like a brainless lump in the corner, choking on a pretzel. Sarah Palin is not going to help McCain be a better president. She has nothing to offer him that he could not get from his wife. She is, like Cindy McCain, a trophy, something to look good on his arm, someone to smile and wave at the cameras and soften McCain's image as an ugly old man. And the fact that he made this selection as a shameless attempt to pander to the voters who supported Hillary Clinton shows that he has absolutely no respect for the intelligence of the American people, and that he doesn't care that she would be a serious liability in the office. All he cares about is that her presence on the ticket solidifies his hold on the conservative Christians, and gives him the ability to claim to support women's rights despite all evidence to the contrary, and that she represents what he thinks women should be: pretty, obedient, and pregnant in the kitchen even while they are in political office. It is a bad choice for the country, should he be elected, and that makes him an asshole.

The sad part is, it was also an asshole thing to do to Sarah Palin. She strikes me as reasonably intelligent, and though I find her political positions universally repugnant, I have to respect someone with the record she has of successfully bucking the system. I respect that she turned in her own party leader when he was abusing his office. I respect that she won the gubernatorial race as an unknown against two incumbents. I even respect that she has done this while maintaining a marriage of twenty years and having five children, though there are problems with that -- she had to know her child was at risk of Down's Syndrome, considering her age, and there is no reason why she should have borne that child to term, but she did it anyway and I can't respect that. Plus, she's another one of those evil, evil people with perfectly normal names who abuse their children with names like Track and Bristol. But the crux of the matter of Sarah Palin is, she had a real political career: she's young, attractive, articulate, motivated, and she represents everything a large segment of our population thinks a woman should be, as well as actually being a woman of power and influence (rather than simply being a woman who is perceived to be powerful and influential). There would have been a great future for Sarah Palin, if she had allowed herself more time to build up political experience and a national reputation, and if she had remained her own person, coming to national prominence on her own merits. But instead, the GOP candidate for president, one of the most powerful Republicans in the land, put her in the untenable position of either turning down his offer, thus damaging her political career as a Republican irrevocably, or accepting the role of female shill to a chauvinist pig who isn't going to use her for anything other than posing for pictures. No matter the outcome, accept or reject McCain's offer, win or lose the election, her own career is over before it had a chance to get off the ground just because he decided to ask her. And once again, women come out on the short end, thanks to an asshole of a man.

Now, being an asshole is not always a bad thing. Most top-level professional athletes are assholes, and they often make millions of people happy, and enrich their employers, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that. There's a problem when they rape people and get away with it, and are then allowed to represent our country at the Olympics, but that's a whole different kettle of assholes. On some level, having an asshole for a president can even be, well, not terrible. Richard Nixon was an asshole, and he still managed to do quite a lot to heal our Asian relations after Korea and Vietnam and the Cold War. But we have just dealt with an asshole in charge for the last eight years. The current asshole has destroyed our economy, wiped out our international reputation, broken apart all of the progress we made toward unity after 9/11 and turned us all into assholes who can ignore millions of victims of natural disasters even when they are our own countrymen. Because of this asshole-in-chief, we are willing to wipe out the entire planet in order to drive SUVs and buy cheap crap at Wal-Mart. Because of this asshole, George W. Bush, we have lost all faith in our own political system and thus made it a hundred times easier for assholes to gain power and do even more damage to us.

We cannot survive another four years under an asshole. I do not believe that John McCain is a political crony of George Bush, but what Barack Obama's campaign is trying to say, but cannot come out and say directly, is that John McCain is, like George W. Bush, an asshole, a Grade-A, four-star asshole. While McCain would not do the same terrible things to us that Bush did -- for one thing, Bush is a stupid puppet asshole and McCain is a smart control-freak asshole -- he will do harm to us, and for the same basic reason: all he cares about is himself. He thinks that helping himself will help all of us, but he only thinks that because he's an asshole.

Please don't vote for the asshole.