Despite my burning obsession with all things Canadian, and Paul Martin's coronation as Emperor of All the Canadas, and the new Liberal government's dire financial straits in Ontario, and David Orchard's pending lawsuit to halt the Alliance-PC merger, I have still been paying attention to the race for America's presidency. Since I am technically an American. And live here. And have a vote. And everything. These 'primary' things are coming up soon. I'm not sure why a lot of the Democratic hopefuls are still running. Like Joe Lieberman. No-one really liked him when he was a vice-presidential candidate; no-one really seems to like him now. I think all he has going for him is the name-recognition thing. Or this Richard Gephardt character. He's pretty boring, too. Boring helped our incumbent Unelected Fraud get into office in the first place. And John Kerry; what's up with him?
I'll tell you what's up with him.
He's not Howard Dean.
Also, he is not Wesley Clark.
These are men who rock. Other would-be world leaders who wish to learn the ways of rocking would be well-advised to observe these men in action. They are like Elvis. Elves. Two Elvises.
I started off pretty lukewarm to Clark, because of the whole military thing, but I have warmed to him...I watched several of his television appearances. I loved his FOX interview...The penis-in-a-suit interviewer of course tried to impugn his patriotism and accuse him of failing to support our troops because he'd called Iraq a bad idea. However, it seems to be the case that four-star generals, for some unfathomable reason, do not suffer such attacks in silence, or break down crying for their mothers when confronted by the massed armies of FOXdom. Clark, in short, ripped the guy a new one. (By which I mean rectum. Rectum? He darn near killed 'um!) It was extremely satisfying to watch. Clark did it with style, too. Nothing histrionic. I think he has a very good television presence. He has a sort of kindly grandfather or county doctor or parish priest air to him...I think it's all in the hair. His hair is a source of great power. I also saw him on a programme hosted by a 'Letter Man' who is apparently some form of 'television' personality. Clark has this earnest gee-whiz John Astin quality that I'd imagine Americans would eat up as if it were *insert your favourite naughty bit here*. He would make an excellent cult leader, with his hair, his air of benevolent wisdom...I'll bet he could give the Mormons a run for their money. I could see his face on the packaging of mass-marketed name-brand magic underwear.
Clark has the underwear going for him, it's true...But he still isn't Howard Dean.
Howard Dean definitely has the cool uncle thing going on. If you're my age. Or maybe he's more like your teenaged daughter's best friend's pretty cool father. You would definitely feel comfortable letting him drive your kids to the mall. You would enjoy having him as your neighbour somewhere comfortably suburban; on summer days you would walk out your front door to get the newspaper, and he would greet you cheerfully while he watered his lawn. I wonder if he fishes? Hypothetically, you could imagine yourself angling with him on a little boat somewhere, wearing hats covered in lures or hooks or whatever it is fishermen cover their hats with. He has a likeable real-person image much unlike that of George Bush, pampered sissy-boy supreme.
Howard Dean does not hate you.
This is something I look for in a president.
George Bush hates me.
Being gay makes it pretty easy to pick a side, politically. The Republican Party as a whole hates me. The Democrats, on the other hand, are slowly and uncomfortably but inexorably coming to back me up. Unless you have some serious self-loathing issues, the choice is obvious, really.
I'm a flaming anarcho-socialist. Dean's a middle-of-the-road kind of guy. We aren't ideological soulmates. Dean wouldn't give us Canadian-style health care or a healthy dose of nationalisation. But that's okay. I can deal. Dean is a decent human being with a fighting spirit who stands for meaningful but incremental changes. He's not a revolutionary. But I do think he would help make things better.
He seems as if he'd put substantial effort into environmental policy...That turns me on. And not just because I'm a tree-hugging hippie peacenik. There's a strong component of self-interest to this. I'll live to see 2050. That's a pretty long while from now. A lot could go wrong. As an avid science-fiction consumer, I have read countless visions of a dystopian blighted near-future Earth withering beneath the onslaught of a total environmental collapse, and I'd really prefer, all things being equal, if these visions did not in fact come true. There's the global-warming thing. Which does actually seem to exist, thank you very much. There's the air-quality thing. The clean water thing. The oil thing. Lots of things. The weather has been pretty consistently unseasonable for a while now, a year or few for sure. At least it has been for a several-mile radius around me. I'm not sure about you. It snowed in Seattle this week. I went out one morning, Wednesday maybe, to catch my bus and found a thin but nontrivial crispy layer of the stuff on peoples' cars and lawns. And we got totally pissed on in October, after a dry, dry summer. Normally it only drizzles here; this rain of which I speak kicked our asses, collectively. I think 20 October was the wettest day on record.
Why, when I was your age, grumble, grumble.
Anyhow. If you don't want to hunt eels from little boats on the flooded and submerged streets of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan a few decades from now, I'd suggest you give Doctor Governor Mister Howard Dean a look.
It's funny to think about 2050 actually arriving...Perhaps even funnier than it was to realise 2000 had come round at last. We're living in the future. We're going to have to start living with all kinds of crazy way-out shit you thought would never come up in the real world. Some day, we will run out of oil. That's just the way it is. Some day, we will have to deal with melting ice caps. And some day, they will try to remake Chinatown. It can't hurt to start planning for it now.
Posted by aloysius at November 23, 2003 01:05 PM | TrackBack |