The boneheads of America lost the election, and they
are going through the predicted ritual of self recrimination and mutual
accusations, doing more of the latter than the first. They are accusing each
other of choosing the wrong man, Mitt Romney, to represent them in the election
for the post of President, but no one is taking any responsibility for the
blunder.
Now that the loss of the election has sunk in, they portray
the man as being like the fictional character Thurston Howell, a millionaire
who is so removed from the life of ordinary people, he cannot connect with them
well enough to secure their love or their vote. This happened, they say,
despite the message he delivered which they insist was a sound message given
that it was their own. And they promise it will remain the same, and will be
maintained in future campaigns. Apparently, these people never learn from their
mistakes; they only recognize that something went wrong when, like a mule, they
are hit on the head with a two by four.
To be sure, Thurston Howell is a character in the television
situation comedy of the Nineteen Sixties, Gilligan's Island .
It is the story of seven people who went on a cruise in a boat, and were
shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean on an island
not shown on any map. Now castaways, their challenge in each episode is to stay
alive; to look for a way to leave the island and to go home if they can. The
most comical figure in the show is Gilligan, one of the two crew members on the
boat. The other crew is the Skipper whose life was saved by Gilligan when both
were serving in the Navy. They remain buddies, and their antics generate most
of the comedy.
Four other characters play supporting roles in the series.
There is the Professor who is in charge of finding ways to keep the castaways
fed despite the meager resources of the island. He keeps them out of danger
when the storms hit, when a wild animal visits the island and when one of them
commits a blunder. And he keeps them informed about the world out there with a
radio he whipped up using parts and equipment salvaged from the doomed boat. It
picks up a station in Hawaii
to which they listen when the professor manages to keep the radio powered and
operating.
There are also three women in the show, one being the wife
of the millionaire who is as detached from real life as him but is not as
smart. This being the decade of the Sixties when the roles played by women were
stereotypical, you also meet the farm girl, Mary Ann whose presence exudes
innocent sexiness without her trying to be sexy. And you meet the movie star,
Ginger who wants to be seductive at all time but has no one to seduce on that
desolate island. Still, she performs every task as if she were doing it in
front of an adoring audience that wants to be seduced by her.
What makes this story a parody of present-day America is not
only that the boneheads selected Romney to represent them in the election but
that they started to turn America into a comical act long before that, and they
continue to do so now. In fact, they are turning the country into an episodic
farce which, to be brutally honest about it, looks as pathetic to the rest of
the world as a political Gilligan
Island
The way things work in an American election is that the top
brass of each Party appoint the people who will manage the campaigns for
President and for the Congressional and gubernatorial positions. As it happened
this time, the appointees of the Party supported someone for President but when
that one lost to Romney during the primaries, they switched their support to
the winner. As it turned out, however, it was Romney's outlook on life that
matched almost exactly the philosophy that the Party brass had pursued on the
international stage when they were in charge and in control of the levers of
power.
In fact, their ongoing effort in and out of power has been
to reshape Uncle Sam's character from being the post-WWII benevolent rising
superpower to a figure that closely resembles a Thurston Howell. This is a
character whose riches are doing him no good, having no access to them, yet he
behaves as if he has financial clout on a desolate island where a banana could
do him a lot more good than millions of dollars locked in a vault in a far away
city. In a similar fashion, the boneheads fail to see that what used to be
mighty America
is no longer in charge of the world's riches – partly because of what they did
to it when they were in the White House – and yet, they act as if they are
still in control of the world's finances.
That was the time when the threat of an American economic
ostracism directed against a nation could send the shivers down the spine of
those in charge of that nation. And so the rulers toed the line to get on the
good side of America
and stay there. These people feared not only what America could do to them with
its riches but also how it could use the influence it had on its allies to
partake in the ostracism; and how it could push institutions like the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to refuse extending aid to them.
But things have changed since that time with an America whose finances now depend on the good
humor of the Asians and the Arabs that hold most of America 's debt and much of its
floating currency. As well, things have changed with the World institutions
about which the Asian and Latin American countries have vowed never again to
deal with. They had a few bitter experiences with those institutions, and they
have judged them to be – let's be blunt about it – more than useless; they
found them to be destructive of their interests.
In fact, what is left for these institutions to do now is
scrounge around to put together enough cash to help not the developing Third
World countries of Asia, Africa or Latin America but to bail out the newly
forming Third World economies of Western Europe – those same old allies of
America whose survival now depends not on America but on doing business with
the former have-not countries. They trade with them and do all sorts of other
business exchanges such as investing in each other's country. How the mighty
have fallen! And how the meek have risen!
The table has turned but the Romney people who are known to
be of the neo-Conservative variety and the Tea Party ideology, are still
behaving on the world stage like the Thurston Howell character. In doing what
they do, they pull America away from a world that wants to remain friends but
can no longer march in lockstep with a financial empire that used to be but is
no more.
The result of their effort to achieve the illogical is
causing America to drift
apart from the rest of the world as if pulled away into a diplomatic ocean, and
made to look like a Gilligan's Island . America is
becoming lost in the middle of nowhere, and things are getting worse by the
day. It is shown on the map as having ties only with Israel and a handful of
small island nations that still bother to toe its line at the United Nations
and the other world forums.
You see these people continue to push the nation to its doom
as they pursue their old philosophy even after the defeat and their breakup into
factions. They continue to do what they have been doing on the local stage and
the international arena. In fact, they act as if each faction were living in a
separate media universe, absolving the self and vilifying the others for being
part of the “entertainment media complex” that instructed Romney to treat America and the
world as clumsily as he did.
That sort of display may be comical to the humorists of the
late night television hours but is not so funny to the people who suffer the
consequences. This being the case, you can imagine why it is beyond the New
Conservatives and the Tea Party hacks to understand that they damage the
interests of their fellow citizens when they try to describe the country as
something it is not. And of course, they will never understand the significance
of a world that is watching America transform into a farcical island while
pretending to have magical powers it never had even in its heydays.
Whatever the faction to which they belong, all of these
people repeat one and the same refrain. It is to threaten the Arab and the
Muslim countries, especially Egypt ,
that if they do not cheer the terrorist activities of the bloodthirsty
Israelis, and if they do not accommodate the incitement generated by the
bloodthirsty Jewish leaders in America ,
they will ostracize those countries economically. They also threaten to call on
America 's
allies to do the same, and call on the World financial institutions to follow
suit.
And the Arabs and the Muslims are saying to them: Go ahead,
make my day, you pathetic bunch of drifters, lost souls and useless bums.