-WRITTEN BY MR. DEBS
During a recent brief, friendly chat, our new neighbors informed me that Barack Obama is apparently a secret Muslim, and also a terrorist.
This does not really come as a huge surprise, as I’d known they were hard-right conservatives (they talk back to their TV, loudly, and our walls are made of aluminum foil and pressed dead-spiderboard). But I was mildly impressed by the sheer scale of the conspiratorial structure they’d bought into: it wasn’t just some half-baked “He’s-got-an-Ay-rab-name” bus shelter, it was a McMansion of the paranoid style. They had memorized a deep, well-researched presentation, a veritable efflorescence of paranoia, reaching back to Obama’s teens (
do we really know which shadowy forces funded his lunches in ninth grade?) and complete with an ominous person-by-person listing of every Muslim working for his campaign, reminiscent of nothing so much as that infamous list of neoconservatives published in Adbusters a few years ago, with asterisks to denote the Jews.
I did the same thing I always do when socializing with the deranged, whether or not I will have to see them again on a regular basis: I nodded politely and said
Wow and
Really? and
You don’t say at appropriate-seeming moments. Paranoia is the world’s very best spackle, and it was certainly an impressive construct these folks had going, like the plot of a Tim Powers book (for that matter, knowing Powers’ politics it may someday become one). The main thing I came away with, though, was a sort of odd sense of excitement; if the conspiracy were true, I could not help but be for a moment rendered faintly hopeful by the extraordinary level of discipline and commitment that maintaining this sort of decades-long façade would have required on Obama’s part. If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from the last seven years and eight months, it would probably be “If it ‘twere done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were not done by a fucktard,” and so a return to an era of competence – even an Evil Obbaman Caliphate sort of competence – does sorta tug at the heartstrings. (Indeed, as a patriot I went so far as to hold out a vague initial hope that Cheney really would turn out to be an evil genius, as advertised.)
As for the neighbors, I don’t mean to condescend, really; I imagine that anyone – including, say, me - would be hard-pressed to arrive at different conclusions from theirs if your only info sources were the 24-hour Obama libel marathon that Fox News seamlessly transitioned into sometime early last week. Their opinions are reasonable, within their frame of reference; in Kung Fu Monkey’s justly famous
Crazification schema, this makes them the group who “have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality, even though they arrive at their positions through rational means.”
While constitutionally loath to make happy predictions, this does seem like it really should be trouble for the McCain campaign. Not that Sarah, Moose Princess hasn’t rallied the base magnificently; Rich Lowry’s boner is undeniable evidence of that. But the thing is that you need at least some support from – if not a plurality of – sane people as well. 100% support for the ticket among the Eeek-Obama-will-replace-preschool-naptime-with-mandatory-bestiality-workshops crowd simply won’t get you there; neither will Stalinist levels of turnout among that elusive demographic cohort who – in surveys – express, unprompted, a belief that Obama will order the Washington monument torn down to make room for a colossal statue of
Juan Posadas, with a hammer-and-sickle in one hand and a flying saucer in the other. These people may brighten our day, but there simply aren’t enough of them to be decisive electorally.
And oh yeah, my neighbors: perhaps it is the unfamiliar feeling of cautious optimism in the direction of the Republic talking, but I feel a bit puckish. In light of the high ambient levels of muslophobia across the driveway, I wonder what would happen if I pulled a young Lovecraft* and faked a very public conversion to radical Islam? (Yes, yes, disrespectful to millions, the fatwas, etc., but it might generate an amusing freakout or two, and I’m hard-up for some cheap amusement.) My dad has some cassettes of bad early-70s Egyptian pop music he got from a Cairene freighter-captain friend that we could blast next door on the stereo; people who play Toby Keith at us daily would surely have no grounds for complaint. Also, anyone know a good place to get a cheap used keffiyeh and a “Death To The Zionist Entity” T-shirt, size medium?
* Okay, research on this subject failed to produce any hits, but I swear I remember reading how Lovecraft announced, when he was 10 or so, that he was now a Muslim and that he should henceforth be addressed as “Abdul Alhazred,” which name he later recycled for the author of the Necronomicon in his writings. I think it was in an essay by Silverberg in a late-90s IASFM? Or maybe a weird dream or something.
From this morning's LA Times:
