Grand Strategy

Bernie and the Messiah Complex

I feel so sorry, fellow Americans, that as a collective entity, your political weathervanes love to shift in the direction of the most persistent, the most prevailing, and most revealing winds. I speak of the Messiah Complex as it populates America’s politics, and it is a recurrent wind, which while blowing hot air most frequently, always blows in the perfect candidate to perpetuate unimaginable devastation.

Look at how the American people received Barack Obama. Hope! Change! Yes, things were going to be Different! The oligarchic, militaristic, and plutocratic evils of the Bush years were to be swept away, and replaced by a new fresh tide of young ideas! Boy, that man is sure some orator! Why, he’s a Constitutional scholar! My, oh my!

Until three weeks into his presidency he is walking back the promises as to putting the BushCo torturers under prosecution and telling us all it’s “time to move on”. forget I said that, puh-leeze! Oh, we are going to close Guantanamo, because its very existence is a stick in the eye of Miss Liberty. Let her hang on to that torch there, of course, we are going to need it! To relight another fire in the Middle East... This time Libya... this again, Syria! We are here to prevent a humanitarian cataclysm! Right.

So where had we heard all of that before?

In the very funny and oracular movie Idiocracy, Joe Not Sure is called upon by his president- many many years into the future- to solve a number of national crises.  “And he’s gonna fix EVERTHING!” crows the President, about his new Secretary of Agriculture. This same approach- we’ll sit back and do our part, and vote- and the (new) president will fix everything- seems to be the easy way out, and the one under which the Messiah Complex forms, in the context of which I am speaking.

Wait for the next president. He is gonna fix EVERTHING! Why, we just had most of our civil liberties vacuumed out from under us by Bush’s AND Obama’s NSA. There might be some ground regained yet, the 2 Billion dollar Megamind in the Utah desert is not going to be going away any day soon, whether or not anything is put forward by our ever-contrary Congress, nor by the next president, whether Bernie Sanders or not.  (The campaign promises of Rand Paul must remain as scrutinized, until the highly unlikely event of his own acquisition of the office and any post election result.) Maybe it is the characteristic “perpetual optimism” of the American people, that same one that drives many of our politicians to lofty and shallow praise and sentiment about the character of the American nation, en masse. I can’t say. But...

I hate watching Americans fall for the same old crap twice. Remember that old Who song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”? How true and appropos it came to be, when we discovered that Barack Obama was no fresh wind, he was just a more-erudite version of the same old stagnant amoebic-bearing gusty mistral. How different it will be with Bernie! Woohoo! Get on the bandwagon now, don’t get left behind!  Grow the cult of personality!

Sanders is growing his popularity for some damn good reasons, but I only offer this as a caution to everyone that when it comes to politics, there can never be any “messiah.” You are laughable if you believe any president can retain the miraculous powers of, so to speak, multiplying the loaves and the fishes in order to feed the tired huddled starving masses, collected around the feet of Miss Liberty, straining at the bit to get in.

No, there never is any Messiah in American politics. On this, you can call me an atheist, unequivocally.