I have to laugh at you wingnuts, especially those of you “deep thinkers” who sit around endlessly debating whether His Serene Majesty the Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Keeper of the Hoops, Master of the Greens, Bringer of Kinetic Military Action, Vacationer-in-Chief, Slayer of Osama, Atomizer of the Economy, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago, is Chauncey Gardiner, the anti-hero of Being There, or the Manchurian Candidate III: This Time, It’s Personal.
Why can’t the answer be both? I mean, it’s laugh-out-loud funny to watch you and your legions of Faux News “Rethuglican campaign consultants” twist yourselves into post–Labor Day pretzels trying to figure out Hussein — and, by extension, all those on the morally superior Left — by trying to shoehorn him and us into your standard white-bread political molds. Because the truth is, Troglodytes are from Mars and Progressives are from Venus and until you get that through those thick Neanderthal skulls of yours, you’ll never understand us, much less defeat us.
As you know from my legendary book on the subject, my task in this life is to make you smarter, more worthy adversaries, instead of the pathetic, mewling sacks of Romneys that you are. This is the job I have been given by my father, the sainted “Che” Kahane, who’s still living down there in Florida in Lanskyland with his brother, my Uncle Joe, plotting the revolution and savoring the triumph of how far we’ve come, and how fast.
But so far I’ve failed miserably, since you idiots continue to live in a prelapsarian past, one in which the Right and Left shared similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the U.S. of KKKA, and you still think we can hash out our differences over a cup of Morning Joe. We used to meet for lunch by day and at the Rotary Club by night, a time of shared cultural values, Cold War paranoia, and endemic racism. Horrible as it may seem today, we lived in the same neighborhoods, sent our kids to the same schools, and once in a blue, gibbous moon even married each other.
Luckily, those days are gone for good, and I’m proud to say it’s our side that has made it so. We’ve self-segregated, not only into New York City apartment buildings and neighborhoods, but into whole states — commie “Red” for you (yuk, yuk — thanks, media!) and patriotic “Blue” for us. It’s like Underworld, where werewolves and vampires fight it out for global supremacy, but we’re evolving into Lycans and you’re evolving into a half-witted Caesar from The Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
But don’t worry: We’re not about to request partition, like India and Pakistan, or the Irish or the original Kardashians. We’re taking you over one state at a time, by any means necessary, moving from state to state like the aliens in Independence Day, sucking the life from one body politic after another and then, insatiable, moving on to the next one. We won’t rest until, like Dracula, we’ve extracted the life essence from all 57 or 58 states and leave your Christianist artifact of the so-called “Enlightenment” as dead as the Holy Roman Empire, and as little mourned.
Let me put this in terms you morons might possibly understand. For activists and advocates of my father’s generation, there were two career choices back in the ’60s through which they could effect their desire for fundamental change. The first was the law, the second (for the less intellectually gifted) was journalism. The tolerance-teaching Southern Poverty Law Center — founded on the belief that there would always be racist-caused poverty, now and forever, amen — or the New York Times — the only place on earth where it is always 1964 and that premature anti-Republican Lester Maddox is still taking a baseball bat to the black patrons of his Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta.
Those too stupid to do either went into academe — but you knew that already, because you probably had some of them for teachers. But, luckily for us, they taught both disciplines.
The best part about our career choices was this: There was absolutely no downside for what we were advocating. Our entire agitation-for-change racket, which long antecedes BHO2, was predicated upon the notion that the only bad things that would happen would happen to you. It was your way of life that would be destroyed, not ours; you who would have to pay the cost of our relentless lawsuits, not us; your kids who would bear the burden of fundamental change, not ours — because, after all, as socially conscious, low carbon-footprint types, we don’t have kids. (We get your kids to pay our Social Security.) Besides, how can you bring a child into a world that also has Sarah Palin in it?
By the simple means of appealing to the better angels of your nature — we also don’t have any better angels, since we don’t believe in G*d or any of that mumbo-jumbo — we got you to question and then junk much of what you formerly believed in. We were the devil on your left shoulder, the little red sonofagun always whispering: Go ahead. Carpe diem. If it feels good, do it. You know you want to . . .
Because what did we have to lose? We were perfectly comfortable embedded, like a contagious tick, in your society, happy to carve out a handsome living as lawyers, labor leaders, writers, teachers, pornographers, and T-shirt icons, injecting our poison into your minds in the fervent hope that you would eventually see it our way. We were Screwtape and you the Patient, working you over with a host of Wormwoods with gilt brass knuckles. We became the enemy you loved.
But perhaps we have done our work too well. Your society is reeling, sick, possibly terminal — just the way Cloward and Piven and the Frankfurt School and Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and the Weather Underground and George McGovern and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden and Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin and the authors of the Port Huron Statement drew it up on the blackboard jungle way back when “Che” was a dope-smoking, rock-throwing pup. Yippie!
As the Shahinshah Hussein prepares to mount the Peacock Throne before a joint session of Congress on Thursday, must we finally confront the paradox of the parasite, and hope not to kill the host lest we die ourselves?
Nah. As the great Yip Harburg once wrote for Harold Arlen, “Life’s Full of Consequence.”
Just not for us. At least, not yet.
— David Kahane is happy to lead a consequence-free life at his palatial pad in Echo Park, where he can make fun of you to his and Ginger’s hearts’ content. You could get a clue by “friending” him on Facebook, dropping a line at kahanenro@gmail.com, or by reading Rules for Radical Conservatives, but you probably won’t.