Thanks to the miracle of absentee ballots, I’ll be viewing the returns from here in the UK, where my friends Jovanka and Jonathan have been kind enough to stash me for a while.
Last night, I once again saw America through different eyes, this time through a Channel Four documentary on America’s crazed political system and its activists. The contents were nothing startling to anyone paying attention, but the program’s manner was striking: the presenter, a passionate gent named Peter Oborne, had the actual liberty to say obvious things out loud, calling the sham televised campaign events and hand-picked shills in attendance precisely what they were — fake — to a degree unthinkable in American "news" programming.
I could give a dozen details, but here’s the basic difference: David Copperfield pretends to levitate his assistant. Wolf Blitzer shows up and breathlessly asks him how long he plans to continue. Larry King asks him how it feels to levitate someone. Rush Limbaugh spins the act of levitation to favor Bush, while pretending not to. Bill O’Reilly does the same, while grabbing the assistant’s ass. Democrats spend more energy trying to feign levitation than presenting a viable alternative to make-believe.
And then comes the British reporter, pointing out the obvious, that nobody’s really flying. Which is obvious to anyone who isn’t part of the groupthink, which is to say, the entire world.
The Americans ignore the unwelcome visitor, and then complain: why can’t everyone else see the magic?
And that’s what it looks like from America’s strongest ally.
We have a long way to go. But the first step is removing the biggest trickster from center stage.
What will Bush do first on the morning after the election? 