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Thursday, September 16, 2004

From the muted post-horn mailbag

I got the coolest letter from the Kerry people yesterday!  Or at least I think I did.  It‚Äôs hard to tell these days with all these simulacra and forgeries floating around out there.

Dear Michael B?©rub?©:

Thank you for not giving us any unsolicited campaign advice.  We‚Äôre having a hard enough time as it is, trying to stay focused on jobs and health care while Iraq descends inexorably into the abyss.

But in all honesty, we have to say that your blog hasn‚Äôt really been helping lately.  We liked your RNC coverage, but since then, your deliberate post-convention confounding of ‚Äúoriginals‚Äù and ‚Äúparodies‚Äù has left many voters confused, and your strange Mobius-strip exchange with Tristero seems to have eerily anticipated the Killian memo phenomenon, in which ‚Äúthe real‚Äù is dissolved in a bubbling vat of textuality only to appear again in the form of a forgery that tells the truth.  It‚Äôs hard, amidst all this nonsense, to keep people focused on the fact that George Bush is the worst president since James Garfield fell into that coma.  (Actually many of us would prefer Garfield-in-a-coma.  But we can‚Äôt very well say that on the stump.)

Moreover, we believe that your literary/theoretical allusions are costing us critical support among undecided voters.  Not because they‚Äôre postmodern and/or poststructuralist, but because they are finally incoherent.  One day it‚Äôs Pynchon and Derrida, the next day it‚Äôs Borges and Baudrillard, the day after that it‚Äôs Nabokov and a smirking reference to Scooby-Doo Where Are You? And what‚Äôs all this business about show tunes?  Is that a reference to Trent Duffy‚Äôs explanation of Bush‚Äôs bicycle accident this summer ("suffice it to say he wasn’t whistling show tunes")?  Our internal polling suggests that this eclectic post-something blog-soup has cost us six points in Ohio and another four in Wisconsin.  Please, for the sake of the party, knock off this silliness and get back to your often-promised, never-delivered entry on Tom Frank.

Sincerely yours,

The Kerry People

Well, of course I‚Äôm very sorry to have contributed to the general confusion.  I‚Äôm writing that take on What‚Äôs the Matter with Kansas? this week, and right now it‚Äôs part of a talk I‚Äôm going to deliver at Binghamton University next Monday, so I can‚Äôt post it ‚Äòtil I get back from Binghamton‚Äì just in case I have any readers in Binghamton who‚Äôll show up to my talk and say, ‚Äúthis stuff again?  Why did we come to see you speak if you‚Äôre just going to repeat the things you say on your blog?‚Äù

More importantly, the Kerry people have a point about my incoherence.  Internal theoretical consistency has never been my strong suit!  So I think I should open this question to the floor, or whatever passes for the floor in the blogosphere.  It’s time for another Reader Poll!

The Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase of the 2004 campaign is best captured by the figure of:

___ Borges
___ Kafka
___ Pynchon
___ Baudrillard
___ Nabokov
___ Scooby-Doo
___ Derrida
___ Lee Atwater (note that one of the minor titles in the Jerome Kern songbook is “Good Old Atwater”!)
___ I don’t know and I don’t care– in fact, I’m not even sure I want Kerry to inherit the debacle that will face a U.S. president in 2005, and I’m hanging on only because I cannot bear to contemplate a Supreme Court made up of Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen, and Tomas de Torquemada.
___ Are you ever going to say anything about the NHL lockout?

Over to you, folks.

UPDATE:  In comments, Tim mentions “forged memos that are true and real memories that are false.” Which reminds me-- what about Philip K. Dick?  Some people have lately informed me that the United States now has an android television network that simulates an actual news network, with simulacra of “journalists” and “analysts” who are indistinguishable from real journalists and analysts except by means of the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test (and even then, Voigt-Kampff has an accuracy rate below 70 percent).  This sounds too much like the alternate police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so I haven’t paid much attention to these people.  But could it be true?

Posted by Michael on 09/16 at 01:50 AM
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