Concerts Opera Dance Theater Gigs Exhibits

Horse Sense

Nothing is to be left to chance in Bushway's efforts to outvote the anti-American diehards.

By Chris Floyd
Published: April 30, 2004

In the heart of the heart of the "Homeland" -- the verdant fields and quiet townships of rural Ohio -- the fate of the world is being decided. There, the sway of a few votes could sway a key state whose political bent could sway the entire U.S. presidential election in November.

That's why the Bush campaign has adopted the methods of Amway, the quasi-religious cargo cult/pyramid scheme that has suckered millions of rubes into peddling cheap tat and passing the profits up the ladder to the leaders, who sit in stern judgment on any disciple who fails to follow the prescribed rituals or feed enough new converts into the machine's ever-grinding maw. "Amway [is the model], no question," campaign officials cheerfully told The New York Times this week.

The cheap tat being peddled by Bushway is, of course, the candidate himself -- or as campaign director Ken Mehlman describes the product, "it's love and belief in the importance of the president." The cult's vast command-and-control machinery has now descended on rural Ohio, where campaign volunteers -- who once merely had to "support" candidates but now must "love" them -- are toiling to meet Mehlman's whip-cracking corporate targets for contacts, converts and cash.

Once this collective mind has been assembled and thoroughly disciplined, Mehlman will "flip a switch" and begin programming acolytes with the campaign's poll-tested "message of the day," which they will then mouth incessantly to friends, neighbors and the local press. Nothing is to be left to chance in Bushway's frantic efforts to deliver enough ardent Heartlanders to outvote the anti-American diehards -- treasonous liberals, sullen ethnics, marriage-mad gays, union troublemakers, apostate clerics, greedy pensioners -- holed up in the big cities of the evenly divided state.

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But beyond its grimly fascinating portrait of a Stalinist-Moonie personality cult at work, the article also reveals a new phenomenon on the American scene, a disturbing development that goes a long way toward explaining the profound, persistent and widespread disassociation from reality that pervades American society and may yet carry the Potemkin president to victory:

Fake horses.

Bushway operatives are now trolling heavily in the "exurbs" -- middle-class and upscale housing developments sprouting all over the countryside, where small farmers have been forced off the land by ruthless, government-greased agribusiness conglomerates and predatory banks. Developers lure stressed-out city-dwellers to these gilded holding pens by constructing a cozy simulacrum of an old-fashioned rural community, complete with fake storefronts -- beguilingly realistic, but only a few feet deep -- and, yes, fake horses, made of metal, gently nosing over white picket fences.

Mehlman's minions believe exurbia offers rich pickings for the Bush cult -- and they're probably right. People who live in fake towns, with fake stores and fake horses, are likely to be happy with a fake president, who uses fake evidence and fake words about "freedom" and "peace" to launch all-too-real wars of conquest while turning the national treasury into a candy store for his cronies.

The exurbanites' virtual reality is a perfect reflection of the dreamworld where half the nation now dwells, snug in the continuing belief that Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction, that he was a staunch ally of al-Qaida, and that every lie their cult leader told them before the war was, quite literally, the Gospel truth, as Knight-Ridder reports.

Polls released this month show that a whopping 57 percent of Americans still believe in the Saddam-Osama connection -- a deliberately cultivated delusion that was one of two prime movers of public opinion in favor of Bush's relentless drang nach Osten. (Recall the many rousing stories of U.S. soldiers carrying pictures of the Sept. 11 attacks into battle against Saddam: "It's payback time" -- a sentiment repeatedly echoed in vox populi pieces in the Homeland during the invasion.)

Even though Bush himself was finally forced to admit, in public, that there was no connection between his unprovoked war of aggression and the earlier attack on America, the Fake-Horse faction is holding fast to the Leader's original revelation. It doesn't hurt, of course, that his grudging, mumbled confession came during a brief photo opportunity months ago and was never repeated, nor that he and his handlers continue to conflate the two events at every opportunity.

What's more, an even whoppier 67 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam either possessed a bulging arsenal of weapons of mass destruction just before the war, or else had a "major program" for developing them. This lie was the second of the prime war movers and Bush must be gratified to see the Fake-Horsers standing firm, despite the overwhelming evidence of his own arms inspectors that Iraq had no WMD or active programs to produce them. In fact, we now know, as Newsweek reports, that the U.S. government learned years ago that Saddam had destroyed all of his WMD and mothballed the development programs -- in 1995.

But fake horses are more tractable than powerful live beasts -- and self-serving lies are easier to handle than a volatile, complex reality. Anyway, is it really so surprising that so many Americans prefer a Potemkin world? Otherwise, they would have to accept the incontrovertible facts: that mass murder is being committed in their name; that their leader is a terrorist -- a fanatic who pursues political goals through wanton violence -- just like the enemy who attacked them; that they have been deceived, betrayed, exploited, suckered and bought off -- sometimes willingly -- for years, for decades, by elites whose crimes and follies are now blowing back in firestorms of rage and hatred.

Is it any wonder that the cozy exurbians prefer cults and fakery to such fearsome truths?

Annotations

The Multi-Level Marketing of the President
New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2004

Americans Continue to Believe Saddam Supported Al Qaeda, Had WMD
PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll, March 16-22, 2004

Many Americans Still Hold Misperceptions About Iraq War, Poll Finds
Knight-Ridder, April 23, 2004

Star Witness On Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Feb. 27, 2003

UN: Iraq Had no WMD After 1994
USA Today, March 3, 2004

What Do You Mean 'We' Were Wrong?
WorldNet Daily, March 20, 2004

Kay Cites Evidence of Iraq Disarming
Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2004

Transcript of Interview With Hussein Kamal
Middle East Reference, Aug. 22, 1995

Defector Talks of Iraqi 'Final Experiment,'
Worldnet Daily, Feb. 26, 2003

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