“Universalize Me, but Watch Out for Your Neighbor”

“Universalize Me, but Watch Out for Your Neighbor”:

Digging for Treasure in "It's a Mad Mad Mad World"

The headline above summarizes the message strategy of the Republican field running for president of the United States: “I speak with universal and infinite
paternal love for all of you, but must warn half of you that the other half are leeches and misfits who are destroying your lives.”

Then, to top it off, they accuse the Occupy Wall Street movement of class warfare and divisiveness when OWS stands up for the 99 percent of Americans who are being robbed by the wealthiest one percent.

In their crazy-making world, it’s dangerously subversive to complain that one percent is stealing all the money. Criticizing 50 percent, however, is patriotic and unifying. Go figure. And it’s all done within the galling pretense that they speak for everyone.

Republicans aren’t the only ones who like to use the empty rhetorical embrace of everyone, nodding as they evoke “the American people” as if the citizens of a diverse democracy were one monolithic, homogenous hunk of humanity they have their loving arms around. But they do it better and more often than their opponents. It’s their Savior Pose:

Perry loves me! This I know,

For his videos tell me so.

Little ones to him belong;

They are weak but he is strong.

Of course, their messiah complexes can take them only so far, and that’s when they abandon the Original’s “love thy neighbor” for “be afraid, be very afraid, your neighbor wants your spouse, your house, your children, your future, and only I can save you from them.”

This is the source of their inaccurate whining that half of America pays no taxes, that suspicious dark-skinned or vampire-pale poor people are stealing elections and destroying democracy, that the unemployed are lazy welfare princes and princesses.

The contradiction is unconcerning to them since so many believe it is always someone else who will be Left Behind. I’m still waiting on End Times Christians to explain just how Jesus loves everyone but will with a clear conscience damn a healthy majority to eternal torment. Politicians have an easier time with the eenie-meeny-miney-moe gambit. They’re just pandering to the Joneses who they’ve already turned against the Smiths.

This is one whacked-out election campaign. We are only in Act I of the 2012 campaign and the GOP wannabes are already doing Die Hard’s final bit. They are lighting up the cable news with rhetorical fireballs, vanquishing all kinds of make-believe villains and striking their best reluctant-hero-saves-the-world poses.

The candidates want us to think of them as Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood types, but they’re acting more like the characters in It’s A Mad Mad Mad World – J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle), Melville Crump (Sid Caesar), Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett), Ding Bell (Mickey Rooney), Lennie Pike (Jonathon Winters), and Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman).

I fear I malign the mid-century comedy giants by the comparison, but really, the GOP presidential candidates are acting like their madcap race is all about Smilar Grogan’s (Jimmy Durante) $350,000 buried treasure rather than the White House. Now that I think about it, to the GOP it is of course about the simoleons.

I suppose in the end it’s not so surprising that a bunch hack politicians pretending omniscience would come off as comical. And so, I give you the footage above from their arrival at last week’s GOP presidential primary debate in Las Vegas.

ME HERO DYD