#Excelsior502 – I hate birds. I hate birds even more than I hate cats, which is something, since I believe that in the future the only use we’ll have for them is probably as food once the Global Economy finally collapses. Anyways, the reason why I hate birds so much is because of a former paramour named Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie was a girlfriend of mine for a short time, and when I say ‘short’ I truly mean short; within three weeks I was thoroughly sick of her ass and showed her the door. Anne-Marie was a bird lover, one of those people who eat, breathe, and shit all things avian, in much the same way as those pathetic cat people – you know, like the ones who insist on dressing Mr. Buttons up as Jack Sparrow or Adolf Hitler and then putting the resulting sappy video up on YouTube? – do.
Anne-Marie’s house was a virtual aviary; she had a parrot, a cockatoo, a pair of miserable budgies, and an insane parakeet named Chester. Chester was, as far as parakeets go I guess, nothing special. However, he did have one singularly annoying quality that drove me right up the proverbial wall every weekend when Anne-Marie just had to have me stay the night because…well, because I know what a woman wants, see? Besides, the lasangna was good, too.
Anyhow, about Chester...
Chester’s annoying habit was the ability to screech his tiny little heart out at all hours of the day and night. Chester, apparently, was a light sleeper who pretty much napped his way through the day, so that he could have the energy to annoy and keep you from sleeping all night long. Now, Chester’s preferred method of being a pain in the ass was to sing, as far as parakeets actually sing. It was more of a repetitive series of screeches, chirps, and puking sounds.
After three weekends of Chester’s midnight antics it had gotten to the point where I could anticipate not only when he would start sounding off, but what ‘song’ he would sing. I knew the pattern, the cadences, the volume, the rhythms, of Chester’s stupidity and could even reproduce them, sound for sound. Chester, so far as I was concerned, was dead meat just as soon as I could get his ass out of that cage and wring his neck. Of course, Anne-Marie would never allow that to happen; that was her ‘baby’, and I was a mean fucker for even thinking such things.
One day Anne-Marie was cleaning all the bird cages in the house. She cleaned the cages one at a time, and while she was thus engaged allowed the birds to fly free about the house, as they would come to her when she called them afterwards (you must have no life whatsoever if you have the time to train birds to do this kind of shit), except for Frederick the Parrot, who had to be chained to a perch, presumably because he was pissed off at Chester, too, and would probably peck the motherfucker to death, if he could.
So, Anne-Marie is cleaning Chester’s cage and the little bastard is flying free about the house, alighting and shitting wherever the fuck he pleases. One of these aeries was Anne-Marie’s kitchen counter, where something absolutely amazing happened right before my eyes.
You see, Chester had found himself an open box of them chocolate diet aid thingies (Anne-Marie had some junk in the trunk; the bigger the cushion, and all that…), if you remember those from the days before medical science told us that everything except breathing and blinking was a deadly threat to your health. Chester had decided to sample one, and within seconds was flying off like a Kamikaze, bouncing off walls and generally behaving like a cocaine addict: fidgety, full of energy, and probably on the verge of a heart attack. You see, in those days (late 1980’s), those diet aid candies were simply chock full of amphetamine-like substances. Chester was fucking wired.
Chester died the same afternoon. His little heart just couldn’t take the 6,000,000 volts of adrenaline that had suddenly coursed through his tiny veins. But before he shuffled off this mortal coil, Chester’s death throes were a sight to behold. He was screeching his little ass off, flitting from one place to another as if he had no clue that he was trapped inside a room with a closed door. He couldn’t sit still, and he wouldn’t come back to the cage when Anne-Marie called him. He was all nervous energy expended to no good purpose, and finally, he fell right off the curtain rods in a flurry of fluffy fragments and landed in the Wandering Jew upon the window sill.
It was, I imagined, like watching Icarus fall from the heavens.
I don’t miss Chester one little bit, and I see many parallels between the story of Chester the Annoying Parakeet and Presidential Contender Rick Santorum. Only worse.
Here are Five Reasons Why Rick Santorum is Worse Than a Parakeet on Speed:
1. The Message:
Much like Chester’s song, Rick Santorum ‘s stump speeches and debate appearances have an annoyingly repetitive quality about them, which must be explained in two parts.
The first part is that Santorum repeats the mantra of the Social Conservative (small ‘c’ intentional) cause that everyone and their mother has heard from countless other messengers for near on three decades now. It is an amalgam, one part Norman Rockwell visions of an America which never existed, one part recycled folk wisdom which is nothing of the sort, and three parts droning insanity that makes you wonder if those who repeat it actually know they’re living in the 21st Century, and not Plymouth Colony, chasing witches.
The second part consists of a litany of non-issues and questionable achievements that have little to do with politics and everything to do with a constipated view of the current state of American Culture. Santorum has two stock responses for every question or issue posed to him: the first is to invoke the sainted memory of the good ol’ days of Ronald Reagan, and the second is to regale you…again…with the list of legislation he either crafted or co-sponsored…20 years ago… which no one either remembers or cares to remember.
That’s when he isn’t complaining that the media pays no attention to him, that is.
One can anticipate Santorum’s answers and talking points before he even begins to utter them. You can anticipate his response, his speech patterns, his cadence, the volume, and the rhythm. Rick Santorum is so predictable that after 30 seconds his voice fades off into the background and is lost in a sea of static, white noise. One day with Rick Santorum, I guess, and you will regard anything he has to say in the same manner a New Yorker deals with the bewildering array of sirens, horns, screeching subway trains and screaming mental patients let loose to wander the streets does: you ignore it, if only because devoting time and energy to focus on it will only leave you with a variety of minor-but-persistent mental disorders.
2. The Messenger:
I’m sure that Santorum himself is a pretty decent guy. You imagine him as one of those dudes who in his down time resorts to polo shirts and Brady-Bunch-style tartan plaid golf slacks and loafers, hovering over a bar-b-que overflowing with butcher-selected Chateaubriand, sipping his non-alcoholic beer, and regaling you with stories of his wild college days when short-sheeting the Dean’s bed, stealing the rival school’s sheep mascot, and pledging for his white-bread-short-haircuts-only fraternity was all the rage. “Otherwise, you’d have to go to Vietnam, you see…” he says, as he nudges you with a friendly elbow.
He’s not exactly the sort that I would hang out with, but I would probably buy insurance from him, if I had to. This doesn’t make him a bad man, but it does make him a bad candidate. He can’t relate to the common folk, you see, and while I’m certain that Santorum was never the sort of Thurston Howell III/ Harvard legacy/Blue Blood type, he certainly looks and behaves the part now, even more than Mitt Romney does.
In terms of his ‘legendary’ governmental prowess, so far as I can tell, Santorum’s main claim to fame is that he beat three democrats…barely…on the way to a career in government that was hardly distinguished. Subsequently, he also lost to a democrat, in a bad way, too.
Santorum relates the heady days of his thrice-barely-elected elevation with a sense of musty nostalgia, invoking the semi-forgotten Republican majority of 1994, you know; the one that ‘forced’ Bill Clinton to ‘end welfare, as we know it’ but only succeeded in ensuring that it would be future generations of Republicans who would spend the money saved like democrats or drunken sailors on shore leave.
Santorum has no accomplishments of note that don’t originate in that time of GOP ascendancy, which is now nearly 20 years past. Santorum hasn’t been relevant to the electoral or legislative process in America for much of the same period. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that 60 seconds after Rick Santorum left the political stage he was nearly forgotten, except by a handful of die-hard social conservatives who regard their own has-beens in much the same way some music lovers will remember one-hit wonders and eagerly line up to pay good money to listen to songs that no one remembers 20 years later, performed by the old artist who has lost his voice, gone gray, and tacked on 75 pounds.
Santorum is not presidential. He doesn’t inspire confidence. He reminds you of what many perceive to be the major turn offs about the GOP: he is a relic of the past, still living in the past, singing a song that no one remembers or cares to hear anymore. Like Chester the Parakeet, Santorum is teetering upon the curtain rod in that final second before cardiac arrest and gravity take over, and it’s painfully obvious to anyone with two good eyes.
3. Social Conservatism is a Non-Starter in an Election over Economics and Process:
This is something I have told my social conservative friends now for many years; cultural and moral issues, while important, will always take a back seat to pocketbook issues and matters of immediate need.
Social conservatives aren’t interested in hearing such obvious truths; they’re too busy trying to tell everyone else how to live in much the same way as social liberals do. Both are convinced of their own superiority and assured of their own eventual victory, in much the same way the Taliban or the Iranian Mullahs are, and so clear-thinking and pragmatism are not exactly priorities for them, nor does it ever occur to them to consider either as an alternate tactic for putting their worldview across to the greater mass of the people.
This upcoming presidential election is not about abortions, prayer in schools, displaying the Ten Commandments, or bringing civility back to our public discourse; it’s about putting people back to work, and in filling in the enormous fiscal hole that previous generations of elected officials have dug for us. This election is about restoring some sanity to the political process, restraining a government – at all levels – that has intruded ever-deeper into people’s lives, and which threatens to legislate and regulate us all into a state of virtual slavery. Both political parties have had a hand in creating this state of affairs, and when you stop to consider the amount of weight social conservatives have brought to the electoral process in the preceding two decades – there is hardly a republican that gets elected Dog Catcher in this country without a social conservative stamp of approval – one wonders just why anyone should continue to listen to them, or champion their priorities over any other.
In fact, the whole idea of a social conservative agenda being advanced by government is an extremely silly one, for two reasons. Reason 1 is that a social conservative is generally motivated by a moral imperative that is dictated by his/her religious faith and moral teachings. This requires that there be no compromise between the imperative and the operative action. Government is not exactly the best instrument for the social conservative because it only works well in a spirit of co-operation, i.e. when compromises are made for the welfare of the common good. A government is a body which often cannot function efficiently without compromise.
Reason 2 is because even if social conservatives managed to get enough of their own into positions of authority, they would still be constrained by the Constitution and the courts so that any changes they can effect take place only about the margins of American Life, and would mostly be temporary in any case, because no one party stays in a dominant position forever. What one political faction does today, the other undoes tomorrow.
Besides, if we elected a slate of social conservatives to Congress, many bearing Calvinist Christian views that went out of favor 150 years ago, we’d only get an American version of the Taliban.
Social conservatives are better off using those tools that have already served them so well for 240 years, already: mentoring programs, churches, community organizations, saving one soul at a time, changing one heart and mind at a time, which is where they are the most effective. But that would take too long, you see, what with the Rapture due to occur at any time, so it’s best just to overthrow the government from within and force people to accept Jesus…at gunpoint, if necessary.
Santorum hopes to tap into that pent-up frustration of those who hunger and thirst for their Savior to return and the Earth scraped clean of sinners, which is why they’re always looking for ‘the Next Reagan’, and finding themselves continually disappointed and disaffected. And much like the Muslims, whenever a religious, social conservative is thwarted, the defeat is not the result of bad planning, poor execution or external factors; it’s always due to a lack of piety, which means the next attempt gets more Medieval, more fundamentalist, more obnoxious than the previous one.Hence, the continual lament that "if we had only elected a REAL conservative, things would be better...", and the renewed, more-fervent quest for that REAL conservative next time around.
More Presidential candidates, people who could have been better-than-average to off-the-charts dynamite Presidents have been lost to this dialectic, many being dead meat before they even earnestly begin the process, and it's about time it stops. I can think of three victims right off the top of my head: Rudy Giuliani, Condoleeza Rice, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. If you can't pass the Godbot smell test, you get sent to the showers early.
A vote for Santorum, in this regard, is a vote for people who view homosexuality being taught in schools as an intrusion of government in to the sanctity of the home and family, but who in the same breath would loudly cheer if the FBI were given free reign to peek into people’s bedrooms to make certain they weren’t engaged in sexual acts proscribed by Scripture.
You can’t take people like that seriously, nor give them any power.
4. Santorum’s Run Isn’t Really Serious:
Santorum is one of those issue-advocacy candidates, much like John Huntsman (more on him later) who’s purpose is not so much to win, but to remind people that there’s a significant constituency behind this or that issue.
Santorum is there to draw voting blocs away from the other candidates, and in so doing, trying to prove a point: if I can draw off this many voters spouting regurgitated pablum over an issue which is both a non-starter and non-priority, imagine what would happen if these people were to feel disaffected and stay the fuck home on election day? His purpose, then, is to force the other candidates who have a better chance of winning to kiss the collective ass of a constituency that might otherwise have been ignored, and for good reason.
Santorum doesn’t expect to win, because if he did, we’d be seeing a whole lot more of him and he’d have something else, something more relevant to our current circumstances, to say. He’d have more money, he’d be polling higher, many more people would be lining up and beating down doors to go see him, he'd be advocating for solutions that are relevant to the times. He’s there to put pressure on the front-runners to not forget there are a sizable number of folks who might realize that their particular pet peeves aren’t on anyone’s menu, but that you daren’t forget that they are there, nonetheless.
Santorum, in other words, is a cardboard cutout, like the ones you typically see in front of a third-rate restaurant imploring you to try the three-day-old fishcakes before they pass their sell-by date.
5. We DO Have Other Choices, You know:
By comparison with some other candidates, Rick Santorum is hardly worthy even of the appellation ‘Dark Horse’. Currently, your front-runners are Mitt Romney (Wall Street’s Fave), Herman Cain (America’s Fave), Rick Perry (quickly fading, but the brain-dead Evangelical Fave), and Newt Gingrich (the Thinking Man’s Fave). Santorum, when he figures into any part of the discussion at all, usually finds himself low on the list, behind Michele Bachmann, who fizzled and dimmed the second she confused Elvis’ birthday and the date of his demise (my, how fickle they are out there in Middle America!), Ron Paul who is about three debates closer to the Special Hospital With Rubber Walls, and John Huntsman, soon to have a paramedic surgically grafted to his wrist to periodically assure people that he does, indeed, still have a pulse.
The election of 2012, unlike many of the past, is going to be one where the make up of the entire ticket is going to be a, perhaps THE, major factor in a GOP victory. The current front-runners are not, individually, strong enough to defeat even the enfeebled and confused Barack Obama, and I predict that it will be the synthesis of two candidates – each combining to shore up the other’s shortcomings --that will be an important factor.
In this regard, a Rick Santorum who lives in the in-retrospect-not-so-great past, reciting a checklist of bullet points of a narrower constituency that espouses concerns that are low on the To-Do List, is not the way to go. He doesn’t add anything to the front-runners, and he brings little return in terms of either excitement or swing voters, the people who will really decide the election.
Not even a shot of chocolate-encrusted speed can help Santorum now.
Previous: Five Reasons Why Ron Paul Should STFU.
Next: Five Reasons Why John Huntsman Should be Mowing My Lawn.
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