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| Admit it, I came awfully close to predicting "Harris" |
I apologize for my relative silence lately. Oh, I'm fine (other than an upcoming hip replacement surgery) but the "news" is so stupid and aggravating that I risk an aneurysm any time I give it more than 30 seconds of attention. I swear, if I hear Kamala bring up her "middle class background" one more time, my head will explode.
Which is more or less what happened to the protagonist of my 2009 novel "CLUMP: An American Splatire." A huge, heavily-muscled mystery of a man with no head and no awareness of his surroundings. His headless condition doesn't keep his handlers from making him into a huge celebrity entertainer (while hiding the little secret that he'll beat to death anyone who touches him). And eventually (spoiler alert!) the headless, clueless Clump runs for President.
With obvious parallels to the brainless Kamala Harris, let's look at what a Clump campaign add looked like:
Emotionally stirring music played as the camera tracked up a grassy hill where Americans of every type were standing, looking directly at the camera. The old and young, the rich and poor, the black and white.
"Most politicians," said a warmly accessible voiceover, "don't care what we the people have to say. They make promises, then break them. And they tell lies. But one candidate is different. Very different."
At the top of the hill, the camera finds a lone man wearing a well-tailored suit and an American flag pin. A man with no head.
"Clump never lies," said the voiceover announcer. "Clump never makes promises he will not keep. Clump is not against anything that you are for, or for anything you are against. And because Clump is entirely poll-driven, his voice is..."
"My voice," said an elderly black woman.
"My voice," said a uniformed policeman.
"My voice," said a goth chick.
"My voice," said a bank president.
"My voice," said an attractive Latina.
"Your voice!" shouted the hillside of people, pointing at the camera as it zoomed past them to find Clump standing tall and proud, fists on his hips like Superman.
"Clump," said the announcer as the music climaxed. "Sticking his neck out...for you."
Okay, that already sounds more substantive than anything Harris is airing. But of course, handling the media is a job that both Harris and Clump delegated to sneaky specialists...
It was Heidecker who had created a war-room of bloggers to secretly feed misinformation and rumors to Internet chat rooms.
Heidecker's bloggers planted damaging lies about Clump's opponents, weaving lurid accusations from a Heidecker-approved list of words which included incest, lubricant, chickens, cocaine, kiddy-diddler, transvestite, felch, hooker, ball gag, traitor, coprophilia, snuff film, anal fistula, wide stance, murder scene, smegma, raincoat, kickback, sheep, Thailand, fisting, fishhook, nipple, vomitorium, gerbil, flesh-eating syphilis and, most damning of all, "big pharmaceutical companies."
But above all, the true genius of Heidecker's campaign strategy was that it offered what voters prized above all else: simplicity. No confusing points or platforms. No moral shades of gray. No lectures about economics, geography, or history. No matters of life and death.
"We are living in post-intellectual times, yes?" Heidecker said to his campaign staff.
But surely a literally brainless candidate would never get very far, right? Right...?
Pundits and politicos who dared to bring up Clump's headless condition were pilloried as being insensitive by advocacy groups for the differently abled. Angry speeches on Clump’s behalf were even made in Congress by members who had lost limbs in various wars, and resented the notion that a man's merit should be judged by his number of extremities.
Clump's history as an entertainer was also taken off the table as an attack point because the Republicans had previously elected actors like Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sonny Bono.
On the Democratic side, they couldn't criticize a “brainless entertainer” without alienating 99% of their all-important Hollywood donor base.
Thank goodness in our current election, we have valuable real world methods for sorting out our candidates and testing their knowledge and mettle. Debates, for instance, could never favor anyone who was dead from the neck up. Then again...
At the televised Presidential debates, Clump absolutely destroyed the concentration of his opponents.
Each time Clump was asked a question, the camera sat on him for three interminable minutes as he gasped, swallowed, drooled, and rolled his tongue.
This made the other two candidates into nervous wrecks who stammered during their own answers and actually jumped away from the lecterns if Clump took a step in their direction. Which Clump frequently did, thanks to the remote-controlled shoes operated by a campaign assistant.
Whenever one of the other candidates actually made an intelligible remark of any kind, Clump was given 90 seconds for rebuttal. On the few occasions Clump produced audible bon mots like "Gaaa!," "Akkk!," or an explosive fart, he received thunderous applause from his supporters in the audience.
In all seriousness, none of this is more ridiculous or frightening than the spectacle unfolding in front of our horrified eyes right now. I'm certainly not the first to observe that satire has gotten very difficult to write because reality, such as it is, has become so preposterously stupid that it's hard to top. Harris and Walz are blithering idiots, media-wrapped in the Emperor's New Clothes.
I wonder if this is how George Orwell felt?
