a Poem by I.M.Small about USA presidential campaign 2008

Agence-Vleeptron Presse has received another of the rare and somewhat remarkable Comments from I.M.Small. This one is a Poem.

We mentioned in that post that this fucking campaign is making us physically sick.

We have noted hither and thither in Cyberspace that historically, USA politics is a very rough and nasty sport, not unlike Rugby or Rollerball with straightrazors and brass knuckles. A game traditionally played with no rules, or by systematically breaking what few rules there are. (About 20 of Nixon's team, including his Attorney General, had to go to federal prison after the stunts they pulled during the 1972 campaign against McGovern.)

Abraham Lincoln confessed that his only regret of his political life was to have bought a silent ownership of a German-language immigrant newspaper in Illinois, and anonymously accuse his political opponent of fathering an illigitimate child. Davy Crockett told voters that a presidential candidate had shot his own mother.

Seeing that his first bid for elected office was doomed, young James Curley sent his campaign workers throughout his Boston district at 4 a.m. on Election Day, banging on apartment doors with pots and pans, screaming VOTE FOR JONES! Curley won.

USA politics are not for the squeamish or dainty or overethical.

But this one's the worst, and I've been paying attention to this crap since the Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960. This one's the worst, the nastiest, the most mean-spirited, ugliest, the most shameful and disgraceful, the one that has attracted the most scoundrels and liars and sneaks and outright criminals and insane people like a cloud of flies buzzing around a pile of fresh hot wet stable dung on a hot summer day. This one's the worst. This one blows dead rats.

I will say this much now about the Obama campaign: As ferociously competitive and ambitious as it is -- to get to this point, a black guy had to drive a steamroller over Hillary Clinton -- it has exercized far more restraint and self-discipline about manufacturing character assassinations and dirty tricks and attacks on family members.

It's pretty clear desperation is driving the leadership, the strategists (if they can accurately be called that), the swarm of unpaid K Street lobbyists, the addled volunteers, in the McCain/Palin campaign. Desperation that has inevitably followed a campaign of spectacularly bad instincts.

They have one final decision to make: After the numbers on Wednesday 5 November 2008 clearly show they have lost the Electoral College vote, will they accept defeat graciously and will McCain make a dignified, respectful concession speech promptly?

Or will we get another Month Of Bitter Paralytic Dispute a la 2000? Will two teams of Harvard and USC lawyers duke it out in state and federal courts while Americans wonder, confused and worried, who their next president will be?

While all the residents of Planet Earth wonder, confused and worried and frightened, who the next President of the United States of America will be.

McCain -- I guess he's in charge, I guess he calls the shots, he says he's in charge and calls the shots -- has only one decision left. He's already lost, will he be a gracious loser?

He has only one lesson left to offer America: How to accept defeat in a sportspersonlike fashion, a handshake across the tennis net, a salute from a burning wreck to the other fighter pilot still flying high in the sky.

There is a Constitutional promise and a historical tradition that every time the voters choose a new president, the transition will be smooth and run like clockwork.

But the promise and the tradition depend on decisions men and women make at every presidential transition. We could end up with coups, with countercoups, with juntas, with suspensions of civilian democratic rule. If it's not sportspersonlike, prompt and dignified, we could end up with soccer/footie stadiums with more people in them than David Beckham.

~ ~ ~

I.M.Small (writing as Rudderless Quipling) said...

ET DONA QUEERENTES

In extended observation of the ways and works of man
From the Four-mile radius roughly to the Plains of Pakistan,
I have drunk with mixed assemblies seen the racial ruction rise
And the men of half Creation damning half Creation´s eyes.

I have seen the worst of Whites berate the aptitude of Blacks,
Obama is a nincompoop or ape so on they wax,
Such eloquence as only White Trash competence can muster,
As idiots declaim in single syllables unjuster--

Than even such a joke about the raping a white gal
(How do you stop a gang of Blacks? Throw them a basketball!)
And on and on the slanders pile, vituperative their hate
These cognoscenti than Obama less articulate!

It is a bit too late to blame your own ineptitude
Upon the Blacks--Obama, neither crass nor coarse nor crude
Is not so much an orator as knows to parse a sentence
Grammatically with logic offering no glib repentance.

Of all the meanest, dumbest numbskulls in the world at large
Would seem Americans the worst so cravenly who charge
To slander and invade while boasting theirs the only right--
But would God bless my country less if people grew polite?

America, America, O gaze into the mirror:
Has self-deception led to estimation growing clearer?
Don´t pin pejoratives upon the Black. Obama can
(If God´s with him) out-think, out-wrestle all y´all to a man.