Why We Shouldn't Throw Neoconservatism Into The Dustbin

Oh boy. Here we go. I got a rant. I'm stretching right now....stretching. Okay...I'm ready:

Today CNN and NPR is reporting the boy-stuck-in-a-homemade-balloon story yesterday may be a hoax. It turns out, the family was on on the reality tv show Wife Swap and posted 55 plus youtube videos and probably coached their six year to stay up in the attic.

Earlier this week, the army charged a man with an obscure charge of "stolen valor," for impersonating a wounded veteran...telling everyone he had a metal plate in his head.

Ralph Lauren is getting shit for photoshopping a model.

Barack Obama won a nobel peace prize for being Barack Obama.

And to top it all off, last year, someone started a fake facebook page of me.

What the f--- is going on?

Something is out of whack. At one time, it seemed like there was a clear line between the real and the phony. Of things with meaning vs. meaningless things. That line is slowly being erased. Erased everywhere.... In politics, the best element of the teaparty protests capture this point. The teaparty people are saying, effectively, "what a second, what are we doing? Where is all the money coming from and why are we bailing out failing companies (GM), why are we bailing out this huge banks (Lehman/Goldman), what are we 'stimulating' with all this spending, how can we possibly afford to massively restructure our healthcare system?" Nevermind the existing problems - ie, we don't have enough money to pay for social security or medicare, we are spending gobs on money on two wars of choice without clear goals.

It is also the best critique of "Barack Obama." I use the quotes because I'm not talking about the man, but the idea of the man. The man who was supposed to be post-racial and usher in a new era of can't-we-all-get-alongism. There were hints of problems early on - the essentially phoniness of "community organizing," the hollow sloganeering of "hope and change," and the silencing of anyone who dared suggest he might not be qualified to be President (by implicating racist undertones to suggest such a point). But only with the Nobel Peace Prize did we reach, in Tony Blankley's words "the theater of the absurd." See the issue isn't Obama, the man, the President, at all. The issue is the world has become so undone and out of whack that we ascribe meaning to the meaningless. To suppose the empty is full. To mistake the real for the fake.

We can't tell the difference anymore and no one seems to want to measure.

We learned what we already knew this past year - the last 15 years of baseball were one giant cheat-fest. Everyone cheated. Everyone. It wasn't just a few people. It was everyone and everyone knew about it and the only one who finally came forward was one of the original cheaters and outcasts, Jose Canseco.

We learned the incredible growth of economy in the past 10 years was largely predicated on a pyramid scheme of inflated real estate prices. People borrowed money on their phony house value and spend it on consumer goods we didn't need.

We spend our time on myspace and facebook and these ridiculous social networking sites looking at people who either a) we don't know or b) decided to not maintain the relationship with. We fool ourselves into calling these computer pages created by people our "Friends." Does that word have no meaning? How can you possibly use the word "Friend" to describe a computer page that someone updates with text and pictures? The whole thing is a sick, perverse waste of time. It is tool for stalking ex girlfriends and everyone seems to think it's this harmless, good-natured tool to keep in touch with people. It's like the whole world has become Timothy Treadwell who befriends Grizzly Bears in the Alaskan wilderness as if there were some cuddly cartoon spokesman.

Last week, I watched THE INFORMANT, the new Soderburgh movie about a compulsive liar. His lies are so elaborate and circular, the movie becomes near unwatchable exercise in inanity. As an audience member I was a victim of his lies. He stole time and resources from all those around him concocting make-believe schemes and phony stories. Watching the movie, this fuck face managed to steal 2 hours of my time and $12. He stole Soderburgh's year of making a totally pointless movie. The pain of the experience still irks me. There is no humor and nothing to be learned from watching this film. I felt somewhere in between like a dog chasing my own tail and Malcom McDowell in a Clockwork Orange being tied down with my eyes held open watching this disaster of a person somehow made into a movie.

The Neoconservatives have a point. Their point is that Western Civilization has a nihilistic impulse and that we are destined to fall into a morass of moral relativism and post modernism where nothing has any value, unless we invade Iraq. Okay, that last part isn't exactly part of the doctrine - but there is an emphasis on finding narratives that will inspire people and give their lives meaning. Early neoconservatives favored hearty American Western TV shows and movies which portrayed heroic frontiersmen and women braving the elements to extend civilization across the land. And that isn't much different from the Iraq narrative of expanding civilization around the globe to freedom loving people who are oppressed by an evil dictator. The communists and leftists will critique this as an imperial power grab that pays little attention to the cultural specifics of the middle east, etc, and is all about money and turning everyone into a white person, etc. The Neoconservatives argue - so what? It's better than wasting our lives away on Facebook and following made up stories of children on balloons and watching Janice Dickenson Modeling Agency and reruns of My Name is Earl. At least we frigging tried to make the world a better place, imperfect as it is. At least we did something other than watch our 401k numbers go up and up and buy the lastest Ipod touch.

Andrew Sullivan the other day finally made a point I've argued for years now - the Iraq War was not a conservative war - it was a liberal war. His reader calls it revolutionary -

The invasion of Iraq was a profoundly anti-conservative project, since the purpose of the invasion -- aside from disarming Iraq from weapons it did not have -- was a revolutionary project meant to rebuild a nation from scratch. At the time, supporters of the effort pointed to the examples of Germany and Japan after World War Two, ignoring the fact that both nations had evolved into fairly cohesive and democratic market economies well before we showed up. Over time it has been shown that the neoconservative perspective -- which is really a revolutionary perspective -- has failed.

What's the alternative? More boy-in-balloon stories, more undeserved Nobel Prizes, more steroids, fake house prices, followed by another reactionary project like Iraq.