Of Hucksters and Hayseeds: GOP Trolls for Rubes in Iowa

The traveling cavalcade of clowns that is the Republican primary season kicks off with the Iowa caucuses this week. As if that haven of corn-fed schmucks is representative of the nation as a whole yet in our sham of a political system this somehow passes for a legitimate process. The entire gaggle of swine have been working the hustings and to add further insult the next step to the coronation of their prospective Führer the equally unrepresentative state of New Hampshire is next. This is serious corn pone along the lines of cheesy 1960’s sitcom Green Acres with all of the hayseeds like the Kimballs and the Haneys rolling into town in their Sunday finery to cast their lot with the one seriously deranged GOP jackass that truly represents them. I do find that Newton Leroy Gingrich has more than a passing resemblance to Arnold Ziffel. Iowans are just more refined versions of the red state fascist peckerwoods down yonder behind the cornbread curtain, hicks and rubes are hicks rubes no matter what neck of the woods that they may hail from. 

Now I am sure that Iowa is a nice place and there is much to see and do there (ha ha ha), thanks to deranged Republican candidate Michelle Bachmann it was pointed out that notorious serial murderer John Wayne Gacy began his illicit activities in Waterloo, a neighbor to Cedar Falls. Famous Iowans include Marion Morrison (the other John Wayne), Herbert Hoover (how apropos), Johnny Carson, Buffalo Bill and a true American hero in former FDR Vice President Henry A. Wallace who certainly knew a fascist when he saw one and must be rolling over in his grave over the GOP invasion. Other famous Iowans resonate greatly with the one true demographic that the Republicans routinely target, the geriatric Fox News viewers whose Cold War and anti-hippie, homophobic and predominantly white worldview easily accommodates such nonsensical horseshit as the Obama is a secret commie Muslim scam. Get a load of some of these names and see if you can find any sort of discernible pattern here:

William Frawley: Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy
Ann Landers: Professional gossip monger
Cloris Leachman: TV actress
Glenn Miller: Big band maestro
Harriet Nelson: THE Harriet from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
Donna Reed: Star of The Donna Reed Show
Andy Williams: Legendary crooner (once sang with Bing Crosby)

According to the 2010 Census Iowa is a whopping 91 percent white, 14.9 percent over 65 years of age and at with a population that is just a tad above 3 million represents less than one percent of the population of the nation as a whole. To sum it all up it is idiotic for the corporate media and the thoroughly corrupt political establishment to tout Iowa as some great representation of the entire United States. As Abe Lincoln once famously remarked:  

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” 

It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that it’s one hell of a lot easier to fool a very small, predominately white and chock a block with famous 1950s-1960s television icons as the greatest former residents slice of the demographic pie like the cornshuckers in the Hawkeye State than the more sophisticated city slickers who have a better knack at spotting flim flam men. So the legend of Iowa as the great American weathervane ranks right up there with all of the other big lies of our times like the phony war on terror, the greatness of the American capitalist system and Tim Tebow as a legitimate starting NFL quarterback (he isn’t fit to carry the jockstrap of former Iowan Kurt Warner, himself a Jesus freak albeit a more humble one) and the increasingly creeping fascist police state apparatus as some sort of benevolent protector. Iowa brings to mind the great and underrated movie Pleasantville where the black and white 1950’s style of television show utopia is forever changed by two modern day teenagers who have been magically teleported into a sitcom by a TV repairman/ sorcerer played by Don Knotts and proceed to change the place for the better.

Pleasantville is a perfect metaphor for the conservative nonsense that is peddled by the traveling shit salespeople of the Republican party, their entire schtick falls apart if they can’t sell their silly non-reality based nostalgic gimmickry harkening back to a simpler and more moral time. The kids in the movie turn the black and white naivete and innocence into a stunning world of color and the hated nuance by introducing art, sex and non-conformity and rapidly run afoul of the town honchos who unleash the typical conservative reaction of violence, intimidation, hatred and rigged legal proceedings to stop the transformation. The “there are no roads out of Pleasantville” type of mentality that has allowed for the permeation of the poisonous disease carried by the Republicans that has for decades eaten our society from within. The world is a vastly more complicated, rapidly changing and thanks to new technologies interconnected environment and the changes represent a mortal threat to the white picket fence style of Americana that was mainlined into the consciousness of generations thanks to television, the most potent drug of them all. The Republicans are able to tap into this Pleasantville mind warp and to blame all of the real perceived evils of those chaotic decades of the 1960s and 1970s on those who would choose to live in a world of color and nuance rather than be mired like dinosaurs in a black and white tarpit, braying and keening as they are sucked under. The civil rights movement, equal rights for women, the Vietnam war, sexual liberation, Watergate, the hippies and drugs and rock and roll music really put a serious mindfucking on a lot of folks and they are desperate to cast their lot with whatever silver-tongued devil riding in on a white horse to rescue them from the savages best appeals to their longing for the past.

 

Republicans Troll For Rubes In The Hawkeye State

The entire fraudulent Republican bill of goods is designed to appeal to the suckers who can’t deal with social change. Their followers have rejected any form of progress of the past half century. They cling to their false idols like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, both of whom are invoked constantly by the cynical and dishonest sheep herders trolling through the teenubg metropolises of Des Moines, Dubuque, Davenport and Waterloo as well as the outlying burgs like Battle Creek, Fort Dodge, Hawkeye and even Pleasantville (population 1,694 according to the 2010 census) as they sell peddle their lies. The lunatic Rick Santorum has found that his snake oil sells far better in Iowa and the man who once brought a dead fetus home to his wife is basking in the national media attention, he has visited all 99 counties and as of last week had conducted nearly 400 town halls and has taken to wearing a sweater vest as a costume. There was much made over the pilgrimages to the Evangelical Christian fast food franchise Pizza Ranch, a western themed restaurant that serves up greasy, cheesy pies along with bible based nonsense, the chains’ motto is PizzaRanchServes. In combining two of the most irrational aspects of modern conservative thinking being the revisionist version of history as filtered through John Wayne’s undershorts and the weaponized form of modern American Christianity (Billy Sunday also hailed from Iowa) Pizza Ranch is a slam dunk with the deniers and haters of the base. Moonbat Michelle Bachmann who gained attention for performing simulated fellatio on a foot long corndog at the Iowa State Fair last summer reportedly visited 14 pizza ranches in one week, Santorum’s kids it has been said are sick of pizza by now and even Ron Paul is holding sessions at the chain. It’s more than a bit ironic that Herman Cain, who made quite a name for himself in the pizza business before his proclivity to serve up the pepperoni to women other than his wife has dropped out and isn’t able to hit the cheese and sausage circuit. One of the more frequent pizza parlor visitors is of course Newton Leroy Gingrich, he didn’t after all get more chins than a Chinese phone book by hitting the salad bar. I don’t suppose that the pizza chain Cheesus Crust from the otherwise lamentable movie My Best Friend’s Girl will be opening any franchises in Iowa in the near future.

And so it begins, the New Years hangovers haven’t completely dissipated and the real onslaught is beginning in earnest. The sick joke of the national media swarms like flies to a fresh dungpile in Iowa, a thoroughly appropriate metaphor for the Republican candidates (Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman excepted) and the flies will soon migrate north to New Hampshire and other locales as the carnival of perversion, a moveable feast of bullshit that is the fascist Republican party primary season. This is going to be the greatest show on earth as well as a glittering showcase of all that has gone so terribly wrong and ugly in America today until the entire kit and kaboodle roars into Tampa come August for the largest gathering of Nazis, degenerates and stone cold freaks since the Nuremberg rallies of 1933.