Behold the man. This time, his sacrifice is to broadcast right from the heart of the watery hell—clean, white shirt and pressed pants remarkably intact among the mud and bugs and sewery sludge. He pronounces for all the world the largesse of the newly-beneficent government, the core of compassion in the ledger books of conservative America.
What comes to mind is George Orwell, “magical rifle in hand,” a subdivisional police officer in Imperial Burma, about to shoot the elephant, and ”[become] a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him . . . . A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.” It is only in his own mind, of course, that our current King George knows anything–having had to be told by his advisors after they saw it on television that a major American city was underwater, that scores of lives were lost, scores of thousands of lives destroyed.
And it is not merely that we have chosen a savior particularly out of touch with the people: we have chosen one particularly out of touch with salvation. Never mind that his proposal to bring those lowest out of poverty is, systemically speaking, the least efficient way. Never mind that his own class is not the one that will pay for it, having gotten their taxes slashed and having long ago divested themselves of that great liability for today’s financial portfolio, the American economy. No, the man understands at least this about the business world: today, all is brand. It is much better to be seen to be doing something than to actually provide a product or a service, much less a quality one.
It would be too much to require corporate America to simply pay their people a living wage after all, especially since the middle class (or what is left of it) is still hanging on, as long as Uncle Greenspan is able to float the massive debt on the backs of our American Express cards.
There is little irony in the fact that Wal-Mart was better equipped to rush aid to New Orleans after the hurricane hit, that it was able to out-aid both FEMA and the Red Cross. We trust it more. Wal-Mart is the devil we know.
And it did something, revealing both the rift in The People’s confidence with their own bureaucracy–the one we paid for–and the corporate leviathans that wield real power.
It is clear now more than ever to whom we ought to pledge allegiance, in whose heavily-monitored parking lots we ought to set up camp and to whom we should redress our needs.
It is all too clear to whom we now must tithe.
The revolution is complete; the bill is now come due.