by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
I’m going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender–Jackson Browne, The Pretender
I admit it. I had finally begun to warm to Bernie Sanders. With each new Berniefest, the old animosities melted a little. After years of unmitigated loathing for Sanders, I was beginning to feel a little pride in the homespun campaign waged by the Faux Comrade from Vermont.
Much of this had to do with the creeping anxiety that Sanders and his growing band of adherents, who I’ve taken to calling the Sandernistas, are inflicting on Hillary Clinton. Every time Hillary is forced to pop some political Prozac, a part of me cheers. Thank you, Bernie.
No doubt, it’s a curious appeal. I’ve never thought of Bernie Sanders as a spellbinding speaker. He doesn’t have the polished allure of Obama or the seductive flair of Jesse Jackson in his prime. His Brooklyn accent is thick, his style more stentorian than passionate. The key to Bernie’s charisma is his charming lack of charisma. But his stump speeches, offering a plodding pastiche of the same liberal economic platitudes that have been common currency since Hubert Humphrey, are packing them in, from Denver to Madison. There is a seething desperation on the economic margins of the country that is luring people toward Sanders as the only antidote for their anguish.
In the presence of this largely ad hoc movement, it is almost possible to anesthetize one’s conscience against the moral revulsion prompted by Sanders’ adamantine allegiance to the Israeli state in the face of one atrocity after another. After all, nearly every politician in Washington acts like an automaton programed by the Lobby. One can also temporarily stifle one’s distaste for his stubborn support of a blustery our-way-or-the-highway militarism, from Yemen to Ukraine. Likely it seemed the politic thing to do at the time.
The self-proclaimed independent socialist even initially backed Bill Clinton’s cruel bombing campaign against Serbia, an independent socialist country. Oh, well, the era of Post-Modernism has apparently given way to the age of Post-Irony. Sanders isn’t a pacifist. Unlike most socialists (excepting, naturally, those of the Christopher Hitchens School of Neo-Trotskyist Interventionism), Sanders is not even an anti-imperialist. Understood. But did the senator have to go so far as to call in the cops to arrest anti-war protesters who had peaceably assembled at his office in Burlington? Tough call, I guess. Perhaps his staffers had dinner reservations at a hot new bistro in Brattleboro and needed to close up shop early that day.
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