One aspect of modern politics has been to elevate the trivial to unheard of heights. By any serious measure Barack Obama holds an enormous advantage over John McCain. His poise, intelligence, and charisma are undeniable, as is the utter ruin of the right-wing agenda with which McCain has many ties. Unfortunately, Obama forgot to wear a flag label pin, and now one has to worry about trivialities reigning supreme once again. Critics have grumbled for decades that soundbites have surpassed informed knowledge of the issues. Taking advantage of this slippage into superficiality, the Republicans turned “liberal” into a dirty word, intelligence into elitism, and the smiling vacuousness of a Ronald Reagan into a prime key for electoral success.

Thus McCain’s “No surrender” approach to the Iraq war appeals to the cherished illusion that America can never be anything but a winner. This attitude covers over the disastrous reality of how the U.S. destroyed another country without provocation, yet the public tells pollsters that it trusts McCain over Obama on national security. In essence, image matters more than realism. In the same way that voters preferred Bush in 2004 because he maintained his hawkishness (and John Kerry rode a windsurfer), Obama has been condemned all over the blogosphere because he doesn’t wear a flag lapel pin and thus, by some mystical rationale, isn’t patriotic enough to be commander-in-chief. What if the electorate had judged John F. Kenney for not wearing a hat? Or Lyndon Johnson for lifting his beagle by the ears?
On PBS last week David Brooks pointed out a similarity in the awful news stories that came out on Friday — soaring oil prices, a falling stock market, plunging home prices, and the revelation than one in ten homes built since 2000 now lie vacant. Brooks suggested that they all represent loss of control, a fear that seizes the American public today, with no end in sight. What Brooks failed to mention is the major cause of all this bad news, which is twofold.
The first is that this country, once it became the world’s only superpower, chose an aggressive military route in using its power. Good guy America, a role occupied since the Marshall Plan, flipped into bad guy America. The results in animosity were dramatic. The Middle East, including most of OPEC, showed its anxiety and anger by using the price of oil as a punitive measure. The atmosphere would have been far different if America had led the way in dealing with global warming, among other positive issues, and letting the UN lead a united front against Saddam.
The second reason for today’s bad news is an addiction to unreality. This includes more than the administration’s blind faith in the free market and its denial of climate change. Obstructing stem cell research was born in an equally blind faith in fundamentalist Christian ideology, and a programmed dismissal of all progressive ideas. The whole country — or a huge segment — bought into the illusion that American leadership, prosperity, and backward-looking self-interest would be permanent. As a result, nobody currently in power has remotely begun to seize any kind of control over our future. Lulled into unreality, we have come to see a lapel pin as equal to “No surrender.” To the extent that we wake up form this field of dreams, the better chance that someone will regain control, not just for our sakes but the whole world’s.