(Indispensable's "duopoly football" meme--to be explained in detail in Part 2--explores the nature of that "common turf" in ways the Swampzilla meme simply can't, exploiting Obama's "forty-yard lines" analogy in the same way Swampzilla exploits Trump's "drain the swamp" one. While space limits discussion of "duopoly football" here, one hint is that whereas our regular-football end zones are marked "PEACE" and "PROSPERITY," our duopoly-football ones [between the thirty- and forty-yard lines on both sides of the field] are blazoned "WAR" and "AUSTERITY.")
Within the narrow confines of those forty-yard lines, both parties feign bitter rivalry, with Democrats especially frantically emphasizing the few real differences. What makes the insistence especially frantic is that the differences, while quite real, are vastly less significant than the lethal common ground the two parties share--and which corporate media and the themselves desperately seek to conceal. With both parties, due to their common corruption, hell-bent on policies that sound the death knell for human civilization, real differences on abortion or transgender bathroom usage hardly bear the weight "Republocrats" give them. Swampzilla's monstrous body, shared by donkey and elephant heads, memorably emphasizes the slimy, lethal nature of the duopoly parties' common ground.
At the same time the two heads, appropriately placed to the left and right, acknowledge the fact of real differences between the two parties. But tellingly, those differences are based on the part of the body that talks, not the part that moves and acts. Which serves to acknowledge another fact: that much of the difference between the two parties is purely rhetorical, based on their appeal to different constituencies.
Roughly speaking, Republicans appeal to a social Darwinist constituency: oligarchs feeling quite righteously they deserve their tyrannical spot at the top of the heap; affluent entrepreneurs hating taxes and social spending in their quest to become even more affluent; and a much more numerous base that, fixated and social and cultural issues, commits economic suicide by embracing the reigning social Darwinism. (Much as the last group tends to reject evolution, its social Darwinism is likely rooted in Christianity's own social Darwinism: its radical cleft between the saved and damned, which the group applies to religious and cultural issues.) Democrats, by contrast, find their fiercest loyalists among a different set of social Darwinists: the meritocratic professional class, so astutely sketched by Thomas Frank inListen, Liberal, who find the key to salvation not in Jesus but in education--above all, education at elite colleges. But much of Democrats' pure (meaning insincere) rhetoric is directed at their legacy base: the poor and working-class base the present party inherited because of its long-term (but now meaningless) association with the New Deal. If Democrats are able to pay effective lip service to their New Deal heritage at all, it's simply because Republicans, economic social Darwinists to the point of refusing lip service, are rightly shown as offering no alternative. But even Republicans, for the sake of serving the Wall Street and War Street donors who count are equally willing--as on the issue of gay marriage or Trump's promise to "drain the swamp"--to throw their populist base under the bus.
Ugly Swampzilla, by attaching the clearly different donkey and elephant heads to a common body of slimy, dangerous policy, summarizes the parties' need to appeal (often deceitfully) to different constituencies beautifully. Different strokes for different folks. Different heads for different lies. The same planet-destroying social Darwinism for all.
Swampzilla: How Indispensable's Meme Validates Our Movement
As I stressed in my "Titanic" piece cited earlier, our two corrupt major parties together are a cancer, of which Trump and Clinton--bad as both are--are merely symptomatic tumors. In fact, as readers will discover in Part 2 of this series the Indispensable Movement, plans to exploit the familiar basketball language of the "Twin Towers" by referring to them as the "Twin Tumors." The Swampzilla meme--like the "Twin Tumors" epithet--strongly validates Indispensable as a mass political movement worth joining. Why? Because of two crucial elements: right message and right method.
As regards right message, a bit of common sense, backed by a convergence of astute academic and leftist political analysis, demonstrates that Indispensable's message--the one conveyed by Swampzilla (and "duopoly football" and the "Twin Tumors")--is precisely the one U.S. voters need. It's simply common sense that if a two-party political system vomits up a president as repulsive and unqualified Trump--after offering a "choice" between the two most unpopular major-party candidates ever--there's something profoundly wrong with both the system and the two parties that dominate at. As academic analysis, we can easily cite major studies showing either that most of us are unrepresented in U.S. government or the corrupting influence of political money on state governments. In terms of converging leftist analysis, we can cite a wide variety of critics of both duopoly parties, such as Naomi Klein, Andrew Levine, Paul Street, or Anthony Monteiro. While converging academic and leftist analysis tells us the corrupt duopoly is the source of our political woes, the mainstream media propaganda machine seeks to keep voters thinking this is still a "donkey vs. elephant" thing . Swampzilla is a powerful pictorial means to "take the bullshit by the horns."
Which brings us to the question of right method. While there's a convergence of serious academic and leftist analysis that our corrupt duopoly is the problem, that analysis is merely a rumor, perhaps a twinge of half-conscious disgruntlement, for mainstream voters. What it is not is a matter of active consciousness--the bringing to conscious awareness of the vote-influencing legitimacy crisis Monteiro rightly sees building. Of movement-building efforts I know of, only Indispensable has embraced the rhetorical problem of "meeting mainstream voters where they are," thereby attempting to radicalize the mainstream. Consider, for example, how our Swampzilla meme embraces both the well-known Godzilla figure and Trump's popular analogy of "draining the swamp." Or how, rather than simply treating Americans' addiction to sports as a depoliticizing distraction, our "duopoly football" and "Twin Tumors" memes exploit sports imagery as a weapon of political education.
If you agree we're correct in our approach to both message and method, please Like and follow our Indispensable Movement Facebook page as we build our website and other channels to spread our revolutionary counter-propaganda. More on that subject in Part 2.
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