In 1940 after the great CIO organizing strikes, the passage of major New Deal legislation and Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign to reorganize the Supreme Court and the Coming of WWII, playwright and humorist George S. Kaufman, who made his living mocking everyone, wrote a satirical story, “The Great Caviar Riots” in the Nation in which he mocked both the culture of protest and the upper classes, who now took to the streets to regain their culinary class privileges. As it turned out, though, the cold war, the military industrial complex, the anti-labor Taft-Hartley law and McCarthyite policies against the left enabled the rich to regain most of the privileges they had lost without launching sit-down strikes in country clubs to end caviar shortages.
Even though Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945 and the last significant progressive legislation in U.S. history was enacted under the banner of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society administration in the late 1960s, the Right in the United States uses the mass media it controls and has instant access to argue that “liberals” and the left “control” the media. Even though Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1968 and the liberalization of the Federal Judiciary, begun during the New Deal, was ended in the 1970s and reversed fully in the 1980s(except for the Clinton years, when mostly centrists and some liberals gained appointment, the federal Judiciary for most of the last twenty-five years has been stacked with at best conservatives, at worst, ultra rightists like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) the right continues to crusade against “activist judges”(meaning judges who refuse to automatically rubber stamp their political initiatives and throw out any progressive legislation or lower court decisions). One could go on and on, from the $400 billion for military spending that is criticized for not being enough, to the trillions in deficits that are blamed on “welfare” and social programs that have been cut back since the 1970s and in some cases, like AFDC, no longer exist, to the manufactured fascination with crime and death seen in the murder mysteries that dominate news and public affairs and fiction television while rising fuel prices, falling real wages, environmental disaster, and a “war” in Iraq (the war as war is conventionally defined is over but the occupation is continuing in a more destructive way for American troops than the war itself) and the “war on terrorism” are thrown in to the news and public affairs mix. The Revolution Will Not be Televised? Why Not? Everything else is in a media stream of consciousness that merges with everything else to encourage people to see reality in fragments between commercials. The real question under capitalism is not whether or not The Revolution will be televised but how many people will be watching.
The Right has in effect created a parallel “reality” though that serves as a sensearound for most Americans, although they have access to alternate sources of information and entertainment that they can use to try to find both what and why things are happening and to keep from loving Cold Case Files/Forensic Files/Survivor/Law and Order/Desperate Housewives, a “reality” where everyone is trying to seduce, rob, maim and kill you all of the time and the only safe course is to stay home, take a break by watching Pat Robertson on the Family Channel, and leave your house to go shopping and occasionally to vote Republican.
But what if we turned the tables on the Right and make their upper class backers believe that the parallel realty they have created is real, that they, like the rich in the caviar riots, must demonstrate, protest, even riot to regain their class privileges. Cindy Sheehan, a heroic woman who refuses to be the Good Mother sending her son to his death in a foreign war with the heartfelt thanks of her government (Mussolini’s Fascist regime in the 1930s used to give women who bore sons who would be soldiers “fertility awards” for their service to the state) has challenged the rightwing writers who have defamed her, telling them to either to send either join the army and go to Iraq themselves or send their sons and daughters.
That inspired me to come up with this idea: A “Patriot Draft” for the rich and the Right. Since liberals and the left are neither brave nor trustworthy, as Limbaugh/Hannity/Coulter ad nausea tell us ad nausea, why not give them all Section Eight Deferments and restrict the draft to Conservative Republicans ages 18-62 (those old enough to vote and not old enough to collect Social Security). Since lower income people and the poor are in those categories because of their own moral flaws, as the Right has informed us for so long, give them Section 8 deferments also and restrict the draft to families with household incomes above two hundred thousand dollars.
Protests would of course begin immediately. On the New York Stock Exchange, hundreds would step forward to sign Vouchers of Resistance to the “Patriot Draft.” Draft counselors would tell clients to sell Condos and donate stocks to charities to reduce their incomes. Country clubbers would buy audio tapes of the collected works of Marx and Engels to prove to the Bush administration that they were not “patriot” at least as GW would define patriotism. Wealthy women would march in the streets denouncing the government for forcing their millionaire middle-aged husbands to desert them. Colonies of millionaire draft dodgers would spring up in Monaco and Bali and the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation would relocate there. The heavy draft of Federalist Society members would create a real crisis in rightwing judicial appointments.
But this would be just the beginning. Faced with a growing upper class insurgency, the administration would try to accuse the protesters of being foreign agents, but it would be difficult to create mass fear against Monaco, Lichtenstein, or even Switzerland, whose banking laws would attract many of the protesters.
Finally, Bush would accuse his enemies of being Sushi munching agents of Japanese Empire and ban Sushi from all menus on the ground that it was encouraging draft resistance (except of course for an American Gulf Coast version, which would be officially called “freedom fish”).
After Selective Service drafted Rupurt Murdoch’s son (Murdoch’s attempt to restore his Australian citizenship while keeping his American properties having failed.) Fox News would turn against the administration, as did Oliver North who, after being sent to Afghanistan, converted to Islam and joined the Taliban because they never waffled, were firm in their belief in God, and knew how to fight a culture war? They also reminded him of Reagan’s National Security Council.
Opposition to administration policy began to trickle down when to the masses of people when multi-million dollar NFL quarterbacks were drafted. Now the Country Club Draft Resistance movement was joined by a new mass organization, the HCLF(Howard Cossell Liberation Front). A national beer boycott followed, along with Japanese creditors withdrawing funds because of the Sushi ban. The administration’s bombing of Monaco, which it accused of harboring draft dodgers, terrorists, and weapons of mass destruction, was answered by a NATO counterattack. As the economy collapsed Bush sought asylum in Taliban controlled areas of Pakistan along with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bolton.
An Interim Government of National Salvation including Liberals, Communists, Socialists, NFL Football Players, was then established and a policy of “deRepublicanization” was launched. The government was trying to repair relations with the United Nations and hoping that the UN might intervene to compel the Taliban to extradite Bush and the other fugitives short of military action.
The upper classes that had started the whole thing by their anti-draft protests were now shamefaced. They would not be drafted any more (no one would) but the huge increase in wealth they had experienced since the Reagan presidency was being rapidly lost. They now tried to argue that they had never supported Reagan or anybody named Bush. Just like there were no self-proclaimed Nazis in Germany after 1945, you could find no self-proclaimed Republicans in the United States after the “Patriot Draft” and the fall of Bush.
Scholars of course had different interpret of what had happened. From exile in Pakistan, Mustafa Ahmad who it was rumored had previously been called Ronald Radosh wrote a book based on “Soviet Intelligence” archives which contended that the whole thing was the fruition of an old Soviet plot to take over the NFL and turn it into the NLF. The Cleveland Browns (who were really Reds) and the Greenbay Packers, a public ally owned (hence socialist) team were at the center of the plot. Red Flag on the Fifty Yard Line was the title of Ahmad’s (Radosh’s?) work, which won the General Zia Prize in Pakistan for the best political work exposing the evils of Communism and American Football.
In the U.S. most writers saw the events as the result of a government that had gotten away with so much for so long that it thought that it could get away with anything, including making its upper class supporters live up to its virtual reality world as draftees. Why did they launch the Patriot Draft Act? Why did they send Bolton to the United Nations? Why did they invade Iraq to fight terrorists and find weapons of mass destruction? Why did they call Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil”? Why did they tolerate private armies and contractors that undermined their military’s own strategy? Was it the blind pursuit of profit, as the Marxists (who were now being taken seriously) said? Was it a combination of religious fanaticism and sheer stupidity, as the liberals generally believed? The only thing that everyone was sure about was that they stole the 2000 election to gain power for themselves and after that called everything they did an extension of democracy.
Let us leave the virtual reality we have created with a virtual happy ending for the virtual reality the administration has given us. While the purpose of this article was to use satire to delineate the “reality” of an administration by pretending that it would violate its most sacred tenet, total protection for the rich and powerful, the Bush administration has shown us that it is capable of saying and doing anything, however absurd. The only way to have a happy ending, Hollywood or otherwise, is to concentrate all of our efforts 24/7 on the driving the Republican Right from power and repairing the damage of a generation.
