Into the Funhouse

Ever since George Bush ascended to the presidency, we’ve been mired in a sort of third-rate surrealist freakshow, a bewildering nightmare of corruption and cronyism and dark ideology that we can’t seem to wake up from. One of the effects of this situation is a sort of tolerance, among the general populace, for the lunatic funhouse our public policy has become. After years and years of being told that up is down, that left is right, that a plan to release more toxins into our atmosphere is a clean-air initiative, that waging a war on demonstrably false pretenses was not a mistake, that a man who approved a memo authorizing torture would make a good attorney general … we’ve developed a sort of hard shell, an inability to sense the miasma of complete insanity in which we’re moving. Our minds adjust themselves to their environment: when you’ve been slogging through the sewers long enough, you can’t really smell the shit anymore.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the confirmation hearings for John Bolton, our UN ambassador-delegate. Bolton is, of course, a frothing-at-the-mouth UN hater, a man who thinks that no one would notice if we took the top ten floors off of the UN building, and that the institution doesn’t really exist except as an instrument of the will of the US government. If he’s not the worst possible choice for UN ambassador, he’s certainly in the top five.

Which, I suppose, made his nomination inevitable. Bush doesn’t much like the rest of the world, and when he or his cronies aren’t invading it, or talking about invading it, they’re showing it their middle finger, and smirking.

So, yes. Bolton as UN Ambassador. In the upsidedown world of Bushland, it makes perfect sense. Nevertheless, the scene at the Senate confirmation hearings yesterday was almost surreal. There sat a man who not long ago seemed ready to rend the UN into tiny little pieces with his sharp pointy teeth, calmly saying that he wanted to restore confidence in the institution, and that the United States is committed to its success. The Democrats flailed impotently at the obvious (Biden: “I don’t who know why the nominee even wants the job”), but the obvious is passee these days. It’s all about the ceremony and shtick that precedes the inevitable, a kind of public ritual where the elephants in the room, in plain sight though they may be, didn’t garner much attention.

The only Republican who seemed at all concerned, pre-hearing, was Lincoln Chafee, but he looks like he’s going to get down on his knees with all the rest of them. After Bolton delivered his ridiculously disingenuous opening statement, Chafee complemented him on “saying all the right things.” Well, of course he said all the right things. Our executive branch hasn’t quite gotten to the point where they can come out and tell us what’s going on. They still need to hold up the occasional fig-leaf.

But I doubt they’ll have to do it for much longer. We’re entering the darkest parts of the funhouse now, where the mirrors don’t even pretend to reflect what’s real, and the lunatic cackling echoing off the walls might just be coming from us.