The Elephant Graveyard

"Democracies die behind closed doors.”

-Judge Damon J. Keith

 

 

Warning: This writing contains spoilers for Soylent Green (1973) which if you haven’t seen, shame on you!

  

I’m a reasonable person: while the amount of patience I have for stupidity trickles out rather quickly, I’d like to think my composure steps in as a graceful buffer against railing every fifth person to the wall and screaming, “Stop being stupid! BE MORE AWARE.”

But this approach, while it keeps friends, has an adverse side effect. Keeping mum sort of makes you feel like the only one who saw the Emperor naked: sure, you’re intellectually honest but you’re the only one dancing at the party. I bet Kevin Bacon never danced alone! Eyes open means being flooded with the kind of incredulous disbelief that only comes when what seems obvious to you remains a mystery to everyone else. Whedonist simplification: on Buffy’s fifth season, after what feels like an hour of reiterating that Ben and super-god Glory are one and the same to a magically amnesiac Scooby Gang, Spike gives up and deadpans, “Are you all very high?” That’s exactly what this election season has felt like. America (or at least the 23% of Texans, for example, who still think Obama is a Muslim): are you all very high?

When I, as usual, fail to find an answer and my aggravation bottlenecks, and only two words come to mind: Soylent Green.

A bizarre, half-finished mantra to be sure, but it’s gotten me through this election season by giving me that much-needed cultural reference point. (see also: dancing alone, Kevin Bacon) It contextualizes my thought process so I don’t have to!

Allow me to expand. For those in the cheap seats, Soylent Green, of course, is the 1973 magnum opus that gave us a rare glimpse of Charleston Heston as the voice of reason. HESTON and REASON—together at last. Playing Agent Robert Thorn, Heston is at the center of a hi-tech dystopian future (though is there other kind these days?) wherein food has become a rarified commodity—a jar of strawberry jam goes for hundreds of dollars and nutrition is provided through ‘ration wafers,’ the newest version of which is called (ding ding, we have a title!) Soylent Green. These wafers are as disgusting as they sound. But that’s life, right? SO THINKS THORN, until predictably, he digs deeper. People die, secrets are revealed! Basically—and don’t read on if you haven’t seen it and thus deprive yourself of one of the greatest in-jokes of all time—Charleston Heston discovers the awful truth: Soylent Green is people! The mega-corporations turned to cannibalism as the earth’s food sources first dwindled then disappeared. For those keeping track, shit just got real. Heston, badly wounded, gasps the truth to nearby ears and we fade to black.

Some may question why my brain goes there; that’s fair, and for the record, always a sound practice. But there is a link between Heston’s mad yowling and modern American politics…even if it’s only in my pop culture ravaged mind.

I’ve been reading non-stop for months—experiencing the up and downs of the political track meet anew with each passing day. I usually pass through 17 varieties of joy, fear, hope, despair in my daily Huffington Post visit alone. But it was this piece in Rolling Stone—two years old and only rolling past my eyeballs now—that finally did it: it broke my brain. It’s not full of revelations…no, far from it. The Republicans, for lack of a nicer word, stole the 2004 election, but this is not new information and barely even shocking at this stage. What this article IS full of is specifics: places, names, stats. In other words, the pieces of the puzzle. For instance:

In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering "Kerry" on the touch screen and watching "Bush" light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.

 WHAT.

Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station in their county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to toss out the ballots of anyone who showed up at the wrong precinct — a move guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live in urban areas crowded with multiple polling places.

 No, seriously, WHAT?

 An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.

 I dare you: say WHAT one more time.

There’s more. Like, 11 pages more. So here’s the Soylent Green of the matter: that is ri-goddamn-diculous. There’s no way that such overt, almost flamboyant political maneuvering could be true; but then, it’s so ludicrous a plot twist it kind of has to be. These days, politics (and by extension, political reporting) feels like one long episode of Punk’d, except it doesn’t end and we all end up speaking the President’s English.

Not all of the dirtiest dealings of the GOP were so explicit, and it’s these that make me most angry. For instance, the downright ingenious method of allocating less voting machines to the weakest Republican districts—ensuring long lines, more waiting and increasing the likelihood that citizens would get discouraged and leave. Honest to God, and this is almost with a kind of sick admiration: that’s the stuff of evil genius.

But why did this happen? No, HOW? Their conduct was grossly illegal and morally repulsive (Soylent Green?). Any collection of people who would sink to these depths obviously doesn’t deserve any power beyond a curbside lemonade stand (Soylent Green). And yet a large percentage of the country still intends on voting this party into power, standing by unawares as their society devolves: SOYLENT GREEN. What am I afraid of? That all this will happen again, and events will be caught up in an endless cycle of bad behavior. Those plot-happy Republicans should be where they belong: in the elephant graveyard, PUN EMBRACED.

Maybe anyone can stand on top of a soapbox and dismiss statistics, anecdotes, EVIDENCE—fine, whatever. But you don’t need to look any further than the desperate mewlings of the McCain campaign in the last two weeks to see exactly the depths to which the GOP can—and have—sunk. Hell, extend that back further and you can encompass the singular pony trick that is the McCain/Palin ticket.

I care about this election, way too much to believe it will turn out okay. It’s much greater than which side will win; it’s representative of the greater, more tenacious problems I have with North American truisms. I see November 4^th as a litmus test – if the American public doesn’t choose correctly NOW of all times, then they probably deserve whatever economically unsound, tax-addled, ration wafer Joe Plumbertopia they get. 2000 was the bad judgment of one drink too many. 2004 was the drunk dial to the ex. But 2008 is the last chance for rehab.

So there you go: Soylent Green as part cautionary tale and part Democratic bedtime story. Yes Virginia, there is a whistleblower and there’ll always be people who speak up against the Bad Things—even in the psycho-scary future where we eat our neighbors! Then, to arrive at the end of my Soylent Green metaphor, I remember that Thorn is seriously—possibly mortally—wounded. He only whispers the truth on—we don’t ever find out how far that truth spreads.

I watch Barack, and my heart breaks. Not because I think he’s hasn’t got a chance—the polls soothingly tell me the opposite. It’s that this awful, old white guy world has taught me to view his progressive vision of change as something this world has to learn to appreciate. What have we gained, as a political culture, if the kneejerk reaction to earnest progress is to Scully his every move? Really, I’m Fox Mulder all the way: I want, so badly, to believe.

Blurgh. Stupid world. To console myself, I think I’ll play The Venture’s “Telstar” over and over again and make believe the super-shiny, automated promise of the Atomic Age is still twinkling in the distance.