Issue #23/78, November 18 - December 2, 1999  

by Mark Ames

The most sophisticated forms of power always try to cloak themselves; only in its crude, anachronistic form does Power do everything it can to announce itself and terrify its subjects. Democratic regimes last longer than authoritarian ones precisely because under democratic cover, power is better hidden, harder to pinpoint, and therefore more difficult to topple. Most subjects of democratic regimes actually believe that they have a share in power; if they are dissatisfied, they assume that they in part are to blame, and that they have a chance to change things for the better by exercising their illusory power. Hope is their opiate. Subjects of authoritarian regimes are not, by definition, under such illusions: stripped of hope, they blame their woes on the small clique of authorities, or on the single authority, that openly professes and crudely exercises its power. For this reason, authoritarian regimes are being exterminated the globe over by the more Darwinianly-successful democratic regimes. All throughout nature, the most successful species develop the means to hide themselves: take the lily mantis, which looks literally like a harmless budding white lily, but in fact is a grotesque killing machine armed with thorny stalk-like claws and exoskeleton-tearing mandibles. It waits among the lilies for an unsuspecting, dainty butterfly gently suckling the nectar, then... WHAM! The buttefly's suddenly caught in the mantis's claws, its wings tearing from its body, and the next thing it knows, its head is being knawed into mulch by the lily mantis...

I guess that's why Bill Bradley is the scariest presidential candidate of all, and why Taibbi and I have been, from the beginning, instinctively more hostile towards him than towards any of the others. Somehow, this freak of ambition who's struggling to become the single most powerful person in the world, who has pimped America's oligarchy for millions of dollars in return for god-knows-what and who has already been anointed by America's aristocracy (sports stars)--this same person is simultaneously snowjobbing everyone into believing that he's a frumpy, unambitious, honest, regular guy. From 6,000 miles away, here in Moscow, where democracy is still in its raw, ugly fetal stage, the Bradley phenomenon seems incredible, impossible to believe, especially since it's taking place in a nation as advanced and sophisticated as America. Your average Russian wife-beater is smart enough to see democracy for what it really is: a slightly less oppressive system than the one before, a system which has exactly the same goal: to provide cover for a clique of insiders as they mercilessly shake down the nation and its subjects. Most Russians wouldn't turn on the TV, look at this millionaire jerk schooled at two of the world's greatest oligarchical institutions--Princeton and Oxford--who avoided 'Nam through high connections, became the highest-paid NBA basketball player of his time, a Democratic Senator known to be Reagan-friendly, and a 7-figure consultant after retirement... only to conclude that "He's somebody I can relate to." No, only the middle-class American peasant, as groveling and worshipful to the anointed-one as feudal peasants once groveled to anointed princes, could conform to such a ridiculous opinion.

In fact, Bradley is scary as hell. Look at Bradley really closely--look at those creepy, double-eyelid eyes of his, and tell me that that fucker isn't a creature from John Carpenter's The Thing, taking refuge in the body of some lanky, chinless everyman. The minute he gets elected president, at the inauguration ball, his stomach's going to burst open, fifty-foot tentacle claws will burst out, he'll grab his vice presidential nominee--let's say some twangy, harmless Republican like Elizabeth Dole... he twists her screeching head around like a bottle cap, entangles her, raises her up to the White House ceiling... The top of Bradley's skull splits open, a pair of bear-trap jaws with strips of human flesh and khaki cloth hanging from the teeth snaps violently (oh, so that's what happened to his missing campaign chief!), as Bradley lowers the VP in, head-first, and devours her whole faster than Belushi ate that hamburger in Animal House... Journalists wouldn't report it, because being the pod-people that they are, they'd all have snapping jaws poking out of their heads too, screeching in alien-collusion.

Compared to Bradley, alleged faces-of-evil Milosevic and Lukashenko are merely Frankenstein's Monster. That monster, if you recall, was so unscary and so easy to kill that they had to set the film in some pre-20th Century backwater just to give the poor creature a fighting chance at surviving 90 minutes. Bradley, on the other hand, is the uber-beast, perfectly hidden, reproducing himself all across the nation, with plans to convert the Global Village into his personal cafeteria. Just look at the way his minions nearly devoured Taibbi just for standing up and speaking his mind at Madison Square Garden--those weren't upper-middle-class, SUV owners... those were alien carnivores REPLICATING drivers of SUVs!

A good friend of mine from Silicon Valley, whose company is an influential supporter of Bradley's campaign and who knows people who have spoken and worked with him, told me, "Of course Bradley's a dick! Everybody who knows him knows that. He's a total egomaniac asshole. I mean a total dick. So what, what did you expect, Ames? He's running for fucking president!"

"Yeah, but people, smart people even in my family, actually buy into the inverse-image that he's marketing," I bitched. "It's starting to make me paranoid. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but how stupid to people have to be?"

"Very stupid. So what the fuck is new, dude? Anyway, fuck 'em. You're in Russia. Grab yourself another teenager and a g of scab and forget about it."

"I can't," I said. "I've done too much scab to get it up, so I'm in this phase right now where I have to go dry for a few months, but I'm not clean enough to reanimate my prick. I'm in between pleasures. I have no joy in my life at all."

Clean, sober and semi-impotent: it's a horrible way to live. Then again, I'm not sure being junked-out and impotent is any better. When I was in New York, I met a 50-year-old junkie, Doug, who's been on it for thirty years. I met him at a friend's dinner party. He was an incredible asshole, sneering and criticizing everyone.

"When the fuck are we going to eat?" he kept snapping. "This wine is bullshit! Who bought this?"

Doug was strung out on methadone at the time, which, as he told me, only gets rid of the sickness without giving you the euphoria. He had the glassy, pin-eyed look, but lacked the glow of warm contentment. That to me was the perfect metonomy for America: heroin without the high.

The only reason Doug didn't snap at me was because I took his side in a dinner-table argument about gun control, which I oppose because I don't believe that today's equivalent of feudal peasant revolutionaries--those freaks who blast their way through their offices, shopping malls and school yards--should be disarmed. They're the last thing that the State fears, the only rebels left. Doug claims that his pistol collection, which includes 19th century Smith & Wessons and little pocket Colts from the early part of this century, is only a hobby. But I know better. It's a substitute. In the course of our conversation, he admitted that in his youth, he was a master at bagging ballerinas. But that was a long, long time ago. Twenty years is a very long time in heroin-years. After he unexpectedly stormed out of the dinner, probably to make a score uptown, I was told that Doug hasn't achieved erection in over two decades. Hence, the pistol collection.

It may seem hyper-bizarre to Russian readers that in America, it's illegal to sell Viagra over-the-counter, but any angry junkie can walk into a sporting goods store and load up on ten-bullet-clip pistols. But then again, take one look at our grim American women, and you'll understand. Pistols are preferable, and far more appropriate, than Viagra. In Russia, of course, it's the complete opposite: Viagra on every street corner (in 25mg, 50mg, and 100mg doses), and limitless herds of females worth wasting those blue diamond-shaped pills on, while guns are only available to the cops and the killers.

Not that conventional, Newtonian weaponry can stop the Bradley-Thing. If you recall, The Thing is one of the few monsters in film history that is literally unkillable. The best you can hope for is to freeze it deep in the Antarctic snowcap. If you're wondering why Gore has made fighting Global Warming his raison d'etre, it's because he knows that without those polar snowcaps, there's no way of ensuring that the Bradley-Thing will ever be defeated.