Tags: elections | George W. Bush | USA

E2K Postscript: During the 2000 US presidential election, this space was a petri dish of confused liberalism.

Before the New Hampshire primaries I blasted John McCain's Straight Talk Express because he could have beaten Gore in a general election.

Besides his admirable plans to ban soft money, his politics stank. Once McCain was crushed, I gleefully took aim at Bush directly, also arguing that the stakes were too high to support Nader's protest bid.

As Nader picked up momentum I started waffling on Gore, and by November I was wearing a big green Styrofoam hat urging everyone I passed on the street to vote Nader. Every babicka on my block got a button.

Surprisingly, not one reader noticed the jerky leftward progression of this magazine's election coverage, further confirming suspicions that nobody actually reads Think. But whatever. I and the two million plus Americans who voted for the Green Party are now sucking on the reality that we tipped the election to the Freaky Right.

Nader supporters were justified in dumping the corporate liberalism of the New Democrats, but the fact remains that as this goes to print we are likely to have an anti-choice Attorney General who speaks in tongues and an Interior Ministress who is a protege of James Watt.

The same James Watt, you may recall, who justified wholesale destruction of the environment with his belief, rooted in scripture, that the world was going to end in the year 2000. Gale Norton herself thinks trees are dollar bills on stumps and rivers trash receptacles for industry.

Yep, the band is back together: oil, mining, petrochemicals, the NRA, the Promise Keepers, Lockheed, Martin, Boewing and all the fanatical libertarian tax cutters you can fit onto the lush lawn of Cato Institute Headquarters. They all stood together for a class photo at the swearing-in, then retired to power tents for shrimp and bubbly.

Reading reports of George W. Bush's inaugural festivities, one detail poked out from the page like John Ashcroft's uncircumcised Pentecostal member. It wasn't the $35 million in party money raised by the corporations that purchased the candidate two years ago. Nor the thousands of pounds of Texas beef and rib that rumbled in on big rigs from Marlboro country to feed the folk.

What jabbed me in the eye was the presence of two Republican 'celebrities' who during the 1980s made some of the most violent propaganda films in the history of the medium. Granted it's a stretch to call Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris celebrities in 2001 - Sly's entire corpus after Rocky II is a twenty year joke, and Chuck Norris is down to making late-night home-gym infomercials for Eastern Europe - but by GOP standards they are celebrities, at least compared to the musket waving Charlton Heston, who ranks just above Wilfred Brimley on the Hollywood sex-o-meter.

Schwarzenegger was probably there too, but I missed his name in the gossip column, and anyway compared to Sly and Chuck he was the Jimmy Stewart of the 80s. In that hypermilitarized decade, Stallone and Norris both played American veterans of the Vietnam war who returned to Indochina to "avenge" the loss.

Stallone's Rambo series came first, consisting of b*stardized sequels to the Carter-era themed First Blood, in which a disturbed vet is abandoned and then hunted by a hostile society. Suffering the fate of Springsteen's Born in the USA, the social criticism of First Blood failed to penetrate the anemic cells of Reagan's America, and two years later John Rambo was no longer a tragic symbol of an awful war, but a bare-chested, bullet-belted Tasmanian devil.

Back in the jungle, Rambo wastes faceless gooks and their Russian sponsors like a Columbine honor student. In the Rambo films, the body counts were roughly coequal to the M-60 rounds fired off, which one social scientist has estimated to be nearly one thousand per film.

Along with massacring pinko slopes, Rambo was also busy rescuing the missing soldiers of Ross Perot's imagination, further emphasizing American suffering at the hands of Asian communists, as if it was they who invaded a sovereign nation and carpet bombed the place with napalm for ten years.

The Norris series - Missing in Action I - IV - took the missing vet theme as its starting point and accomplished the impossible by making Rambo seem understuffed with cartoon racism and ridiculous Cold War moralizing. I haven't seen these films in years, but I remember them well, remember how they taught me to enjoy violence.

That these films were so popular in a democratic society with a high literacy rate is sobering. But the Reagan White House was key. It helped, as William Bennet might say, "set the tone."

So what does it mean that these B-actors were A-list at the inauguration of our new Texan president? Probably nothing. These Hollywood machine gunners and commie killers were actually superfluous omens. But it is nice a coincidence that two of the only movie stars the Republican party could get made viciously nationalistic movies as a fake blood backdrop to GOP sponsored slaughter in Central America fifteen years ago.

Sly and Chuck's inclusion in the events of that grey day last month, devoid of poetry and sponsored by the Friends of the Pentagon Committee, is a neat-o fit. Of course militarism and lawlessness never disappeared after Reagan/Bush, but they assumed less evil popular faces than Stallone and Norris; namely, the faces of Matt Damon and Barbara Streisand.

But John Rambo was back in Dick Cheney's Washington on January 20th. Does this somehow symbolize the bubbling back up of Marine biology, the complete burial of reason and compassion in foreign policy - in short, the return of very bad men?

Call me crazy, but I think that it does.