Featuring A Limited Wag The Dog Scenario, Starring Bill Clinton as The Dog and Monica Lewinsky as The Beaver

R.U. Sirius

"There's something called the Black Pox or flat smallpox, in which the body is covered with flat black marks, and pustules erupt all over the surface of the gut, and the stomach blows up to three, four times and you get blood blisters extending through the entire GI tract. The gut lining separates because of bleeding behind it. It comes off, and the rectum actually turns inside out and hangs outside the body. Then everything hemorrhages and you die."
~ ~ Robert Preston, author of Cobra Event, in MONDO 2000#18

The future just got uglier. Somewhere at the interface of Bill Clinton's penis, bin Laden's half million dollars worth of hate, and a whole host of other factors the mainstream media is too lazy and biased to bother with, we now face the imminent probability of a biological and chemical endgame in the very near future. It's Jihad vs. McWorld, and nobody gets to sit comfortably on the sidelines. There are no good guys in this game. McWorld has its own long-term claim on international terror, ranging from the current American-sponsored torture and murder of thousands in Guatemala to the starvation deaths of millions that occurs every time the IMF forecloses mortgage on a third world country and tightens its belts around the necks of its poor. And who can forget that the Reagan administration gave Pol Pot a massive arms infusion after the Cambodian holocaust? You can? Well, I can't say I blame you. PRAVDA (the American mainstream press) won't remind you about that, will they?

Nevermind, some of my friends tell me. There is no time to factor in gross hypocrisy, government deceit, and the various waggings of lapdog's tales. The evil bin Laden has declared war internationally on each and every American and Jew. And as an agnostically-raised, half-Jewish, weirdly-all-American, Sufi-dancin' cultural mutant, I am a primary target.

Buddy Boy Bill is trying to protect me with 75 some Tomahawk missiles raining destruction on faraway lands filled with the sick, the starving, and some of the best damned opiated hash ever cultivated by formerly CIA-sponsored Mujahedeen. Who am I to question the wisdom of the National Security State in such a time as this? So what if they did fuck us on Viet Nam, engage in a whole host of strange and murderous little adventures in Latin America spanning four decades, control the flow of information in "Operation Desert Storm" until freedom of the press was rendered an empty shell, and always left their dazed and confused soldiers to fend for themselves, cancer-bellies filled with Agent Orange soda and other chemical and biological fried chicken dinners comin' home to roost? We don't care. When push comes to shove, it's root root root for the home team. "After all," they ask me, "What would you do?"

I'd suggest a different game. So rather than engage in any further analysis of the gross hypocrisy of the US National Security State, the contemptible toadying of the mainstream media, the brain/soul death of the Clintonoid Hollywood/Democratic Party limousine liberals, and the usualand predictable support for state-sponsored murder by the Moron Majority, I'll trust Disinformation readers to connect most of the dots for themselves. What I want to do instead is offer a reasonable story line for what the hell is going on, and in fact tell you what I would do.

Limited Wag The Dog Scenario, Starring Bill Clinton as The Dog and Monica Lewinsky as The Beaver

Ok. Imagine you're William Jefferson Clinton. As a po' boy back in Arkansas, you stopped daddy from beating on mommy and dreamed of some day becoming President of the United States. As a teenager you shook hands with JFK and decided you were going to be just like him some day. In the late Sixties, you were a flaming civil rights, antiwar liberal (which actually means you were a bit of a conservative among the radicals and hippies) And while you walked on the mild side of hedonism, you sure discovered a taste for pussy. Long or short, blonde or brunette, you just couldn't ball enough chicks (as we used to say).

In graduate school at Oxford, things got a bit more intense. On the one hand, you started grooming yourself for a political career, taking the "realpolitikal" and rather Machiavellian Carroll Quigley as a mentor. At the same time, you went a bit further left, attending militant anti war demonstrations. And you took to eating hash and pot cookies, and taking a bit of acid and mescaline (according to some of your old classmates, who don't want to deal with the fallout of talking about it to the press, you lucky devil). Sometimes you thought about throwing over the ambition and dropping out. If you'd tripped a few more times, you might still be somewhere out there today, dawdling in some European coffeehouse, maybe a part-time professor reading a dog-eared copy of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (one of your favorite books) for the umpteenth time, and wondering if you would have made it if you'd tried. Hey, I'm not entirely unappreciative. George Bush might still be president and lobbing a handful of bombs at Arabs might be the rule rather than the exception.

But you didn't drop out. You came back to America and before you could say, "Wanna do a line?" it was the mid-70's and, still in your twenties and a flaming liberal, you were elected Governor of Arkansas. You and your hip little buddies, coke-filled with arrogance and youthful idealism, drunk on power and all the pussy a Governership can get you, bit hard at the ankles of the Arkansas establishment. And the establishment bit back. And you learned lesson number one: if they don't like what you're doing, they can make things bad for everybody. And as the head of state, you'll get the blame. And so you did. Thrown out of office, you went home to lick your wounds and discover a taste for stealth and cunning, strategy and compromise.

And so The Comeback Kid made his first comeback as a moderate Democrat, elected to a second term as Governor of Arkansas. You sold Arkansas' waters down the river, turning it into one of the most polluted states in the Union but earning yourself the support of Tyson Foods, Arkansas billion dollar chicken waste dumpers. On the other hand, you were sympathetic toward the poor and you and Hillary worked like dogs to improve the educational system.

You learned to trade a little bit of bad (ecological carnage) for a little bit of good (improved education and social infrastructure). In this new land of tradeoffs, you couldn't really claim that you were doing more good than harm, but you could claim that some other guys would be doing less good and even more harm if you weren't such a damned strategic and charismatic guy, able to keep your hands on the levers of power and keep those really bad guys at bay.

And so it was that you determined that you were about as good as it gets in the world of realpolitik, the only Democrat with the stealth and cunning to win the White House and maybe squeeze through a mildly progressive agenda. Who knows, with some dumb luck and a lot of charisma, you might even institute real progress, bringing badly needed attention to America's damaged social infrastructure. Maybe not "putting people first" (let's not be ridiculous) but at least putting people at all. Education, housing, birth control, gay rights, increased funding for AIDS research, reduced defense spending, and universal health care. You brought your message to the American people, making sure to feed the wolves of reaction with the requisite anti-crime and anti-welfare rhetoric, and just barely enough patriotic jingoism to slide by despite having been a pot smoking draft dodger. You even sent a retarded boy to his death in Arkansas, lest you appear soft on the death penalty. Anything less would have meant instant death for your ambitions, because the Moron Majority considers the death penalty a litmus test that proves that you're part of their angry and fearful mob. And so you killed.

They say the first time is the hardest.

Still, we were proud of you when you beat George Bush. It could be that nobody else could have done it. You faced down questions about sex and drugs, and you rocked and rolled (a bit lamely but what the hell) on Arsenio. You were our boy, the first boomer president, the great hip hope. During your nomination you played that lame-ass Fleetwood Mac song, but at the victory party in Little Rock, Hillary had them play Power to the People by John and Yoko over and over again. Man, it must have been some kind of a head rush.

And then, there you were, you and your Arkansas buddies in the White House filled with the delirium of power. Why not come right out swinging? Legalize RU 486? Check. Live up to your campaign promise to allow gays in the military and send a signal out to Saddam Hussein that you held no personal animus toward him.

UH OH. You hit the wall fast. The Pentagon let you know who's boss. And you weren't about to derail your entire administration over a campaign promise to gays and a mild move towards diffusing Middle East tension. There were social programs to pass. And so you wound up in a compromise that would define the peculiar Orwellian schizophrenia of the entire American body politic; from your sex life to the spin doctors to the mainstream media to the (dis)info-exhausted public, to our ahistorical and uneducated youths, the words resonate across American culture with such poignancy that it should be the new pledge of allegiance. Stand up, salute the flag and repeat after me:

It's really been downhill from there, no matter how well the economy appears to be doing, no matter how many approval polls you may win with the Moron Majority. We watched your friend and Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders (and my choice for Vice Presidential candidate for The Revolution®) get laughed out of public life and your Administration by America's allegedly liberal media for having the absolute gall to speak some taboo common sense about sex and drugs. And nearly all your social programs die within months when, under heavy manners from the Fed and Wall Street, your administration decides to emphasize deficit reduction over social infrastructure. According to Bob Woodward you exploded in rage that all your programs were captive to the needs and demands of "them." But a few days later, the political survivalist in you took over and you were gleefully dragging conservatives into your administration. Well, at least you still had health care, right? Hah. As any streetwise kid'll tell ya, never never never fuck with a protection racket. And since the insurance industry didn't like your deal, they set out to destroy you.

By the time the supposedly-liberal media got through talking about your Health care plan, contextualizing it within the rest of the first two years of your administration, you'd have thought you were Chairman Mao, leading the professional classes off to slave on the farms with the peasants. And so in 1994 came the "Republican Revolution."

It's been quite a downward spiral from there, although nothing in recent memory quite matches the strange Alice In Wonderland quality of the Starr investigation or, for that matter, your uncontrollable urges and the Byzantine situations they occasion.

But let's talk about the path that lead you to lob 75 some bombs at some allegedly independent nation states in violation of all international laws. Elected as a post-cold war president who would dedicate himself to getting America's own affairs in order, you soon found our position as rogue international police department for the New World Order put us in special danger in a dangerous world. With technology/weaponry getting smaller, communications getting faster, travel getting cheaper, the "terrorists" (many of whom, like the ones in Afghanistan we supported and continue to support) were coming home to roost. America would no longer be safe from the potential damage of holocaust-in-a-pocket desktop weapons of mass destruction. With neither the ability nor the will to alter American foreign policy substantially enough to shift the prevailing winds of hostility, and with the election of Netanyahoo insuring escalations in hostility just at the moment when relative sanity was peaking ever-so-slightly through the veil, you developed an uncharacteristically high level of paranoia. And with your only source of information being a National Security apparatus that -- as one of your assistants told my friend John Perry Barlow -- doesn't really like you, what a fuckin' mess! And then you read that damned book by Robert Preston. Cobra Event brought home the reality of pocket sized holocausts and the angry religious fundamentalists who might just use them.

According to Preston: "It turns out that Bill Clinton was reading my book that same week. The book either scared him or captivated him, because he got hold of Newt Gingrich and told the Newt, 'You have to read Cobra Event, and then get a hold of Richard Preston. Find out who he knows and what we need to do.' You know, Clinton and Gingrich are sort of good old buddies? Rivals, but they're both Southern pols. And Gingrich is very bright.

"So I get this frantic this frantic series of calls on my answering machine, Newt Gingrich is trying to reach you. He has been instructed by the President to call you and get your advice. So I think, right, sure. But I ended up talking with Gingrich for quite some time about biological terrorism."

Well, Bill, you've been on a hair trigger ever since. After that bogus arrest in Nevada of alleged white separatist for supposedly developing biological weapons terror, the mainstream media suddenly launched a paranoia/"consciousness raising" campaign about the subject, in its typical airhead-Orwellian style.

So there you were, embarrassed before the entire nation for getting blowjobs from a White House groupie and lying about it, and there was your entire national security apparatus telling you to drop some bombs to prevent chemical and biological apocalypso. And while you were usuallythe one who was slow to go on hard core military action, not this time. Somewhere at the interface of your dick and bin Laden's half-million dollars worth of hate, you were now fully the dog, wagged by the tail, and only too eager to comply. And so, soul-dead, dazed and confused, your sad tale of devolution ends. Worst of all for your egos, history will probably forget you, if there is in fact any history:

A) If there is, in fact, a species.
B) If there is, in fact, a civilization.
C) If, in the face of dissipating decentralized medias, "history" doesn't become even more of a subculture than it already is, about at the level of mycophilia or fans of The Residents.

In your youth, you turned on just a little. You tuned in quite a bit. But you failed to drop out. And now we need The Revolution® to make up for your failures.

The Revolution® 7 Point Program for Dramatically Decreasing the Threat of International Terrorism (short and vastly oversimplified)