It is no accident that this column is titled Hey, Rube. That is what’s called my “Standing Head” in the arcane jargon of Journalism, and it will not change anytime soon. “Hey, Rube” is an old-timey phrase, coined in the merciless culture of the Traveling Carnival gangs that roamed from town to town in the early 20th century. Every stop on the circuit was just another chance to fleece another crowd of free-spending Rubes—Suckers, Hicks, Yokels, Johns, Fish, Marks, Bums, Losers, Day traders in Portland, fools who buy diamonds from gypsies, and anyone over the age of nine in this country who still believes in his heart that all cops are honest and would never lie in a courtroom.
These people are everywhere. They are Legion, soon to be a majority, and 10,000 more are being born every day. It was P. T. Barnum, the Circus man, who explained the real secret of his vast commercial success by repeating his now-famous motto, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” in this country, and his job was to keep them amused. Which he did—with a zeal that has never been equaled in the history of American show business.
Barnum knew what people wanted: Freaks, Clowns, and Wild Animals. The Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town only once a year, and those days were marked as sacred holidays on the John Deere calendars of every Rube in America.…. Those dates were Special; many schools closed when the Circus came to town, and not every student returned when the public frenzy was over. “Running away with the Circus” was the dream of every schoolboy and the nightmare of every mother with a bored and beautiful daughter.
Pearl Harbor was 60 years ago, before we had TV and computers to keep us totally informed. When half the U.S. Navy was destroyed by Japanese bombs, at least we knew who did it and where they lived, and that news was spread all over the world in a matter of minutes, with eyewitness accounts and photos of burning battleships.
What has gone wrong with our communication system since then? Why are we more ignorant and less informed today than we were in 1941?
That is an eerie question, eh?
You bet it is. If World War III can start in a vacuum of silence and stonewalling by the White House, we are doomed like rats in a maze of fear. We are slaves to mendacity and hostile disinformation. Bread and circuses were not enough to sustain the Roman Empire and they will not be enough for the United States of America.
How long, O lord, how long? This blizzard of shame is getting a little old, isn’t it? Just how low do we have to fall before the voters catch on?
Indeed. How many times can a man be robbed—on the same street, by the same people—before they call him a Rube? Bob Dylan said that, in a tattered old song called “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Read it and weep, you poor bastards—because Dylan was yesterday, and George Bush is now.
That is a morbid observation, at best, and we are all stuck with it. The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November. Take my word for it. Mahalo.
It was not at all clear to me when I first started writing this Hey, Rube column just before the 2000 presidential election that it was actually a week-to-week calendar / record / diary of what it was like to be alive and suffering in the first disastrous days of the George W. Bush administration.
That is a long sentence for a short thought, but I won’t hang around and worry about it. We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.
Who knows why it happened? But there is no doubt about what it was: the suicidal collapse of the American empire in the final year of the American century.
The Empire collapsed for the same corrupt and greedy reasons that plagued and destroyed so many other empires in the long curve of history.
The Roman Empire lasted more or less 900 years—which is 888 years longer than Adolf Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich.” They both imploded because of internal corruption and a pampered, decadent citizenry. They were weak because they no longer used their muscles or their brains. After only 500 years, they were all either pimps or whores.
But so what? If you have lemons, make lemonade. That is ancient Hawaiian Wisdom—and that is what I have tried to do here. So buckle up and prepare to look into your own rearview mirror and see how it happened, as seen through the innocent eyes of a sportswriter.
