With George W. Bush leaving office, and his approval rating now primarily made up of family and friends, we may soon be forced to return to the drudgery of fact-based reality. Without Bush around, our ability to create our own reality promises to be severely hampered, especially if a killjoy like Barack Obama takes office.
What kinds of reality creation will no longer be available to us? Here’s a partial list:
- No more blaming terrorist attacks on countries we want to invade.
- No more climate change happy talk.
- No more tax breaks for the wealthy to help poor people.
- No more solving the energy crisis by invading other countries or drill, baby, drill euphoria.
- No more bankrupting government as a service to taxpayers.
- No more killing social security in order to save it.
- Most likely, not even another heckuva-job-brownie.
Nope, all we would have in front of us is the long slog of facing up to our problems and engaging in actual work to fix them. Yuck.
However, new hope has arisen with the arrival of Sarah Palin on the political scene. Truth is once again hiding out in an undisclosed bunker, while fantasy lopes across media-enabled fields of invention. Palin, like Bush, knows that narrative is far more important than those pesky, troublesome facts. Her story of being a reformer and a whistleblower are not lies, exactly — she is merely creating a new reality, which is something even you could do.
Do you want to be against a bridge to nowhere after having campaigned for it? No problem – just say you killed it, and it won’t seem to matter to most everyone. But don’t be a fool for goodness sake – keep the money Congress allocated for it and apply it to something else.
Do you want to be against pork even though you’ve lobbied for and received more earmarks per capita than any other state? Just repeat after me: I am a Reformer. I am a Reformer. I am a Reformer. You can make your dreams come true, if you believe hard enough.
If you have said in front of the whole world that you sold your governor’s jet on eBay, ignore that guy off to the side who keeps saying you sold it at a loss via some broker. He will eventually go away if people keep shouting at him for being such a sexist.
I could go on, but this reality creation thing looks like so much fun that I think I’d like to try it.
For example, I’ve decided that I’m an expert in banking. If living next to a foreign country qualifies Palin to be a foreign policy expert, then living near a bank should qualify me to be a banking expert. If there is one thing I know to be true about me, it is that I live down the street from a number of banks. Let me know if you have any financial questions, and I’d be happy to field them. I might need your PIN number though.
Also, lately I’ve been thinking of taking over as CEO of Microsoft. You see, I used to be part-owner of a local software firm (which employed literally dozens of people). We even used many of Microsoft’s products. If Sarah Palin has taught me anything, it’s that scale doesn’t matter in governance, and I’d be fine navigating a billion dollar company with a hundred thousand employees. I can’t wait, because the first thing I’m going to do is put Microsoft’s underused ground troops and artillery to use and preemptively invade WalMart. I hope they’ll fondly call it The Schreiber Doctrine when they write it up in history books.
The media may have a field day if I did something like this, but the best thing about creating reality is that if you get criticized for it, you can blame the media for being biased. After all, believing in facts is merely a bias towards existing reality and against reality creation. Those who harp on it must be haters or unfair or something else bad.
It will be hard to lose ole George, who puts us all to shame with his ability to just make stuff up so we don’t have to worry about the state of the world. But there’s still hope. It’s a little early to say that Sarah Palin is capable of recreating a Bush presidency, but she clearly has the potential. That McCain guy looks like he has a shot at it too.