The Paradise Trap

"I used to imagine paradise when I was a kid. While I don't remember very many details of my image of the place, I know there were a lot of toy airplanes and most everything was blue.

"My more adult visions of paradise put me in the center with all I wished for available on call...Our paradises tend to be solipsistic dreams in which there is either more of everything we think we love and need, or we are awarded gifts of all that's usually denied us.

"Seems to me the point is that, in all our paradises, we don't pay heed to the slaves who are the rest of the population in our ideal imaginary lands. A paradise, which should suggest expansion of human potential, is usually a reduction, generally to the state of inertia. People lounge in paradise a lot more than they do in life, or even want to do...

"We humans have an unfortunate tendency to welcome traps if we can find some way to call them paradises. 'Be content,' [we are told]; and we can be content, if we don't have to think of the slaves or the inertia, so long as there are plenty of toy airplanes, and everything is blue."

-William Adama

~ ~ ~

William Adama is not (to my knowlege) a real-life historical figure. He is the main character on the old (and new) scifi TV series Battlestar Galactica. And, I think it is fair to say, an honest-to-goodness knuckle-dragging, neanderthal, right-wing neocon warmongerer, to borrow the current center-left vernacular.

The premise of the series is ruthlessly straightforward: after a long war against an alien race (the Cylons), that enemy does a sudden about-face and offers an armistice. In the original series the humans are lured into an ambush that destroys their space fleet and leaves their home planets defenseless and quickly annihilated. In the remake several decades pass before the Cylon sneak attack, but the results are the same. The common thread, though, is "war-weariness" and complacency, and how a devious and vicious enemy exploits those weaknesses to dupe the good guys into cooperating in their own destruction.

One warship manages to escape - the Galactica - along with a handful of survivors in any spaceworthy ship they can scrounge up. This "ragtag, fugitive fleet" sets out across the stars looking for a new home while trying to evade the alien enemy that is still bent on their destruction.

What is most interesting, in my opinion, about both versions of BG is the insight they have into base human nature. In the original version, the first port of call for the human diaspora is a planet called Carillon on which they find a resort facility that appears to offer them everything they need: fuel, food, all manner of entertainment. A virtual....paradise. Adama doesn't trust it, but his equivalent of a legislature (the Quorum) overrides him and plunges headlong into what seems to be the right thing to do. So bitter is the split that they force his resignation as president (the office fell to him after the destruction of their civilization).

Of course, Carillon does turn out to be too good to be true. It's run by an insectoid race that is being used by the Cylons to set up the human survivors for the coup de grace. They survive only through the extralegal preparation of Adama, who is ready for the Cylon attack this time and repulses it. But then, that's how fiction of any sort usually works. Ultimately, the good guys have to win, and the hero does not get impeached and indicted, no matter how implausible it is.

In the new version of BG, the "ragtag fugitive fleet" finds a habitable planet right in the home stretch of a presidential election campaign. The incumbent, Laura Roslin, had been leading in the polls until this electrifying discovery. Her challenger, Gaius Baltar, being nothing if not a political opportunist, immediately embraces and champions the idea of halting their "star trek" and settling on this new planet.

Roslin (and Adama, kind of like her version of Don Rumsfeld) knows that this will simply make their people a collective sitting duck, easier for the Cylons to find and conquer or wipe out, and she passionately and eloquently makes that case (not unlike Rick Santorum has been in his "gathering storm" speeches of late). But she finds herself in an impossible position. Her people have spent the previous year as refugees on the run, under constant attack, living on ships, enduring a more or less permanent emergency. They're hungry and sick and tired and they want to stop, settle down, pull the figurative blankets over their head and pretend that this nasty reality no longer exists.

Roslin is right, but sometimes in politics there's no reward for being right, and all kinds of reward for being wrong at the right time. This was the latter. Roslin loses in a landslide, Baltar takes over, and the settlement of this new planet commences.

A year later the Cylons arrive, take over, and the humans endure a brutal occupation that snuffs out a fifth of their remaining population. Of course, they're ultimately rescued (because the good guys have to win), but even that isn't without additional cost.

Did either version of the human diaspora learn anything from the folly-cum-tragedy they inflicted upon themselves with their own political choices? Probably for a while - until the lesson faded and the next paradise beckoned.

~ ~ ~

Why have I gone into such detail about a scifi television saga on the main page of a political blog? I should think the parallels with campaign 2006 are obvious. If not, I'll elaborate further (as if there was any doubt....).

9/11 was said at the time, and for a considerable period afterwards, to have "changed everything." And it did - for a while.

The 2002 midterms, where the party in power usually takes it in the shorts, produced a history-defying Republican triumph, as the GOP gained five or so House seats and regained a narrow majority in the Senate, mainly on the strength of the fresh memories of the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush's popularity and prestige as a wartime president. Two years later, despite the open, loud, and brazenly wholesale treason of the Democrat party, 9/11 still resonated enough to (narrowly) keep Bush in the White House for another term and expand further Republican congressional control.

Now here we sit the night before Election Day 2006. Two additional years of politico-media agitation against the nation, its war effort, and its leader and his party have taken a toll both on the latter and on the nerves and eardrums and psyche of the American public. Though far from the calamity of the human survivors of Battlestar Galactica (for now, anyway), many of us are, well, not hungry, and not sick, but certainly tired of the relentless bilious din pouring across our front pages and TV screens on a daily basis. It appears that five years of incessant, obnoxious, seditious left-wing bullshit may be what offsets one morning of real-world horror. Some have perhaps reached the point of being willing to accept regular mass terrorist attacks in the homeland if it means political peace and quiet. And that sure isn't going to come from keeping the Republicans in charge.

"Enough," they say, "We've had enough of 'living history.' We want all this crapola to go away. No more Iraq, no more Afghanistan, no more Osama bin Laden, no more big, tough challenges. Give us the nineties again where the biggest choices we had to contemplate were what flavor latte to swill, what dot-com into which to invest and make a fortune, and which Clinton distinguishing characteristic locator pool to bet in order to get the investment capital for the dot-com. The Dems are promising that 'return to abnormalcy,' even if none of them are historically literate enough to invoke the slogan. Let's put them back in charge. Then we can start up impeachment pools and invest the proceeds in magic wand IPOs."

Of course, switching legislative horses from the tiresome to the insane wouldn't end the bile flow any more than fleeing Iraq, then Afghanistan, and then the Middle East altogether (a "strategic redeployment" to the moon may be the next big idea) would "end the 'insurgency'" (other than in the sense of surrendering Iraq to the "insurgents" - which is to say Iran). The reality of a chemical attack in Los Angeles or a dirty nuke attack in Chicago or an EMP attack that instantly destroys the nation's economy and technological infrastructure would be a very different thing from the flippant contemplation of it in the abstract in all our glorious complacency. The lesson of this greatest folly-cum-tragedy would be learned, and it would endure because there would be no more paradises beckoning again any time soon.

~ ~ ~

So, with all that in mind, we arrive at my several-times-teased-over-the-past-few-days final midterm election calls. I think you can tell from the semi-maudlin undercurrent above that they're not going to be the champagne-cork-poppers that I have alluded to recently.

Here we go (Incumbents in CAPS)....

~ ~ ~

SENATE

ARIZONA: KYL (R) 55.7%, Pederson (D) 44.3%

CALIFORNIA: FEINSTEIN (D) 63.0%, Mountjoy (R) 37.0%

CONNECTICUT: LIEBERMAN (I) 51.9%, Lamont (D) 40.9%, Schlesinger (R) 8.0%

DELAWARE: CARPER (D) 64.7%, Ting (R) 35.3%

FLORIDA: NELSON (D) 61.7%, Harris (R) 38.3%

HAWAII: AKAKA (D) over Thielen (R) (no polling available)

INDIANA: LUGAR (R) (unopposed)

MAINE: SNOWE (R) over Bright (D) (no polling available)

MARYLAND: Cardin (D) 51.1%, Steele (R) 48.9%

MASSACHUSETTS: KENNEDY (D) over Chase (R) (no polling available)

MICHIGAN: STABENOW (D) 54.9%, Bouchard (R) 45.1%

MINNESOTA: Klobuchar (D) 56.3%, Kennedy (R) 43.7%

MISSISSIPPI: LOTT (R) over Fleming (D) (no polling available)

MISSOURI: McCaskill (D) 50.3%, TALENT (R) 49.7% (DEM PICKUP)

MONTANA: Tester (D) 50.5%, BURNS (R) 49.5% (DEM PICKUP)

NEBRASKA: NELSON (D) over Ricketts (R) (no polling available)

NEVADA: ENSIGN (R) 55.3%, Carter (D) 44.7%

NEW JERSEY: MENENDEZ (D) 51.5%, Kean (R) 48.5%

NEW MEXICO: BINGAMAN (D) over McCulloch (R) (no polling available)

NEW YORK: Rodham (D) 61.3%, Spencer (R) 38.7%

NORTH DAKOTA: CONRAD (D) over Grotberg (R) (no polling available)

OHIO: Brown (D) 53.8%, DeWINE (R) 46.2% (DEM PICKUP)

PENNSYLVANIA: Casey (D) 54.6%, SANTORUM (R) 45.4% (DEM PICKUP)

RHODE ISLAND: Whitehouse (D) 51.4%, CHAFEE (R) 48.6% (DEM PICKUP)

TENNESSEE: Corker (R) 54.3%, Ford (D) 45.7%

TEXAS: HUTCHISON (R) over Radnofsky (D) (no polling available)

UTAH: HATCH (R) over Ashdown (D) (no polling available)

VERMONT: Sanders (I) over Tarrant (R) (no polling available)

VIRGINIA: ALLEN (R) 50.6%, Webb (D) 49.4%

WASHINGTON: CANTWELL (D) 55.5%, McGavick (R) 45.5%

WEST VIRGINIA: BYRD (D) over Raese (R) (no polling available)

WISCONSIN: KOHL (D) over Lorge (R) (no polling available)

WYOMING: THOMAS (R) over Grautage (D) (no polling available)

~ ~ ~

HOUSE

DEM PICKUPS: Arizona-8, Colorado-7, Connecticut-5, Florida-13, Florida-16, Florida-22, Illinois-6, Indiana-2, Indiana-8, Indiana-9, Iowa-1, North Carolina-11, New Mexico-1, New York-20, New York-24, Ohio-15, Ohio-18, Pennsylvania-6, Pennsylvania-7, Pennsylvania-10

GOP PICKUPS: Georgia-12, Illinois-8, Indiana-7

~ ~ ~

FINAL SCORE: Dems +5 in the Senate, Dems +17 in the House

NEW ALIGNMENT IN THE 110th CONGRESS:

SENATE - GOP 50, Dems/"Independents" 50

HOUSE - Dems 220, GOP 215

I feverently hope and pray that the polls are off more than my formula corrects for. God, do I ever. Otherwise the party that promises paradise through permanent political civil war and the insanity of an eternal public policy pilgrammage back to the same historical ashheap on which they and their ilk were left behind years ago will once again hold the reins of power, we will once again become slaves, the electoral inertia of "compassion fascism" will once again descend, and everything will be blue.

And one day soon, our real-life "Cylons" will return.

UPDATE: AJ Strata has the rose colored glasses on on both sides of the Capitol.