JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
©
2008
Who
You Gonna Call?: The
Presidential Obsession with 3 a.m.
From the “Ghostbusters” school of campaigning, Hillary Clinton recently attempted to terrorize America into electing her via a TV ad that said your sleeping children will die in their beds unless she is in the White House at 3 a.m. to answer a phone call about a world crisis.
Perhaps it will involve Osama bin Laden.
Perhaps it will be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. (Either
way, one of our self-created monsters, no doubt.) Who you gonna
call?
Ralph Nader is totally wrong about the
two major parties becoming indistinguishable, Democrats will tell you. They
just happen to sound exactly the same now that the other two top candidates are
repeating Clinton’s loco in loco parentis
ad and saying they are the best candidate for the 3 a.m. phone call. Obama, McCain, Hillary herself—Democrat and Republican
alike, all claim they’re tops at this remarkable feat of lifting a piece of
plastic one-handed, quite possibly in a dark room.
No matter which candidate it is, or which
opinion column boosts the claim or mocks it, that is
the precise time given: 3 a.m.
Does no one remember that the Sept. 11
attacks happened at around 9 a.m.?
You know, when G.W. was attending grade school?
Or how about Pearl
Harbor? Oh, right—around 8 a.m.
The Cuban Missile Crisis? It’s hard to pinpoint when
that really began; it was not an 80-minute action movie, but a series of
escalating events, as most crises are. The biggest current world crisis is a
war we started on our own timetable.
As usual, what are these candidates,
their parties and their supporters talking
about? Do they know? Do they care? Do they ever wonder about anything? Or
are we indeed still just a bunch of squealing chimps who
will follow whoever and whatever bangs the biggest stick against the rottenest
tree trunk?
And what’s the deal with it being a phone
call? I wouldn’t need some wussy phone call to rouse
me, because I’m usually awake at 3 a.m. (Yet another way in which I—who always
opposed the war, knew more about the looming peril to New Orleans than FEMA did
as I sat in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and declared America not a
democracy long before 2000—am eminently more qualified to be president than any
of these fraternity-official types.) Someone could just walk up and tell me as
I sat there, burning the midnight oil, staring at a war-game table of the
Middle East with a giant puddle of quicksand in the center. This is all just
the candidates’ way of admitting that they will be lazing around asleep when
crisis comes.
Of course, what they each want to suggest
is that they are best at making outstanding snap decisions under pressure when
only half-awake. For at least two out of three of them, dozens of things said
on the airport-hopping campaign trail argue against that. In any case, it’s
easy enough to test.
From here on out, hold
all the debates at 3 a.m.
Put up or shut up, already.
Well, it’s easy enough to mock this notion
of the presidency as tech support. And it’s fitting enough to laugh at the
spectacle of three supposed leaders all following each other, desperate to
synchronize their campaign messages like a “Mission: Impossible” team.
But in that case, the joke’s on us, because
there is something far more insidious to the whole “3 a.m.” mystique.
Obviously, there is nothing special about 3 a.m. and
the occurrence of a crisis. Whoever is president would grab a cup of coffee,
and whatever mystic ooh-spooky-nighttime “Hour of the Wolf” atmosphere the
candidates are trying to whip up here would disappear. And if we’re honest
about it, in most crises, it doesn’t matter for a long time whether there even
is a president. There’s always somebody awake in the White House and on
military bases. We have a vast government that can churn along on its own for a
while. Our moronic coward of a president spent the first several hours of Sept.
11 getting dumbly shuttled around the countryside like a FedEx air package, and
we still did relatively well.
A world crisis phone call is not what we
dread at 3 a.m. A dead-child phone call is what we dread at 3 a.m. That is the
hour when kids use our cars and our liquor to hurl themselves through
guardrails and out dorm windows. Clinton’s ad cynically conflates the two types
of crisis, and her competitors are eager to reap the benefits as well.
And why not? This is the paternalist (or maternalist) view of government—that it will be the parent,
or at least big brother, to us all. It’s icky and disgusting, but it’s the way
things are. Look at the Mean Dad of a president we have now. We’ll certainly be
better off no matter if we get the Cool Dad, the Condescending Mom or the
Cranky Dad Who Is Several Years Older Than Mom.
The 2004 election was a referendum on American idiocy, which
the electorate failed with flying red, white and blue colors. I would still
argue that even the most gullible fool deserves better than crass manipulation
of dead-child fears, particularly in a way that contributes to the paranoia and
irrationalism that make the world perpetually more dangerous. The children
certainly deserve better.
What we really should fear is this world
of lazy media and political partisans who will endlessly repeat something as
curiously specific as “3 a.m.” without ever once asking why. It’s the sort of
detail that hides quite a devil.
Posted March 4, 2008 (and written through the 3 a.m.
hour).