There is a former sportscaster in England who’s grabbed a few headlines in recent years with claims that the world is run by a conspiracy of shape-shifting multi-dimensional lizard-people he calls “reptoids.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke)
Not to sound judgmental, but this is clearly crazy.
Still, I look at Mitt Romney sometimes and wonder.
There is something strange and unhuman about the smiling soulless masks our politicians create for themselves.
It’s not unique to Romney. All politicians try to make themselves into mythological heroes, and if they even start to succeed, their opponents try to make them into mythological monsters. (Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning saint who kills the bad guy! No, Obama is an un-American, socialist, Muslim secret agent engaged in an open war on religion!) The result: reptoid. Most of us don’t know these people, and none of us knows all of them, so politicians exist for us as media figures – larger than life, possibly, but somehow empty inside.
But, of all the empty masks out there, none is emptier than Romney.
No one can say what this man believes because he has said it himself so many different times, in so many different ways – many of them utterly contradictory to each other.
He implemented universal health care in Massachusetts using a plan designed by the conservative Heritage Foundation – boasted about it, held it up as a model for the nation. When the Obama administration actually implemented it nationwide, Romney started to claim it was an abomination, unconstitutional, reprehensible. When he was trying to appeal to voters in Massachusetts he was passionate about his devotion to the pro-choice position. Now that he’s talking to a different group of voters, he claims with equal insistence that he is pro-life.
The list goes on and on. (Google “Romney vs. Romney” for a long series of entertaining videos where Romney argues with himself.)
A guy can change his mind about something and still have convictions, but that is not Romney’s account of himself. He claims to be a man of “steadiness and constancy.”
He rewrites the past so that he can pretend to have always held the beliefs he claims to hold now. When he was running for governor of Massachusetts he said he was not conservative: “I’m someone who is moderate, and my views are progressive,” and also insisted (during his unsuccessful run for the Senate), “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”
That was then. Now he claims that he was a “severely conservative” governor of Massachusetts, and even asserts that “when I ran for governor, there’s no question; the principles that Ronald Reagan espoused were the basis of my campaign.”
It would be comforting, in a way, to believe that this conscienceless shape-shifting marks Romney as something other than human. That’s part of the appeal of the reptoid hypothesis, I guess.
Put the blame on the lizards!
The grim truth is that Romney’s dishonesty, his smiling indifference to the suffering he has caused (whether to people or dogs) is what marks him as human.
Romney’s flexible approach to the truth says something about his character, but it also says something about us.
After all, Romney’s public identity has evolved (or devolved) in response to pressures from his audience. He acts this way because voters want him to (or he thinks they do, anyway).
The prominence of shameless, open and untiring liars in our political culture is a consequence of our addiction to comforting lies.
We need to shake that addiction if our politics are ever going to have any real relationship with the policies that affect our lives.
We could start by sending Mitt Romney back to the showers, or New Hampshire, or the constellation of Draco, or wherever it is that he’s claiming as his home these days.
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