Fayette Nam

Although the inquiry stems from a fundamental misreading of everything ever written on this blog, the question is worth a brief answer: why am I interested in Ron Paul?  Well, I am not interested in Ron Paul per se.  I mean, I did call him a stooge and say that ersatz intellectual diversity superimposed on the public facade of the ruling class is an affect overlying an underlying unanimity among the actually powerful.  What I am interested in is the fact that Ron Paul has a constituency.  I am interested in the fact that a statistically meaningful portion of the adult voting population of the Benighted Apes of Duh-merica is unabashedly in favor of ending the war on drugs and military adventurism abroad, of a substantial and meaningful devolution of centralized federal power--and not merely the window-dressing smallgovernment yibyab of the Republican Party, but far more fundamental limits on the government, including its warmaking apparatus.  Now I don't disagree that this is not gonna be part of the program, not even if well-timed asteroid strikes eliminate every other candidate and Barack Obama is finally proven to be the immortal incarnation of Jomo Kenyata; I mean, obviously.  How often have I harped on the institutional nature of power, especially political power in an empire?  But what you hear, over and over, is that the middle of this country is chock full o nuts, that it is wholly populated by a gang of Caucasian homophobes who wish to instate executions for parking violations and invade those few uninvaded parts of the world that remain in order to establish an eternal Bachmanate of the Palin, and while that may be to a degree true, it is also true that, literallyjoebiden, millions and millions of people believe quite the opposite, that there are millions of fat white nativists who despite their abhorrent views on immigration also believe that America ought to end the drug war.  You are of course, free to argue that Paul's nativist supporters tolerate the legalization of heroin as a charming quirk of a man whose real appeal is his view on the Fed, but you will be wrong.  I grew up with these people in Appalachian Pennsylvania and your collegeboy convictions that a couple Fox News whoopsters in the back of a televised debate represent their degraded humanity is wrong and only indicative of your own insular life; most people haven't got the luxury of your imagined political coherency, and the fact that Ron Paul's popular rhetoric of liberty coexists with an uncomfortable fixation or borders, or that his beliefs about government intrusion into private life sit oddly against his positions on abortion--well, these things might in fact represent (I use that word intentionally) the unsettled nature of his supporters' convictions.

The Tea Party itself is a construct, and Ron Paul is mind control, and I am not interested in either of them in and of themselves; yet there are millions on millions whose human conscience is offended by war, surveillance, prohibition, and coercion.  A lot of them simply don't vote; many who do get suckered by the Paul Pill.  But their conscience remains.