In an article posted on antiwar.com, Professor Ira Chernus makes an interesting point about how the Republicans manage to win elections despite the odds:
[Rove is] borrowing a page from an ancient Iranian storybook and imitating Scheherazade . . . [he] is telling Republican candidates to follow Scheherazade’s rule: When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy.
Follow me over the edge as I tell you what the Republicans’ story is, and how Democrats can one-up it.
You can argue that things are not going well for the party of Rove. Republicans are being indicted faster than we can keep up, scandals dot the landscape, their legislative agenda is a joke, and on and on. So how do they cope? They tell a story every American knows: Cowboys and Indians.
Oh, it’s different from the Tom Mix movies of yore. The Indians live overseas these days, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but they still have brown skin and they still shoot at the cowboys — that is to say, us.
The story of America from the Anglo point of view is a compelling one. From time out of mind the good Christian Americans have found the need to expand into the territory of the savage heathen Redskin, who wasn’t using it for anything important anyway. What is the adventure in Iraq but a game of cowboys and Indians writ large, where it’s our job to create civilization in the midst of chaos and make good respectable citizens out God’s lesser children?
It’s a story that every American knows by heart. And the people the Republicans want to recruit see themselves as the cowboys, as the cavalry, as the civilizers who are going to tame this brave new world.
The Democrats need to counter with their own story. And as it happens, they have the perfect story. It’s just as American as the story of the frontier — maybe more so — and it also goes straight to the origins of this country and the people who live here.
It’s a story about a government that’s out of touch with the common man. A story about big business interests who see the country as a cash cow to be milked for all it’s worth.
Our story is about a group of patriots who dared to suggest that we don’t have to subject ourselves to tyrannical rule, by big business or by a unitary monarch. It’s about people who started forging the idea of liberty, of freedom, of being able to choose one’s own rulers. About people who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor toward throwing off the shackles that had been imposed on them. About men and women who fought and died for the idea of liberty.
We are the patriots. We are the ones fighting the Tories. Remember that only 40% or so of the population of the colonies supported the cause of American independence. By all accounts more than 50% of the American population is against the war in Iraq. Over 65% don’t approve of the way the alleged President is doing his job. The numbers grow every day.
The Republicans want us to be afraid of the terrorist bogey-men. I say, we should be afraid of the ruling elite and what they can do. The Republicans want to tell you stories about cowboys and Indians. I want to tell stories about Patrick Henry and George Washington and Samuel Adams and John Paul Jones.
And Cindy Sheehan and Pete Seeger and Boston Joe and Damnit Janet and everyone else who is putting their life, their fortune, their sacred honor, and everything else they have on the line to try to wrest control of our country from the madmen and crazy women who have taken it over.
And I want you to tell those stories, too.