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About 20 minutes after George Bush announced that his running mate would be J. Danforth Quayle, and the details of the Indiana senator's background began to appear, I was certain that Bush had just figured out how to lose the election.
But I was wrong. The Republican ticket is doing well in the polls as the Quayle uproar has subsided. Mystified by this turnabout, I called my favorite inside source: Ananias Ziegler, the press secretary for the Committee that Really Runs America.
I wanted to know what happened to that great surge of anti-Quayle sentiment last summer.
A lot of people were angry at the time,
Ziegler
conceded. You had an image of this pampered rich kid
with meager talent, but great connections. He supported the
war in Vietnam, but pulled strings to stay near home in the
National Guard, where he wouldn't get shot at. His own
father said he majored in 'booze and broads' in college,
and he had only a C average -- but he still gets into law
school. And so forth.
So how did Ziegler and the committee defuse the controversy?
It wasn't spin control. We're good, but not that
good,
Ziegler explained. Truth be told, we didn't
need to do anything. The anger was based on resentment, and
the resentment was bound to fade, for the same reason that
there will never be a revolution in America.
How's that?
It's complicated. Okay, look at Dan Quayle. He's no
Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson. He's not some smart,
ambitious guy clawing his way up from poverty. He has a
charming smile and he's a tolerable golfer. Let's put it
this way -- if some black kid from the wrong side of the
tracks had been born with Dan Quayle's exact abilities,
that kid would not have grown up to be anywhere near a
heartbeat from the presidency.
So why aren't people still upset about the rise of the least deserving mediocrity since Incitatus? Where did the anger go?
Let me finish. There are two ways to respond that
kind of inequity. In many societies, a large group of
people would unite, and that group would struggle to
eliminate the inequities that allow the lackluster Quayles
to shine while more talented people languish in obscurity
and poverty. In short, you'd have a revolution in the
making, bent on toppling an unjust system.
But not in America.
No, of course not. That's the peculiar genius of the
American way. You see, in this country, it's a lot easier
to find a way to benefit from the inequities than it is to
change the whole system.
Explain that.
Do you want a society that is perfectly fair so much
that you are willing to devote your life to fighting for
such a society? Is it worth the risks of revolution --
draconian repression if you fail, and if you should win,
the probable emergence of some terrible despotism, even
more unjust?
That's a chance few people want to take. America is
set up so that it is easier, much easier, to find some scam
or hustle that gives you a bit of an advantage. Once you
find your little edge, you don't care that a few people
have bigger edges, or worry that a lot of people don't have
any edge at all.
Nobody with a lick of common sense says
How can we
put an end to this undeserved privilege?
Instead, we all
think How can I get some money and connections, so that I
can enjoy the best that America has to offer?
That's why
there will never a be a revolution in America. And that's
why nobody's upset about Dan Quayle's shabby and shadowy
résumé. The vast majority of Americans would rather find a
way to benefit from injustice than struggle to put an end
to injustice. And I bet you're one of them.
I wouldn't admit it to him, of course, but he was right. For one thing, if we got rid of injustice and privilege, what would I have to write about?
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