Eliot Weinberger

The frat-boy humour magazine Charlie Hebdo is unfortunately back in the news. Six writers who were scheduled to be 'table hosts' at the annual PEN American Center gala in New York – tickets start at $1250 – have refused to attend after it was announced that the surviving staff of Charlie was to be awarded the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award at the dinner. The response to the six has been almost uniformly negative. Salman Rushdie, for one, who has turned PEN American into his little fiefdom, charmingly tweeted that they are 'pussies'. Others have even accused the writers of being apologists for terrorism.

Last January, I predicted here that Mitt Romney would lose, based partially on the Curse of the E-Trochee: American presidential candidates whose last name is two syllables ending with a long e sound have always failed; they just can’t be taken seriously. It may seem ridiculous but, as Novalis said, 'Language is Delphi.' Closer to realpolitik, Mitt failed the Safety and Sincerity tests. Voters like to feel safe, to be assured that things will generally be all right, that there will be no bad surprises. I’ve always believed that Obama won in 2008 thanks to Sarah Palin. McCain – though he’s still with us – looked old and tired, and the possibility that the dim Northern Light might suddenly illuminate the Oval Office was scarier than a black man with a funny name. He at least seemed level-headed and intelligent.

Obama and Romney are each spending about a billion dollars to get elected – four times what Bush and Gore spent in 2000. When one adds the unregulated PACs (political action committees) and Congressional and gubernatorial races, the cost of this year’s election is around $6 billion. The reason, of course, is television advertising. As the election draws near, some 80,000 political advertisements are running every day on American televisions. The entire ecosystem of lobbyists and politicians dependent on donations from corporate and other interests is almost entirely due to television. Eliminate the ads, which are forbidden in many countries, and American politics would change overnight. The astonishing thing is the uselessness of this potlatch.

Mitt knows what it takes. At the second presidential debate, he said: ‘I know what it takes to get this economy going.’ ‘I know what it takes to create good jobs again.’ ‘I know what it takes to make sure that you have the kind of opportunity you deserve.’ ‘I know what it takes to bring them back.’ [jobs] ‘I know what it takes to balance budgets.’ ‘I know what it takes to make an economy work.’ ‘I know what it takes to get this to happen.’ Mitt knows what it takes, but he isn’t sharing. Once he gets elected, he’ll tell us, he says, how he’s going to cut taxes by $5 trillion, add $2 trillion to the military budget, and balance the budget while still having some sort of federal government, besides the Pentagon, left to run. He’ll tell us how he’s going to create 12 million jobs, even though he believes, as he said at the debate: ‘Government does not create jobs. Government does not create jobs.’ (A pause for fact-checking, a tedious necessity throughout the Tales of Mitt.

American political campaigns rely on what insiders call the ‘narrative’, though, like a Hollywood sales pitch, it’s a story that’s never more than a sentence long. One of the problems the Republicans have had this year is that they have three contradictory narratives for Obama. There is Obama in the dashiki: the Kenyan Muslim Socialist who ‘hates America’ (as Rush Limbaugh often says) and wants to turn the country into some sort of jihadi North Korea. There is Obama in the hoodie: the ruthless, corrupt gangsta, ‘Chicago-style sleaze’ (as John McCain said recently). And then there is the barefoot Obama, shirtless in ill-fitting overalls: an amiable but bumbling clown, ‘lazy’ and ‘not that bright’ (as Romney’s spokesman John Sununu said after the debate) who’s in over his head trying to run a government. Unfortunately for the Republicans, the images of Obama as simultaneously the blackface Scarface, Chairman Mao and Stepin Fetchit tend both to cancel each other out and bear no resemblance to the articulate, unflappable, professorial type and his seemingly perfect all-American, however unwhite, family.