Eric Cantor and Dadaism

The ‘historical’ loss of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been mourned by the media en masse as the death knell of many ‘progressive’ hopes and dreams, from immigration reform to greater financial oversight of discriminatory bank lending practices.  Stories carrying headlines announcing reasons why we should be afraid of this electoral upset abound, and certainly not without reason - after all, being afraid of the Right is the first instinct of most center-Leftists.

The ‘free market’ mantra of Brat’s campaign platform that has been favored as the reason for his catapulting into the electoral race may have played a role.  His main criticism of Cantor was his irresponsible bailout of the big banks.  But how might a militant communist view this situation?   Our skeptical stance toward representative ‘democracy’ and parliamentarism to produce lasting reform might lead us to target not Cantor’s loss as the problem at all.  Maybe, instead, we would see the problem in the reality that a system of ‘democracy’ can undo so drastically so much potential progressive reform with the loss of one election by one House Majority Leader.

You can fill libraries with the scholarly research on how the support by left-wing parties for respecting their national constitutions and the electoral votes of their parliamentary system has led to the clearing of the space for a power vacuum that racist, xenophobic, jingoistic fascists scramble to fill.

But fuck all of that for now, and let's shift over to the potential humor in this tragedy-as-farce political drama.

I have an idea - a radical idea - for creating an 'event' out of this event, and not investigating the 'causes' or the historical determinations of what happened (I could, but let's leave that to 'academics').

In breaking this situation apart, by situating ourselves in this site of an irruption, perhaps we can in our own small way understand the discourses - and their performative enactment by actual people - that constructed it.  And in our own small way, we would ruthlessly interrogate them.  Perhaps I am getting your hopes up, so let me just cut to the chase.

People all over the country are just dying to share their opinion on this GOP debacle and what it means for the country.  So why not call them up on the phone - in key geographical locations - and ask them to complete a "short survey questionaire for independent polling purposes"?  The questions will be plausible, but with just the right amount of discomforting irony to elicit reactions, affects, and statements that highlight the meaningless absurdity of this, the uselessness of this political process, and the repressed 'absence' behind what is said and how it is said.  In other words, what isn't said, which is important.  I am willing to do this and enlist others to do the same.

Share your thoughts and suggestions - what questions should be asked?  how should i pose them? - and await a possible realization of this in the near future. 

And let's be honest about this vision:  I want to make prank calls to people.  Guerilla prank calls.  Sure, let's settle on that.