DATELINE–South California

South to the Future sat at the feet of Bob Dole last night, basking in the tubescent glow of the twinkling pixels that constitute a man whose body was broken for you.

Even the book upon which the movie that is the 1996 Republican nominee is based must address this larger than life reenactment in the third person.

We gasp in our living room as the camera alights on Robert Dole’s shoulder to deliver us the view that brings tears to the eyes of the plausibly alive televised audience. We see a man not to be contained in a single screen. We see a man standing taller than a figure made of dross flesh can ever draw himself up to be. Through the eyes of a fly we watch him deliver the speech of a lifetime. And from behind that Hollywood square of a hundred screens, the transubstantiation is completed, and a Republican president is raised again from the dead.

Bob Dole has been born and born again. A constant mantra of the Dole origin myth, springing forth in that small town on the Kansas prairie, cannot divert our attention from other births, other reconstructive surgeries, other television gala productions.

Bob Dole has crossed over to another shore, to the other side of the screen. There, a secret government, operating as the self-appointed guardian of technology, has rebuilt him–stronger, faster, better than he was before.

But where is democracy? Surely it does not lie in a members-only bohemian grove on the distant shore across the Republican river of forgetfulness.

Where is freedom? Do not tell us that it is at this very moment crossing this river on the prickly back of a double-talking reptile who gives his alias as the “free” market economy.

Who can be citizens? We fear they will only number those willing to swim in the amnesia-inducing waters. We see those allowed to call themselves citizens exchanging the legacies of their own mothers for read only memories of Susan Molinari’s granddad and Colin Powell’s papa.

We found the 1996 Republican National Convention a religious experience. A Triumph of the Will worthy of following in the footsteps of our dearly departed Olympia.

But Bob Dole has not abandoned us, as Kerri Strum, Michael Johnson and Bela Karoly have. Bob Dole lingers in the ether that runs through our veins. When we eat his body and drink his blood, we become both rulers and ruled. We are absolved of the duties and sins of exercising our remaining rights and responsibilities. We too can talk about ourselves in the third person. And we too can call ourselves Bob Dole.

And in our words as Bob Dole, of Bob Dole and for Bob Dole, we will fall asleep imagining…

as my voice echoes across darkness and desert …
as it is heard over car radios on coastal roads …
and as it travels above farmland and suburb,
deep into the heart of cities that, from space,
look tonight like strings of sparkling diamonds,
I can tell you that I know whose moment this is:
It is yours.