Not since 2000 have I been so loath to read, listen or watch the corporate media – the weapon of assassination not just of Howard Dean but also of the message he embodies. An insurgent populist who did an end run around the media that guard and hold hostage the popular consciousness, he was to be stopped. Anyone who speaks boldly with intelligence and vision and who can galvanize a large section of the population will be destroyed. Is it conspiratorial or an unconscious reflex? To be debated. But the fact is the distance between Palm Sunday and the crucifixion is a handful of days. The crowd is now yelling - Give us Barrabas. Kerry is both Barrabas - and Judas.

The message the media is sending to America and to any prospective future candidates is that they are to say nothing important – stand for nothing important. The more homogenized, the more passable. The botox for Kerry is not just cosmetic – it speaks volumes. The sash on Ms. Heinz-Kerry also speaks – it says royalty. The cool detached and queenly benevolent deference to the people is a favor more than a civic duty or passion. Kerry has appropriated and sanitized much of Dean’s original message. He has reduced it to something that sounds like a battle cry but is really an echo.

Kerry, as a congressman, spoke at my adult father’s graduation from college in the Berkshires. I thought then he had nothing to say – and he said it – and not much has changed. He voted for the war out of fear and calculation and those motivations are as deeply entrenched as his facial lines used to be. Nothing wrong with facial lines – sometimes they signal character. It’s interesting that someone in his makeover camp considers them liabilities.

The parental pantheons of our culture are not interested in what we think we want but in telling us what we ought to want. The ostensible free elections are more like a herding process. Men on horseback with whistles, yelps and ropes ride the herd in the direction that ultimately, as we all know, ends in confinement and sometimes slaughter.

From the beginning as Dean became a phenomenon of popular support the only questions that headlines seemed to ask were, who is the anti-Dean? – who can stop Dean? - the implication being that something is wrong with this groundswell and who will rescue us from it. Where are those questions now? Now it’s band-of-brothers Kerry – Viet Nam – “we knew how to fight for our country.” Is that what most vets thought they were doing in Viet Nam? Over the years most Viet Nam vets I spoke with thought an appropriated government that did not represent the higher aspirations of the country and its people criminally exploited them.

So it goes – again – nothing will be said – career politician advances career – intones a few clichés – abdicates responsibility – and makes a nice picture here and there – and for what? The national treasury will shift into someone else’s pockets if the Democratic ticket, as it is being sold now, gets in the White House. The fact that Dean has been so pilloried supports the notion that he probably would do what he says he will do. In other words he is considered by most of the corporate media to be genuine and that alone makes him vulnerable, undesirable and a candidate for the cross.

The brilliant pathetic irony of it all is the fact he’s a candidate for the cross makes him the right candidate for president.

On the outside chance that the media simply wants good copy and opera I urge Howard Dean to give them that. Make the case – go after the frontrunner who really is more of a front than a runner. To be cunning will not destroy the message or the mission. It could be that corporate media may simply want reality programming. Give it to them Howard – even as the crowds yell Give us Barrabas.

Bill C Davis is a playwright.

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