General Discussion

flamingdem

(39,313 posts) Thu Oct 17, 2013, 05:29 PM Oct 2013

Cruz's Castro Complex (With apologies to Fidel)

http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/hill-cruz-castro-complex

"Ted Cruz es un pendejo!"

Cubans who happened to catch Ted Cruz’s fantasy filibuster last month (not that they had any way to do so, mind you) would have instantly recognized the long-winded, histrionic junior senator from Texas as one of their own. After five decades marinating in Fidel Castro’s day-long polemical speeches, televised in total and reprinted verbatim by fawning state-run media, Cubans accept that political leaders traffic in prolix demagoguery and that only loyal sycophants take their rambling ranting seriously.

So describe Ted Cruz to a Cuban, and you might provoke a sly smile of familiarity. You see, Cruz suffers from a peculiarly Cuban-American disorder: the Castro Complex. It is the disorder in which a professed hatred of Castro belies a perversely flattering fixation on Castro’s political genius, and in Cruz’s case, a notable imitation of Castro’s flamboyant governance gimmicks.

Of course, the official version of Cruz’s oft-repeated biography presents him as the anti-Castro: born of a Cuban father who fled the Cuban Revolution, disgusted by Fidel Castro’s communism, Cruz grew up in a staunchly conservative, prayer-filled Texas home. Except that, it turns out, before Cruz’s father was against Castro, he was for him (kind of like the way before Republicans were against a private, individual health insurance mandate, they were for it). Never mind the 180-degree shift on the Cuban Revolution; it does not trouble the Cruz family.

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But Cruz doth protest too much. In reality, Ted Cruz is less a self-proclaimed anti-Castro than he is a loud, expensive copy of the original he has styled himself against.

Consider this: if you strip away any reference to Castro, Cuba, or communism from the content of the Cruz padre and hijo speeches and public statements, you are left with rhetoric that still resonates with Castro, Cuba, and communism. Ignore where they position themselves politically (somewhere in Boston Harbor, circa 1773) and pay attention to how they deliver their message: by using specious claims, whipped up to hyperbolic frenzy in gleeful corruption of widely accepted facts, and by demonizing their opponents as traitors to the American Revolution. In so doing they construct an enemy (an artificial one to be sure) whose continued invocation galvanizes their followers and solidifies their identity. It’s nearly an exact copy of Fidel’s best work.