Pseudo Obituary

Richard "Dick" Cheney 1940-2011
Founder of the Corporate/Government Hybrid Structure.

If anyone in U.S. politics died fifty years too late it was Dick Cheney. He lived his last years in redoubt at his ranch in Wyoming. More noteworthy than his dislocation from national politics was his lack of a pulse due to the continuous pressure of a heart assist device. Mr. Cheney died as an apt metaphor for his life in the corpora-political world he fostered - operating pulseless from a remote location.

He received his political science education in the early and mid 60's, when Eisenhower's warnings of a military industrial complex subsuming healthy government were increasingly disregarded. Mr. Cheney saw the depth and width of public treasure flowing to that complex through the white house and surfed upon it to his first job - aid to Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon. Mr. Cheney functioned exquisitely as a defense contractor liaison to the white house under both presidents Nixon and Ford, for as long as he could sustain the Vietnam conflict. In his seven years there he dug an information hole so deep that he crapped the Vietnam post conflict analysis ("Tiger Team Report") into the void upon departure and echoes of it hitting bottom were not heard until he finished six terms in the House of Representatives. Without an obvious or large scale military conflict for focus Mr. Cheney became the progenitor of a new western energy politics that saw no destructive edict, tenet nor philosophy not worthy of full government subsidy. This stretch in the federal legislature completed his maturity in the corporate dark arts.

Reminiscent of his jump from political science PhD student to white house insider, Cheney became CEO and chairman of energy market manipulation giant Halliburton. This made him George H.W. Bush's choice for secretary of defense, during which time he developed his greatest facility for, and impunity to, government/ corporate double agency. He transferred so much public treasure to private enterprise, through non-competitive sealed bid contracts and waivers of taxes and fees, that when the next competitive republican election came around in 2000 he was the logical backstop to candidate George W. Bush.

As vice presidential candidate Mr. Cheney's sheer political mass countered electoral gravity and allowed Supreme Court appointment of him and Mr. Bush as co-chief executives of the United States of America. He was rewarded with free reign to continue the same deceptions as his previous two unelected tenures in executive power. Mr. Cheney executed in a hunkered down, off the reservation, new world political mode akin to the Colonel Kurtz character in Apocalypse Now. The metaphorical information pit was transformed into a literal walk-in safe and no business conducted in the Vice-President's office was public. The materials and matters that passed through the safe and office will never be known, thus the preposterous safe - not without irony, became a metaphor for the redefining and subversive execution of his public obligations; perfectly analogous to Marlon Brando's portrayal of Col. Kurtz. His most salient public statement during the grinding collapse of the republic he was supposed to be protecting was telling Representative Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself, after a contentious visit to the chamber - a government entity that he was truly, rather than by political wrenching, the president of. The net result of this third tenure was that so much more public revenue was transferred to the private banking, energy and defense sectors that the U.S. economy collapsed in concert with the end of his second term.

Mr. Cheney's function as public to private money funnel was finally exhausted. His corporate patron, Halliburton, had relocated to the United Arab Emirates in advance of the financial collapse and could no longer bear the liability of his name on their letter head. He punctuated his retreat to rural Wyoming with an autobiography that obtusely disregarded his own obtuse disregard for his public obligations. The tome was a deathbed rationalization of his deference to the corporate construct as generally beneficial. The public received it as yet another "GO fuck yourself!" from the most successfully subversive politician in U.S. history.

Even the secret service agents that preserved his pulseless body so far beyond its deserved span knew the detriment he brought to millions. Joblessness, reduced public and private pensions, and the structural financial damage to the U.S. will always remind people of democratic philosophy that Dick Cheney fucked them with abject capitalism; and assassinated the compatible democratic capitalism that came before him.
Jason Pecci