“It’ll take a nation of fools to hold us back.”
A climate conducive to the oversatursation of bulging politicians. Every campaign stop from villages in the Catskills to Seattle is covered with the same grandiosity and fever a stop in Washington, D.C. gets. They’re all televised live on the cable news giants. There are no small cable news outlets and won’t be with ol’ Rupert and Teddy Turner scoring the game. Further proof politics has lost its sport.
Speeches can no longer be immortalized by writers, such as Hunter S. Thompson did with then presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter’s Law Day speech in 1974. Carter was only speaking to the public – Thompson being the lone reporter in the crowd that afternoon. The speech was written about by Thompson in an issue of Rolling Stone, which arguably turned a young public onto Carter thus changing the tide of the election, but ultimately the face of American politics.
Today, candidates’ deep words are showcased between commercial for SUV hybrids and home pregnancy tests. Today, scores of emboldened bloggers broadcast their view of each candidate’s words, didactically relaying the facts, “facts,” fictions, “fictions” … spewing fire and brimstone. The only difference in the frenzy between ‘em and the Reverend Billy Graham is not interspersing every third sentence with glorification due/undue to the one Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and/or God himself (God is a man, so the Christians say and if they say so, then…). Making the tail wag.
But even writing this is screaming in space. Everyone’s drunk on the gratificazione immediate of what is simulcast or printed as (the) news. People’ve become deep junkies for this. There’s no convincing them of no more television/newspapers/magazines but most importantly INTERNET. See, some of these folks preach about how they do not have a television and/or cable yet spend more minutes online than the average person – which is to say the time equals those minutes they aren’t sitting in front of the TV so they’re both equal via alternate parities.
They’ve both become so diluted politics has lost its edge/importance/ relativity and more people vote for American’t Idol than a presidential election. The round the clock coverage permits even the most simple person in American society – the redneck – to stay current alongside the Caucasian CEO fellow on the latest trends and words of their candidate.
The politicians are not men – each is the consummate trained actor. Each is quite aware he or she will constantly be on camera or caught on mic, so they have precocious handlers whose sole purpose it is to be pre-occupied with their employer’s ever lasting Gobstopper image. The candidate’s vast knowledge is sold as a gimmick, a selling point for the product…kind of like a freshness guarantee with a fast food hamburger. The handler’s savviness is synonymous with sliminess. Men like Kennedy and Nixon never had this gig figured out as skillfully as the ace thespians Barack Obama and John McCain do, and they did not have to back then.
The world has become one where highbrow individuals tend to follow the gossip of politics because it appears more real/genuine/relative than of movie stars’ – but they are and have become molded into one in the same. Politics have become a viral circus at the hands/words of the media and bloggers who break the politicians down into as interesting figures as they do with Lindsey Lohan. (Just what were her and Sam Ronson up to this past weekend anyways?) A cartoon army of politicians have decided the day, and the people have given them the permission.
Sometimes the best thing about a bar is the water fountain.
--dan
