The Stupid Campaign Season Distraction
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
Here’s one of the funnier, and more on-point, comics that Tom Tomorrow has done lately:
Biff and Wanda are anchors on Action McNews Network.
Tonight we’ll be discussing the latest stupid campaign season distraction that we in the media keep talking about!
Why is the stupid distraction getting so much attention, rather than all the substantive issues we aren’t talking about?
Some have suggested that we in the mdia may actually bear some responsibility for the excessive attention being paid to the stupid distraction–but this is, of course, absurd!
Indeed it is, Wanda!
After all, the media did not create the stupid distraction. We’ve simply reported the facts–and provided endless hours of analysis and commentary!
That’s true, Biff! We’re not responsible for the perceived importance of the stupid distraction–
–But iff the stupid distraction is perceived as important, we have no choice but to discuss it further!
The entire process is completely out of our control! We have nothing to do with any of it!
Why–I can’t even remember how I got to the studio this morning! It’s as if my body simply brought me here of its own volition!
Why do my lips keep flapping and making these noises?
Please stop us–before we waste any more time on the stupid distraction–
—which our roundtable of experts will examine in depth in just one moment!
And: is the stupid distraction nothing more than a stupid distraction? We’ll see what random people on the street think!
All that and more about the you-know-what… after these messages.
The only thing to add is to complete the thought — to remember that the campaign season itself is the stupid campaign season distraction
— that the empty and idiotic rituals of party politics, the Presidential election, and electoral politics as a whole are nothing more and nothing less than a colossal and largely successful effort to eradicate serious political discourse from the culture, for months at a stretch, and to replace it with such a shoddy substitute as the discussion
of shamelessly dishonest attack ads, shamelessly vacuous positive ads, the reduction of all political debate to a pair of politicos’ names joined with a forward slash, the rowdy team loyalties of the Reds against the Blues, the endless series of professional blowhards gassing about the electorate and picking over popularity polls, a series of stump speeches and a tiny handful of carefully stage-managed two-person debates between anointed would-be oligarchs. And that this idiotic distraction is the sole means by which it is determined who will wield supreme Executive power over 300,000,000 people — which in these days, according to the popular theory of the mandate,
is unaccountable, unchecked, and nearly absolute over all matters regulatory, military, and indeed also legislative — for the next several years of our lives. A power which the last 8 years of continuous, unchecked, unpunished, lies, manipulation, overtly tyrannical power-grabs, and catastrophic failures, have empirically demonstrated can apparently only be checked or ended by the purely astronomical phenomenon of four revolutions about the sun. That system itself, and all the works that flow from it, richly deserves discussion, debate, and challenge. But it will never be brought under scrutiny as long as it holds sway, because the function of the system itself is to destroy serious politics, to replace it with the distraction of politicians, their personality, their power, and their parties.
Yet this colossal distraction, and all the power that attaches to and derives from the absurd spectacle, would disappear in a moment if enough of us just ignored the damn thing, if enough of us refuse to take their orders, treat the absurd spectacle of their idiotic rituals with the contemptuous silence that it so richly deserves, and create our own combinations in spite of whatever they may say.
Boycott the Matrix. It’s time to wake up.
Follow
Coincidentally, I was just listening to some sort of pundit on NPR this morning (didn’t catch his name) bemoaning all the stupid distractions from, you know, the “substance” of the campaign season, because there really are very substantive differences between Obama and McCain.
HA!