When All Else Fails, Shame the Voters

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is blaming the unappreciative audience for their tepid response to the latest episode of the House's January Sixth Extravaganza. Given the fawning media reviews of her own bravura performance, the low ratings are such a downer, especially after all the trouble that she went to in keeping it entertaining. She'd even arranged for her videographer daughter to be on-set to film her up close and personal, vowing to punch Donald Trump in the face and then "go to jail" for doing so. If we couldn't even share her outrage over the "poo on the floors" of the sacred Capitol, or think about the custodians who had to clean the mess up, then there must be something horribly wrong with us.

So to remind us of what we missed, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell lackadaisically wound up her corporate game-arm and pitched her softball to Pelosi last week:

  In one new poll, again, 39 percent of voters say that they would vote for an election denier – and this included some Democrats and independents – if they liked their stance on other issues. How do you explain that?

Pelosi: I don't – can't explain it.  I think it's a tragedy for our country that people don't value the vision that our Founders had about a democracy, what our men and women in uniform fight for, about freedom and our democracy, here and other places in the world and, again, what that means to our children.  We have to give them – many children born now will live into the next century.  We have to make sure they have a planet that is safe, that – a democracy that is strong and values that are respected and agreed upon.  That's not what – the path that the Republicans are on.

Pelosi did depart from her voter-shaming exercise at least long enough to admit that her own particular version of "democracy" is strictly confined to people voting on Election Day, and that their votes then be accurately counted. Whether or not they will eventually count in the halls of poweris left studiously unmentioned. The tragedy for Pelosi is that people who've had it drummed into them for most of their lives that "there is no alternative," and that they have no real power, still cannot just pull themselves out of their doldrums long enough to cast a ballot for someone else to "represent" them. For pre-selected politicians to win and to keep power, voters must persist in believing that they can't manage either their own lives or the problems of society as a whole. They need some sort of savior or expert or Mother Superior to do it for them.

The tragedy for Nancy Pelosi is that too many people are getting too wise to the con to even bother participating in the holy sacrament of voting booth communion. Or else they're just flat-out heretics, opting for devil-worshiping the corpus of Donald Trump and his imitators.

After all, our assigned role as US citizens is to be consumers in the marketplace and attendees at the spectacle - not activists in direct politics or actors in improvisational, experimental theater. 

 It has been drummed into us by a consolidated media that only a select category of people are fit to act and to govern.  Since "representative democracy" has devolved into professionalized politics coupled with public apathy, the real tragedy is that Nancy Pelosi thinks that the same old drugs and cattle prods will continue to hook and lull and scare people, getting them alternately high on proxy wars and anesthetized by the Broadway version of Hamilton and scared witless by Trump. 

She is essentially blaming the oppressed and exploited and disheartened for their own inability to thrill to the spectacle, whether it be of the high priests and priestesses huddling behind their poop-spattered walls, or soldiers and civilians spattered by the blood of the US Imperium's perpetual global wars for "freedom."  

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders reprised his own role as relief pitcher for the Dems, appearing on CNN to warn that young people and working class people won't turn out to vote unless the party starts concentrating on economic issues to supplement their promise to "fight for" abortion rights:

I think what the Democrats have got to say is we are going to stand with working people, we’re prepared to take on the drug companies, we’re prepared to take on the insurance companies and create an economy that works for all of us.

 Well, as long as they "stand with" their constituents and "prepare to" devise an appealing agenda with just a few short weeks to go before the curtain rises on Election Spectacular '22, it seems like it's a little late to be learning new lines, let alone rewriting the whole plot. And these are the alleged professionals with the experience that you, supposedly, so sorely lack.