Occupational Therapy For Democrats: Weaving a Basket of Persuadables

aHow can we be sure that those microplastics recently discovered in human brains aren't also caused by toxic overdoses of political propaganda, supplementing  a steady diet ultra-processed food and breathing air polluted by petroleum byproducts?

Studies show that plastic brain pollution is worse now, in the recently dead, than it was in 2016 cadavers. 

But you may remember 2016 as the year when the ultra-processed Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Her loss was blamed on, among other things,  her notorious Basket of Deplorables  remarks to a group of wealthy donors at Club Cipriani in the Wall Street district of Manhattan.

And that brings me to Bill Clinton's speech on Night Three of the Democratic National Convention. The words oozed like petroleum jelly on electroshock paddles for a real jolt to the Trump-deranged throngs in the convention center.

Clinton sold a placatory mind-bend to the liberally confused. He sagely counseled the hyperactive audience with their signs and their cazy hats  that vocal liberal disdain for the hinterlands is a recipe for another disaster.  He lectured them to "meet your neighbors where they live" and to not equate Donald Trump supporters with Donald Trump himself.

You can still, of course, insult Donald Trump all you want. Bill Clinton doesn't seem to realize that if you trash Trump, you also trash his supporters, if only by proxy. They know when they're being tolerated, condescended to, and obliquely insulted. People have been indoctrinated by competing corporate media siloes to  internalize their cult leaders, making them and their trials and tribulations  a virtual part of themselves..

Clinton set the cautionary tone the whole night. After all, with Robert Kennedy dropping out and fixing to endorse Trump, the manic joy must now be tempered by caution. Even Oprah Winfrey made a surprise appearance to magnanimously urge Democrats to be nice to their Trump-supporting neighbors. You can so folksily agree without being disagreeable. 

Please, people, try to pretend to be nice to the erstwhile Deplorables at least until after November election!

Of course, no soul-searching is  ever attempted by the liberal elites, who still haven't figured out that it was the Clinton and Obama administrations, and their wealth gap-enhancing neoliberal policies and job-destroying trade deals which paved the way for Trump in the first place. It still paves the way for Trump in the second place.

This is despite the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Kamala Harris's running mate. He embodies the tweaked Democratic narrative that despite being funded and controlled by corporations and billionaires, they have suddenly developed a soft spot for Flyover Country.

Bill Clinton himself bragged about spending time in "rural areas" of New York. He evidently considers  pricey Westchester County, where he lives, to be a rural area. Or maybe he's ventured even further north. His wife Hillary actually spent a week in my own town of New Paltz n late fall of 2016 , to help herself heal after she lost to Trump. She stayed at the exclusive Mohonk Mountain house, whose employees can't afford to rent a small apartment in a town where the majority of residents are in fact, renters and not owners. 

But I digress. Suffice it to say, though, that Kamala's solution to the housing crisis doesn't involve the construction of more public housing stock. Rather, she has merely called for cutting bureaucratic red tape and pesky regulations so that real estate speculators and developers will be more incentivized to build more "affordable" housing.

Compared to Bill Clinton's hour-long schmooze, the aforementioned Tim Walz confined his own remarks to an affordable 15 minutes. He fully embraced his assigned role as Coach. We're all supposed to take the field and win one for the Gipper - actually for the right-of-center Reagan Democrats descended from the Gipper. Walz did mangle his metaphor slightly by intimating that football fields also apparently have developed trenches that we must fight within to beat Trump. Or maybe even in World War III, which the still-sitting President Biden took to another level this week with his enhanced nuclear weapons deployment package.

This is truly a made for TV stuff, nostalgically evoking memories of the 90s TV sitcom "Coach." Although filmed in Hollywood, it was set right in Walz's own hometown of Mankato, where the leading character, played by Craig T. Nelson, was the sometimes hapless mentor to his small college football team and long-suffering family and friends.

It was truly another made for TV moment as the camera repeatedly panned to  Walz's real-life family weeping openly and copiously in the audience. It was almost good enough to melt brain-plastic.