As much as I've tried to ignore the hype, it has become near- impossible to avoid the media-manufactured reality that Decision '24 is now officially underway. It's hard, because the first Republican primary debate tonight is being marketed as a blockbuster double bill. Or more accurately, it's a teaser for the much more thrilling show of Donald Trump and his racket getting booked on yet more criminal charges. Seeing as how Trump is skipping the debate, his fans will likely also skip the debate in favor of a third big draw - the rumored Tucker Carlson interview. The target audience for the actual debate itself are the Democrats, who are reported to be getting the popcorn and the booze ready in anticipation of just how boring and out of touch Ron DeSantis will be, and how many zingers Chris Christie will manage to lob, and how many of the candidates will visibly squirm when asked if they will sign a loyalty oath to support the ultimate victor (who, by popular polling and media acclaim is said to be the absent Donald Trump.) The mainstream media outlets are rife with articles about all the complicated different ways that your captive eyeballs can glue themselves to the Fox show - not to mention all the takeaways to be had from doing your civic duty of watching it, and then listening to rival cable channels analyzing it to death into the wee, bleak hours of Thursday morning and beyond.
The more I think about it, the more I doubt that the general election will, in fact, be a contest between Trump and Joe Biden. Trump looks more bloated and pasty by the day. He is spending all his political contributions on his own legal defense. His only campaign theme is martyrdom. The phony appeal to the working stiff is running a sloppy second.
And between the Hunter mess and his own visibly deteriorating mental and physical state, Joe Biden will be lucky to outlast even his first term in office. The establishment media, which had breathlessly reported on his visit to Maui, went into radio silence mode in the wake of the actual visit. If you wanted to find out that Biden actually compared hundreds of people losing their lives to the worst United States fire in more than a century to a minor kitchen fire decades ago in his Delaware home, when -no joke - he nearly lost his wife, his cat, and his vintage Corvette, then you had to read about it in the New York Post or The Daily Mail. The New York Times abruptly stopped its own Biden-Maui coverage after a last photo of the president waving from Air Force One en route to Hawaii. Meanwhile, they are oh so subtly boosting the hapless Kamala Harris and keeping Gavin Newsom on 24-hour call. Little by little, they seem to be giving up on their Philip K. Dick simulacrum of a president. He's winding down, creaking to a halt, and painfully so. It's a case of political elder abuse if there ever was one. Dianne Feinstein is still around, in part because she serves to make Biden seem spry.
As a matter of fact, the Times coverage of the Maui catastrophe already had been taking second place to the Trump indictment, and which unknown GOP politician had just made the donation/polling cut for the debate. One of them, I forget his name, apparently got hurt in a basketball game and may or may not appear. This news is interspersed with breaking news accounts of which Trump racketeer has had his or her mug shot taken in Georgia.
To the extent that the corporate media are covering such news as that food insecurity in the richest country on earth has increased for the fifth straight month, or squeamishly euphemizing the mass expulsion of millions of Medicaid recipients from their health care as "the Great Unraveling" rather than eugenics on steroids, or is downplaying the surge of still more coronavirus strains in an increasingly strained denial that many more people are getting sick, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to learn about these things even if you're a stalwart doom-scroller of approved news sites. Read the comments section of any Times article trying to convince you that catching Covid, and catching it often, is actually good for your immune system. The definition of "mild" has been upgraded to anything that doesn't kill you within a week. And even then, you will be said to have died "with" Covid, not of it. New public health emergencies will be declared over your dead bodies, if not theirs.
It's all Trump all the time if your reading is restricted to consolidated Democratic Party-aligned media. It's all Biden scandal all the time if you're more inclined toward the right-leaning outlets. Personally, I always sample everything out there.
Everything is centered on all this divisiveness that has supposedly reached such new epidemic proportions. The sub-headline in an otherwise good Times article on the health and financial effects of the Palestine, Ohio train disaster is that residents have allegedly returned to a "newly divided community." The contrived dichotomy of partisan politics must always take precedence over human solidarity, which is very threatening to the powers-that-be.
If you consider yourself a lefty and you take too much issue with the Democrats, you're either a closet Trump supporter yourself or you are propelling others into a Trumpian orbit of doom. You could even be a Putin plant if you're anti-war. You can preface your Biden or anti-military critiques with all the Trump disclaimers you want, and it still won't matter. If you raise your voice and persist on harping on Medicare For All, then all you will succeed in doing is ushering in a reprise of fascist rule under Donald Trump or one of his imitators. Think, for example, of Mike Pompeo, or some other more intelligent version of Trump. Or don't even take the trouble to think, because Victoria Nuland, the newly appointed acting undersecretary of state under Biden was also a protegee of Dick Cheney.
Because of course, we already live under fascism in this country. Bertram Gross wrote about it a long time ago in his book "Friendly Fascism." So did Sheldon Wolin with his critique of "inverted totalitarianism." It's also known as corporatism, or rule by predatory capitalists. Its appeals to patriotism and nationalism may vary in intensity depending on the party in power, but it transcends all the usual geographical boundaries, which are artificially put in place by the same corporatists in every single one of their bloody climate-destroying wars for endless profit.
Getting you to fight with your neighbors and even with your family members over allegiance to one of the two US-based corporations known as legacy political parties is exactly what they want. It's their weapon on of mass distraction, so you won't focus over-much on your lack of medical care, a livable income, secure housing or a lifetime of education debt. Keeping your focus off their relentless exploitation of humanity is of the utmost importance to them. Heaven forfend that you would expend whatever physical or mental energy ou still have in organizing a labor or rent strike, or a patient-led occupation of a private equity-owned clinic or hospital.
Howard Zinn had it right when he said it's not who's sitting in the White House (or spieling on a Fox News "debate" stage) that should concern us, but who is out there marching or sitting in the streets or any number of semi-public spaces.
