Since the latest edition of Perpetual Primary was hosted by MSNBC and the Jeff Bezos Gazette, and since the only way that cable-free households could watch it was by downloading the NBC app, and since the NBC app kept freezing up, losing audio or crashing completely on my cheap smartphone, I had to resort to the New York Times live blog to get their elite take on the festivities.
It was weird. because when the Times reporters were carping about Tulsi Gabbard's refreshingly blunt attack on the Democratic Party and thrilling over NBC-WaPo's orchestrated smear of Gabbard through the willing, shrilling mouth of Kamala Harris, this exchange had not yet appeared on my tiny screen. It was a real spoiler from the Times, who never questioned the whopper that Gabbard had spent Obama's entire second term trashing him on Fox News rather than serving in Congress. And when the exchange finally did appear on my screen a minute or two later, the Times live-blog had already moved on to inserting its own video of a Deval Patrick campaign event in order to give private equity's stalking horse equal time.
I don't know whether the Times reporters pimping for Patrick did so to avoid covering one of the few times that Bernie Sanders was allowed to speak, but it wouldn't surprise if they had. I quickly logged off the Times's Deval Patrick gush-fest and turned back to my tiny little sputtering screen.
The best part of the consumer experience for me was Amy Klobuchar's mouth moving and no sound coming out - until the part where she actually said that when she's president, nobody is getting a free car. A free car apparently is her code for guaranteed health care. And then they went to commercial break for another annoying December to Remember Lexus commercial for those willing to work hard, play by the rules and go high when "they" go low.
And that brought back so many unpleasant memories of the earlier part of my wasted day, when I'd watched hours of impeachment hearings, or what the media outlandishly calls The Smoking Gun Episode..Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the E.U., came right out and said that US military aid to puppet state Ukraine was predicated entirely upon Ukraine's president going on live TV and announcing he was digging up dirt on the Bidens and Russiagate. No matter that Trump had already boastfully admitted to this exercise in corrupt diplomacy a couple of months ago on live TV.
For some reason, NBC streamed its impeachment coverage on YouTube, graciously allowing me to watch it on live TV without having to download their horrible app. NBC also treated me to endless loops of Donald Trump bellowing "I want nothing! I want nothing! I want nothing!" as he read directly from notes saying "I want nothing! I want nothing! I want nothing!" in those large block letters so eerily reminding me the threatening letters we used to get at my newspaper from one particular person well-known to the authorities. Those letters were also big on frenzied repetitions, such as "You will die! You will die! You will die!"
Fast forward again to my less than satisfying NBC app of a debate consumer experience later in the day. Remember when you were a kid. and how much fun it was to turn off the TV sound and make up your own dialogue for the characters on the screen, or else put on "Nowhere Man" when Nixon was talking? Well, maybe you don't because you didn't and I was just this weird kid - okay, young adult - having another one of my oddball moments.
But last night when Mayor Pete's face froze right in the middle of a sneer, I imagined him saying "You'll get nothing. You'll get nothing. YOU'LL GET NOTHING! because all I care about is reaching across the aisle and getting STUFF done even if it kills you!"
And when the camera panned to Rachel Maddow and the screen got so fun-house loopy that even her wonkish outsize eyeglasses couldn't sharpen her image for me, I pretty much assumed that all her questions consisted of a noun, a verb, and Russia.
Andrea Mitchell, a/k/a Mrs. Alan "Ayn Rand" Greenspan, did not seem to get a whole lot of airtime, but I assume that there was at least one "but how you gonna pay for that?" in her repertoire.
In the spurts of actual dialogue among the ten candidates that did escape from my phone in tinny little soundbites, I heard a lot of agreement and very little argument, signalling that at least half the candidates on the stage are simply vying for vice president or cabinet positions. Absent the bullying of Tulsi Gabbard, it was an exercise in mutual back-scratching.
Elections, like everything else in Neoliberalandia, are presented to us as pure, for-profit entertainment, at the lowest possible cost to the oligarchs and at the highest possible social cost to us, the citizen-consumers.The consolidated media-political complex controls both the information and the delivery of the information. Both the information and the delivery of the information have become so distorted and so corrupted that the "free" commercialized cheap applications they offer those who are unwilling and/or unable to pay high cable prices to access a simulacrum of democracy are an epic, abject failure. The dialogue intended to spurt straight from the belly of the corporate media beast into our living rooms in one smooth stream of projectile vomitus got stuck right in their own craws last night. They effectively choked on the distorted byproducts of their own gluttony.
They got nothing, they got nothing, they got nothing from their message of "You'll get nothing because you are nothing. So vote for me!"
You might think that if the medium crashes, the messages of the politicians can't get out to the public, and then we all lose as a result.
But I beg to differ. I'll take a frozen grimace and a multitude of silently flapping gums over empty platitudes any time. Their techno-enhanced silences and freeze-ups on the debate stage spoke volumes of unintended truth. They have nothing, they offer nothing, and they know that we know that it's all a big nothing-burger.
It's long past time, anyway, that we mute their distorted volume-product and create our own democratic dialogue.
