"You could take the five major news networks and filter Jesus
Christ, Buddha, Hitler, Stalin, Attila, Gandhi, and Lawrence Welk
through them, and eventually you wouldn't be able to tell the difference
among them. They'd all come across in the same way. That, in fact, is
the purpose of television." (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
I
have nothing against hope, but the brand of naïve hope that surfaces
during every presidential election season is truly ridiculous.
Candidate after candidate lies through his teeth, and the people buy in.
Now
some are saying The Donald is running to form a third party and thus
hand the election to Hillary. Whereas the preferred alternative would
be what? Prince Jeb? There's a difference between Hillary and Jeb?
Who's kidding who?
Or they say The Donald is running to provide a
safety valve, so the American people can blow off steam, but ultimately
wind up with nothing to show for it.
If that were true, so what? Public despondency will set in? What grotesque political swamp-soup are we wading in now?
I approach this from a different angle.
Trump
is unpredictable. He's the only unpredictable presidential candidate
in recent memory. That's a major plus, because the press can't do
anything with him. They attack him on point A, and he responds with his
own attack, or he replies with a non-sequitur, or he just changes the
subject because he's bored with the reporters.
He's mentioning taboo subjects. Bring back tariffs on US imports. Get rid of inner city gangs.
He
says something culturally and politically incorrect, and the press
jackals go after him with flashing teeth and claws, fully expecting a
take-down, demanding a grovel---and he shrugs---and his approval ratings
go
up.
Putting the press into the wall---this alone is a feat worth celebrating. Reporters want Trump to be
one defined thing they can identify, and then they want to assault
that...but he keeps shifting ground and juking and putting on new moves and faces. He drives them crazy.
And the crowds at his speeches are building. Maybe he'll fill a football stadium one of these days.
What
brings the people out? They sense he hasn't got a script. They love
that. They think he's a different breed from Politician 1-A Normal.
They love that, too.
The press hates that.
Right now,
The Donald is all throwaway lines---and that's good. If he resorts to
analysis, the press will bring on an army of experts to refute him "on
the facts."
Megyn Kelly thought she'd make a bigger name for
herself by trumping the Trump, and instead helped power his new
numbers-busting popularity. Another defeat for the press.
When
it comes to election campaigns, you have to understand that the job of
the media is to grind down every candidate to a small series of
meaningless truisms.
The press wants empty generalities. They
want android candidates in the debates. They want to make a possible
something into nothing.
This is a form of intended political correctness that goes largely unnoticed.
Trump
has broken the mold. Therefore, he must pay. But...it's not working.
Not so far. Something in the machinery has gone wrong.
Trump
has triggered a response in an audience who feels they've been bottled
up and straitjacketed for far too long. They've been seething and
straining. They can't say this, they can't say that. And they can't
look to presidents for solutions. Presidents spout rhetorical bullshit.
And then a man shows up who seems to feel the same way they do and isn't afraid to say so.
The
press doesn't know what to do. Every line they feed Trump, in an
effort to slam him, becomes the occasion for one of his comebacks that
carries the day.
Trump doesn't use filler. He improvises. He doesn't play fast and loose behind the scenes; he does it right out in the open.
Worst
of all, the media, for decades, built up the image of Trump. He was
great copy. His hair, his marriages, his business deals, his scandals,
his greedy eagerness for self-promotion.
Now here he is, and he can't be cast off like an old suit. He's front and center.
Presidential campaigns ARE the press.
That's the way it's been for decades. Campaigns are media events
manufactured out of slime you'd sue the city for if it bubbled up in
your back yard.
The press takes the slime and lies and packages
them into neat little products and puts them in front of television
viewers. The press runs the campaigns and wins every election.
But right now...a monster has showed up.
Making
a joke out of him doesn't help, either. People laugh, but the laughs
are becoming with-Trump rather than at-him. So what if he's a
self-serving cartoon? Isn't all presidential politics a cartoon?
You
can be sure the foul stench-ridden execs at the major networks are
trying to figure out how to torpedo Trump. They're in a dither. This
is supposed to be
their presidential campaign, not his. They own the franchise. But he's ripping huge chunks out of their hides.
Is
it possible they could unearth some horrendous cheating scandal from
Trump's past, expose it to the sky, and then watch Trump nod and say,
"Yeah, I screwed up, so what?"---and his ratings would jump another ten
points? Yes, it's possible.
Regardless of the issues coming to
the fore in this presidential season, the real issue, as always, is the
press itself. That's not supposed to be noticed, but more and more
people are noticing it. And because they instinctively hate the
powdered and coiffed anchors with their presumptive attitudes, every
time Trump hits a home run against one of these smug bloodless
motherfuckers, it's an occasion for great glee.
Trump is doing much more than gaining ground on the other candidates; he's attacking the whole framework of the Show.
He's
sawing off the pillars of the studio sets. He's slapping the faces of
the news hosts. And as the ultimate insult, he's lifting their ratings.
An
interview with Trump isn't an interview. It's a circus. He's
essentially saying, with every breath he takes, "See, audience, see this
whole charade, it's ridiculous, isn't it? Why should I agree to their
terms? Why should I consider these doofus Demo-Repub media mouthpieces
are any better than I am or you are? Watch me crack the illusion of
television. It's fun. Let's kick some high-priced ass together..."
On
the media front, it's looking like Trump is too big to fail. The only
thing the networks can do is try to shut him out. I'm not sure that's
going to work. He's cranked up too much visibility jizz.
On the
Disney spectrum of personality, Trump is Scrooge McDuck with some Goofy
thrown in, plus a slice or two of Mickey Mouse's good will. But then
there is also a piece of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a clump of Ralph Nader
(Nader would hate to admit it), a splash of Salvador Dali, and a
passable imitation of Ronald Reagan.
Let the press try to reduce that down to a mainstream presidential candidate.
The
television medium, in particular, sets itself up to accommodate the
lies candidates tell. It builds studios and lights them for those lies
and empty promises. It provides camera angles to feature those lies.
It hires hosts and moderators who will facilitate the candidates who
lie.
But even all this is not enough. The networks set themselves up to offer a
style
of lying. Candidates are expected to deploy all sorts of hollow,
sanitized, and familiar phrases. They're expected to affect a fake
sense of passion. They're prompted to offer some fake "new beginning,"
as if no other candidate has ever tried that before.
Through these mechanisms, the viewing public is conditioned to expect predigested soulless corporate PR and accept it.
This, as much as anything else, is the death of modern politics. It's bright grinning groomed zombie android death.
Any man or woman who can come along and punch a gaping hole in that illusion is a threat to the Big Sleep.
Trump is warming to the job.
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