“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” —H. L. Mencken
The human mannequins get dolled up in (probably very expensive) makeup in the backroom while their consultants brush them up on their four or five talking points ad nauseam. Their assistants dutifully straighten their ties and spruce up their perms/hairpieces and dust-bust their lapels, then cap off the presentation with some flag pin or whatever. Because that’s what patriots wear.
Now they’re real boys and girls!
They are trotted out onto the stage to the thunderous applause of a carefully curated audience of enthusiastic (or at least ostensibly enthusiastic) party insiders who can be expected to clap at all the right moments.
The equally made-up news actors moderating the production –- the directors, as it were — kick off the spectacle with “Welcome to Milwaukee…” and it’s showtime.
The warhawks (like Nikki Haley and actually the entire roster of the debate stage except for him, as Vivek Ramaswamy accurately pointed out) angling for a position on the Raytheon board do their talking points about Vladimir Putin and the Russians like it’s 1980 all over again.
(“You have no foreign policy experience and it shows” is code for “how dare you not wholesale outsource U.S. foreign policy to Raytheon.”)
Chris Christie does his tough-guy routine while Vivek pantomimes Trump.
All the rest, who have memoirs to sell or CNN contributor roles to fill later on or, in their wildest dreams, a VP slot with Trump, fade into the background because they look and act just like every other unremarkable hack who’s run and gone nowhere since 1960.
The actors rehearse said platitudes their consultants had drilled into their empty heads minutes before, all of which sound great (who could be against patriotism and God?) but don’t actually mean anything coming out of their mouths:
- “Values”
- “Small towns”
- “Small town values”
- “Border”
- “Fiscal responsibility”
Then, assuming one of them assumes office (does it really matter who among those on the stage?), small towns will continue to atrophy as what scraps of U.S. manufacturing are left are outsourced to sweatshops in Bangladesh to pad Walmart’s bottom line. The border will remain open because multinational corporations love illegal labor. The debt and deficit will continue to skyrocket.
… And the actual power structure goes largely unchallenged by design.
In the postgame, it’s the corporate state media pundits’ turn, with their omniscience, to “interpret” the results of the debate on behalf of the peasants in classic horse-race style like they’re calling a sporting event: “so-and-so did a great job,” “this was a great moment for so-and-so,” “so-and-so landed a great blow there.” There will be no meaningful policy discussion on set, to the extent there was any policy substance offered in the original production.
At least football games and boxing matches are meritocratic and honest.
No viewer leaves the debate better informed about what is going on in the world or even, really, what the candidates would actually do once they assume office. Of course, informing is not really the point — the point is the spectacle of democracy minus any of the actual democracy.
I watched it because that’s what I’m expected to do. All I wanted — which I’m not naïve enough to have actually believed would happen prior — was for one candidate, just once, to cut to the chase and call out the multinational bankers at Blackrock, the multinational technocrats of the WEF variety, the war profiteers and security state goons who bleed American life and treasure dry for profit and social control, and the pharmaceutical industry/Public Health™ parasites that sicken and bankrupt Americans for the same purpose.
We might’ve gotten shades of that if the Big Guy was there, at least, but the whole charade was all the more shallow for not having the obvious frontrunner in attendance.
