An Emperor’s New Clothes

Pots and kettles must fill our dreams. We are caught now, as we have been for decades, in a Political Party Ping-pong that holds as much fascination as that other  favorite American past-time, baseball. We suffer the delusion that Democrat and Republican manifest real differences on the stage of the State, when in fact they are all of a piece. Rhetorical hop-scotch is another game we play; ethics, politics, even our families are situated in one or another square we hop into from another. Identity is therein contained, a board drawn by our media who tell us who we are, what we are, when and where we are.

There is no  Truth in America, none that we believe in as a noble pursuit. We have succumbed to a materialism as gross as the one that subsumed the Bolsheviks. There is only material; there is nothing of spirit. We no longer believe in any Absolutes, and thus we have abandoned Truth and all the little ‘t’ truths that accrete in the former’a evolution.  What we are left with is the Will to Power, and how we imagined that this was going to give us greater freedom is impossible for me to imagine. We have, since JFK, been furthering the transformation of ourselves as a People into a State serving Public, the latter of which has always been what the Public is.

For too long we have only Media Presidential Candidates–and television dictates how elections are run like sporting events, competing with the Super Bowl in how they are managed and produced and projected onto the Public. We are faced with candidates formed by the media need to package without respect for product; it serves created needs–needs manufactured by received ideas disseminated again through the media meeting the designs (literally) of marketing because we no longer a free a People with a Folk base to turn to, to rest on, to be informed by . . . .

So the media to meets our inorganic wants created by the media as the media is for the media and by the media, everywhere, all the time, any time. As if anything manufactured and disseminated through the media by the media is rooted in real needs determined by rational discourse. We can no longer engage with power as The People, that is, Jefferson’s We the People; but we do become a media-formed Public, perhaps from the material of the People, bit no less Publican in manner and choices. We have been formed by a Media that is more than the message. The media shows us who we are, not by what we are in ourselves but by what we must become according to the needs of power that the media elite support.

The First Amendment has been under assault from the Left as well as the Right, and the semi-literacy and systematic under education of the college educated class of the last quarter of a century or more has only aided this consolidation of power. How we ever hoped to manage liberty or democracy with as poorly as we read and write is beyond me. Systematic under-education has become perennial. We do read at a lessened level, and that is not from a broadened base alone, but all the way up the pyramid. I cannot tell you how many semi-literates I have meet in the management of literacy here in these United States; or just grossly mis-informed and mis-guided games of hop-scotch with the truth have been played while randomly passing images in the mind or playing ping pong with slogans masquerades as thinking.

We do assume that there are ideological differences between Obama and Bush when they are, in fact, flip-sides of the same coin. They are of one minting, and it is a tribute to how endemically racist we are that we imagined Obama had a hotline to the little man and woman because he was black. One is the oil gangsters’ baby and the other the bitch of the bankers, but this is only a small part of the picture.  The differences among the Presidents of the past fifty years have not been heartening to anyone committed in his life, engaged, as the Existentialists used to say, with Liberty and Democracy. There are no ideological differences from among Reagan, Clinton, Bush I and II, and Obama–none.

The difference today is in the critique, the level of the critique, the focus of the critique. Too much of multiculturalism has been co-opted by either the media or the bureaucracy, too often by both, most horrifically in the ways print and broadcast media pesist in propaganda function for Power and Monied Elites, especially in their backing of government authority that influences the policies of our bureaus.

Critique of Power has thus lost its edge, has become Status Quo, and has been used to change the color and the dress of the old power establishment. Power has become multi-culti, that’s all, and those who are in hegemony from among the various groups in the new critique have made their pact with the Devils of the elite.

In our degraded literacy, thus our degraded ability to manage and use rhetoric, thus degrading our ability to fulfill our responsibilities as citizens, we are all of us living “The Emperor’s New Clothes”