Last night on CNN, the news channel spent almost the entire evening discussing at length and in detail the specifics of the claim that Trump was milling about the White House in his bathrobe, rolling out experts in this or that White House etiquette, taking care to usher in historical anecdotes for breadth and accuracy.
For me, this was a pretty amazing moment, surely one in a series of many sordid moments, because I hadn't actually taken the time to pay attention to commercial media coverage. Like reading in the car, I just can't do it for too long; it makes me too nauseous.
But there are millions of people watching this stuff, and undoubtedly sitting transfixed, becoming excited as a loud commercial flashes on the screen, depicting a spat between two Republican politicians as a sort of wrestling match.
I find myself sitting, scratching my head. What has changed? What is different now? It seems as though it is simply more of the same, only amplified.
Indeed, Trump is a culmination of the last 30 years of Republican party propaganda and nonsense. But part of the reason that propaganda like this could function - as in practice it is clearly against the interests of a vast majority of the global population - was that there was a simultaneous concealment and compartmentalization of the practical effects of the policies that this propaganda was pushing.
You could have these "presidential" figures strutting about in their tailored suits, flashing their winning smiles, and looking very composed, telling these lies. And the propaganda was quite believable for many people, namely middle-class white people who were bribed with cheap credit, cheap gas, and their very own mini-fortress in one of the outer-circle suburbs of their choosing. One could look away, and attend to something else; at least the fire was not yet under one's own two feet.
Communities of color were left to languish in the inner cities, or else they were stuffed into the prison system and silenced. Perhaps a lucky few, upon winning lotteries of their own, were admitted into the middle and upper classes. Working classes everywhere were gutted. Global communities were threatened, suppressed, or destroyed.
And now, the inner cities are aflame, and the prison system is bursting at the seams with tales of overcrowding, profiteering, cruelty, and torture. The working classes are also aflame, and make that triple for many other global communities. And the middle class now finds the fires creeping dangerously close to its own suburban borders. To top it off, the Republican party now has on its hands a cartoon caricature of all of the collected fables it was pushing to suppress those on a class, race, and gender basis.
Trump really does represent an externalization of these interests. They can no longer be concealed with his person, which are of course amplified with the migration of him and all of his cronies into the most visible public offices in the world. Right on cue with the simultaneous failings of 30+ years of bad public policy.
And what do the commercial media organs do, when confronted with the sudden eruption of flame, this physical manifestation of a deeper pathology? They stare at it with awe, horror, and fascination, as if it has suddenly materialized from a parallel dimension, or touched down from outer space. They are frozen in place, dazzled by it, ushering in their viewers to take part in the frightening spectacle as their profits rise once again.
All of that mass, all of that energy, suddenly frozen in place, unable to confront the conditions of its own existence, fixating instead on all of that smoke and flame. They've been redirecting the attention of their audiences for so long, so as to maintain profit. It is what they have learned to do. And now with the stakes this high, it is natural that they choose to redirect the stare from their own conditions of survival, and the conditions of survival for humanity itself.
And how could such a machine behave otherwise? Here I am, rubbernecking. There is still much work to do.
