Media whores, clear your palettes and ready your doggy-bags: here we go again. The guy with eleven mansions and a private plane or two is the regular guy. His opponent? The self-made neighborhood organizer and college instructor? He's the elitist.
Get it?
Actually, I don't care. EAT IT!
Obama's problem is that he's popular, you see. McCain is lucky he doesn't have that problem. No, McCain's face has only been glued like a latex deathmask to the inside of your TV and scorched into a translucent cuero by cathode rays since the Reagan administration, but the other guy?
He's the celebrity! And that's bad.
... or something.
I DIDN'T ASK YOU IF IT MADE SENSE, I SAID "EAT IT!"
Last time, we watched the whores choke down something similar, remember? The trust-fund baby was the regular guy, the other guy was sighing! The guy who doesn't drink is the guy we all wanna have a beer with, or so we are told. The other guy ... probably drinks wine.
And it's not just that the establishment media is made up of some real dolts. It is, but that's not the point. The point is that we get to watch media talking heads, paid political operatives, and the candidates themselves, squirm while they say things that you know, I know, and they know are complete bullshit.
We watch for the same reason we watch reality shows or actuality shows or a viral video on youtube of some guy getting his balls crushed by a cannon. We like to watch people squirm, if only because ... for a moment ... that person isn't us.
It's escapism.
Why was The Wizard of Oz so popular during the Great Depression? It's not like people didn't know there were serious issues outside the theater, it's that they needed somewhere to hide from them. Only now, our escapism is laced with unrefined sadism. American political journalists are engaged in a kind of performance art, married to daredevil danger. Can she sustain it? Can she repeat the "he said/he said" format, without cracking a smile? We watch, hoping to see them fail, but we get enough of a thrill just seeing them have to bear it.
THE HEADLINE READS: "SHAPE OF EARTH - OPINIONS DIFFER," which is literally true, but the audience and the campaign spokesman and the other lying sack of shit campaign spokesman and even the latest playpen of flesh from J-school, feeling your news at you, they all know it's bullshit.
And we're gonna watch them, like a man on a high wire, feeling the tension while longing for the moment when it breaks. Watching NASCAR, hoping to see a crash. Not one of those tedious, ten minutes of a yellow flag affairs after a fender-bender, no I mean one of those highly elastic collisions where some of the debris takes a full two beats to fall back to earth. A WHAM, and the man on the razor's edge just got cut.
That's why we do it, those of us who aren't political junkies, anyway. And that's one very good reason for The Great American Brothel to keep plenty of specialists in the stable.
The Japanese have bukkake. We have the "news."
I'm gonna watch Katie Couric make a face while she mouths what a Republican just gave her, because if I wanted to see something more explicit, I'd have to go to redtube.com. I'm watching George Stephanopoulos take it when he really doesn't want to so I don't have to wait 'till movie nite at Lindsey Graham's.
The only place I can watch beautiful people being taken down a peg by barely sublimated sexual humiliation is on a reality show where they eat bugs, or on FOX News, where some blonde's face is being used in a politically pornographic way.
Can't.
Get.
Enough.
EAT IT! EAT IT!
NOW SMILE, SLAVE!
I SAID "SMILE!"
.