Modern Political Escapism
15th May 2019
ZMan nails it.
One of the weird features of current age America is it is kind of like a community theater production of popular Broadway shows. The people on stage are enthusiastic to play the roles and the production people work hard to get everything just as the audience would remember it. The audience will tolerate some changes and revisions, in order to update the show, but otherwise they want to see the original. The culture of this age is like a long re-do of the past, in order to get it right this time.
Just once I’d like to see a candidate get up and say ‘We need change!’ and have somebody in the audience get up and yell back ‘No, we don’t! We need to have you clowns in office to quit changing shit all the time! Let us get used to what’s going on before you go changing everything up again! If you have to change, change it the fuck back the way it was!’
Where this lack of new ideas is most obvious is in the realm of politics. The vast Democratic field, which is up to 22 now, is interesting for the sole reason that it is the wildly boring cast of characters. The front-runners are two near-dead geezers who sound like museum exhibits on the 1970’s. The rest remind everyone of the people you meet at a corporate retreat. They are studies in blandness. The primary is going to be a beauty contest without a talent competition, because no one has any talent.
Ain’t that the truth. What people want is somebody like Mitt Romney who will do what Trump is doing but not make such a Broadway production out of it — a New Reagan. But that’s not going to happen.