There Are Real And Serious Reasons That Trump Could Be President And If Not Him The Insane Dr. Carson

What care I who makes the laws of a nation
Let those who will take care of its rights and wrongs
What care I who cares for the world's affairs
As long as I can sing its popular songs

Irving Berlin

I am old enough to remember when people had a hard time believing that a rather lousy movie and TV actor like Ronald Reagan could become the governor of a state, never mind a two-term president who was given the power to begin the whole-sale demolition of the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and democracy.  I still couldn't believe he would become president in 1979 and we'd already had Richard Nixon to show how easy it was to dupe the American people into electing a mentally disturbed liar with some clear fascistic tendencies.

Now, thirty-five years after that we see the country is in danger of getting the likes of Donald Trump or the insane Dr. Carson, and if you don't think that's a danger, consider what I said about 1979. Thinking about how the bizarre Trump has risen and how another scion of the Bush Crime Family is considered among the few non-insane members of the Republic pack who are being seriously promoted by the billionaires as the next leaders of the United States has made that old Irving Berlin song seem a lot more insidious to me than it ever did.

The United States is in full blown decay-of-the-Empire decadence and it has been brought there by what is found in the collective mind of the nation.   The only difference between what elected a Franklin Roosevelt and Reagans and Bushes is both the moral and the intellectual mindset of a majority of the voters.   Roosevelt faced economic disaster of the kind that sent Germany into Nazism and Italy into Fascism.  The difference wasn't based on economic conditions, the difference wasn't a result of any kind of material factors and forces, it was based in how the American people thought. It's hard for us, looking back from our electronic and media saturated popular culture to consider how much more what people read, learned in school and from religion and from their parents counted back then.  We all, individually, have only so many hours in a life, so many hours of those to devote to gathering information and absorbing influences and when TV and other electronic media become the primary influence, accounting for the overwhelming majority of what goes into peoples minds, what informs their thinking what that thinking uses as material, what that media says is of the greatest importance.

The idiotic luxury of pretending that what lies and malicious content people get from entertainment and infotanement didn't really matter because, you see, on some shelf, somewhere, a book had letters in it that contradicted that is the ultimate in denial of reality.  Words on pages in books, in magazines only become politically important if they are put into peoples' minds in large numbers and the only way that gets done under a regime of electronic media is through the electronic media.   The medium isn't the message but it is the only way that the message becomes a message.   The class of people who read those books certainly have not been politically effective as compared to the most ignorant, vulgar and corrupt scribblers of slogans and lines.  They have been the ones "making the laws of the nation" and they certainly don't intend to encourage what is right since what is wrong profits them.

The reason we have Trump as a serious contender instead of the joke he should be is because he was on TV, exactly the same reason that Ronald Reagan became president.  It's been thirty-five years since the left should have learned that lesson and it is still denying it because, well, Madison and Jefferson who never saw a single TV show in their lives and couldn't have imagined anything like that.  Today, more than sixty five years after TV began to brain wash the world our alleged intellectual class can't imagine it and it's been there, right in front of them for the entire time.

The only reason for the voices of the alleged left to deny the danger that media released from an obligation to truthfully inform the public in the absolutely serious matters of public life in a way so as to effectively inform the political choices of an effective majority is that they either don't care about the results or they are in on the con-job.  As can be seen from the actual behavior of those who defend the media libertarianisim we have today, their actual briefs and who those are filed on behalf of, they are in on the con-job.  The ACLU other media libertairans are the ones who brought the United States into the insanity of having the Republican field having a real shot at ruling the country. I include Barack Obama in that, I think he was part of the con job.  We know that because of what he did and didn't do in office, by the people he appointed.

The People have a massive consciousness of commercial, pop culture, they have that because it is what the freest media in the history of the world has put into their minds, has taken up their time with and, through planned PR tactics, has enticed them into wasting their lives on.   And the free-speech, free-press industry had one of the more crucial lines to sell on that count.  It came up with the enabling slogans that greased the skids on the clown car to the bottom.

Update:  I am told that "if here was alive today Shakespeare would be writing for television".  Oh, yeah, you can tell that from how Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and August Wilson spent their careers writing for TV.   I doubt Rod Serling could get work on TV, today.

Update 2:  Well, James Ellroy is a better writer than I am too and he said this, "I think [Raymond] Chandler is the most overrated genre writer of the century. I think the guy was a bad writer, frankly. I often find his books engaging and humorous, but I think he knew jack shit about people. He kind of gave away the game when he said that in real life someone with Philip Marlowe's attitudes could no more be a private detective than he could flap his arms and fly to Milwaukee. He all but admitted that Marlowe was bullshit. I'm tired of Big Ray. I wish he'd go away."