Another story on NPR's morning edition was an interview with Justin Barasky of Priorities U.S.A. talking about how the Republicans didn't anticipate how Donald Trump would take off until it was way too late for any of them to stop him. Which is pretty strange as their flagship example of a president, Ronald Reagan, was sold in quite a similar way, through his career in show biz, especially on TV. If anyone needs to understand how Donald Trump was sold to a frighteningly large percentage of the American voters, it was through constant exposure on TV. The camera might put on ten pounds but the presentation of even total garbage on TV will gain it something which in someone who is credible could be called "credibility" but it's clear from the Donald Trump phenomenon that there is a media created substitute which, in politics, works like the real thing, when it is its complete opposite. Such was the media created mastery of George W. Bush, such was what sold his father's brief period of success in the so-called First Gulf War, before the disasters forced a measure of correction in those who hold the controls of our media.
This year's political season, as it gets to the end of the nomination phase has carried several terrible lessons, the percentage of those on the left who are willing to risk having a repeat of the Bush II years, perhaps worse this time but it also shows how unwilling we are to face the fact that TV celebrity can put the most inappropriate, ill equipped, temperamentally and intellectually unsuited people in the most powerful office in the world. I think the fall election will be a contest between the media creation, Donald Trump and a woman who the media has been trying to destroy for more than a quarter of a century. The people who decide that may well be a media creation as well, the segment of the electorate who are the most ignorant, the most stimulated to worship violence and derision and insult and vulgar trash talk, who vote for a media created Mussolini American style. The left has not generated anything like that as a counter to them, leftist media, segregated to a few magazines, many of which are as delusional in their own way, is more likely to mount the ridiculous force which, like Captain Peachfuzz, go off in the wrong direction as it did in 2000. If you point out that a media which is free to lie has generated this situation, they'll spout the lines fed to them by the porn industry lawyers.
If this seems to be chaotic, look at the political world that it is addressing and the media that has generated that world. We live in an intellectual dystopia which is the creation of the media which is the force which has informed all of the living generations of this country, today. It's not going to get better until they stop selling glitzed up lies.
Update: My sister and I were talking politics, this morning and I remembered the first time I ever saw Donald Trump on TV. I may have heard the name before that but it was back during the Reagan years when the PBS show, This Old House during the Bob Vila years went to Trump Tower to look at the decor. I can still, sort of, remember the feeling of my mouth falling open and staying open at the sheer, crass gilded vulgarity, not only of Trump Tower but, even more so Donald and Ivana Trump. I remember the kind of revelation it was to me about the nature of PBS that Bob Vila was so openly drooling all over all of the monumental vulgarity of it. And, to top off that disilluioning revelation, it was produced by that ol' reliable Iron Sides of public broadcasting, WGBH in Boston. I know it was during those years of the Hollywood produced Second Gilded Age because the internet tells me that Vila left the show in 1988, the last year of Reagan's administration. That's when the seeds of this year's political crop were being sowed.
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