Birds of a Feather, by Elayne Riggs
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m already burnt out on the 2008 primary season. Okay, to tell you the truth I was burnt out sometime last autumn. The other day I was watching Tom Brokaw’s documentary about 1968 (highly recommended) and one of the political facts mentioned was that Bobby Kennedy didn’t even enter that year’s Presidential race until after the New Hampshire primary! Can you imagine such a thing today, a candidate not even declaring until after an “important” primary has already been run? This year almost all of them dropped out before yesterday’s Super-Duper Pooper-Scooper Fat Tuesday.
It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of Catholics out there are considering giving up following politics for Lent. It’s not like there’s anything in it for us any more. People joke about the campaigns turning into another version of American Idol, but if you think about it the parallels are valid. You have performances evaluated on TV by a bunch of millionaires, and you’re given the illusion of choice among a very narrowly-acceptable band of telegenic hopefuls running more on the basis of style over substance (hey, they have machines now that can “correct” even live voices so they all come out on-key and synthetically perfect). The big difference with politics, besides the sad reality that the results of this contest matters to our lives and the future and the rest of the world, is that the contestants are also millionaires. Have to be; they wouldn’t be considered “viable” candidates otherwise.
“Viable” is one of those nebulous, never-defined vagaries like “freedom” that means whatever the person using it wants the people hearing it to think it means. The less you define something, the less you can be pinned down and expected to stick to your definition. So when you assume everyone believes “freedom” means the same thing, when most of the time those who employ the term equate it with “unfettered capitalism and false consumer choice” even though others still consider it to mean “having bodily autonomy and not being homeless nor starving nor spied upon nor told how or whether to worship,” they’re able to completely circumvent actual communication and not have anything they say be actionable! And “viable” is a media-created term — they don’t have to admit that their use of “viable” means “rich and part of the political machine and accepted by the corporations we’ve allowed to actually run this country” if they can get us to believe it means “intelligent and experienced enough to be taken seriously despite their income level or circle of cronies.” I mean, we should have known that ship had long since sailed when the last guy got elected despite having mostly negative experience and far too little intelligence for the job. (more…)
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