Today’s the last day to register (or update your registration) to vote in Cuyahoga County. The primary is March 17. If you believe the hype, I’ll be crawling over St. Patrick’s Day floats and half-in-the-bag cops on Public Square to get to my polling place. Whatta town!
But I write this mainly to say that something sinister is happening in the Democratic wing this year. Surprise! I’d recommend pulling your copy of “Manufacturing Consent” off the shelf and reading up on a few of the basic tenets of corporate media decision-making in this country. It’s nothing new! This is cold, hard, circle-the-wagons political news programming. It comes from a place of fear and kowtowing incompetence. It’s a virus that infects newsrooms all over the country, often attacking the spineless “political content producers” who slept through ethics class back in undergrad. And, right about now, it feels more damning than it has in quite some time.
The discussion of “frontrunner” status alone has been almost unbelievable to watch. The discussion of “socialism” has been a perfect example of how we use memetic templates to talk about reality. It’s like social media preempts real life now! Surprise! The complete inability to grasp the stakes of the hour — our global climate crisis, the movement of refugees and immigrants seeking safety across borders, the rise of white nationalism in dying republics, the very idea of what *words* mean — well, good luck finding your way through that thicket if you turn on your television or open up your three-page weekday newspaper, to say nothing of the overwrought garbage on your newsfeed (hi!).
The cartoonish possibility of two billionaire henchmen squaring off for political power in November is too much to bear. It’s so of-its-time that we may as well give away next year’s screenwriting Oscar right now. If I sit for too long on this topic, my eyes begin to cross and I start instinctively grasping for my unborn children.
We can help put a stop to all of this in Ohio on March 17.
And you know what? Go ahead and pull your copy of “Aesop’s Fables” off the shelf while you’re at it. It’s all there, too.
“A groom used to spend whole days in currycombing and rubbing down his horse, but at the same time stole his oats and sold them for his own profit. ‘Alas!’ said the horse. ‘If you really wish me to be in good condition, you should groom me less and feed me more.'”
Sandy 